Review: "The Real Thing"

“I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.” 

There are few greater playwrights in the English language than Tom Stoppard -- Sir Tom Stoppard, that is to you. 

For nearly half a century, he has crafted some of the finest language ever to have crossed the stage. From the balls-out, awesome inventiveness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the late 1960s -- a reworking of Hamlet from the perspective of the doomed prince's doomed sidekicks -- to the massive Coast of Utopia trilogy in the mid-aughts -- about, of all things, 19th century Russian intellectuals -- Tom Stoppard finds inspiration in the most unlikely material and brings it to life on stage with words of great beauty and power, the most dazzling language created this side of Shakespeare. Indeed, Stoppard is one of the Bard's true blue successors. 

I've seen some of Stoppard's plays over the years -- Arcadia, The Invention of Love, Jumpers -- and they never cease to amaze me. That was why I was so happy to go to the Roundabout revival of Stoppard's 1980's hit The Real Thing -- the second time it has been revived on Broadway since 1985 and the second time I've seen it stage. This is a very good production with one glaring problem.

The Real Thing is about a playwright named Henry (Ewan McGregor) who has been having an affair with Annie (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the wife of his actor friend Max (Josh Hamilton). Henry is married to Charlotte (Cynthia Nixon), an actress who is currently appearing in a play written by Henry. It's not giving away much that Henry and Annie run off together. Most of the play is devoted to the complexity of their relationship while Annie tries to negotiate her acting career while at the same time working on the "Free Brodie" (an imprisoned political activist) committee and Henry tries to keep writing while grappling with the challenge of being a divorced dad. Like all Stoppard play's, the plot is a device to encourage a larger discussion on the nature of truth, love, sex, family and how we understand them through the beauty and challenges of ... words. Also, The Real Thing has a big plot twist -- some might even call it a trick -- and it appears at the beginning of the play, not the end. Like all Stoppard plays, not only is the language sublime but so is the plotting.

This production is beautifully staged. The set is very modest and the actors really move around and use it in a way that helps to make the story compelling. There's a lot of music in this production, with the actors even singing along to a diverse number of songs like "Do Run Run" and "Whiter Shade of Pale." And, of course, the acting is great (well ... almost all of it). Cynthia Nixon, as always, is great. As wonderful as she was on Sex and the City, she really is one of the great stage actresses of her generation and is a joy to watch on stage. Josh Hamilton is very good as Max, making the most of the one of the most thankless parts I've ever seen in a play.

The biggest revelation is Maggie Gyllenhaal. Man, she is a GREAT actress. I've seen her in some movies like The Dark Knight and she was good. But on stage, with a great material like Stoppard, she really shines. Her Annie is such a complex, sexy creation that you can't take your eyes off her for a second. She generates so much power from the stage that you leave the theater thinking not just about what a great writer Stoppard is but what a great actress Gyllenhaal is. She inhabits Annie so completely that I'm still thinking about her performance. She's just a joy to watch.

The same, sadly, quite can't be said about Ewan McGregor. He is a very good actor and I loved him in Trainspotting (who didn't?). Also, he was the only decent thing in the Star Wars prequels. But he's a less than compelling Henry. In the play, Henry is supposed to be a great writer and a lousy human being. In fact, he's kind of a prick. That's part of what makes his evolution in the play into a good husband and father so important. But McGregor is just too likeable, too decent, too ... unprickish ... that this evolution doesn't really register with the audience. I will, however, admit a bias: in the revival I saw in 2000, Stephan Dillane (better known today as Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones) played Henry and he was incredible (won a Tony for it, in fact). McGregor just doesn't compare. I tried to seperate the two performances in my mind but just couldn't: while McGregor's Henry is passable, it just didn't work for me the same way Dillane's did. 

However, these feelings aside, this Real Thing is a production worth seeing. 

“Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.” 

P.S. This production is appearing at the American Airlines theater on 42nd street. It's a great theater and it has a secret 5th floor bar that is a great place to go during intermission. When the wife and I went there to get a drink during intermission, there were hardly any people but there were lots of tables and chairs plus a beautiful open-air balcony. It's a real gem and worth checking out if you ever go to a show there.

Review: "Arcadia"

"Et in Arcadia ego." Literally translated, it means "And in Arcadia I"; more figuratively, it is "And I too was in Arcadia." Arcadia is generally defined as a region of rural simplicity and contentment, a nice place to find happiness.

"Arcadia" is also the name of Tom Stoppard's great 1993 play, currently revived on Broadway.

It takes place in an English country house and alternates between the present and 1809. In the 1809 part, a  man name Septimus Hodge tutors a young girl named Thomasina Coverly. An intriguing character, Hodge is also a friend of the great poet Lord Byron (who we do not see in the play) and has been having an affair with the wife of another great poet, Ezra Chater (Hodge and Chater's wife were allegedly caught in a "perpendicular poke" in a gazebo, thus triggering the plot). Hodge's life is quite complex: he is called out by Chater to duel for his wife's honor and he is also developing an inappropriate relationship with Thomasina. As time goes by, it become clear that Thomasina is also a mathematically genius, understanding and discovering the second law of thermodynamics years before it officially was.

In the present, a writer named Hannah Jarvis and a literature professor Bernard Nightengale are  investigating a strange event  in the life of Byron. They believe that he, not Hodge, may have killed Chater in the duel. As they and other begin to go through the old treasurers in the house, they discover the truth about what happened -- and about Thomasina's early genius. 

"Arcadia" is a very complicated, intriguing play. You go in thinking this is a standard English drama set in the country -- albeit with a time twisting narrative and a murder mystery to boot -- but it turns out, instead, to be a discourse on how we come to understand the past (like mathematics, we try to make sense of it through deduction and reason and evidence -- but ultimately there are things we can never know and chaos plays a huge part). "The future is chaos" one character says. Living in these troubled times, that has never seemed more true.

Amazingly written by Stoppard, "Arcadia" is considered one of his best plays. The original Broadway production in the 1990s was a hailed as a masterpiece and, full disclosure, I'm a huge Tom Stoppard fan (I was unable to see "Rock'n'Roll" and "The Coast of Utopia" but did see the revivals of "The Real Thing", "Jumpers" and "The Invention of Love" several years ago). Stoppard's plays are so funny, his characters so interesting, and the language so beautiful, that he manages to effectively convey difficult ideas quite clearly. His plays are also very dense -- lots going at once. My brief synopsis above in way captures the full complexity of the play. After seeing it, I felt the need to go out and read the script for myself.

The current production is quite good if not great. The cast is mostly excellent with an actor named Tom Riley as the stand out playing Hodge. His performance is the glue that binds the play together, making a mostly awful guy as sympathetic as can be. Also great is someone named Margaret Colin who plays Lady Croom, Thomasina's mother, who rules the estate. In the modern day parts, Lia Williams is wonderful as Hannh Jarvis, the nutty author. Billy Crudup is good as Bernard Nightengale but his performance is a bit manic and overacted. I usually like Raul Esparza -- who was great in "Company" and "Speed the Plow" but I felt he probably wasn't right the part of Valentime Coverly (a modern day member of the family who helps Bernard and Hannah in their work). 

Also, and this has been mentioned by others, the sound in the theater was a little low so it wasn't always easy to hear the dialogue -- not good for a play trying to communicate such complex ideas.

Still, this production is very much worth seeing. When it's good, "Arcadia" is about as good theater as you'll ever see on Broadway. Tom Stoppard is incapable of writing a bad play and, even though this production is not the best interpretation of his work, you'll still be glad you saw this when you walk out of the theater.      

Tom Stoppard RIP

Probably the world's greatest playright, Tom Stoppard, has died.

Plays like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, The Coast of Utopia plays, and so many others, were like nothing that had ever been seen before. Stoppard's use of language was brilliant, complex and yet captured your mind and emotions in equal measure.

He was a true genius. 

I saw several of his plays on Broadway -- revivals of Jumpers, Arcadia, The Real Thing (in 2000 and 2014) as well as new plays like The Invention of Love and, most recently, Leopoldstadt. I reviewed this last play, his great swan song, in 2023, as well as the 2011 revival of Arcardia and the 2014 version of The Real Thing. Read them here. 

And yes, Stoppard also wrote for the movies, winning a screenplay Oscar for the 1998 hit Shakespeare in Love. It had the great line, "That woman ... is a woman!" 

Two amazing things about Stoppard's life and career are worth noting.

First, his native language wasn't English. He was borin in Czecholslovakia, escaping the Nazis with his mother in the 1940s, before landing and living the rest of his life in England. From there he would not only learn his new country's language but take it and mold it into magic for six decades. Stoppard is an open-and-shut case for why immigration, and welcoming migrants, is a smart thing to do.

Second, when my parents got together in the late 1960s, they went to the original NYC production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (I actually have one of their Playbills in the family files). Forty-odd years later my wife and I got together, in part, via our mutual love his plays. Kismet.

RIP Sir Tom. We'll probably never see his likes again.

Here is a local NYC news review of The Real Thing from 1984. "Put the right words in the right order and you can nudge the world a little bit." 

Review: "Leopoldstadt"

The madness of the Holocaust -- the Nazi's mass extermination of millions of European Jews during the Second World War -- remains one of history's greatest crimes. Grappling with it has confounded humanity ever since. Numerous artists have tried to make sense of something that is fundamentally insane -- most famously by Steven Spielberg in the 1993 movie Schindler's List. 

The brilliant playwright Tom Stoppard, himself a refugee of WWII, makes his own attempt in his new play Leopoldstadt which I recently saw on Broadway.

Whereas other Holocaust stories brood on the horror of the camps and the brutality of the Nazis, Stoppard does something different but, in some ways, even more devastating -- he tells the story of a Jewish Viennese family from 1899 to 1955 and how their safe, beautiful, sometime scandalous life is upended and destroyed by genocide. It's an intimate story of the fabric of family being torn apart, rendered asunder, only leaving lonely strands behind. In the play this is literally symbolized by the string game cat's cradle -- the strings are pulled apart but still connected, forever bound together.

The plot concerns the Merz family, a wealthy family of factory owners. At the turn-of-the-century, the family is happy and thriving, although not all is clockwork harmony. Some of the family members have converted to Christianity in order to blend into Viennese society while others have held steadfast to their Jewish faith and identity. Their existence in precarious -- in some ways they are respected citizens of the then-Austro-Hungarian empire, protected by and pledging fealty to the Emperor Franz Joseph, living freely and enjoying their hard-earned success. But as Jews (or former Jews), they are still held suspect by society, kept at arms lengths -- as shown when one of them is denied membership in an exclusive Viennese club. Clandestine love affairs and old family squabbles are upended by the First World War. By the 1920s some family members have been killed and maimed by the war, several relationships are strained, and the mighty diversified empire they belonged to, that gave them safe (if sometimes sneering) harbor, is now gone -- replaced by a weakened republic. Eventually, in 1938, the Nazis come, annexing Austria with the "Anschluss" and literally beating down their doors, hauling many of them off to the camps. A decade after WW2, in the mid-1950s, only three of them are left alive, living in different countries, forever haunted and distraught at the lost lives -- some of which they aren't even old enough to remember. This is an intimate story of a massive crime, where we see the almost complete erasure of a family -- a tradition, a way of life, a whole world -- as the actors literally vacate the stage. We see it in the void, the absences of the people who are not there but should be. It hits home in a way that only great drama, great storytelling can do.

Haunting.

Leopoldstadt is the name of a largely Jewish neighborhood in Vienna but, in this play, it becomes something more -- the place in memory where family happiness and acceptance thrived before horror invaded it. As always, Stoppard's scenes and dialogues are superlative but unlike some of his past plays (like the Jumpers, The Invention of Love or Arcadia), it's less intensely intellectual and dense or more emotional and free flowing. Unlike most plays these days which have small casts, this one has a huge cast of 39, that fill the stage before, as indicated, they gradually vanish. Amongst the large cast, Josh Malina plays Hermann, the family patriarch, heading a great cast including Brandon Uranowitz as Ludwig, his brother-in-law and intellectual sparring partner, and Faye Castelow as Gretl, Hermann's unfaithful wife. All of the performances are excellent.

Even though a Stoppard play is a feast of smart dialogue, there's one moment in Leopoldstadt that is purely visual and deeply powerful -- before the time-jump to 1924, at the end of the 19th -century fin-de-siecle part, Hermann has returned home to a family seder. While he knows his wife has been unfaithful, while he himself has converted to Christianity, he joins the seder and recites the prayers. He realizes he cannot run away from his roots or his family, he cannot deny who he is. Then he and his wife embrace while the other family members come together and dance, spinning around in joy while wearing their elegant clothes, purely happy. Its shows us the accomplishments and happiness of this family that will soon be destroyed -- a reminder that we should always hold onto the people and things we love, and be forever vigilant to those dark forces that seek to destroy them. 

In that Leopoldstadt is, sadly, more relevant than ever before.

New York City Man: A Lou Reed Tribute

Lou Reed is dead.

After 71 years of agitation, defying expectations, spitting in the face of politeness and conformity, producing music that influenced musicians who went on to influence other musicians, Lou Reed did something rather conventional -- he died. But even that he did in a cool way -- on his Twitter page, he left a simple message and image: The Door.
 

Show's over. He's outta here.

The easy way to sum up Lou Reed's legacy is to rattle off the number of good, great, and holy songs that he composed and performed -- both with the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist -- over his decades-long career: "Sunday Morning", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "I'll Be Your Mirror", "Venus in Furs", "Pale Blue Eyes", "Sweet Jane", "Rock'n'Roll", "Perfect Day", "Walk on the Wild Side", "Sally Can't Dance", "Dirty Boulevard" -- the list is endless, and I know I've forgotten a couple dozen or two.

Most of these songs weren't hits in their day but people still listen to them and re-discover them all the time. I remember back in college in the 1990s, when I discovered his music, being amazed at how fresh sounding it was -- and most of it was over thirty-years old.

He did things with music and lyrics that no one else did -- and few have dared to do since.

"Heroin" is about the experience of doing heroin. That's it. Nothing more. It's just about what it's like shooting up and how "it makes me feel like I'm a man." And, original that he was, Lou Reed used words like "nullify ("nullify my life") in the lyrics. How brilliant -- and risky -- to write a nearly 7-minute song about doing drugs while using highfalutin words to boot.

Another song isn't really a song at all. Called "The Gift", it's a bizarre short-story set to music about a young man who literally ships himself in the mail to his girlfriend. Its ending is, to say the least, interesting.

Lou Reed only had one Top 40 hit in his lifetime -- "Walk on the Wide Side -- and it's probably the only Top 40 song ever about transvestites and to talk literally about "giving head."

And when he formed the Velvet Underground in the mid-sixties, Lou Reed and his band mates did something that few bands in the hyper-macho, testosterone-drenched, girl-chasing, boys club of rock'n'roll had ever done, then or since -- they hired a woman, Maureen "Mo" Tucker, to be the drummer.   

Lou Reed endlessly innovated. He released a two-album deal called "Metal Machine Music" that was just guitar feedback. No one, not even Reed, has ever listened to all of it but it was original, to say the least. Late in his career, Reed produced an album called "The Raven" based on the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. And he collaborated with everyone from David Bowie to Suzanne Vega to Metallica.

His influence is unbelievable. U2 and REM and many more have all claimed Lou Reed as an inspiration and have covered his songs. As the tributes poured in after his death, everyone from Nikki Six to LL Cool J to Weezer to Miley Cyrus hailed him. By being a musical iconoclast, by ignoring the mainstream and pursuing his own unique vision, Lou Reed's appeal became universal.

It's often said that not many people bought a Velvet Underground album but those who did all started bands. 

Yet Lou Reed's influence went beyond the musical. He was a revolutionary -- literally. The playwright Vaclev Havel was a huge VU fan who found freedom and a call to dissent in the music during the age of Communist oppression. Havel would eventually work to overthrow Communism in Eastern Europe and, when he became president of the Czech Republic in the 1990s, he called it the Velvet Revolution. (The 2006 play Rock'n'Roll by Tom Stoppard is largely about this.) 

Even the Vatican -- the  Vatican! that 2000 year old institution of conformity! -- Tweeted out a tribute to Lou Reed. God, apparently, is a fan, and now He has him all to himself.      

Of course, Lou Reed wasn't just a great musician -- he was also a great New Yorker. Like Woody Allen, he was one the artistic geniuses of this city, its spirit infusing his music. One of his great albums is simply called "New York", an album dedicated to the crazy life of his beloved town. One of his best late career songs is the jazzy tune "New York City Man", another is the soulful "Coney Island Baby", and many of his songs are peppered with illusions to the city -- particularly St Marks Place (like in "Sally Can't Dance"). If Woody Allen's New York is a city of museums, beautiful apartments, fancy restaurants, old movie houses, and yuppies, Lou Reed's New York is a city of the downtown scene and the underground (velvet and otherwise), of dive bars and back alleys, parties that go on all night in cheap apartments, kinky sex and misunderstood artists (and kinky sex with misunderstood artists), addiction and redemption, loving everything in life except the bourgeois. His New York City was the naughty place that years of gentrification have been washing clean but that people like us will never forget, thanks to Lou Reed.  

If you've read this blog over the years, you know how much I loved Lou Reed's music. This blog, for better or worse, wouldn't exist without him. If you like this blog, credit him; if you hate it, blame him. As I try to do in each post, I try to capture that spirit and psyche of NYC on this blog, and Lou Reed was doing that in music (and, of course, doing it WAY better) decades earlier. 

So now Lou Reed is gone and our city is a little poorer for it. But we won't forget him and his legacy is enduring. 

Farewell, bard of New York. As you take your last walk on the wide, may your trail be lined with heavenly wine and roses, into an eternal perfect day.  

Or as Lou Reed once was sang, "I'm a New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone ..."