You would expect a young, hip president such as Barack Obama to have his
finger on the pulse, but one thing nobody expects these days from an
American leader is that he will go to a Broadway play. Yet there were the
First Couple in Manhattan last Saturday on a so-called “date night”, when
they went to West 44th Street, minutes away from Times Square, taking in a
performance of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, one of a majestic
series of plays by the late African-American dramatist August Wilson,
chronicling the black experience throughout the 20th century.
“We were incredibly moved and honoured,” André Bishop, artistic director of
Lincoln Centre Theatre, told me, recalling an evening when he, his partner
and daughter found themselves seated in front of the Obamas. Backstage, the
predominantly black cast did their best to stay focused on the performance,
despite, Bishop says, “feeling obviously beyond exhilarated; they were in
some other dimension of life”.
So what if the performance began 45 minutes late, a three-hour play delayed,
Bishop says, by an audience that “went completely crazy, standing and
cheering and taking photos on their cellphones”? Later the Obamas were first
on their feet, applauding what Bishop says was “a really, really good
performance of the play”.
Whereas the Oliver Stone movie W reports a conversation between George
W. Bush and his wife, Laura, about whether they should buy tickets to a
touring company of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, here were
the Obamas on Broadway seeing a serious play on an important theme in what
is widely regarded as the most varied and rewarding New York theatre season
within memory. If the Tony Awards offered a trophy for “most triumphant
moment of a newly resurgent Broadway”, the sight of the Obamas seated in Row
K of the Belasco Theatre would win hands down.
As it happens, Broadway has plenty to celebrate when the 63rd Annual Tony
Awards — the American theatre’s equivalent of the Oscars — are given out
tomorrow at Radio City Music Hall, with Joe Turner up for six awards.
This year began with doomsayers predicting the death of Broadway, but the
street has rebounded, and then some, in recent months, offering more
productions (43) than have been put on in New York in 25 years and of a
quality that prompted Ben Brantley, drama critic for The New York Times,
to remark that “the voters bestowing the Tony Awards face the hardest
choices in decades”.
How did Broadway gets its bounce back? Largely by talking up to an audience
that one could argue has been undernourished for years because of the
assumption that those in search of genuinely serious theatre could look
elsewhere — Off Broadway, for example, or, of course, London. Instead, this
season the playhouses studded across midtown Manhattan began to look like
some sort of New York collective equivalent to the National Theatre in
London, offering the likes of Noël Coward, Ionesco, Beckett, and Schiller,
plus a Eugene O’Neill oddity (Desire Under the Elms, with Brian
Dennehy), Matthew Broderick acting Christopher Hampton (The Philanthropist,
directed by the Englishman David Grindley), and the latest from the prolific
Neil LaBute (reasons to be pretty).
When an unknown entity such as Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests
— a theatrical triptych that faded when first seen in New York in the 1970s
— can become the critics’ darling 35 years later you have conclusive
evidence that theatrical tastes have shifted, or even matured. “The thing
that’s really extraordinary is to have got The Norman Conquests
on to Broadway at all,” says its director, Matthew Warchus, who looks likely
to win the Tony for Director of a Play. The success of the production,
Warchus says, “is a reflection of the season as a whole” — one in which
risks were taken, many of which paid off.
Warchus’s competition in his category includes his English colleague Phyllida
Lloyd, for the Schiller play Mary Stuart, and Warchus himself. The
42-year-old has also been nominated for his Broadway premiere of the Yasmina
Reza play God of Carnage, the first time since 1973 that a director
has vied against himself for a Tony. “Awards are a strange thing,” Warchus
says. “They turn a community momentarily into a set of competitors. One must
not get too hung up on that when the purpose is to celebrate.”
That the celebrations this year are especially keenly followed owes much, as
well, to the resurgence of sheer star wattage on Broadway, not least by
contrast with a West End in seemingly ceaseless thrall to reality TV, the
occasional sighting of Jude Law or Ian McKellen notwithstanding. This has
been a season of long-overdue returns to the New York theatre, starting with
James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden in God of Carnage, both of
whom last appeared on Broadway in the early ’90s. Jane Fonda, the
sentimental favourite to take the Tony for Best Actress in a Play, most
recently braved Broadway 46 years ago; the delight that she took this year
in appearing in Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations was evident
from the blog that she filed during the run.
Her fellow Oscar-winner Susan Sarandon previously played Broadway in 1972 and
is now back until June 14 at the Barrymore Theatre in the season’s single
most audacious offering: a rare sighting of Ionesco’s Exit the King,
an absurdist tragicomedy that isn’t exactly the sort of fare that audiences
either side of the Atlantic encounter much. Sarandon’s co-star is Geoffrey
Rush in what marks the Broadway debut of the Australian Oscar-winning star
of Shine. Rush could win the Tony for Actor in a Play in the sort of
wildly florid star turn Broadway probably hasn’t encountered since Ian
McKellen won his own Tony for Amadeus in 1981.
If Fonda could win her first Tony for reasons of talent mixed with sheer good
will, that is even more true of the front-runner for the Featured
(Supporting) Actress in a Play Tony, which, barring a major upset, will go
to Angela Lansbury, 83, for her sublimely dotty Madame Arcati in Michael
Blakemore’s largely becalmed revival of Blithe Spirit. With
four Tonys already to her name across five nominations (this one is her
sixth), Lansbury is that increasing rarity, a Broadway mainstay, and her
willingness to return for yet another hurrah at a time when many actors of
her generation would prefer anything but the rigours of the stage will be
rewarded — even if my personal vote would go to Jessica Stevenson Hynes, one
of four Tony nominees from the six-person Norman Conquests ensemble
who are helping to lead a sizeable British charge at the ceremony this year.
(Hynes’s colleague Stephen Mangan gets my nod for Featured Actor in a Play.)
It has become an annual truism to trumpet the British presence on Broadway,
but that is at no time more evident than in a year in which Billy Elliot
the Musical leads the field with 15 nominations, despite concern that
American theatregoers would understand neither the cultural specifics nor
the accents of a piece set in and around Durham during the Thatcher-era
’80s.
If any spoilers lie in wait for a Billy sweep, they consist not of the
Dolly Parton-scored 9 to 5, which opened to mediocre reviews, but in
a small-scale American musical called Next to Normal, about a mother
suffering from mental illness. Stephen Daldry’s strongest competition for
Best Director of a Musical rests with a Broadway first-timer, Diane Paulus,
and her revival of the 1960s rock musical Hair. Long deemed to be too
tethered to a bygone era, Hair in Paulus’s staging honoured its
counterculture roots while serving up anew a Galt McDermot score that brings
the audience dancing on stage at the finale: the Mamma Mia! megamix
was never like this.
Will this renewed activity on Broadway continue? It’s hard to say, since in
the immediate future one may see the demise of the Tony also-rans that were
most dependent on awards to stay alive — Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter in Mary
Stuart is just one example of a show reliant on kudos to a degree that,
say, 9 to 5 is not.
But the autumn promises new plays by David Mamet and Martin McDonagh as well
as Broadway debuts from James Spader and Daniel Craig, the latter in an
American two-hander opposite the previous Tony winner Hugh Jackman that
looks set to ignite a Broadway stampede not seen since Julia Roberts came to
45th Street three years ago in Three Days of Rain. For now, that
jubilant finale to Hair can stand as a marker for a Broadway theatre
that has regained its mojo, an industry not long ago beset by uncertainty
that will bring the seasonal curtain down, Barack Obama-style, on a stirring
note of hope.
Matt Wolf is the London theatre critic of The International Herald Tribune.
