Theater Review: Les Misérables at Benedum Center

Dec 8, 2019 | Literature, Music, Stage, Theater

Cameron Mackintosh’s slightly changed production of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic Les Misérables retains its glory. I decided to see the revised musical, after having seen the original 1989 production several times in Los Angeles. Les Misérables recently returned to Broadway with new staging, which is mixed, and scenery inspired by Hugo’s paintings, which adds a flair, in downtown Pittsburgh at the Benedum Center toward the end of its run there.

The 19th century France-themed Les Misérables is an unforgettable story. The musical version softens the villainy while keeping the plot’s redemptive theme for every character that does wrong to any degree. The songs “I Dreamed A Dream,” “On My Own,” “Stars,” “Bring Him Home,” “One Day More,” and a great favorite, “Red and Black”, make this beloved musical one of the most popular in theatrical history.

This great musical is unique for its idealism and seriousness and this version did not disappoint. Nick Cartell’s Jean Valjean had a commanding presence. His “Bring Him Home” was easily the show’s most emotional performance. Other cast standouts include an actress named Phoenix Best as Eponine, a conniving ghetto girl who falls in love with a French aristocrat enlisted in an anti-government rebellion; she turns romantic, defies her father and fights for her true love. Matt Shingledecker as Enjolras was captivating in every scene, especially leading “Red and Black”, stupidly renamed “The People’s Song” against the very core of its meaning in this version. The actors playing the Thenardier couple overacted. Gavroche was too precocious (there is such a thing for this character, which entirely relies upon innocence for its full impact) though I think the part and the boy’s lines were rewritten to pander to modern parents, families and audiences.

The best performance belongs to Josh Davis as Javert. I’ve never liked this character and I still do not. I’m planning to review a few recent TV and movie versions of Les Misérables, which I’ve recently seen, and gained a new appreciation for the rationalistic policeman character. But Davis, whose physical, vocal and acting ability added dimension to his portrayal, delivered what for me is the first performance that makes his suicide truly meaningful, organic and impactful to the plot. I’m not a fan of the new set, which dominates the stage, though I was surprised at how much I like the infusion of pieces suggested by Hugo’s art. The barricade remains central to the performance.

Overall, I was as moved as ever, possibly more so because I’m older. What strikes me now, as against 30 years ago, when I first saw Les Misérables on the stage, is that the world has grown darker, more perverse, more desperate. The show’s explicitly Catholic underpinnings resonate less with the audience than its searching themes of wanting to examine and know who am I, what am I doing here on earth and how can I be my best. It was impossible during the often pin-drop perfect performance not to think of those young rebels in Hong Kong, and now also in Teheran and in countless other silent and unknown rebellions from Saudi Arabia to Communist Cuba, China and North Korea. I’ve the sense that I was not alone. Couples, families with children, older and younger adults of all types were held by the power of “Red and Black” (I refuse to call this poetry by its mangled title the people’s song) with the soft yet searing plea by an idealist to his fellow men:

It is time for us all
To decide who we are
Do we fight for the right
To a night at the opera now?
Have you asked of yourselves
What’s the price you might pay?
Is it simply a game
For rich young boys to play?
The color of the world
Is changing day by day…

Red – the blood of angry men!
Black – the dark of ages past!
Red – a world about to dawn!
Black – the night that ends at last!

Les Misérables endures, especially in the streets, back alleys and hushed halls of Hong Kong, where the anti-Communist rebels, young and old as in Les Misérables, unite, gather and mobilize despite China’s barbarism, brutality and oppression to sing the 1989 musical’s triumphant final “song of angry men who will not be slaves again”. In Pittsburgh this Thanksgiving, its banner waved with wonder, power and inspiration still.

The 2,800-seat Benedum Center for the Performing Arts, formerly a movie palace called the Stanley Theater before a $42 million renovation in 1987, affords intimacy and grandeur. Named for Mike Benedum, the son of West Virginian farmers and merchants who became a self-made, wildcat oil tycoon who made a charity after his only child died in 1918, the Liberty Street theater is nearly perfectly proportioned. I plan to return.

 

Stage Review: ‘An Inspector Calls’ at the Wallis

Jan 26, 2019 | Stage

Playwright J.B. Priestley’s social drama, An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours, Trash, TV’s The Crown, Billy Elliot) and now playing in the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, unspools a dastardly tale of one woman’s demise in sometimes shocking, sometimes compelling and often dreary and distracting detail. Its theme that each individual must morally serve others or be damned unfolds with predictable moralizing. The exclusive West Coast engagement at the Wallis, which runs an hour and 45 minutes without an intermission, plays through Sunday, February 10.

This uniquely staged version was revived in London in 1992 after the original play’s run following its premiere in Soviet Russia (which, with the play’s anti-capitalist ideals, is fitting). This version won awards during runs in the West End, Broadway and elsewhere, including Los Angeles at the Ahmanson theater in 1996. Besides the very convenient Wallis venue in tony Beverly Hills, An Inspector Calls currently tours theaters in Washington, DC, Chicago and Boston.

The talented Mr. Daldry reimagines the original 1945 script, which is set in 1912, about an inspector who abruptly imposes himself on a wealthy English family, interrupting their dinner party with an accusatory and quite pointed inquiry about what he claims is the death of a young woman. The capable cast includes Liam Brennan in the title role, Christine Kavanagh as Sybil Birling, Jeff Harmer as Arthur Birling, Andrew Macklin as Gerald Croft, Lianne Harvey as Sheila Birling, Hamish Riddle as Eric Birling and Diana Payne-Myers as Edna. As prospective son-in-law Gerald, Mr. Macklin (TV’s Mr. Selfridge, as well as King Lear and The Picture of Dorian Gray in theater) fares best, though there wasn’t a bad performance.

As the mysterious visitor interrogates each family member, one by one, about the apparently suicidal young woman’s demise, a strong presumption of guilt emerges. As it does, those in the audience may watch and wonder: why is each character prejudged as bad? Who, besides the unseen and mysterious woman presumed to have killed herself, is conceivably to blame?

Buy Tickets (Photo by Mark Douet)

Everything in An Inspector Calls revolves around these questions and the answers become dreadfully and glaringly obvious as the play’s morality, altruism with a collectivist-socialist twist, becomes clear. With stark, dramatic music by Stephen Warbeck and elaborate staging specifically designed to accentuate and dramatize the idea that no one is self-made and everyone who’s wealthy, productive or successful must come down, really crashing down, to the level of the common man to whom he’s tethered, An Inspector Calls rings and rings its smashing climactic points.

A mob gathers in silent, condemnatory moral judgment, like a Me, Too march (there’s admittedly an air of that lynch mob movement’s influence throughout the production) as the angry white male inspector demands to know about an act of charity for which the giver is presumably supposed to be guilty: “How much did you give?”

Amid an unasked and unanswered question of paternity, bestowing of blankets for the rich and the unspoken conclusion that money is the root of all evil (with you as thy brother’s keeper), the family’s house literally crumbles, crashes and explodes as the Birling family comes undone.

Or do they? On top of the socialistic moral mystery, the raging and elusive police inspector implants the question “How do we know (what we think we might know)?” Therein lies the play’s deeper mystery that nothing is knowable and, unless you renounce yourself, property and individualism, you are likely to be doomed…at least to the extent these things can be known. This is the upshot of An Inspector Calls, officially billed as “the National Theatre of Great Britain’s Landmark production of J.B. Priestley’s classic thriller An Inspector Calls”. If it sounds rather tedious, it is and can be, depending on one’s tolerance for seeing the same ideals laid bare in moralistic melodrama, if with inventive staging and a booming score to match.

Tickets to An Inspector Calls range $35 to $105 and are on sale now for shows on weekdays at 7:30 pm; Saturdays at 2 pm and 7:30 pm; and Sundays at 2 pm and 7 pm. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Zoltan Paliis of Studio Pali Fekete architects and located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, is housed in the building featuring the restored, original 1933 Beverly Hills Post Office, the 150-seat Lovelace Studio Theater, space for arts education and the 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater.

Stage Review: Laughter on the 23rd Floor (2018)

Apr 14, 2018 | Stage

Playwright Neil Simon’s hallmark intelligence, wit and, briefly, pathos remains on display in a revised version of Simon’s 1993 comedy, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, playing at the Garry Marshall Theatre (formerly the Falcon Theatre) in Burbank. The two-act play runs through April 22.

The setting is a New York City television writers’ room in the early 1950s, when a band of comedy writers, a secretary and a brash TV show host banter, clash and strive to tap what’s humorous about news, politics and culture amid a major media transition from radio-friendly routines to the onset of televised sports, variety and situational comedy. This is Neil Simon’s homage to early television figures such as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Revised through a modern perspective by director Michael Shepperd, neurotic creatives try to please the blustery boss of a weekly 90-minute show. Though a recent Saturday night performance was a bit sluggish in the first act, and some of the acting was overdone, cast, crew and show come through.

You can tell from the caustic humor that this is an early 1990s take on the early 1950s. The 40-year difference lies in a few too many McCarthy jokes and flat lines about the deaths of Josef Stalin and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The basic narrative with young Neil Simon stand-in Lucas (Jason Grasl in his Garry Marshall Theatre debut) punctuates and frames the story about the strain of storytelling when making sharp jokes about Ibsen and Shakespeare was about to fall prey to the less literate post-war culture. Not that these writers for the fictional Max Prince Show put on high brow material. They don’t, which inevitably is part of the play’s point that writers are human and must deal with the culture, too. Laughter‘s funniest shtick mines this self-awareness, which goes to Neil Simon’s strength in portraying ordinary people making light of life’s indignities — enduring damage, digs and hardship — without making fun of what matters.

Like Simon’s Lost in Yonkers and his 1980s trilogy of coming of age-themed plays, Laughter on the 23rd Floor recreates artistic struggle with a wistful longing that wrestles with the Fifties’ deficiencies, too. Neil Simon is a master storyteller. Here, too, he sets forth arcs of loss and love in life and work. With a standout performance from understudy Jason Weiss (also in his Garry Marshall Theatre debut), filling in for Jeff Campanella as hypochondriac Ira, a pivotal role that helps Pat Towne bring the show to a climax as TV host Max Prince, the 130-seat Garry Marshall Theatre delivers with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which marks the final production in its four-play inaugural season.

Tickets, starting at $45, are available by calling (818) 955-8101 or visiting GarryMarshallTheatre.org