Reports in recent years of the demise of New York theatre may have been a little premature. Certainly, this year both Broadway and off-Broadway seem to be bouncing back to something approaching the good old days.
The Irish contribution to the revival is not insignificant, with Conor McPherson's lucid and mischievous St Nicholas adorning the Primary Stages Theatre off-Broadway, and Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane moving from off-Broadway's Atlantic Theatre to Broadway's larger Walter Kerr Theatre. It's heavily tipped by the insiders to become the winner of this year's Tony Award for best play, while McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan opened last week and has already had its run in the Public Theatre extended.
Meanwhile, the old art of the Broadway musical (as opposed to to the synthetic equivalent of British and European imports such as Cats and Miss Saigon, which have dominated the scene in recent years) is enjoying a significant revival in the larger theatres around the Great White Way. But there are still some worries: while the number of shows on offer has greatly increased, there does not seem to be an accompanying increase in the total size of the audience seeking tickets, so that each show's slice of the available financial cake may prove smaller. With production costs still astronomically high and seat prices ranging from $50 to $76, even having all but a couple of Broadway's theatres open and active may not be enough to avoid numerous commercial catastrophes during the year.
There is still a relative paucity of plays (as opposed to musicals) on Broadway, but 12 theatres have plays running at the moment, and that's a great improvement on the situation a couple of years ago, when scarcely more than 12 theatres were open, and then almost all were housing musical theatre rather than straight drama. Currently, there are 17 musicals running, and the plays range from Eugene O'Neill's rarely staged Ah Wilderness, to the comfortably safe nostalgia of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys.
Druid's production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Walter Kerr can, of course, be warmly recommended. So can St Nicholas at Primary Stages on 43rd Street, but its limited run (already extended due to the big demand for tickets) is set to finish on April 25th. If you can beg, borrow or buy a ticket, you will find one of the freshest pieces of drama penned by an Irish author in some years, given a bravura performance by Brian Cox.
Conor McPherson has produced a 90minute monologue in which a pig-headed Dublin drama critic ("I never formed opinions: I just had them"), suffused with self-disgust and drowning in alcohol, follows a young actress to London whom he had seen performing in Salome at the Abbey and with whom he has become irrationally obsessed. In London he falls in with a coven of vampires whose leader he meets when waking in a park near Crystal Palace after a drunken night on the town. McPherson is demonstrably a consummate story-teller: there is not a moment when his narrative, however unlikely the events may seem, is less than compelling. And he manages to weave into the story a mischievous and masterly sense of the art of theatre itself, pausing every now and again to question the audience's suspension of disbelief. It is as if he has not merely written a highly original story and (with Brian Cox's superbly knowing portrayal) told it brilliantly but has created a kind of metaphor for analysing the art of theatre itself. Someone must bring this work to Dublin, please.
Meanwhile, the other young scion of Irish story-telling, Martin McDonagh, has added The Cripple of Inishmaan to his triumph with The Beauty Queen of Leenane in his New York repertoire. But this, under the oddly rigid direction of Jerry Zaks, is not as successful as was the Royal National Theatre's production, seen last year at the Gaiety. The rhythms of language are not allowed to flow free and some of the American "Irish" accents are excruciating, while Tony Walton's dark grey, near-monochrome sets drain much of the colour from the play. But Donal Donnelly's Johnnypateenmike, the purveyor of news, has his moments and Aisling O'Neill triumphs as the bully-boy Helen, while Ruaidhri Conroy repeats the performance of Cripple Billy which he gave effectively in the original production. It remains a good evening of theatre, but the play has been diminished.
Meanwhile, on Broadway, there is a stately new musical which seems destined to remain for years at the new Ford Centre on 42nd Street. Based on E. L. Doctorow's novel of the same name, Ragtime is a stately, musically lush and elegantly staged piece of unashamed Americana, which drew a spontaneous standing ovation from a packed matinee audience. The music is of the Scott Joplin type of ragtime, composed by Stephen Flaherty and the text, by Terrence McNally, is reasonably respectful to the original novel and suitably sanitised for family consumption.
The story is of the "wasps" smugly settled in New Rochelle - the little boy, mother, father, mother's younger brother and grandfather (none is given a name) - the Blacks like Coalhouse Walker, the piano player whose model T Ford is vandalised by racist Irish Americans and whose wife is killed by cops in a political demonstration, an event which turns Coalhouse into a revolutionary, and meanwhile there are the Eastern European refugees flooding in like Tateh and his daughter. Tateh starts out in poverty on the Lower East Side, selling silhouette portraits and goes on to become a pioneer in the early movie industry.
Their lives are interwoven with appearances by such famous figures as J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, the anarchist of the period. White, black, Christian, Jew, rich and poor: all are part of the American social tapestry of the ragtime period, richly (if theatrically unexcitingly) portrayed and excellently characterised and sung by a vast cast under Frank Galati's solid, even stolid, direction in rich designs by Eugene Lee, Santo Loquasto, Julia Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer. A uniquely American evening.
Then there are Kander and Ebb, manifest by a lively revival of Chicago and by the darkest, grungiest production yet of their Cabaret, directed by Sam Mendes. The latter is one of the hottest tickets in town and is staged in the old Henry Miller's Theatre which has been converted into the dank, dark Kit Kat Klub nightclub of pre-war Berlin, where the chorus girls wear torn stockings and frayed slips; where Alan Cumming offers the most lascivious Emcee ever seen and Natasha Richardson the most touchingly innocent and silly Sally Bowles. There are also effectively touching performances from Ron Rifkin as the gently Jewish Herr Schultz and his was-to-have-been wife Fraulein Schneider, played by Mary Louise Wilson.
What was impressive about the production was its open recognition (sometimes covered up by the original, glitzy Broadway production of the show) of the decadence and the Nazi threat of Berlin at the time. Chicago also provided substantial theatrical satisfaction (for which it carried off half a dozen Tony awards in 1996, since when it has been filling the Shubert theatre). But this staging is almost like a concert performance, with the band on stage and Ann Reinking's recreation of Bob Fosse's original choreography thus constrained by the limited space available. Nonetheless, the music and lyrics are as tuneful and as sharp as ever, while we watch the literally murderous competition between Velma Kelly (Bebe Neuwirth) and Roxie Hart (Karen Ziemba) for the kind of tabloid notoriety that will enhance their night club careers. Still worth a visit.
The new Disney stage show of The Lion King is also worth a visit because of the brilliant visual imagination which goes into its set designs and the extraordinary range of mobile masks and manipulated puppets which are used to tell the tale of strife in the African animal kingdom. But the music and lyrics by Elton John and Tim Rice are anodyne (although Lebo M's African pastiches are more fun and more original) and the story amounts to very little in the end except for kids, and who can bring a family of kids to a show at $75.00 a seat?
And then, by way of a footnote, there was The Capeman, which closed a couple of weeks ago because of declining audiences (although there is still a cast recording due which may well be worth buying because Mr Simon's music and Derek Walcott's lyrics are worth listening to and were very well sung). Bob Crowley's sets were all magnificent with odd perspectives which lent an almost abstract feel to the show, and the show itself seemed to be drawing Puerto Rican New York audiences into live theatre in a manner which had not happened before. But the authors (Simon and Walcott) failed to tell the story sufficiently clearly for those who did not already know the story of murders in New York in the Fifties which inspired the show in the first place.
After that, with almost 30 shows on Broadway and more off Broadway, the theatre-minded tourists must make their own choices and, whatever they choose in New York, they'll certainly pay their money out to see it.
