This week's Back Stage (due on the newsstands on the East Coast Thurs. Sept. 5) will be our biggest issue ever with 104 pages. It features a special 56-page pull-out section on acting schools and coaches. Thirteen working performers tell us how they prepare for a classical role and Listing Editor B.L. Rice has compiled an exhaustive list of NYC-area dramatic instructors.
The Labor Day weekend was highlighted by the Live from Lincoln Center broadcast of the last performance of "Contact" and catching "Signs" at the local multiplex. Mel Gibson was his usual expressionless self as a minister battling doubt and aliens, but Cherry Jones had a nice supporting role as the tough sheriff. Hopefully, this will lead to more film roles for the Tony winner. There was also a "Law & Order" marathon on TNT to celebrate their exclusive rights to the reruns, now that A&E has lost them.
A year after Sept. 11, the Broadway and Off-Broadway box-office are suffering through the same roller-coaster ride as Wall Street. So what the street needs is a great big hit. One has arrived in the traditionally slow summer season. To employ the obvious metaphors, "Hairspray" has plenty of body, bounce, and sheen. This is a campy, raucous hoot lovingly nostalgic for a bygone, innocent era, unlike that synthetic concoction "Mamma Mia!"
Like the appealingly messy 1988 John Waters upon which it is based, this musical is mainstream enough for the blue-hair set and just-out-there-enough for more adventurous types. For the fringe element, we've got Harvey Fierstein in his first starring Broadway role in more than 15 years. If he was waiting that long for the perfect role as a follow-up to the one he wrote for himself in "Torch Song Trilogy," this is it. Arnold (the gay hero of "Torch Song") was an outsider searching for acceptance and love. So is Edna Turnblad whom Fierstein plays in drag. She's a frumpy laundress stuck on the wrong side of town in 1962 Baltimore. Fierstein's froggy voice, comic timing, and eloquent body and face, combine camp and compassion to create a character who is both a cartoon and real human being.
But the real star is Marissa Jaret Winokur as Edna's pudgy daughter who is determined break the weight and color barrier on a local teen TV dance show. Winokur is funny, hip, edgy, and sweet without being saccharine. It's rare that a musical features so many outstanding performances as this one. In addition to Fierstein and Winokur, there's warm-hearted Dick Latessa, big-voiced Mary Bond Davis, wicked Linda Hart and Laura Bell Bundy, dynamic Corey Reynolds and hilarious Kerry Butler, Jackie Hoffman, and Joel Vig. Jack O'Brien's staging moves the pace like lightning (there are no dead spots here) and Jerry Mitchell's choreography is a perky pastiche of 1960s dance crazes. "Hairspray" will be spritzing Broadway for many years to come.
Even with some considerable retooling by the witty playwright Nicky Silver, the book for "The Boys from Syracuse" still doesn't work. This 1938 musicalization of Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" is a treasure trove of Rodgers and Hart evergreens like "This Can't Be Love" and "Falling in Love with Love." The current Roundabout revival at the American Airlines Theatre even shoehorns in other R&H goodies like "You Took Advantage of Me." The trouble is the libretto. Originally by the show's director George Abbott and here updated by Silver, it squashes the Bard's madcap farce about two sets of identical twins running riot in ancient Greece into a corny sitcom structure. We don't care about these characters because they are merely mouthpieces for some tired gags about sex and lead-ins for some classics songs. Don't get me wrong, the songs are enjoyably delivered by a game cast (including Jonathan Dokuchitz, Tom Hewitt, Chip Zien, and Lee Wilkof) and, for the most part, admirably staged by director Scott Ellis and choreographer Rob Ashford. It's just the frame around them is so shoddy.
Despite the overall let-down factor, there were some giggly moments (such as a bit involving "The Wizard of Oz" and some inside Broadway banter delivered "Laugh-In" style). The musical moments were definitely the highlights. Towards the end of the evening, the plot is given short shrift and choreographer Ashford is allowed free reign with a delightful full-out mounting of "Sing for Your Supper." Led by a sassy Jackee Harry (yes, the nosy neighbor from "227," that Jackee Harry), a troupe of long-legged courtesans give the proper patrician ladies a lesson is keeping a man happy. It's clever, it's fun, it's the best thing in the show, but it comes almost two hours too late. Even a surprise, unbilled cameo by another former TV star can't quite save this show. "Syracuse" is a collection of bright moments which fail to coalesce into a gratifying whole.
"Harlem Song," George C. Wolfe's tribute to the titular New York neighborhood is similarly scattered, but at least the director doesn't try to impose a storyline where it doesn't belong. Playing at the world-famous Apollo Theatre, this revue is intended as a sort of theme-park attraction to encourage tourism to the revitalized uptown area. A combination of old and new songs tied together with some narration spoken by Queen Esther as a local gossip figure, the loose libretto traces Harlem's history from the glory days of the Cotton Club and Small's Paradise to the devastation of the Depression and 1970s drug wars to the hopeful present. Wolfe's kaleidoscopic direction creates a mosaic of slides, video interviews with actual residents, and musical numbers. It's an entertaining 90 minutes and much more than an infomercial.