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New York Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: In ‘Wonderful Town,' a Party for Writers and Weirdos
Betty Comden was from Brooklyn, Adolph Green from the Bronx, Leonard Bernstein from Boston. All were born in the 1910s. Yet the mind's eye first spies them huddling around a Greenwich Village piano in the early 1940s, cracking one another up while writing topical sketches for the Village Gate. They called themselves the Revuers. That off-the-cuff, show-off spirit is what they tried to capture in the warm and silly 'Wonderful Town,' their 1953 musical set in and around the Village's crooked streets and rattletrap apartments. Though nominally about the wacky New York adventures of two sisters from Ohio — based on Ruth McKenney's autobiographical New Yorker stories — what it's really selling is something the authors knew firsthand: the joy of finding the place where misfits fit and eggheads shine. But the piece is as jury-rigged as a candle in a Chianti bottle, as rickety as those Village Gate revues. Bernstein goes loco with congas and rags, just because he can; Comden and Green, less interested in character logic than in fun, let a football player rhyme 'learned to read' with 'André Gide.' And with a devil-may-care book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on their earlier play 'My Sister Eileen,' 'Wonderful Town' is an almost random contraption, barely hanging together even when shaped by a light and loving hand. It got that treatment in Kathleen Marshall's 2000 Encores! production, starring Donna Murphy, which transferred splendidly to Broadway in 2003. The Encores! encore that opened on Wednesday at City Center — just the third time in 31 seasons that this invaluable series has returned to a former title — does not reach any of the highs of that earlier production. Anika Noni Rose as Ruth, the older sister, and Aisha Jackson as Eileen, the younger, are well cast, and each has endearing moments. The magazine editor both women fall for is beautifully sung by Javier Muñoz. The choral work is up to the high house standards. But except when it dances, the staging, by Zhailon Levingston, is shaggy and leaden and fatally lacking in laughs. It pains me to say that because his main idea is good. Though we like to think of diversity as a one-way street, always improving, scruffy Greenwich Village welcomed a greater variety of people (and rats) in 1935, when the story is set, than it does today with its wraparound terraces. Levingston builds on the script's comic portrait of impoverished bohemianism — its beret-topped painters, shrink-wrapped Martha Grahams and street-corner Carusos — to celebrate the racial and gender mix the authors omitted from their hymn to Christopher Street as 'the place for self-expression.' But though his feel-good update is more easily accommodated than you might expect, it does not itself make 'Wonderful Town' wonderful. Rose's way with a throwaway line, and Jackson's delightful bubbliness are too often undercut by pictorial vagueness and weird-pause pacing that leave you wondering what's happening and whether the next thing will ever arrive. Even when the sisters dig into the haunting harmonies of Bernstein's 'Ohio' with palpable longing for an easier if emptier life, the weirder-than-usual sound design makes it seem like they're singing about a home on Mars, not in the Midwest. I won't take you through the painful details. In any case, what's most painful is something large: the way the presentational deficits of the production reveal the underlying material to be ickier than I'd imagined. Its satirical portrait of Ruth's ambition to be a writer — her stories, read aloud and performed as vignettes, are deliberately terrible — feels merely meanspirited now; its entirely flippant treatment of the wolfishness of the men attracted to Eileen steps over the border of sexual harassment. That effect may also be a byproduct of time: It has been a momentous 25 years since Encores! first produced the show. Our expectations about what can be treated lightly no less than our expectations of dramatic coherence have changed a lot since then, let alone since 1953. Regardless of the production, 'Wonderful Town,' I'm sorry to report, is not aging well in either respect. And yet: Bernstein's contribution feels as coherent as ever, and fresh and treasurable besides. The chance to hear a 28-person orchestra, led by Mary-Mitchell Campbell, ripping through the score's exhilarating pastiches and gently cradling its loveliness with strings, may, for some of us, override the production's many problems. That the dance numbers are by far the best aspect of the staging is at least partly to the composer's credit as well. He gives the choreographer Lorin Latarro a lot to work with; the new tap insertions, by Ayodele Casel, make a surprisingly good fit when paired with Bernstein's ecstatic polyrhythms. After a pushy 'Urinetown,' a baffling 'Love Life' and now this 'Wonderful Town,' one cannot say that 2025 has been the standout Encores! season that 2024 was. It happens. But even without a high point of praise, we can hail the outgoing artistic director, Lear deBessonet, as she moves, after five years, to her new position as executive producer at Lincoln Center Theater. What she's done in those five years has been, regardless of hits or misses, nothing short of rejuvenating, finding in the series' peculiar mission some of the quirky spark and community spirit that gave rise to American musical theater in the first place. Like those hinterland émigrés cobbling together a revue at a boîte, Encores! at its best embodies the joyful ethos of teenagers putting on a show in a barn — even if the barn is City Center.
Washington Post
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Janis Ian doc offers conventional account of an unconventional artist
'Janis Ian: Breaking Silence' is so close to being a great documentary that its easily remedied flaws are all the more vexing. Director Varda Bar-Kar ('Fandango at the Wall') offers a conventional but still compelling synopsis of the iconoclastic singer-songwriter's long career, from her seminal 1960s hit 'Society's Child' to her heartbreaking cancellation of a planned 2022 farewell tour after vocal scarring left her unable to sing. Bar-Kar's mix of present-day talking heads with archival interviews and performance footage of Ian from (mostly) the 1960s and '70s isn't innovative, but it gives us the fundamentals of Ian's artistic and personal struggles from the mouths of the people who experienced or witnessed them. There's no question the artist born Janis Fink warrants the veneration: The daughter of a New Jersey chicken farmer, she was all of 12 years old when she sent her composition 'Hair of Spun Gold,' which she'd written at summer camp, to the folk music magazine Broadside, which published the song. That got her invited to play a 'hootenanny' at the storied Greenwich Village club the Village Gate, as part of a lineup that included Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton. She was 14 when her song 'Society's Child' addressed the subject of interracial romance. A double-digit number of labels declined to release it before Verve Records, the home of jazz greats and avant-garde weirdos the Velvet Underground, agreed to put it out. Not until Leonard Bernstein invited Ian to perform and discuss the song on a 1967 TV special did the tune become a hit. In Bar-Kar's documentary, Ian recalls that producer George 'Shadow' Morton told her he could guarantee 'Society's Child' would top the charts if she agreed to replace the lyric about a suitor's face 'shining black as night' with something more anodyne. But even at that tender age, Ian understood the importance of sticking to her principles. The line stayed. Bar-Kar had enviable access to her subject and to many of Ian's collaborators, romantic partners, chroniclers and interlocutors. Influential critics Ann Powers, Anthony DeCurtis and Stephen Holden praise her originality and fearlessness. Fellow folkies Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie admire her craft. Janey Street, a singer-songwriter who met Ian at the summer camp where Ian wrote her first songs and has remained close with her since, is here, as is Ian's first love, photographer Peter Cunningham — who remained friendly with the singer even after she left him for a woman who would, in turn, leave her for Ian's drummer. The course of true love never did run smooth. Nor did the course of music biz careers, which for Ian included struggles with depression and substance abuse, and an unnamed business manager whose book cooking left Ian deeply in debt to the IRS for unpaid taxes. Before coming out in the early 1990s — after being accused of being a lesbian in the 1960s by that self-appointed guardian of public morality Bill Cosby, and then outed in a 1975 Village Voice piece by Cliff Jahr — she endured an abusive five-year marriage to Portuguese filmmaker Tino Sargo, who she says once held her at gunpoint for hours. It was the last time she'd ever be in a room with him. In 2003, Ian and her longtime partner Patricia Snyder would marry in Canada, becoming the first lesbian couple featured in the New York Times' 'Vows' column. One of the film's most entertaining talking heads is producer Brooks Arthur, who engineered 'Society's Child' and appears to have sat for several interviews before his death at 86 in October 2022. Of his decision to reteam with Ian for her 1974 album 'Stars,' several years after Ian had withdrawn from the limelight, Arthur says, 'We did groove back then, and there was no reason in the world we couldn't groove again.' Other guests appear seemingly just because Bar-Kar could get them: Actor Laurie Metcalf and comedian Lily Tomlin — who presented Ian with her Grammy Award for 1975's 'Between the Lines' — drop in to pay their respects, though neither contributes much. You know who does? 'Hacks' star Jean Smart, who reflects that she identified with the clear-skinned 'beauty queen' referenced in Ian's immortal ballad 'At Seventeen' rather than the awkward 'ugly duckling girls like me' that described the self-image of so many listeners. Ian made even the bullies feel seen. Given Bar-Kar's focus on a handful of standout Ian songs — 'Society's Child,' 'Stars,' 'At Seventeen,' 'Flying Too High' — it would be nice if the film gave us a full, uninterrupted performance of even one of them. But we see Ian play only in too-brief snippets, and the same goes for when we see other stars — Roberta Flack, Mel Tormé, Celine Dion — perform her compositions. (We get a glimpse of Nina Simone's epic interpretation of 'Stars' from the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, and the performance has been released commercially, but the clip is still worth watching in its 7½-minute entirety.) 'Breaking Silence' goes awry only when it indulges in a wrongheaded attempt to liven things up visually. 'This film depicts events from Janice Ian's life as imagined by the director for a richer audience experience,' a title card included in the end credits advises. But these soft-focus, slow-mo reenactments — where actors representing the years-ago versions of Ian and her confederates mime a scene as we hear the present-day Ian recount it — are the most imagination-deficient element of what is otherwise an insightful biography of an exacting singer-songwriter whose achievements have been, um, undersung. There's no 'ecstatic truth' revealed by these Investigation Discovery-grade pantomimes, just a surfeit of taste. Anyway, Ian's songs offer all the truth we need. Unrated. At AFI Silver Theatre. Contains non-explicit discussion of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. 114 minutes.
