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On Tap: A Male, Male, Male, Male World
TO study the behavior of men under stress you won’t need to look much farther
than the front pages of newspapers this fall. The surprise entry into the race
of a certain moose-eating, gun-toting grandma-to-be caused a minor shift in the
focus, but most of the news-media glare will soon rest once more on the flaws
and strengths, the goofs and the gaffes of the two men leading the tickets.
Perhaps by way of competing for attention during a historic presidential
campaign, Broadway is also shining a bright spotlight on the male psyche this
autumn. A handful of productions, probably converging by coincidence, will
provide a season-long seminar on the subject of the male animal under pressure.
Young and old, morally healthy or mentally sick, manipulated or manipulating,
embattled or empowered, men of all kinds will be dominating the theater district
this season, mostly in revivals of various vintages.
Is it a reaction against last season, when the New York stage seemed to be
overtaken by domineering women? The play of the year, of course, was “August:
Osage County,” Tracy
Letts’s hair-raising family saga focused on a mother-daughter smackdown. And
the most hotly debated and attention-getting performance came from Patti
LuPone as Momma Rose in “Gypsy,” a musical that also focuses on a
mother-daughter conflict, this one somewhat less savage and partly conducted in
song. Whatever the reason, wives and mothers are taking a definite back seat to
their husbands, fathers and sons this fall on Broadway stages.
Aptly enough, this season of all men includes the first Broadway revival of
“A Man for All Seasons,” Robert
Bolt’s historical drama about Thomas More’s conflict of wills with his
political contemporaries and Henry VIII. More was the chancellor of England when
Henry decided to break with the Roman
Catholic Church to embark on his epic spree of wife dispatching. Frank
Langella, whose formidable performance as a somewhat less revered historical
figure, Richard
M. Nixon, won him a Tony
Award last year, undertakes the title role in the Roundabout
Theater production, opening on Oct. 7 at the American Airlines Theater. (The
movie version of “Frost/Nixon,” in which Mr. Langella also stars, comes to
theaters in time for Christmas.)
A young man in a state of serious sexual and psychological anxiety sweats at
center stage in the revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” which opens on Sept. 25
at the Broadhurst Theater after a stampede-inducing run in the West End of
London. The clamor was not inspired by a fervent need to revisit Mr. Shaffer’s
drama from 1973, about a stable boy obsessed to the point of psychosis with
horses under his care. No, it was another case of collective celebrity fever, an
illness itself in need of inclusion in the latest version of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The role of the freaked-out horse worshiper is taken by Daniel
Radcliffe, who is apparently the star of a fantasy film series based on
books about a British boy with nerdy eyeglasses and magical powers. (Henry
somebody?) The estimable Richard Griffiths, seen recently on Broadway in “The
History Boys,” portrays the psychiatrist who seeks to cure him but comes to envy
the confused lad a wee bit too.
On Oct. 16 one of the more intriguing productions of the season, the revival
of Arthur
Miller’s “All My Sons,” opens at the Gerald
Schoenfeld Theater. In the midcentury dramas that made his reputation Miller
anatomized the moral failings — and the occasional pyrrhic victories — of the
American everyman. “All My Sons,” Miller’s first Broadway hit when it appeared
in 1947, turns on the discovery that Joe Keller, an upstanding middle-class man
in the manufacturing business, may not be as guiltless as he claimed to be in a
scandal involving shoddy airplane parts sold to the United States military.
The play is a foursquare American classic of powerful effect, if no great
intellectual intricacy, regularly seen on stages across the country. But the new
production teams an interesting cast — John
Lithgow, Dianne
Wiest, Patrick
Wilson and a tabloid favorite, Katie
Holmes (a k a Tom
Cruise’s wife) — with one of the most innovative directors working today, Simon
McBurney. His work with his British troupe Complicite has pushed the
boundaries of contemporary theater, employing multiple mediums and nonlinear
storytelling to create entrancing productions that refuse to play it safe. His
aesthetic might be just the ingredient to bring us an invigorating new
perspective on a familiar play.
What would a season of troubled and troublesome men be without a blast of David
Mamet? A travesty, surely, and aptly enough this season brings not one, but
two. First up is a revival of Mr. Mamet’s typically scabrous comedy-drama
“Speed-the-Plow,” opening on Oct. 23 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, about a
couple of Hollywood sharks circling an innocent female victim who turns out to
be more than a match for them. Neil
Pepe directs a potent-sounding cast: Jeremy Piven, who knows from
showbiz-nasty, having leaped to fame as the fire-breathing agent Ari Gold in HBO’s
“Entourage”; Elisabeth Moss, who stars as the demurely ambitious Peggy Olson in
the white-hot AMC series “Mad Men”; and Raúl
Esparza, the versatile actor who has become a season-in, season-out mainstay
on Broadway. There follows the intriguing trio of John
Leguizamo, Cedric
the Entertainer and Haley
Joel Osment (he saw dead people, recall, in “The Sixth Sense”) in a new
production of Mr. Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” about a desperate, squalid plot to
steal a rare coin. Directed by Robert Falls, the production opens Nov. 17 at the
Belasco Theater.
The focus on the hearts and minds of men is not strictly limited to straight
plays, either. Two of the fall season’s most eagerly awaited musical productions
continue the theme. A British boy finds the courage of his dancing convictions
in the stage adaptation of the popular movie “Billy Elliot,” which opens on Nov.
13 at the Imperial Theater. Acclaimed in London, where it continues to run after
more than three years, the musical mixes sentiment and splash in relating the
story of the lad from coal-mining country who dreams of a life on the ballet
stage.
And a hoofer of a less inspiring kind is at the center of “Pal Joey,” the
Rodgers and Hart musical considered long due for a revival, which opens on Dec.
11 at Studio 54, courtesy of Roundabout. Gene
Kelly song-and-danced his way to fame as the caddish title character in the
original Broadway production from 1940. The show was considered strong stuff at
the time for its clear-eyed portrayal of a gigolo with a feckless heart to match
his fleet feet. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times famously held his nose,
wondering, “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”
But the musical’s parade of Rodgers and Hart gems — “I Could Write a Book,”
“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Zip” among them — has kept it on the
short list of Broadway musicals considered ripe for a major reassessment. This
new version will be directed by Joe
Mantello and feature a revised book by the prolific Richard
Greenberg. Stockard
Channing plays Vera, the Chicago society dame who keeps Joey as a favored
plaything, while Martha
Plimpton plays the chorus girl Gladys Bumps.
As Joey, Christian Hoff, who won a featured actor Tony for “Jersey Boys,”
makes a bid to emerge as a bona fide Broadway leading man. The signs are in his
favor, even if the tide of testosterone swamping stages this fall may leave
audiences craving feminine intervention by Christmas. For as this season, amply
stocked with duplicitous, deranged or deluded males, makes clear, men behaving
badly may be a dispiriting spectacle in the public sphere (see Edwards, John),
but it almost inevitably makes effective
theater.
