Salutations from a 42nd Street internet cafe, 'Natians!  My NY theatre binge is continuing, and I'm quite amazed that similar themes keep cropping up in the work that I'm seeing, no matter how disparate the genres and styles.  Case in point:


NEXT TO NORMAL
music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey
directed by Michael Greif
featuring Alice Ripley and Brian D'Arcy James
Second Stage Theatre

On Wednesday night, I caught my first musical of my trip, Next To Normal, currently in it's first full week of previews at Second Stage Theatre, an incredible Off-Broadway institution, who most recently developed and transferred the Broadway hit The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Next To Normal has been in development for several years by it's authors, Tom Kitt (whose music was heard on Broadway in High Fidelity: The Musical for a whopping 13 performances) and Brian Yorkey (who I very briefly got to work with while at NYU).  Originally titled Feeling Electric, the show had a developmental run at the New York Musical Festival in 2005, and has been rewritten and further developed by director Michael Greif (Rent, Grey Gardens).  That's a long time for development, but for a brand new original musical not adapted from prior source material (a MAJOR anomaly) and incredibly difficult subject matter, smart brains and major time spent seem to be the perscription for success.

In a nutshell, Normal is a rock musical about depression, psychotherapy, loss, overmedication, psychotherapy, and suburbia.  More importantly, it's about the desperate struggle to find happiness when your brain refuses to let go from a trauma, regardless of how much time passes.  Sounds like a real upper, right?  But with Tom Kitt's haunting and rocking score and Brian Yorkey's honest, fresh, funny and surprising writing, this is a musical that draws back the curtain to a world we know but rarely see onstage, much in the way American Beauty did several years ago.

I won't be too specific about the piece, since the production is in early previews, and changes are happening every day.  But suffice it to say, an incredible cast of 6, especially Brian D'Arcy James (who eerily looked, acted, and sang almost exactly like Cincinnati's Charlie Clark) and newcomer Aaron Tveit in a fearless and vocally searing performance, tells this heartbreaking and electrifying story in a thrilling way.  The production is aided by a truly exceptional design, and Mary Mitchell-Campbell (of Playhouse's Company) brings the score thrillingly to life with her terrific band.

There are some pretty big structural problems in the last half an hour of the piece, but from what I understand, it's because of cuts and changes from the show's much more emotionally affecting ending in it's NYMF incarnation.  I sincerly hope the powers at be make the changes/reinstatements necessary to fix the show before opening, because, as Richard Oberacker (who happened to be at the performance I attended) agreed, this could be the new musical Broadway has been craving.

HAPPY DAYS
by Samuel Beckett
directed by Deborah Warner
featuring Fiona Shaw
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

After an acclaimed run at the National Theatre in London, Fiona Shaw's lauded performance in Samuel Beckett's two-handed classic Happy Days has travelled to BAM, and the New York cognocenti are shlepping out in the cold to catch her blazing performance (on Thursday's performance, I spotted Peter Sarsgaard, Maggie Gyllenhall, and Isaac Mizrahi, among others).

When I was a poor college student at NYU, I never made it out to BAM, which constantly programs trans-Atlantic tours by exceptional artists, from London and elsewhere.  The BAM Harvey Theatre is an arrestingly crumbling house, with the lobby underneath the stage, and the chipping and cracking walls haven't seen a coat of paint in ages.  The inside of the theatre feels literally like ancient ruins, and this makes Tom Pyle's extraordinary set feel like an extension of the theatre. 

A massive mountain of rock and rubble cover the entire space, which has been stripped of any and all dressings, is bathed in an incredible lighting design of complete white light.  The thrilling preshow sequence, featuring a superbly apocalyptic sound score, features a new version of "curtain raising" that leaves the audience breathless.

Ms. Shaw, who has collaborated many times with director Deborah Warner in galvanizing productions, does not disappoint in the stamina-testing role of Winnie.  Stuck and sinking in her hole in a mountain, she is a almost scarily optomistic surviver, constantly speaking because she must. 

For a woman stuck in a whole, this a large, full, theatrical performance.  Winnie does about everything but dance (and almost does with her arms), performing for her audience in her head, intentionally mugging and showing off because that's all she can do.  At times, the performance seemed a tad too fast-paced for us to allow the pauses in Beckett's dialogue to break through to the humanity of the moment, but regardless, Shaw's performance was worth the hype.