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Mary Beth Peil

Anastasia – Irresistible

04/28/2017

In a season crowded with what have turned out to be so many disappointing Broadway shows rushing to make the Tony Award deadline (April 27), Anastasia rises above the fray. Here is an old fashioned (that’s a compliment) book musical with a ravishing score, expressive, illuminating lyrics, significant talent, remarkable visuals, war, deception, and love.

The Cinderella story, for those of you unfamiliar with Anatole Litvak’s 1956 film or the Disney cartoon, revolves around what might’ve happened had Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, escaped the murder of her family by Bolshevik secret police in 1918. There were, in fact, rumors of survival and young women who declared themselves to be the princess.

nana

Nicole Scimeca, Mary Beth Peil

Ostensibly caught in an explosion, our heroine (Christy Altomare), is an amnesiac called Anya by the hospital in which she was treated. The girl is scraping by as a street cleaner in poverty-stricken St. Petersburg: A city on the rise/It’s really very friendly/If you don’t mind spies…She remembers only someone’s promise to meet in Paris, where all will be well. We’ve seen that covenant made by her grandmother, the Dowager Empress (Mary Beth Peil) who inadvertently decamped to the French capital in time to escape joining her family in death. A Faberge music box is given little Anastasia (the superb Nicole Scimeca).

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna

Anya is conscripted by con men Dmitry (Derek Klena, a young audience heartthrob with an excellent tenor, though less presence than he might have) and Vlad (John Bolton – a fine comic actor in the vein of Billy De Wolfe) to masquerade as Anastasia in order to collect a sizeable reward 0ffered by the Dowager. Vlad was once a palace insider and provides fount of information. Lyric details add historical interest. Hesitant about the dishonesty, Anya reconciles it as a way to get to France and then begins to believe the possibility.

Every now and then during tutoring, the girl finds she knows something she shouldn’t – like French. These windows of recollection, skillfully woven through the book, are dismissed by Dmitry and Vlad as imagination. A scene at the last palace ball Anastasia attended is evocatively recreated with projected spectres joining dancers on stage and balconies.

soldier

Ramin Karimloo, Christy Altomare

Meanwhile, Anya is noticed by Gleb (Ramin Karimloo) a regimental official so taken with her that despite staunch commitment to the authoritarian state, he lets the girl go even after hearing of the plot in which she’s involved. Anya, Vlad and Dmitry make it to Paris backed by a surprising resource. (Oh, the ingeniously imagined train ride!)

Gleb follows, instructed to kill the girl if she turns out to be Anastasia. His father was one of the soldiers who killed the Tsar’s family. Will he be able to finish the job? Also in the balance is Dmitry’s romance with the young woman he must give up should her identity be proven.

Vlad hopes to get to the Dowager Empress through her lady in waiting, Countess Lily with whom he was once romantically entangled. (Caroline O’Connor – imagine a more attractive Martha Raye.) A charming push/pull number with Lily and Vlad (O’Connor and Bolton make farce delicious) recalls early Hollywood musicals as does a number in The Neva Club peopled by white Russian exiles. Outcome rests with hopeful, frightened Anya and Anastasia’s disillusioned grandmother – no, her Nana. “You can’t be anyone unless you first recognize yourself.”

club

John Bolton, Caroline O’Connor and the Company

Fellow journalists have objected to sidelining the royal family’s deaths/turbulent Russian politics. I disagree. The event is unmistakable. Poverty and government shifts are not the point. Enough is evoked to give context to the situation. This is not an opera.

In fact, Anastasia might be considered a primer for well conceived musicals. Numbers organically elaborate on dialogue. Comic relief appears after quiet intensity. Past and present occupy the stage with cohesive luster. Even aware of the conclusion, we willingly, appreciatively succumb.

Songs like the music box’s “Once Upon a December,” “Journey to The Past”: Heart, don’t fail me now!/Courage, don’t desert me!/Don’t turn back now that we’re here… and  “Crossing a Bridge” may be familiar, but empathetic emotion feels fresh. Several solos by Gleb are as edifying as they are musically powerful and “Still” by the Dowager Empress is heart wrenching. At least two vocal arrangements play conspirators’ themes against one another with consummate skill. (There’s no analysis in the moment, just intoxication.)

ballet

John Bolton, Christy Altomare, Derek Klena in the box 

In her Broadway debut, Christy Altomare is grave and radiant. We’re with her every step of the way. Warm vocals wonder and soar. Memory fragments emerge credibly abrupt. Doubt feels sincere. An artist to watch.

Mary Beth Peil is stunning. Every inch the Dowager Empress, the actress embodies magisterial grace. She exudes love for Anastasia, bone deep suffering of loss – her vocals tear at one, galvanizing expectation, and weary joy. A masterful turn.

Ramin Karmiloo (Gelb) is a leading man to his toes. Stage presence is unconditional, his muscular, expansive voice hypnotic. Karmiloo shows us the nuance of Gelb’s conflicting feelings while maintaining a habitually rigid outer demeanor.

last

Christy Altomare, Derek Klena

Director Darko Tresnjak, like four other members of the show’s creative team, was responsible for the gleefully high-wattage A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Tresnjak adroitly handles the Dowager Countess’s delicate goodbye to little Anastasia and small, telling gestures – like Gelb’s dismissal of his subordinates, as well as he manifests murder, revolution, and nightclub frivolity. Visual tableaux are always pleasing.

Choreographer Peggy Hickey melds Broadway hoofing with 1920s Charleston, gives us a comic tango with panache, and engineers shimmering waltzes.

Alexander Hodge’s Scenic Design and Donald Holder’s Lighting (from war to ghostly dreams) work symbiotically hand in hand with some of the most fantastic Projection Design I’ve ever seen (by Aaron Rhyne). Though I’d’ve preferred a bit more solid scenery and a tad less Peter Max coloration in videos, cumulative results are astonishing. Settings are comprised of full scale, detailed photographs artfully manipulated to indicate time of day and character movement. Anyone in this field should emphatically attend.

Linda Cho’s Costumes are period perfect, believably tattered, stylish when appropriate, glorious at court, and always collectively flattering.

Photos by Matthew Murphy
Opening: Christy Altomare
Photo of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, Wiki

Anastasia
Book by Terrance McNally
Music by Stephen Flaherty
Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens
Directed by Darko Tresnjak
The Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th Street

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – Machiavelli Had Nothing On Them!

11/05/2016

The original Royal Shakespeare/Broadway production of this piece with Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan was electric. From the moment Le Vicomte de Valmont (Liev Schreiber here) slithered into proximity of La Marquise de Merteuil (Janet McTeer in this production) the stage crackled with wit, innuendo, and sexual anticipation. While outwardly meticulously proper, the Machiavellian power game played with others’ lives (and their own) is not just selfish and cruel, it’s rooted as firmly below the waist as it is in intellectual satisfaction.

There’s no denying both leads are excellent actors. The mercurial McTeer was far and away the best thing about this summer’s Taming of the Shrew in Central Park and Schreiber’s cable show Donovan has been well received, but the pair seems miscast,  she uncomfortable and he lost in translation. Had this Marquise been coupled with as strong a force of nature as herself, things might’ve gone very differently. (London reviews with another Valmont were raves.)

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Booth Theatre

Janet McTeer

Schreiber is stiff and brutish in a role that requires lascivious finesse. When calculation is apparent it’s rarely magnetic. A sword fight, however, is terrific, and its consequences well played. While McTeer has glorious moments of self-satisfaction and fury, she’s also forced to roll her eyes as her co-conspiritor peeps from behind a screen. Subtlety exhibited elsewhere is all but eliminated. We barely observe femininity or desire.

The fault lies partly in lack of balance and chemistry and partly in Director Josie Rourke’s rethinking the piece as a melodrama of mores and manners, not the vibrant life or death battle of the sexes its author intended.

Les Liaisons Dangeruses Booth Theatre

Liev Schreiber

We should have suspected how radically this production had changed things in the face of Tom Scutt’s beautifully dilapidated set: faded paint and peeling plaster, minimal furniture under diaphanous drop cloths, candelabras, floral arrangements, period art, and empty picture frames. We’re reminded of the wages of sin by omnipresent decay. As if this weren’t sufficient, contemporary lighting flickers out and rises up as chandeliers descend, so we’re made to distinguish then from now. Ghostly women sing oooo through set adjustments. The original production opened and remained in sensual opulence.

Conveniently a widow, La Marquise de Merteuil has the cleverness, position, resources, and backbone to organize her life and lovers as she chooses. Valmont is her amoral match. The pair, circling one another like feral, though eloquent beasts, had been, and might again be lovers. La Marquise, unaccountably thrown over before she’d been ‘finished,’ wishes revenge on an ex swain about to marry the very young Cecile Valances. (Elena Kampouris making an auspicious debut.) The man’s prize, she tells Valmont, is not Cecile’s inheritance, but her virginity. If he would kindly relieve the girl of her bud before marriage, The Marquise would be obliged.

Les Liaisons Dangeruses Booth Theatre

Elena Kampouris and Liev Schreiber

Valmont at first refuses. He feels Cecile is “…bound to be curious and on her back before the first bouquet of flowers…” i.e. the task is an unworthy challenge. He also has his own current agenda to seduce the unimpeachable Madame de Tourvel without, he adds, disabusing her faith. This would be an accomplishment that could only enhance his considerable reputation. (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen is a graceful, dignified, and then wretched Madame; brava.) When La Marquise offers herself, in exchange for written proof of the deflowering, Valmont agrees. They contrive to place both “victims” at the home of Valmont’s Aunt, Madame de Rosemonde (a superb Mary Beth Peil) whom he will shortly visit. Two birds, as it were, enticed onto one extended perch.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Booth Theatre

Birgitte Hjort Sorensen and Liev Schreiber

Cecile’s gullible mother (the face-making Ora Jones), Emilie, one of Valmont’s courtesans (a credibly saucy Katrina Cunningham), and Le Chevalier Danceny – a young man besotted with Cecile who, alas, is beneath her while never actually getting beneath her (Raffi Barsoumian, who lacks naiveté ) – become mere pawns. With the help of a spying servant, a duplicitous maid, and the calculating false friendship of La Marquise, Valmont beds the teenager and baits the righteous, married Madame de Tourvel. (This is, alas, poorly depicted as a cold-blooded act, rather than exciting, if initially ambivalent discovery.)

We watch Cecile develop a taste for what’s been forbidden, potentially learning the ways of the world from a master (The Marquise), while Valmont unexpectedly gets enmeshed in a relationship with his prey (Madame de Tourval). The latter, a compelling surprise, revises all plans. La Marquise and Valmont reach a crossroads.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Booth Theatre

Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber

This is a splendidly written piece of theater, full of smart double entendre, abject decadence and ultimate risk. Unfortunately, pace that should be scintillating too often lags. Our protagonists think (and act) on their feet, forcing reaction to be as swift or at least revealing wrenching effort. Because Josie Rourke’s vision lacks the guilty pleasure of enjoying the art of consummate manipulation, the horror of its outcome also diminishes.

Costume Design (also by Tom Scutt) is handsome but restrained. We never really get a sense of the luxury and excess that act as a Petrie dish for observed games. Mark Henderson’s Lighting cooperates beautifully with actual candles to great effect. Movement Director Lorin Latarro offers stylized motion without appearing awkward. Extremely believable swordplay is attributable to Fight Director Richard Ryan.

Photos by Joan Marcus
Opening: Janet McTeer, Liev Schreiber

The Donmar Warehouse Production of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton
From the 1782 novel by Choderlos de Laclos
Directed by Josie Rourke
Booth Theater
22 West 45th Street