Dave and I went to see a small production of Hammerstein and Kern’sVery Warm for May at 42nd Street Moon last night. I’d always read that this was one of both men’s favorites among their musicals and that they were both very disappointed in its failure on Broadway, so I was all prepared for something no doubt flawed in its construction or uneven in its writing but with plenty of charming and special qualities all the same. At the end of the first act, though, Dave and I looked at each other with dismay — this dog of a show was the one they remembered fondly? The story and characters seemed both trite and clumsily written, the songs made very little impression, and the moments of real charm and wit were few. However, the second act started out a bit better, and continued getting better and stronger as it went along, and by the end of the show I could see how you could feel some affection for it.

Very Warm for May has a rather loose story about a theatrical family and an amateur production of a new musical, and probably works best as a vehicle for a bunch of talented and characterful performers. It doesn’t get that here; only Bill Fahrner as the eccentric writer and director of a very strange musical and Maureen McVerry as the wealthy woman who owns the barn in which the musical is being rehearsed created distinctive characters for themselves and had the presence and comic timing to make their roles sparkle. None of the others was bad or anything, they just didn’t seem very sharp. (Jimmy Robertson was only so-so in the spoken portions as the director’s geeky assistant, but suddenly outshone everybody else whenever dancing started.) That and a tendency to keep the musical numbers at an unvaryingly brisk pace gave the production a bit of a mechanical feeling sometimes.

One thing I found very interesting about the show was seeing how Hammerstein reused ideas from Very Warm for May in later shows. Dave and I had just been talking a couple of weeks ago about how playwrights and composers often recycle things from their failed or forgotten or unfinished works, and here you could see where Hammerstein had done the same; Very Warm for May contains early versions of ideas that later became “Song of the King” from The King and I, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music (though I might argue that A.E. Housman got to that one even earlier), and especially a whole lot of Me and Juliet.

Dave also speculated that Hammerstein may have gotten more than a few ideas for Very Warm for May out of Die Meistersinger, a suggestion that seems ludicrous until you actually stop and work it out.

I’m not 100% sure but I think one of the dances contained a rather snarky “quotation” from another well-known dance number from another show. I really dislike that sort of thing when it pulls me out of whatever involvement I was feeling with the characters and the story at that point. I laughed when I recognized the steps (or thought I recognized them), but if I’m right about the “quote”, it was kind of a cheap shot that didn’t have anything to do with the situation in the story, and I felt a bit slimy afterward for having laughed.

On Friday evening, Dave and I and some friends went to the opening night of Giant Bones at the Exit Theater. I’ll write more later, but the short version is that this is a terrific show, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek story about a traveling theater troupe in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek medieval England. Several stories, actually — the play has a really delicious Thousand Nights and a Night feel to it with stories interrupting other stories and the levels of narration occasionally colliding. Lots of fun. A little longer than it needs to be, close to three hours, but never dull. The acting ensemble is terrific.

Dave and I went to see Wicked again last Thursday. We bought the tickets months ago or we might not have picked such a stressful and busy time, but it was a lot of fun to see the show again.

Whatever faults it has, it’s a completely entertaining show — the story is engaging and novel, the performances are very good, the set and costumes are astoundingly beautiful, and the show moves at a breathless pace.

I thought the second part of the show, after Glinda and Elphaba leave school and head for the Emerald City, and we start to learn about the dark side of how Oz is governed, worked better than I’ve ever seen it work.

Much of this improvement is due, I think, to Kendra Kassebaum’s performance as Glinda, which seemed much stronger and richer to me than it had when we saw it earlier in the run. I think maybe she wasn’t quite as funny as Kristen Chenoweth was in the college scenes. But I thought that in the second part, from the scene at the end of first act where Glinda and Elphaba part ways and all through the second act, she was much stronger and more moving than Chenoweth was, or even than she herself had been at the beginning of the SF run. Right from the beginning of the second act, she made her sadness and disillusion more palpable, and there was more heart in her performance. That helped make the signs of totalitarianism in the Emerald City feel more significant this time around, and I felt more than I did before that I was watching Glinda in the process of being changed by events and not just being told at the end of the show that she had been changed by them.

I still don’t care much for a lot of Schwartz’s lyrics, which don’t seem well crafted to the story to me; many of them don’t seem to me to make their points as sharply as they really ought to. Schwartz spoke in an interview I read somewhere about rewriting Fiyero’s first act number so that what had been subtext in the first version of the song was explicitly stated in the new version; I think there are a number of other songs that would be stronger if he’d done the same to them.

But I liked his music more this time around. Knowing the score better, I was able to follow how the themes are used as underscoring in the second act, and there were quite a few nice little ironic surprises there.

Dave and I saw Emily Mann’s Chekhov adaptation, A Seagull in the Hamptons, at Shotgun Players on Friday and it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s been extended through this Sunday so I urge all theater lovers to go see it. Mann translates The Seagull from a successful actress’s vacation home in the Russian countryside to a successful actress’s vacation home in the Hamptons, and it all works wonderfully well. The characters and situations seem more immediate and vivid, more understandable, easier both to laugh at and to sympathize deeply with. And it seems to me that the production conveys Chekhov’s own mix of comedy and pathos more truly and consistently than any other I’ve ever seen. The production is intensely human and painfully funny from the opening lines (“I’m in mourning for my life” is not just a poignant line but a very funny one as well in this production), and the final scene between Alex (Konstantin’s name in this version) and Nina is both hopeful and heartbreaking at the same time.

It’s a bit scary to realize how important The Seagull has been to me in my life, and yet how completely my view of it has changed over the decades. When I was in college, I identified a lot with Konstantin, the young, idealistic writer; now I find Konstantin maddeningly naive and pigheaded, and Trigorin carrying his damned notebook everywhere seems by far the more sensible artist to me now. He may well be third rate, as Konstantin thinks, as even he himself thinks; but I no longer think it’s the job of a writer to try not to be third rate, only to do his or her best and keep writing. And hopefully not try to evaluate or think too much about one’s ranking in the larger scheme of things; nothing will bring on depression, crappy writing, and/or writer’s block quicker than that. If one’s best turns out to be third rate, so be it; it’s only through by continuing to write as well as one can that one might become better, and if one never does, well, despite what they tried to teach me in college, the world badly needs more good third-rate art, too.

Now, some 30 years after my first acquaintance with the play, it seems to me that Nina is the one is this bunch most likely to ever become a really good artist. When we see her in the last scene she’s still in the throes of a lot of very painful disappointment and disillusion, but she’s forging ahead all the same, and even if she doesn’t realize it yet, she’s going to get her head straight one of these days and find that she’s learned more than she realizes from all the miserable small parts she’s been playing. The director and cast agree with that take on Nina in this production, I think; Alex/Konstantin doesn’t think she’s a good actor, but when she recites some of his ridiculous play again in the last scene, in this production she speaks it with so much genuine feeling that she even makes it sound like good writing, and we in the audience can see for ourselves that she has now achieved exactly what she said she dreamed of in the first act; but she still doesn’t realize this herself, nor does Alex see it. But Alex never will, and there are hints that Nina is already slowly starting to wake up to it. She still thinks of herself as the girl in Philip/Trigorin’s short story, the one whose life a man carelessly destroyed; she doesn’t yet realize that the real destruction of her life would be to end up like Milly/Masha, and that Philip didn’t destroy her life at all but saved it. Not that he intended to; he could just as easily have destroyed it through his weakness if she were a slightly different kind of young woman. He gets zero brownie points for saving her life. But he saved it, however accidentally, all the same. And if Nina hasn’t put all the pieces together yet, she will, if she keeps at it. And at the end of The Seagull it looks like she’s determined to keep at it.

At least, that’s how it looks to me now.

Anyway, this is a wonderful production. It runs one more week.

On Sunday Dave and I saw John Gabriel Borkman at the Aurora Theater. Afterward I said to Dave, I think we just saw a performance of an opera libretto without the music.

I’d never seen or read the play before, which was Ibsen’s second to last. It’s a very spare play, and if my memory was correct when rereading some of it the next day, it was made even sparer by some cuts taken in the performance. The characters are drawn more in bold strokes than in realistic detail, and Borkman in particular is quite a bit larger than life. The story has a poetic, mythic, somewhat stylized quality to it that at times seems to call out for singing rather than speech.

It’s also a bleak play, beautiful and poignant and at times profoundly comic, but very bleak. Most of these characters are determined to live out their days in what amounts to a tomb of their own construction, hiding themselves away and holding out for others to redeem them, holding out for others to do things and to make sacrifices on their behalf that the others will surely never, ever make. In contrast is Borkman’s son, whom I couldn’t help but sympathize with in his determination to get as far away as possible from the tomb his elders have built for themselves, and would like to shut him into as well; yet whom at the same time I couldn’t help but dislike a bit for his shallowness and aimlessness, even as I could well understand why he’d grown up as he had.

With some words and music by artists who can find their way sympathetically into the souls of these very difficult people, I could see it making a good opera and perhaps a powerful one.

John Carpenter is terrific as Borkman. I’ve enjoyed his work for a couple of decades now, and I’ve always thought of him as a very good actor within a somewhat limited range, but in the last few years he’s been going well beyond that range and finding all sorts of depths I haven’t seen in his performances before. The other standout, I thought, was Karen Lewis as Ella Rentheim, who breathes remarkable life into the role; her scenes with Carpenter were high points for me. But nobody is anything less than very good in this cast.