Dave and I saw Macbeth at CalShakes again last night. Wow. The show has gotten much sharper and clearer all around since we saw it at the last of the previews. Everything ties together better, the characters’ throughlines are all more sharply defined. The significantly trimmed script doesn’t feel quite as rushed as it did (though it still moves awfully fast) and we do have time now to see the MacB’s make the journey from awe at their good fortune to the sense that the good fortune is no less than their due, to resentment that their share of good fortune is still not large enough and willingness to murder allies and friends if it might get them a larger portion. We seemed to speed toward the murders too fast before to know who the MacB’s were before ambition took control of their souls; this time we got to see it.

The acting all around is more polished and secure, except maybe for James Carpenter who was already there in the preview; now the rest of cast is up to that level all the way through the play. Particularly powerful performances by Jud Williford as MacB, Stacy Ross as Lady MacB, and Craig Marker as MacDuff.

Dave and I saw Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession Thursday night at CalShakes. The production is really good. Stacy Ross is terrific as Mrs. Warren, Anna Bullard holds her own very well as her daughter Vivie. Dan Hiatt is very endearing as Praed. The whole ensemble is delightful — the direction, the pointedly ironic set (pointed and ironic both literally and figuratively), the supporting roles, the colorful costumes.

It’s still Mrs. Warren’s Profession, though. It was Shaw’s second play and it has always seemed to me with this play that he hadn’t yet figured out how to make his lecture-hall points and tell a good story at the same time. There are too many times where the lectures cause the story to stop in its tracks for too long. Mrs. Warren seems to me to be a well-drawn character, but the same isn’t true of Vivie, who often seems to me to be who she is, and to do what she does, not so much because she’s a woman in a story as because she’s a symbol in the equation Shaw wanted to construct to describe the world as he saw it.

Still, this production made the play work better for me than it’s ever worked before, and I think it’s mostly because of the approach taken toward Vivie. A reviewer of this production harshly criticized the way Vivie is presented in this production, saying that it wasn’t worthy of Shaw’s character,

… the brave young woman who makes a hard choice to go it alone, at a time when conventional wisdom — and hindsight — declared a woman couldn’t.

Well, that’s one of my big problems with the play, right there: By the end of the play I don’t think Vivie is brave. I think she makes the easy, selfish, heartless, and ultimately cowardly choice, choosing to pretend to “go it alone”, when the really brave thing to do would be to admit that she knows she is only equipped to do well in the world because of the countless advantages that she’s received from her mother. But she doesn’t want to have to acknowledge them or admit any gratitude for them, because that would require her to give up her black-and-white, this-is-good-and-that-is-evil view of the world.

I understand that Shaw makes her that way because she’s his representative for the privileged world’s conventional attitude toward prostitution, loudly condemning it and staying aloof from it while in a state of carefully preserved denial about all the ways in which the world quietly profits by it. But that’s not a living character, that’s an allegorical statue. The few productions I’ve seen have tried to present Vivie in a positive light, her and Mrs. Warren as equally strong-willed women who have opposite and incompatible, but equally valid, points of view. It’s always managed to make the play about as compelling to me as a problem in long division.

What I’d really like to see is for Vivie to struggle her way toward some new understanding and acceptance and wisdom about her situation and her mother — not to give us the usual conventional, sentimental attitude about motherhood and/or prostitution, but to show us how Shaw wished that people like Vivie could change, rather than showing us how they don’t change. Shaw did take just that approach in so many of his plays, letting one or two of his central characters come to new and more complicated understandings of their worlds, even as the more conventional supporting characters around them held fast to their conventional, sentimental, black-and-white attitudes. But Shaw hadn’t tumbled to doing that yet with Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was only his second play.

This production, though, does something that I don’t remember seeing before or remember ever occurring to me before in reading the play, and that is to make us see Vivie’s inflexibility as her way of coping with her profound fear of the world, of its sensuality, and of her own feelings. The production shows us that she is not so much going out into the world on her own as she is locking herself up tightly in a fortress she’s building higher and higher around herself. I still didn’t completely believe in Vivie as a human being, but the approach in this production came closer to making the play work for me than I can remember it ever doing before.

I thought Timothy Near’s direction contained a great many memorable and telling moments, maybe the most powerful of all being the sequence at the very beginning, all done silently before a line of dialogue is said, as we watch Mrs. Warren and Vivie, each in her own home, getting dressed in the morning. Vivie dresses herself in comparatively simple and lightweight clothing, while Mrs. Warren puts on layer after complicated layer with the help of two maids, starting with a corset (trying stoically not to wince as a maid puts a knee to her back and gives a firm tug to tighten the laces just another tiny bit) and a bustle and ending with a jacket and full skirt in a rich, beautiful, and very heavy-looking fabric. Her day hasn’t even begun and already she’s breathing a little harder just from getting dressed — but by God, she has created exactly the effect she wants and needs to create. It’s a brilliant opening, and Stacy Ross’s acting through it is brilliant, too — she seems to do very little, just stands and looks at herself in a mirror as she is dressed by her maids, and yet by the end of the sequence we know, before a word has been spoken, a great deal about Mrs. Warren, her character, her position in the world, her attitude toward it. And about the differences between her and her daughter.

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.

Dave and I went to see a staged reading of a new play last night. Overall, it wasn’t really very good — the characters were well drawn and funny in the commedia dell’arte style (which basically means what you might call “comedy of types”, in the sense of simple, easily recognized character types). But they never really got very far beyond their basic types — the gay men were flamboyant, catty, temperamental, creative, and sex-driven; the wealthy woman spent outrageous sums without thinking to get whatever she wanted; her daughter was spoiled and shallow; and so on. Don’t get me wrong, they were stereotypes but pretty well-written ones, almost always funny and only occasionally edging into possibly borderline offensive territory (that line about cucumbers, for example).

But there was a predictable paint-by-numbers quality to it, too, with very little to make the characters particular to this play, and after 15 minutes or so I wanted to tell them all that, okay, I really and truly get who you all are, so now can we do something with this information rather than just continue spinning out further variations, however well crafted, of the same eleven or twelve jokes?

There seemed to me to be no genuine conflict until about ten minutes before the end of the play. I think those two things are the same issue, actually. The way you develop a character in the commedia dell’arte style, as everybody is a “type” and there are no psychological depths to be explored, is to start with the archetype and then give each principal character one clear goal to work toward, something vitally important to that character, something that seems at the start to be impossibly difficult to attain, yet that he or she will go to extraordinary means to pursue. Then the character is particularized by this desire and by the manner in which he or she goes after it. (A common variation is to define a character in terms of what he or she desperately wants to avoid. Best of all, if you can do it without cluttering things up too much, is one of each: The central character desperately wants to get the woman he’s smitten by while staying far away from the mafiosi who are after him, or she desperately wants to rescue her boyfriend from pirates while not being herself kidnapped and bedded by the pirate captain.) In a nutshell that’s the classic basis of both strong melodrama and strong farce, depending on whether your tone of voice is serious or comic.

If an archetypal character doesn’t have an all-consuming desire to go after, though, he or she doesn’t have anywhere much to go, and that was the problem with last night’s play. Until quite late in the play, nobody had anything that they wanted so badly that they’d go to extraordinary means to get it; there was nothing that anybody was trying to avoid at all costs; nobody had any serious obstacles to getting what they wanted. There was no real conflict, just a lot of bitchy talk. Very funny bitchy talk, most of the time, but with never anything much at stake. It was like weak sitcom writing, everybody working very hard at swapping zingers to cover up the fact that nothing much was happening.

Near the end, though, a plot finally appeared, when the wealthy woman secretly bribed someone to try and sabotage her own daughter’s engagement. This never really led anywhere, though — it was too late in the play, the man never actually did anything to try and break up the couple, and the couple ended up breaking up on their own, just from their own incompatibility.

Then the sentimental ending in which all the seemingly cold and hypocritical (and therefore theatrically interesting) characters are revealed to have hearts of marshmallow after all. Everybody stops squabbling, drops the bitchiness, and makes up with everybody else, the sort of sitcom ending that is supposed to be heart-warming but always seems to me to be underlining how really unimportant the situation has been all along.

It’s always irritated me when a character who throughout the story has only been drawn in one dimension for perfectly legitimate comic or melodramatic purposes suddenly turns sweet and gooey in the last scene just because the playright thinks it’s time to make the audience go “aww!” In the final scene, Regina Giddens admits with tears in her eyes that she really always loved Horace, and she and her brothers are moved to make up their silly little misunderstanding, realizing that the love of family is what really matters after all; Sweeney Todd suddenly decides to let bygones be bygone and tells Mrs. Lovett to pack her bags, because he’s taking her away this very afternoon to that little cottage by the sea she’s dreamed of for so long; Lady Bracknell embraces Jack warmly, confesses that she has disapproved only because her own heart was once cruelly broken in her sensitive youth, and we see for the first time that under her lovably crusty exterior, all she ever really wanted was for Gwendolen to be very, very happy.

No, no, no, I just don’t get how you can even want to make the entire play depend for its working on the presentation of a character as single-minded and archetypal, and then in the last five minutes suddenly give this character a heart and soul and expect me to do an about-face and feel instant sympathy. If this has been the character’s nature all along, then what on earth has the rest of the play been about? If he or she is really that flexible and forgiving, what exactly have we been fretting about the whole evening? If the characters can shrug off so easily and nonchalantly in the final scene the conflict that has been driving the whole play, then aren’t we in the audience now being told that any emotional engagement with the story and the characters that we may have felt up to this point, based as it was on the now-exploded idea that anything has ever really been at stake for anyone, was all just a matter of ha-ha-fooled-you-into-caring?

Dave and I saw the opening night of Phèdre at ACT Wednesday night, the Racine play in a new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Physically it’s a very attractive though somewhat austere production, but the direction and performances are mostly understated to the point of dullness. This is a 17th-century French take on an ancient Greek tragedy, for heaven’s sake, and it cries out for intense, exhausting, bravura, larger-than-life acting. The acting in this production, though, is careful and cautious and very much smaller than life.

The only two actors who seemed to me to be in the right ballpark were Seana McKenna as Phèdre and Roberta Maxwell as her servant and confidante Oenone. Both of them seemed most of the time to be cruising at half strength, though; it felt like they both had the chops to give larger performances but were deliberately holding back. Why on earth were they directed in this way? Just crazy. Their scenes together were by far the very best thing in the production, but even those could have been so much better. Phèdre’s big second-act scene with Hippolytus, which is usually the most emotionally charged in the play, came off as a bit awkward because of the difference in intensity between Phèdre’s passionate, tormented reading and Hippolytus’s absurdly low-key one. Theseus wasn’t all that much better, and when Theramenes entered near the end of the play and told Theseus of his son’s horrifyingly grisly death — which Theseus himself helped bring about through his rashness and anger — it was startling that Theramenes’ tearful account had about thirty times more passion in it than Theseus’s stifled reaction.

One thing that had occurred to me is that this production premiered in Stratford, Ontario, with the same cast, and perhaps it was in a much smaller theater there and the cast has for some reason not made the adjustments needed in their acting to carry out to a larger hall. A little web research shows that this is the case, and the theater it played in in Stratford was less than half the size of the Geary. However, while researching this I also came across some reviews of the Stratford production, and several of them said much the same thing, that this production has (to quote one of them) a “general lack of voltage”. To quote another,

While all the actors in the production turn in solid performances — particularly Tom McCamus as Theseus, Roberta Maxwell as Oenone the nurse, and McKenna in the lead — they seem to be working independently of one another. While one character delivers a gut-wrenching confession or tirade, the others just stand statue-still and stare.

That’s a pretty good description of the big central scene between Phèdre and Hippolytus.

Dave and I were saying afterward that later in the run, if the actors get out from under the director’s control and after they’ve had a few weeks in front of live audiences, the performances may well find a more natural level of intensity better suited to the play. Lord knows I’ve seen that happen.

I was particularly disappointed because the play itself is one I admire a lot — the amount of emotional detail in the writing, the way that in those long speeches the shades of emotion are constantly shifting and yet always drawn so sharply, all of that just astonishes me. But that emotional complexity and subtlety is precisely why the play calls for larger-than-life performances in which the actors really convey those subtle shifts of emotion through their acting, not just stand back and let the words do nearly all the work.

The translation seemed okay to me, but I’d have to spend some time reading it myself to be sure what I think, because I don’t think it was given the sort of reading it needed. The audience laughed more than a few times at lines here and there that seemed absurd, but I came away thinking that the problem was more that the lackluster performances made the poetic intensity of the lines seem out of place, when really it was the other way around, that the intensity of the language was appropriate — I mean, if we don’t want that kind of heightened poetic language in the theater, why are we doing 17th-century French drama in the first place? — and it was the matter-of-fact way in which the lines were read that was a mistake. Take away the brilliance and passion of those raging torrents of poetry and Phèdre doesn’t have much left; you kinda gotta go with it or leave it alone and do some other play more to your taste.

Carey Perloff boasts in the program that this translation “has avoided the rhyming that often makes English translations of French slightly laughable”, which seems rather a shallow thing to say; certainly there are laughable rhymed translations of French verse plays, but it isn’t the rhyming that makes them laughable, it’s either the writer’s lack of poetic skill or the performers’ lack of skill and experience in performing a sort of drama that is no longer native to us, or both. My very best experiences in the theater with Molière and Racine have been seeing good productions of Richard Wilbur’s rhymed translations, and when the lines are spoken with intention and conviction, the rhymes are not laughable, just a convention that gives shape and a kind of power to the verse. Whereas in this production there was laughter in the audience at a dozen or so inappropriate moments anyway, and not one of them can be blamed on a rhyme.

ACT performs Phèdre without intermission. The whole thing only runs about an hour and a half, but it feels longer and they really would have benefited from a short break in the middle.

I’ve been so busy and tired that I still haven’t blogged anything about South Pacific in the Golden Gate Theater, even though we saw it a couple days after it opened and now it’s already a few days before it closes.

Actually, though, it’s hard to know what to say about it once I’ve said that it’s just about a perfect production. I’ve seen several productions of South Pacific, large and small, so I know how easy it can be to do it poorly. This is easily the best production of the show that I’ve seen.

It makes for an interesting comparison with Wicked, because where Wicked is full of splash and spectacle and larger-than-life performances and characters painted in very broad strokes, South Pacific is a much more low-key show, sets are beautiful but simple, characters and performances are more human-scaled and nuanced — Hammerstein called South Pacific a “musical play” and this production keeps it that way.

And where Wicked was often far more thrilling, South Pacific kept me emotionally involved all the way through.

Part of the production’s strength is that it gives full weight to the fact that Nellie Forbush and Joe Cable are, to be blunt about it, racists. I’ve seen productions (and the movie version) where the intention seemed to be to give this aspect as little emphasis as possible, but it’s the crux of the story. In this production they even restore the line (cut from the original production) in which Nellie refers to a Polynesian woman as “colored”. Yes, I know, it makes you squirm in your seat; that is exactly why the line is there. Nellie’s unconscious racism is the obstacle that she must face up to and overcome if she’s to pursue the life she wants; if this isn’t made clear, then there’s no journey of the soul that she has to take, no real reason why she couldn’t say yes to Emile in the first scene and save us all three hours and the price of the tickets, no story to be told here that is really worth the telling.

(I read an article recently that referred to the “colored” line as offensively “racist dialogue” that should have been left out. How else, though, are you going to show that a character is racist without giving her something racist to say? Or is the point that no story should ever be told about a racist who confronts and overcomes her prejudices? Well, screw that reasoning.)

Rod Gilfry makes the transition from opera to musical play well — he sings magnificently, of course, but he acts well, too. Carmen Cusack as Nellie and Anderson Davis as Joe Cable are very, very good. But maybe the high point for me was Keala Settle as Bloody Mary singing “Bali Ha’i”. She gets across more layers of meaning in that song than I think I’d ever realized were there. And you know from the way she sings that song that she’s already making her plans for Joe Cable.