Terry and Mauricio and Dave and I went to see 42nd Street Moon’s production of Call Me Madam last night. The production is fun and the performances are very good, but oh my god what a threadbare script it is. The show wasn’t written to tell a story that anybody wanted to tell, it was written to show off its star’s personality. There’s hardly a line of dialogue that has any intrinsic wit or excitement or character or even basic dramatic craft in it; everything is tailored to give the illusion that there’s some kind of slight story going on while actually letting Ethel Merman play herself and be entertaining while doing so. Klea Blackhurst seems to me to be Merman’s equal as a singer, and certainly could have run circles around her as an actor, but this show isn’t about any of that, it’s about being Ethel Merman, and I don’t see much reason to do Call Me Madam now that she’s not available. Some shows ought to be treated like football jerseys and retired with the star performers who wore them.

Many of the songs are terrific, of course, so the show has a lot of entertaining moments, too. Maybe someday somebody will take the songs and stitch together a new script tailored to the personality of somebody new.

Dave and I have seen Wicked, South Pacific, and Awake and Sing! in the last couple of weeks.

Wicked and South Pacific are an interesting contrast. [Later: This post got to be very long by the time I got finished with grousing about the lyrics to Wicked, so South Pacific will wait for another post. The short version: Drop everything and order tickets.] They are both terrific experiences in the theater. Wicked is a spectacular production with amazing, witty, eye-filling sets and costumes. It’s larger than life and full of energy and often thrilling. We saw it six years ago when it was on its way to Broadway, and the show is much stronger now. The storytelling is usually sure-handed — I think there are some weaknesses in the second act but the first act seems to me to be just about flawlessly constructed. I had a great time, was never really bored, and yet I left also feeling a little sorry that the show doesn’t touch either my emotions or my intellect much.

I think it’s due to the songs. For the most part the songs tell us what emotions the characters are feeling rather than showing us the characters feeling those emotions. Early on, for example, there’s “Loathing”, in which Glinda and the other students do a peppy upbeat dance number to indicate to us that they all hate Elphaba. But there’s no loathing in the music itself, which could have served just as well for the peppy upbeat Ozdust Ballroom sequence or the peppy upbeat “One Short Day” sequence in the Emerald City.

Nor is there much loathing in the words, which is mostly just everybody describing their loathing over and over again in general terms. It’s an entertaining number, but once you get past the first few lines, nothing new is said, the situation doesn’t develop any further, and you don’t learn anything more about the characters. The idea of taking some popular song cliches and changing “loving” to “loathing” is a fun idea, but doesn’t add anything meaningful to the story or characters. I probably wouldn’t even notice this or care about it if it were just one number that was there to provide some lightweight diversion before getting back to the meat of the story. But most of the score is lightweight is the same way, and yet the story isn’t, or at least doesn’t seem to want to be. The story and situations are very unusual, the dialogue keeps setting up situations just right for somebody to express some unique, intense, heartfelt, human emotion in a song, and then all too often when the song comes it’s a generic pop song with a generic lyric. Many of the songs strike me as being very enjoyable pop songs, but still.

There are exceptions. I really like “The Wizard and I” a lot, and “Wonderful” strikes me as putting a shrewd insight into an enjoyable song (though it also reminds me an awful lot of “Somebody” from Birds of Paradise, which is an off-Broadway show from the late 1980s that I’m very fond of, which happens to have words by the very Winnie Holzman who wrote the book for Wicked, and what is that about). “Popular” is a major, major hoot. But beyond those, there aren’t too many places where I feel like the lyric is revealing new facets of character or creating dramatic tension or moving the story forward or any of that good stuff.

The characters of Glinda and Elphaba don’t have much depth to them. We don’t see them develop much (though we’re told at times that they have developed). All through the first act they’re “types” in the commedia dell’arte sense, “comic archetypes” you might say, boldly but one-dimensionally drawn characters with uncomplicated and easily conveyed traits and motivations. Of course, they’re types in the MGM movie, too, and it’s great fun to see these well-known characters reinterpreted as two high school students, the popular blonde girl and the serious dark-haired girl. It’s a familiar kind of comic situation with a familiar pair of comic archetypes, and it gets us to the laughs very quickly. And many of them are genuinely excellent laughs. But the authors also seem to want the story to say some serious things about how and why we perceive people as being good or bad, and that part never really happens for me. In the second act in particular, where the authors seem to be trying to make some more serious points, the characters just lose their clarity without gaining depth (or at least any that convinced me), and the points don’t go for much. I think there’s some kind of connection being aimed at, for example, between Glinda’s first-act craving for popularity and her second-act career choice as a much-loved spokeswoman for a government whose secret corruption she helps keep covered up, a desire to show how the one has led to the other; but if that’s what is intended, it never really hits the mark.

I’ve been listened to the recording of the score, and Schwartz’s music is growing on me, but his lyrics aren’t — they’re mostly bland and generic and don’t paint the specific characters. Often they just restate the main idea in general terms, with no particulars or surprising insights into why this character in this situation is feeling these things. I’m listening to the final duet, for example, and the characters tell us over and over that they’ve been changed by knowing each other, but they do it in general terms. You could give all of Glinda’s lines to Elphaba and vice versa, or even give the whole duet to some other two characters — make it for Boq and Nessa, say, after the end of the dance at the Ozdust Ballroom — and you wouldn’t notice the song wasn’t written for those characters. It’s a lovely song, I like the sentiment, I particularly love the lyric line about the river that meets the boulder, and yet I feel like once again we’re being told something in general terms, not being shown characters in action.

There are also too many places in the lyrics where I’m reminded of a lyric from some other song (usually by Sondheim), and way too many trick rhymes that don’t work well enough to have bothered with. I mean, sure, “personality dialysis” is a terrific, funny phrase. But then the line before has to be contrived to end with “analysis”, and worse, the following line is twisted all around so that there’s an internal rhyme with “be a pal, a sister”, and before you know it the lyric has spent 25 words or so just to embroider little curlicues around that two-word joke, words that could have been spent on fleshing out Glinda’s character or something. Plus, that “a pal, a sister” line is very oddly worded and thus very hard to catch as it goes zipping by in the theater. I had a lot of “what did she just say?” moments in the theater that, when I listened to the recording afterward, I discovered were lines that had been unnaturally worded in order to force a rhyme.

But as I listen to the recording, I find that I think the music has more character and more inventive twists in the melodies and harmonies than I had realized in the theater. Like I said, it’s growing on me. But I’m a word person and don’t have the chops or the vocabulary to say more about the music than that. Just that I’m getting to like it. But I do kinda wish Schwartz had asked Holzman to write the lyrics.

Dave and I saw Private Lives Friday night at CalShakes. Private Lives is not a play I was feeling a strong urge to see again; I think it’s a very funny play but I’ve seen it several times in my life already. But Dave hadn’t seen it before, so we got inexpensive tickets, and I’m glad we went because it was a very good production with terrific performances all around.

The performances were so well fleshed out that there were even times when I felt a bit sorry for Elyot and Amanda, trapped by their inability — or perhaps just unwillingness — to give or receive real love. There were times when you could smell the fear of intimacy that lurks underneath and behind everything they do. But just times. Most of the time they were being if anything even more self-centered and egotistical than I’d remembered.

I’ve been reading A Strange Eventful History, Michael Holroyd’s recent biography of Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and their families. I read Ellen Terry’s autobiography many, many years ago, and I’ve read chunks of Laurence Irving’s biography of Henry Irving, so I’m familiar with the broad outlines, but I guess I must have forgotten a lot of the particulars, especially as Terry’s autobiography, at least, must have been a major source. Maybe it’s time for a reread of both the other two books.

The emphasis is more on personal matters than professional ones, which is often less interesting to me — I’m interested to learn about Irving’s unhappy marriage, for example, but I tend to skim more quickly through the details of who moved out when and who complained to whom about what. I’d have been interested in as much detail as one could get about the Lyceum productions, on the other hand, but Mr. Holroyd has much less about that than, say, the Laurence Irving book. I suppose his interest was in the personal matters where mine is in learning about the theater of the period.

So we don’t get, for example, the often-told description of how Irving made a powerful theatrical moment out of the act of quietly lacing up his boots in The Bells. On the other hand, there are some wonderful anecdotes like this:

To avoid extra worries at the last minute, Ellen got on with her dresses and had them all finished early: a pink one for her first scene, one of pale gold and amber for the nunnery scene, and for the mad scene, one of midnight black. Irving solemnly asked her to put on these dresses. He was, she found, “very diplomatic when he meant to have his own way”. His eyes hardly flickered when he was the black dress. Later he called out to one of the old stagers, Walter Lacy, who was helping out with the production, and asked Ellen to describe her dresses to him . “Pink. Yellow. Black.” At the word black Lacy gave a gasp and began to expostulate. But Irving interrupted him. “Ophelias generally wear white, he explained. “I believe so,” Ellen answered. “But black is more interesting.”

“I should have thought you would look much better in white,” Irving persisted. Then he dropped the subject and walked away.

Next day Walter Lacy came up to Ellen. “You didn’t really mean that you are going to wear black in the mad scene?”

“Yes, I did. Why not?”

“Why not! My God! Madam, there must be only one black figure in this play, and that’s Hamlet!”

So she changed to a white costume, though later remarking: “I could have gone mad much more comfortably in black.”

Dave and I saw Spring Awakening at the Curran on Thursday. Dave liked it a lot; I liked it more than I was expecting to. The musical seems fairly true to the feverish spirit of the Wedekind play, which may or may not have been such a good thing, and the rock songs are fun and a surprisingly good match for the story of nineteenth-century teens angsting about sex all over the place.

But though the songs were pleasant and the choreography was interesting and the story was clearly told, I never felt any strong emotional connection with any of the characters, who seemed thin and conventional to me. The deck is heavily stacked in favor of the teens, who are all poignantly lost in various ways, and against the adults, none of whom cares much about any of the kids and most of whom do little other than find new and increasing cruel ways of mistreating them. (The one adult who ever makes an attempt to be understanding, and who is somewhat less obviously a cartoon character than the others, nevertheless won’t stand up for her son when it counts, so it doesn’t matter.) The cartoony, one-dimensional way all the parents and teachers are written reminded me at times of things like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Bleah.

I haven’t read the Wedekind play in probably thirty years, so I’ll have to reread it and see, but my memory is that the characters are just as shallowly drawn and the story just as one-sided there. But that’s just an observation, not a justification; I’m not a believer in being faithful to the weaknesses of a play as well as its strengths when you’re adapting it. And the Wedekind play is not a classic because of its theatrical skill, but because it was very, very shocking a century ago. It isn’t very shocking now. It’s not that America isn’t every bit as fucked up and in denial about sex as Germany was a century ago; but we aren’t fucked up and in denial in quite the same ways.

However, the audience was full of young people who were applauding vigorously all the way through and cheering at the end, so clearly the show strikes a chord with its audience, and equally clearly I’m at least a quarter of a century too old to be part of that audience.

I have several rules of thumb I’ve developed over the years about choosing stories to adapt as musicals, and one of them is: Don’t adapt anything you were assigned to read in school. It tends to lead you as a writer into to the wrong relationship with your story. It’s hard to argue with Spring Awakening‘s success, but the story and characters never came alive for me, and I wish they’d chosen a different play to give this treatment to, something that they might have felt freer to rewrite as they wanted to in order to tell a richer and more alive story. Or maybe scrap the nineteenth-century German setting and move it to modern-day America, and use it to write about the lies about sex that our society is telling itself. It’s a little too easy to give ourselves credit for recognizing the lies of a century ago.

The book itself to Spring Awakening is clear and well constructed. One thing it was hard to miss about the musical, though, is that the songs are rarely used in a dramatic way to advance the action. They’re all static expressions of the characters’ attitudes and emotions, and the characters and situations and relationships never change between the beginning of a song and its end. It’s what I think of as opera seria construction: You have a spoken scene in which, say, X tries to persuade Y about something; Y is either persuaded or not, still in spoken dialogue; and only once the action of this scene has concluded do X and Y sing a static duet that is in some way about the new situation. This seems like bland theater writing to me; better if the song in that scene consists of, say, X making his argument, or Y giving her answer, or a duet in which both happen.

On the other hand, though, with the songs in Spring Awakening being performed in the modern overamplified style, I couldn’t make out very many of the lyrics, so maybe it was just as well.

Wednesday night Dave and I saw the first preview of CalShakes’s Uncle Vanya. What a pleasure it is to see Chekhov and Ibsen now and then performed by people who get the humor! A couple of seasons ago there was that terrific The Master Builder at the Aurora Theater, and now this production. Even one actor in common — James Carpenter played Holness in Master Builder and he plays horrible old narcissistic professor in Vanya, and I can’t remember seeing him be as funny before. There’s Barbara Oliver in common, too — she founded the Aurora, and she plays Marina, the old family nanny, here, with a brilliant deadpan singlemindedness. I have no idea why the sight of her simply walking across the stage with such concentrated determination just so she can fuss with the samovar and the teacups made me laugh out loud, but it did.

Dan Hiatt as Vanya is giving the best performance I think I’ve ever seen from him, and that’s saying a lot. But really, the whole cast is spot on, every character very touching and recognizably human and a little bit crazy.

As is the production, which is full of humor. Chekhov’s characters love to piss and moan about how hopeless life is and how trapped they are in their situations, which has led a lot of directors and actors to play them as bleak. But Chekhov always, always took great pains to show us as well that the cages his characters complain so incessantly about being trapped inside were built by them themselves, that the bars are made of papier-maché, that the construction is so flimsy that one good knock would bring the thing down, and anyway the doors are all unlocked and wide open. If a character in Chekhov says she has no choice, it is a safe bet that within half a minute somebody will offer her a perfectly good alternative and she herself will come up with a lame excuse why she can’t take it. If somebody says he can’t take any more and he is going to leave immediately, you know he’s going to jump at the first possible pretext to stay. On the comics page this morning I saw at least three strips whose punchlines turn on precisely this structure, and nobody would have any trouble seeing the humor in it, but for some reason you give your characters Russian (or Norwegian) names and it’s suddenly grim, deadly serious stuff.

Dave and I saw a production of Mae West’s rediscovered play Sex at the Aurora Theater. It’s an odd play. At the intermission I had decided it just wasn’t very good, little more than a bunch of vaudeville skits, songs, and jokes loosely linked together by some common characters. But the second act was a big surprise: Many of the apparently disconnected story lines unexpectedly came together and a real plot with real interest and conflict and humor developed. Not a great comedy by any means, just a lightweight sex farce, but the second act was a lot of fun.

The production itself was enjoyable but not ideal. Dave and I both felt that the director and actors were taking a bit too campy an attitude toward the material. This kind of comedy is very difficult to pull off if you aren’t experienced with it, but you can’t slum in it, and it’s a trap to think that because it’s relatively superficial, you can play it on the surface. The characters are less well rounded, more archetypical, than in more sophisticated comedies, but you still need to build them up as you would a character in a more substantial play. And you shouldn’t mock the sentimental parts; they’re an important part of the structure.

For me, the moment when the production and the play were most out of synch was Agnes’s surprise reappearance in Port-au-Prince. For the story to work, this ought to be played seriously for sentiment and pathos; we should see that Margy loves Agnes like a sister, and that she is genuinely shocked and brokenhearted over Agnes’s miserable and impoverished situation. We should not only see but feel that Margy’s fear of becoming like Agnes is what causes her to drop the man she loves and to pursue a wealthy young man with whom she has to pretend she is a different kind of woman than she is.

Instead, though, Agnes continued to speak in her affected widdle-girly voice, and move with the same self-consciously zany mannerisms, so that we didn’t really believe much in her situation, or in Margy’s concern for her. Margy’s subsequent change of affection seemed like capricious gold-digging, and the moment near the end of the play where she decides to abandon her charade felt unmotivated.

For all that, the show is lively and a lot of fun, and if Mae West’s first act feels a bit rambling and disjointed, her second act well makes up for it.