*Enron* fizzled

Lucy Prebble's inventively (gaudily?) staged play about an American financial crisis (no, not last year's -- the one from a decade ago) is closing quickly on Broadway, despite being a success in London.

('Muricans don't much like having snooty Brits poke fun at our red, white and blue shortcomings, evidently, along with our other moral failings.)

Some take-aways from Michael Billington's analysis:
1. Musicals can be expressionistic, but plays should be realistic. This is not only false, but it endangers theater's future. Serious, or serio-comic non-musical plays that use dream-like, imagination-prodding theatrical effects are the future. Let movies do spectacle and novels grab individual readers — but you-are-there, psychological immediacy ... that's what theater can deliver like nothing else.

2. And two points from near the end of Billington's article:
"If Enron's melancholy saga proves anything, it is Broadway's irrelevance to serious theatre. ... at heart, Broadway is a big, gaudy commercial shop-window, where fortunes are won and lost."
What's commercial isn't cutting-edge. What isn't cutting-edge will be lost — in a generation, possibly two — to oblivion.

3. Chicago is generating more exciting theater than N.Y. (In general, a tip of the cap to America's regional theaters.)

[ photo: Lucy Prebble, from bargaintheatre.com ]

Broadway grows up

Maybe it's a sign for theater everywhere -- even for theater that's in a city on the edge of a state that's stuck in a corner of the Union.
In the New York Times, Ben Brantley cites the ongoing Broadway season as surprisingly profitable and serious.
Read through his season review. Consider all the play titles. Is there an old-fashioned, inoffensive, nice light comedy among them?
And half of Broadway's business involves tourists.
Theater, at its best, can be thoughtful and visceral, immediate. In an era of airhead celebrity gossip and mindless Twitter crap, there are some folks willing to pay to see plays that aren't derived from comic books, the tried and true, or theater museums.

[ photo: Konstantin Stanislavsky as Trigorin and Maria Roksanova as Nina in Moscow Art Theatre's 1898 production of Chekhov's *The Seagull* (because Kristin Scott Thomas was so good in *Seagull* last year as Mme. Arkadina) ]

A stimulating play

Vibrators on Broadway! Sarah Ruhl's *In the Next Room (or, The Vibrator Play)* just finished a run at the Berkeley Rep and is headed to Broadway in November.

Ruhl's premise: At a spa in New York state in the 1890s (and with the use electricity just becoming widespread), what better way to treat women diagnosed with "hysteria" than to provide a little stimulus (of a kind other than economic, if you know what I mean)? It all makes for an obstetrician who becomes very popular with the local housewives.
Ruhl apparently aims to get past the "I'm coming!" jokes to an examination of gender relations and marital miscommunication. Can the premise (and her "hysterical" women) achieve, um, fulfillment?

[ photo: Maria Dizzia, left, and Hannah Cabell in Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)” in Berkeley, Calif.
2/18/09 New York Times, article by Charles Isherwood ]

Time Top Ten

10 best plays or musicals of 2008, according to Time magazine:

10. Farragut North, by Beau Willimon (about a presidential candidate's too-clever press secretary; soon to be a movie?)
9. South Pacific (dir. Bartlett Sher; with Kelli O'Hara and Paolo Szot)
8. Blasted, by Sarah Kane
7. The Little Mermaid (yes, the Disney musical)
6. Reasons To Be Pretty, by Neil LaBute
5. Black Watch (Scottish troops in Iraq, performed with video and choreography)
4. The Visit (Kander and Ebb's neglected masterpiece, based on the Friedrich Durenmatt play about the world's richest woman, out for revenge -- played by Chita Rivera!)
[ photo: Chita Rivera and George Hearn in the musical version of *The Visit* at Virginia's Signature Theater, from daylife.com ]

3. All My Sons
2. Hair
1. Billy Elliott

2008 Broadway review

Ben Brantley reviews the dozen best shows of 2008, complete with audio slide shows. Sarah Kane's bleak and violent outlook can be hard to take, but at least it has migrated over to this side of the Atlantic. (Bobo saw Kane's *Crave* in Salt Lake City, c. 2002.)

A companion look-back article by Charles Isherwood mentions *What's That Smell,* the show that Max Kumangai is in. (See the Nov. 30 post on this blog.)

(photo: Sarah Kane, 1971-99; *Blasted,* full of atrocities in its commentary on domestic violence and the Bosnian War, premiered in 1995)