Sutton Foster: fun, laughs, good times...and something more

Broadway's golden girl, Sutton Foster, has become Neil Simon's refugee of the heart, Charity Hope Valentine. And all the reasons some critics felt disappointed with The New Group's approach to Simon's fifty-year-old phenom, Sweet Charity, are reasons I admire it.

Scaled back, toned down and set in 3/4-round, small-theater intimacy that finds jaded dance hall girls and their clientele looming over the first few audience rows, this Sweet Charity feels like a musical for the sobering times we're suddenly living in. You surely expected fun, laughs, good times only to get this bucket of cold water thrown in your face.

I came for the brilliant Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields tunes that, decades ago, took up permanent residence in my brain--"Big Spender," "If My Friends Could See Me Now," "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This," "Baby, Dream Your Dream" and, especially as later socked home by Streisand, "Where Am I Going?" Even with the poignant re-positioning of one of those songs, they hit the mark again as rendered by Georgia Stitt's all-women, five-member band and director Leigh Silverman's sturdy, versatile, multicultural cast.

I'm a downtown gal, much more accustomed to close-up performance than being set back behind an invisible screen with action unfolding at a far remove. Sitting in the 200-seat arrangement, I liked being able to see what was in these characters' eyes--the dead or dying souls, particularly--and how hard the actors worked for this show. I felt privileged to witness a top-of-her-game performance from Foster--my first time--who owns every single twisty complexity of her character and her show.

Unlike some of her co-workers, Charity maintains moral lines she won't cross. Yet, in her ever-hopeful quest and desperation for love, she's easy pickings for exploitative men. Yet, in the right situation, she can show a crafty, even tough side. Yet, she breaks just like a little girl, shielding that quirky, sparkly grin and lively, hungry, intelligent eyes. And yet. And yet. Foster--in some mind-boggling integration of Carol Burnett and Jane Fonda happening right before our eyes--manages to master every bit of this. I came late to fandom, but I now adore her and would follow her to any stage.

As panicky Oscar, Shuler Hensley is so viscerally good--and adorably hilarious--in the stuck-elevator scene that he began to make me feel claustrophobic. (Okay, maybe the Linney Theatre really is a little small...). I also enjoyed the smooth subtleties in Joel Perez's work as movie star Vittorio Vidal but liked him even more when, as the usually loutish dance hall owner Herman, he suddenly reveals how much he loves to cry at weddings.

Sweet Charity leaves Herman, and the rest of us, with something to cry about all right. It feels unexpected, unimaginable, all wrong and...yeah...familiar.

Sweet Charity's run has been extended through January 8. Get information and tickets here.

The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
at The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

Tonya Pinkins and Dianne Wiest open in "Rasheeda Speaking"

Tonya Pinkins (Jaclyn) and Dianne Wiest (Ileen) in Rasheeda Speaking
(photo: Monique Carboni)

Yeah, friendship and all that but, as Nina Simone taught us, "You've got to learn to leave the table when love's no longer being served."

In Rasheeda Speaking, Jaclyn Spaulding (Tonya Pinkins) has taken several sick days and returns to her administrative job in a Chicago surgeon's front office to discover that her buddy Ileen (Dianne Wiest) has been promoted to Office Manager. Well, hooray for Ileen. Except, what is she managing, really? It's a cramped, two-person reception area and, from the look of things, Ileen can barely manage her half of it. Neat-freak, plant-loving, toxin-phobic Jaclyn quickly figures it out: Ileen will be managing her.

And why is that? Well, it turns out that their boss, smooth operator Dr. Williams (Darren Goldstein) is more than a little put off by Jaclyn's supposed attitude and rudeness. Let me point out, now, that Jaclyn is Black. Everyone else in Joel Drake Johnson's four-person play is white. You see where we're headed?

Darren Goldstein (Dr. Williams) with Wiest
(photo: Monique Carboni)

And we're headed there rapidly. Johnson wastes no time. The surgeon's opening gambit with sensitive, clearly fragile Ileen goes by in a flash. He leans in, verbally, and works her. Yes, she agrees to monitor and secretly document Jaclyn's behavior for irrefutable evidence. Because, you know, it's so hard to get people fired these days. Despite Ileen's initial reluctance to betray Jaclyn, she knows how to take orders, especially from a boss she reveres and who constantly reminds her how essential she is to him.

Presented by The New Group, with multiple award-winning actress Cynthia Nixon in her debut as a director, Rasheeda Speaking is a humorous and lacerating slice of reality in "post-racial" urban America. Tony-winner Pinkins calibrates and channels numerous expressions of insight, cunning and everyday fury as a mature Black woman who understands all too well what's going on with both clueless white people and white people who know exactly what they're doing. Her rich, indelible performance is this play's through-line.

Johnson and Nixon are also blessed to have Wiest, Oscar- and Emmy-winner, at her best when breaking her distress into vivid fractions and seconds. In the small, if pivotal, role of an elderly patient, Patricia Conolly is both irritating and hilarious with perfect timing and inflection. Goldstein embodies the arrogant Williams with such ease, you have to restrain yourself from storming the stage.

Or, at least, I did. But I saw it with a largely white, largely female audience drawn, undoubtedly, by the starry trio of Pinkins, Wiest and Nixon. Rasheeda Speaking, though often devilishly funny, provokes a necessary discomfort, and perhaps white viewers will absorb some useful things.

Johnson--a white playwright, and one who did well to heed recommendations from Pinkins--knows how the divide-and-conquer game is played and how that game usually ends for the played. He's also onto racial aggression of both the macro and micro kind. One of my favorite examples has to do with Jaclyn's name and the good doctor's claiming of entitlement to reduce it to "Jackie." The back-and-forth around Jaclyn's name is priceless. Also priceless and sly if deliberate, which it must be, is the fact that "Ileen" is also an unusual spelling of a common name yet never draws ridicule and manhandling.

Well, of course, it doesn't. Of course.

Rasheeda Speaking runs through March 22. Running time: 95 minutes, no intermission. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

The New Group at
The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Erika Sheffer premieres "Russian Transport"

Janeane Garafalo and Morgan Spector (Photo by Serge Nivelle)

In Russian Transport, a tale of the secrets of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, playwright Erika Sheffer, making her Off-Broadway debut, gets a big, lucky boost from her talented ensemble.

Diana (Janeane Garafalo) anchors this Sheepsheads Bay household, playing the kind of wiry mother with eyes behind her head and a sharp remark–in English, Russian or Profane--at the ready. Basically goodnatured hubby Misha (Daniel Oreskes) runs the family business, a car service in financial decline. Teenagers Mira (Sarah Steele) and Alex (Raviv Ullman) appear bright enough but preoccupied. Mira, resistant to the controlling Diana and allergic to the badgering Alex, can’t wait to escape to an art history study program in Italy–that is, if her mother will grant permission (guess the likelihood). Alex, dreaming of his own independence, augments his Verizon sales job with a mysterious source of extra cash that no one seems to question until he offers $200 to his struggling dad (take a wild guess here, too).

Top: Morgan Spector and Sarah Steele
Bottom: Sarah Steele and Raviv Ullman
(Photos by Monique Carboni)

 

Into this soap opera in the making struts Diana’s brother Boris (Morgan Spector) on serious business from the Old Country. He’s buff, tattooed and rocking the kind of easeful swagger and charisma that would signal trouble ahead to anyone paying the least bit of attention. Think the young Brando or Jack Nicholson but come back to Spector, because this actor does his own deceptively effortless job of embodying a mercurial theatrical archetype. Before long, the insecure, susceptible Mira and the striving Alex get drawn into a very dark place. I’m pretty sure that no one on either side of the invisible fourth wall could be naive enough to be surprised by the contour and contents of that place.

Like Sheffer, director Scott Elliott lucks out with this cast, particularly Garafalo’s embrace of her character's insistence on making order and ordinariness centering forces in family life. But the direction and acting only serve to illustrate paper-thin, contextless characterizations–how did these people get to be the way they are?--and a plot that takes forever just to roll up within sight of anything interesting and then simply drives off a cliff.

Russian Transport, presented by The New Group, runs through March 10 at The Acorn Theatre. For information, click here. For tickets, click here or call the box office at 212-239-6200.

The Acorn Theatre
The New Group@Theatre Row
410 West 42nd Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)