It’s that time of year loyal lovers of theater dread. Shows that have been struggling to make it, will be closing. The light at the end of the tunnel, as is always the case with Broadway, is that new, and some are quite exciting, shows will be taking their place.

The musical Ghost, based on the 1990 smash film, gave up the ghost Saturday [August 17]. The End of the Rainbow, with [whether you believe the arc of the play to be factual or fiction] a commanding performance by Tracie Bennett, heads out to tour soon [and will be adapted for the screen] and, as of Sunday, there’s no Judy, Judy, Judy on Broadway. On August 29, the curtain rings down on glitzy Sister Act.

Closing it’s limited engagement on September 1 is the New York Shakespeare Festival’s revival of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, playing Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre [free admission], and starring Oscar winner Amy Adams and Tony winner Donna Murphy.

September 2 we must say cheerio to one of this season best entertainments, One Man, Two Guvnors, starring 2012 Best Actor, the incomparable James Corden. It’s a laugh riot and should be at the top of your Must See list. Also closing the same day is this year’s Best Play, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, also a Pulitzer Prize honoree and Olivier Award winner.
The acclaimed 2012 Tony-winning revival of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,starring Audra McDonald

Porgy and Bess (Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis | Photo by Michael J. Lutch)

[except August 21-23], Norm Lewis, and David Alan Grier, has posted September 23 for its final performance. Rumor has it heading to the big screen, directed by Spike Lee.

Off Broadway, you can catch the last performances of the popular farce, Potted Potter, which presents all seven Harry Potter books in 70 minutes.

Still holding strong Off Broadway is Nina Raine’s must-see family drama Tribes, one of the best plays of this or any recent season.

In previews or soon to open are the play Grace, co-starring Paul Rudd and Ed Asner; the musical Chaplin, based on the life of filmdom’s silent era king, the Tramp; one of Broadway’s biggest blockbusters, the Tony-winning Annie; Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Rupert Holmes’ Tony-winning The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on Dickens’ incomplete last novel and co-starring legendary Broadway favorite Chita Rivera; and Chicago’s Steppenwolf’s revival of Edward Albee’s landmark play, the scorching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? 

Also in the good news department, a brand new edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s wickedly funny send-up Forbidden Broadway, Alive and Kicking! has arrived.

PBS Specials

PBS regularly airs performances of the Metropolitan Opera and a variety of the best in classical and pop concerts. Coming up is a superb example of the former.

Verdi’s La Traviata gets a contemporary design that’s both off-putting and provocative on August 23 at 9 P.M. and August 26 at Noon in Willy Decker’s production that might not satisfy loyalists but breathes new breath into a classic. Celebrated French soprano Natalie Dessay delivers a staggering portrayal of Violetta. Matthew Polenzani is Alfredo, with acclaimed Russian bass Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s magnificent portrayal of Giorgio. The Met’s Fabio Luisi conducts.

Upcoming: Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert, Great Performances, August 31, 9 P.M.; Paul McCartney, Live Kisses, September 7, 9 P.M.

On the Record

Tony winner and two-time Grammy nominee Betty Buckley’s new solo album, Ah, Men! The Boys of Broadway [Palmetto Records] features tunes from her acclaimed 2011 concert, “songs,” she says, “we gals never got to sing. It’s my take on some of the soaring melodies the men got to sing.” The 14 tracks include Irving Berlin’s “My Defenses Are Down,” Annie Get Your Gun; Bernstein/Sondheim’s “Maria,” West Side Story; Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady,” Guys and Dolls; and a suite from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

Raissa Katon Bennett, cabaret award winner and a later Christine in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart’s Phantom of the Opera, has released Another Kind of Light [LML Records]. The 15 tracks include Broadway, pop, and jazz. Among the highlights is “Ordinary Miracles” by Marvin Hamlisch and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You,” and the rarely-recorded “How Could I Not?” by Alan Menken and David Spencer from the musical adaptation of The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Bennett  performs songs from the album August 21-25 at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency. To book, click here.

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Does being a “fan” always mean that in some sense you are intrinsically a “fanatic”? There is ample, and shocking evidence at this point in the twenty-first century to suggest that there is, well, to some degree, a measure of being “touched” in our adoration of public and performing figures, aka “celebrities”. Some performers, of course, have a more invasive reach than others, and in this regard Judy Garland emerges as singular in her ability to stir the more extreme emotions of her devotees. Mark it down to a singularity of presence and performative intensity in her case – in so many ways a relentlessly raw nerve of emotion projecting powerfully beyond the simple melodic lyrics she could sing. Several generations have been passing the torch for Judy now, and in the gay male community she has been deified many times over. “Friends of Dorothy” have given way to worshippers of the later Garland – the obviously wounded, out-of-control spitfire who could turn it on at performance and Deliver.  So when a gay male performer undertakes a role invoking Miss Judy Garland, there is an immediate and heavy-breathing audience that can be relied upon. But beware, there’s a lot of it out there so you’d better be good. And really, at this point, there better be a reason.

John Fleck, in his self-authored performance, Mad Women, playing at La MaMa, never stops to explain why he is tying Garland in with this autobiographical tale of a modestly successful performer with some national notoriety  - he was one of the original NEA-4 back in 1990, Jesse Helms and all that – making his way on the boards and the screen over the last 30+ years. It’s just a given that she should be a touchstone of talent, and a cultural icon of special, coded appeal to any gay man of his generation – he was 18 years old when she died. And it’s a given, that as a gay man, he is permitted to get down and dirty with the “facts” in Garland’s life – Judy gave great head, and at least two of her three children exhibit signs of fetal alcohol syndrome – yadda, yadda, yadda. More pointed is the unaddressed question of why he is specifically focused on one of Garland’s late performances, at L.A.’s Coconut Grove in 1967, when she is wretchedly drink and drug-addled, forgetful, rambling and volcanically angry. He treats us to original recorded excerpts from this low point in her career, content merely to embody her with minimal wardrobe props, a loose physical impersonation, and the lip-synching of her public performative meltdown (one of several, it should be admitted). He is positively gleeful as he shares the details of her pill and liquor regimen at the time.

At one point he is transformed into young Joey Luft, Judy’s youngest child, who witnessed this exhibition at the age of nine. Abandoned in the Grove following his mother’s triumphant exit born aloft by her fans, Joey approaches the microphone and sings to an empty auditorium, an aria from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Fleck’s falsetto is accomplished and affecting, but he has Joey sing it to his mother’s discarded wig, a clumsy, slightly twisted visual. Then he has Joey put on the wig and his mother’s show jacket before storming off stage. Suddenly we are presented with film footage of Fleck’s elderly mother during her battle with Alzheimer’s. Segue to the story of young John Fleck’s first performance in public at the local veteran’s meet at the Legion Hall, where the unwary boy performed Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland in a simpering, coquettish style that brought the curtain down on him before he had finished. Young Fleck is entirely in the dark as to the nature of his offense, and is in turn shunned by the Legion Hall patrons, and snarled at by his mortified father – “Freakin’ fag. I’m gonna kill you when I get home.” As a formative episode it has all the hallmarks of a classic, prompting him to cling to his sympathetic, protecting mother, and flee his alcohol-fueled, abusive father. More film footage follows of his bed-ridden mother fulminating about alcoholism and her husband, and there’s a long, meandering monologue about Fleck’s turn in the HBO series, Carnivale, as Gecko, a carny freak. Snatches of Judy’s audio are inter played, and there are allusions to drug dependency on Fleck’s part. “I’m not an addict!” he snaps petulantly, and more than once. A confused and worked-up recounting of a dream forces everything towards a lurching, melodramatic climax, caustically overplayed with Garland sounding out the Battle Hymn of the Republic, some more sentimental home movie footage, and a horribly flat, would-be up-beat ending – “A big hand for my mother, Josephine. Wasn’t she something?” “My dad was hot, wasn’t he?” The piece seems to have slipped from Fleck’s control, morphed into an angry, narcissistic, runaway car that’s jumped the tracks and hurtling toward a smash up – one that never really arrives.

But Fleck likes things out of control: Judy; his ailing mother; the danger of drug enhanced experience; perhaps even (gasp!) his father. Inexplicably (and disastrously during the show I attended), he invites the hazards of audience participation (shudder) not once, not twice, but three times. Is he playing with form, playing with fire, or does he know what he’s doing? He’s bored by the tight leash, and he definitely slips it in this wired, sweat-drenched performance. But in the end he offers no insight. Looking for the silver lining is for him a lovely lyric but, realistically, a complete waste of time. Perspective it seems is not in his vocabulary, unless it’s the agreed adoptive perspective of being at the bottom looking up. This is a bitter little pill taking you nowhere, unless it’s to a mirthless laugh of hopeless scorn. It’s too bad; he is magnetic and can be clever and funny. To arrive at a convincing conclusion perhaps, would require him to get over that most massive of obstacles that looms in every performer’s life; himself.

~~~

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