My Top 10 Theatre Experiences: Part 2

A few weeks ago, I started to publish a list of my Top 10 theatrical experiences of all time.  This list includes the shows that have had a profound impact on my theatre-going life, and the ones that have remained the most vivid in my memory since initially seeing them.  You can read the first article for a more thorough breakdown of the criteria I've used, but basically for a show to make the list it had to play Broadway and be solid from top to bottom (excellent star turns in mediocre shows have been left off).  And the list is alphabetical, because coming up with a numbered ranking for these 10 shows would just be too hard.

So picking up where I left off:

The Book of Mormon

Andrew Rannells and the original Broadway cast of The Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon holds a distinction that I do not give out lightly; despite my hesitancy to rank the shows on this list, almost 3 years after my first viewing I can safely say that The Book of Mormon is the best night I've ever spent in the theatre.  The energy inside the theatre was palpable during the early March preview I attended back in 2011; though highly anticipated, the show was shrouded in secrecy.  The producers had only released four production stills, there was no video or audio available, and the program purposefully lacked a song list or even a basic scene breakdown.  None of us quite knew what we were getting into, and the experience was all the better for it.

As a huge fan of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (easily among my favorite films of all time), I had enormous expectations for this show, and it handily exceeded every one of them.  By the end of the opening number I was grinning from ear to ear, and soon after that I was howling with laughter.  The show was every bit as gleefully offensive as you could imagine, and crossed a couple of boundaries even I wasn't sure they were allowed to.  And yet the show was so hilarious, and more importantly so heartfelt, that it didn't matter.  The show had a soul, and a soul that not only respected but embraced the traditions of the glitzy book musicals of days past.  There are rousing production numbers, comic duets, and second act power ballads that manage to both gently mock the absurdity of such things while at the same time being excellent examples of those troupes.

Simply put, The Book of Mormon is one of the best constructed musicals of the new millennium, as well as one of the funniest.  But what made this experience truly transcendent for me was the absolutely extraordinary original cast.  Everyone, from the principals to the ensemble members, was an extremely talented triple threat with spot-on comic timing and amazing chemistry.  While Josh Gad was rightly praised for his scenery chewing turn as the hopelessly awkward Elder Cunningham, I think Andrew Rannells' supremely smug Elder Price was the show's true revelation.  Rannells managed to play straight man to Gad's comic genius while remaining hilarious in his own right, and turned what could have been a thoroughly off-putting character into a beacon of charisma and old-school showmanship.  (Also, Rannells' pop-tenor is nearly flawless.)  Tony-winner Nikki M. James provided the show's heart and soul as Ugandan tribeswoman Nabalungi, and Rory O'Malley led one of this decade's great production numbers with his showstopping "Turn It Off" (which incidentally includes my favorite sight gag in the entire show, and one that made me audibly gasp in delight when I first saw it).

The Book of Mormon is rightfully one of the hottest tickets in town, commanding upwards of $450 per ticket for the premium seats.  It is the only show running I would even consider paying that much money for, and I will continue to recommend it to any and everyone who will listen.

Follies (2011 Revival)

The "Loveland" sequence from the 2011 revival of Follies

Stephen Sondheim's utter mastery of the musical theatre form is sometimes taken for granted, and I often call him the Shakespeare of the musical stage.  Like the Bard, Sondheim's works have the remarkable ability to reveal new facets of meaning with each subsequent viewing, and have proven able to withstand a wide array of reimaginings and concept-based stagings.  But sometimes, as the breathtaking 2011 revival of Follies proved, all you need is to do the show the way it was written.  Grandly opulent and utterly heartbreaking, this revival took a show I had always found intriguing and skyrocketed it up my personal list to the point where I consider it one of the finest musicals ever created.

The show, centered around the reunion of the last remaining performers of a Ziegfeld Follies-esque spectacle, is simultaneously about nothing and everything.  There is very little plot, and yet over the course of the evening the show manages to make deeply poignant observations about growing older and regret while still celebrating the vast amount of beauty to be found in life.  Sondheim's score is a parade of pastiches that include some of the greatest ballads ever written, including cabaret standards like "I'm Still Here" and "Losing My Mind."  The most expensive musical ever produced at the time of its original premiere, Follies requires an elaborate physical production and enormous cast, and this revival hit both of those elements out of the park.

Bernadette Peters' performance as Sally Durante-Plummer is probably one of the more divisive in recent Broadway history; I personally loved her, and found her character's slow unraveling to be a fascinating portrait of the cost of unmet ambitions.  But nobody could argue with the stunning brilliance of her onstage husband Danny Burstein, who was a revelation as Buddy Plummer and robbed (ROBBED!) of a justly deserved Tony Award.  And Jan Maxwell's pitch-perfect embodiment of the jaded, bitter Phyllis Rogers-Stone was such a masterclass in musical theatre acting that I can still vividly recall her two big numbers ("Could I Leave You?" and "The Story of Lucy and Jessie").  The only reason I am okay with her not winning a long-overdue Tony is because that year's victor was Audra McDonald for Porgy and Bess, which was one step beyond perfection.

Finally, Follies has what may be one of the most thrilling theatrical climaxes of any musical I've ever seen.  Watching the main quartet of characters finally reach their breaking point, triggering the 20-minute long "Loveland" sequence in which each character is deconstructed in an elaborately-staged Follies-style production umber, had me on the edge of my seat in the way few shows ever had.  I can still see that initial reveal, with the downstage drop curtain falling to floor to reveal the dazzling Loveland set, as if it had happened this morning.


That's enough for today.  Hopefully I will be a little more regular on the blog postings, but even if it takes a while I promise the rest of this list is coming!

My Top 10 Theatre Experiences: Part 1

Ever since Playbill.com started publishing "Their Favorite Things," in which notable Broadway talent lists the 10 Broadway performances that most affected them as audience members, I have toyed with the notion of doing a similar feature on this blog.  But every time I've gone to write it, I've shied away, since making lists of my "favorite" or "the best" theatre is not something I do lightly.  It takes time to fully process the best theatre, and to ensure that your enjoyment was of the piece as a whole and not just a particularly flashy performance or technical element.  There are many productions I enjoyed immensely at the time that I have trouble remembering now, and while those types of shows are certainly valuable experiences they are not ones I feel belong on a "best of" list.

But after a lot of careful consideration, I have (I think) come up with a list that represents the 10 shows that have had the greatest effect on me as person.  These are the shows that made me feel, that made me laugh out loud, fight back tears, and stare in wonder at the sheer amount of talent on display.  I want to be clear:  this is NOT a list of what I consider the 10 Best Shows of All Time.  There are several shows that I adore as pieces of writing that I've never seen a wholly satisfactory production of, and though my theatrical knowledge is broad I don't consider it broad enough to make such sweeping proclamations.

No, this list was created with a pretty specific list of caveats.  It is confined entirely to productions I have personally experienced, and the specific casts I saw in those productions.  Also, I have borrowed Playbill.com's convention of limiting the list to Broadway productions, as it provides a narrower field to choose from (and has honestly been the home of almost all of the best theatre I've seen).  And in making my picks, I focused on productions that were outstanding as a whole, which has led to the exclusion of some of my favorite individual performances because the vehicles they starred in were flawed in some way.  Perhaps one day I'll make a companion list that is performer-based, but for now, a stellar production overrules a singular star turn.

Oh, and one last note: the shows are in alphabetical order, because attempting to rank them from 1 to 10 simply proved too difficult.  At this level, separating number 1 from number 2 or number 9 from number 10 would be splitting hairs.

Here's the start of the list:

August: Osage County

Perfection personified.  The acting ensemble for August: Osage County was everything!

  

On my first trip to New York after college, I bought a seat in the back of the balcony to August: Osage County based entirely on the ecstatic word of mouth from my friends.  The following three-and-a-half hours were some of the most thrillingly theatrical I've ever experienced, as playwright Tracy Letts and the astound ensemble of actors hurled the Great American Drama into the 21st century.  A deftly written dark comedy at turns hilarious and chilling, this Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece was riveting, and I left with a renewed sense of excitement about the possibilities of theatre as an artistic medium. 

The cast, all of whom transferred with the play from its world premiere at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, was uniformly astounding, forming a tightly-knit ensemble that truly felt as if they had known each other their entire lives.  They were the Weston clan, and the extended second act dinner scene was one of the greatest master classes in acting that I've ever seen.  And while everyone was phenomenal, I must give special mention to Amy Morton as the eldest Weston daughter, Barbara.  Her slow unraveling under the psychological torture of her monstrous mother was mesmerizing, and her bellowed declaration of "I'm running things now!" at the end of Act II was perhaps the most electrifying curtain line in any play ever.  I would gladly have watched three more hours of such astonishing acting, and to this day August remains one of the finest dramas I've ever experienced.

Avenue Q

Puppets, humans, and Gary Coleman all live in happy harmony down on Avenue Q.

A smartly written, expertly executed examination of the struggles of early twenty-somethings in the new millennium, Avenue Q will forever be remembered as the show that beat megahit Wicked for the 2004 Best Musical Tony.  Having seen both productions just before said award was handed out, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with the Tony voters' choice.  Avenue Q went far beyond its gimmicky-sounding Sesame-Street-meets-South-Park premise to become the perfect distillation of early-2000s pop culture, and in my opinion had a heart far bigger than the giant set-pieces on display at the Gershwin Theatre.  The show had me *howling* with laughter, even though I knew all of the songs by heart long before I made a trip to the Golden Theatre to actually see the show that contained them.

And while that was in no small part due to the writing, the insanely talented ensemble took the show over the edge as far as quality was concerned.  Most shows have two or three stand-out numbers; in the hands of that original cast, Avenue Q had 8 or 9.  John Tartaglia's and Stephanie D'Abruzzo's dual roles helped show me what true musical theatre acting looks like; when Kate Monster had her confrontation with Lucy the Slut I thought little of it until I realized D'Abruzzo played both characters, at which point my jaw dropped.  And I will never understand how Ann Harada failed to even be nominated for her career-defining work as Christmas Eve; a supremely talented comedienne, Harada had me rolling in the aisles and then blew me away with her powerhouse vocals on "The More You Ruv Someone."  10 years later I can still clearly remember large swaths of this show, and those memories never fail to bring a smile to my face.


That's all for now.  Check back soon for the next 4 shows in my top 10, including the show I'm fairly certain is my favorite theatrical experience of all time.