the craptacular

… and we celebrate with a list of reasons we love him.

See item #3.

It’s not just because he has a cute face. Of all the pretty theater boys out there, there aren’t many like Jonathan Groff. Somehow managing to play both sweetly innocent and smoulderingly intense, he stopped hearts in Spring Awakening and walked away with Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock. Offstage/screen, he’s sublimely quirky. (How much do we love the slightly breathless, Judy Garland-y way that he speaks? Like he’s always on the verge of a sob.) And thus, a fangirl icon was born. In celebration of Jonathan’s 25th year on this planet, we’d like to inaugurate our new (and ongoing) series:

4 Million Thousand Things We Heart About Jonathan Groff

1. His sparkly green mermaid eyes.
2. That he loves Lea Michele enough for all of us.
3. His bashful lower-lip bite.
4. That he’s the only known person in history to meet a future boyfriend… at the stage door.
5. His endearing aversion to modern technology.

Photo Credit: BroadwayWorld.com

When the original Broadway cast of Hair departed for London, something happened over there on 45th Street. Maybe there’s something in the water pipes, or the producers started handing out nightly bonuses for Best Acting Ever, but there’s a sense and spirit among the new Tribe and its principals that is markedly… different… than what’s gone before.

And I don’t know if I like it so much.

I’m not the type to dis a replacement cast just because they’re a replacement cast. I’m not from New York. My entire theater-viewing history is based on national tour casts and replacements, and I cherish some of those performances. (I saw Steven Pasquale as Chris in Miss Saigon. Come on, now.)

And the new Tribe as a unit is really solid. They’re high-energy and they look pretty and they sing well. Wallace Smith is a loose-limbed, fluid Hud. Jeanette Bayardelle is appropriately goddess-y as Dion. Larkin Bogan has amazing hair. They’re worthy replacements for the lovely folks who originated the roles.

But something is decidedly up with the new main principals. I can’t speak for Ace Young, because he was out the night that I saw the show. (Although he appeared onstage at the dance party. Isn’t that sort of like calling in sick to work and then running into your boss that night at a bar?) But Diana DeGarmo and Kyle Riabko have got some ‘splainin to do, because I don’t know what show they think they’re in, but I’m pretty sure it’s not Hair.

The thing about DeGarmo is that she’s just not very nuanced. She certainly sings the hell out of everything, and there are some big notes in “Easy to be Hard.” But there shouldn’t be laughter from the audience—full-on laughter, not just a stray giggle from someone who wasn’t paying attention—when Sheila talks about protesters getting tear-gassed. The book doesn’t do Sheila any favors in that scene, to be sure, but Caissie Levy could modulate through that rickety piece of dialogue—from silly, to sad, to relieved, and back again. DeGarmo, on the other hand, does so much over-crying and over-moping and over-stating that it’s impossible for her to recover with any deftness at all. For the first time ever, I understood why Berger got so annoyed with her. That’s not a good sign.

As an aside that has nothing to do with DeGarmo as an actress, but seems to be an affliction of this particular role, in this particular revival: Why does Sheila always have the worst, rattiest hair? In that sense, DeGarmo is following nicely in Caissie Levy’s footsteps, rest assured.

And Riabko. Oh God.

First, let’s address the good things, so I don’t totally bum you out on his performance: He’s really cute and he looks good in the costume and he can sing in tune. If you like those things—and lots of us do—I don’t think you’ll mind him so much. Beyond that, though, Riabko’s performance is pretty fraught. Though he enunciates each line like it’s Shakespeare, there’s nothing happening underneath all the mugging. His Claude is all bluster, with none of Gavin Creel’s tough disillusion or Jonathan Groff’s searching vulnerability. Whatever naivete he can muster is sort of accidental—it’s mostly because he looks so young. And if you don’t get at least a chuckle out of the audience—one chuckle, I don’t care—out of the line, “I’ve seen the war on TV and it really looks great,” you have problematic Claude on your hands.

Part of this, of course, is that we’ve all been very spoiled, Claude-wise. And let’s be real—Shelia-wise, too. But I’d hoped that there was another great Claude and another great Sheila out there somewhere, even if they had to be dragged away from some soap opera, or coaxed out of Los Angeles while their TV show was on hiatus.

The other mildly disconcerting thing is that none of the new press features any of the principals, even though some of them are vaguely famous. It’s all about the Tribe now, floating by on the top of taxis and looking mildly sexy, twelve feet tall, above Times Square. In a way, it makes sense. The show is intended to be all about the Tribe. And with this new cast, putting your focus on them might not be such a bad decision.

“You know something’s wrong when Steel is the most subtle person on that stage,” Lucky said, turning to face me during intermission.

I’ll be honest, for a second I was tempted to push her belongings over the edge of the balcony.  Or maybe her body.  You know, for revenge.  Don’t disparage my boy.  Especially not to my face.

Except, I have no point of comparison, so I can’t even get that mad.  I don’t actually remember seeing Steel play Berger this past fall.  I know it happened.  I remember the performance well, actually.  It was September 15^th 2009 and it was my first time seeing Gavin Creel on any stage, anywhere, ever.  As anyone who has witnessed him can understand, seeing Gavin on stage for the first time that night basically obliterated every other possible memory.  His awesomeness was, well, that awesome.  He’s all I remember.  And personally, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable defense for not having any memory of Steel from that performance.

My secondary defense?  My well-documented crush on The Dirty Jerz (read: Steel) dates back to Gavin’s Symphony Space concert on December 7^th 2009. That night, at Gavin’s gig, The Jerz’s mere appearance almost knocked me out of my seat.  Before then?  I confess my attention was elsewhere on the stage at the Hirschfeld.  But since then, I assure you, I have not missed a move Steel has made.

Which is obviously why, when I saw this @HairTribe tweet last week I all but dropped everything to get my ass down to the Hirschfeld.  (I mean, I couldn’t drop everything. Wednesday was Paddy’s Day, after all, and any girl called The Mick clearly has plans to drink that night.  And Irish Pub owning friends who would disown her if she tried to bail.)

Seeing Steel play Berger this time was amazing.  Suddenly I didn’t have to feel guilty about watching his every move—he was a principal actor, now.  And let me just tell you, Lucky wasn’t lying, Steel was giving the most subtle, layered performance in that entire show.  In fact, I’ll go ahead and say Steel Burkhardt was the best thing on that stage last Thursday night.  I know, I know.  I’m clearly biased.  But I don’t think my crush renders my opinion moot.  Diana DeGarmo and Kyle Riabko should be going to Over-Actors Anonymous meetings daily at this point.  Their performances were that over-baked.  I’ll leave the details to Lucky—who is working on a piece memorably entitled “I Am On Stage at the Hirschfeld and I’m Acting My Face Off” (or something like that)—but it was bad.  Bad.

To be fair, outside the main principal actors who were not Steel Burkhardt, the rest of the cast was actually great, the tribe especially.  Their energy was high, they were excited to be there, they had the vibe right.  It’s obvious the Starshine Tribe doesn’t have the strong internal relationships and deeply bonded trust that the Aquarius Tribe had—they were clearly shocked when Steel just blindly THREW himself at them for the lift in “Going Down”—but I think that’s just a matter of time.  Remember, by their final Broadway matinee on March 7^th, 2010, the Aquarius Tribe had been more-or-less intact for over two years.  These Starshine kids were thrown together only a few weeks ago. They’re new, they have a lot to learn!  I think time is going to strengthen what they have.  And if we’re all very lucky, time will also help Kyle and Diana to chill out and stop trying to Commit an Act of Theater every time they set foot center stage.

Traumatizing Acts of Theater aside, I thoroughly enjoyed myself that night.  I don’t think I’m prepared to see Hair with the full Starshine Tribe just yet.  I think without The Dirty Jerz to distract me, weaknesses would be much, much clearer (as they were to Lucky that night).  But I was beyond thrilled to finally see Steel play Berger, and you know, actually see him.  Commit his performance to memory.  He was wonderful.  (I especially appreciated the Jersey accent he kept throwing in any time he had to do a funny voice.)  Plus, I mean, we all know I find The Jerz so attractive it’s almost uncomfortable to look at him—like looking at the sun, it burns a little—so, in the days before he jetted off to London, I was happy to have one last chance to cause myself a little pain.

There is this moment in the first act of Oklahoma! when the whole show falls to shit.

Some of you, I know, will argue that Oklahoma! falls to shit the moment the curtain goes up, and there are days on which I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but this particular moment of falling to shit is obvious. If the show is not dead and gone by then, this moment kills whatever whimpering, cornfed spirit the thing has left.

It’s the dream ballet. And it sucks.

In it, the audience is treated to a solid 10 minutes—it might even be 15—of dancing, wherein we don’t learn a whole lot about anything that we didn’t already know a moment before. There are some dim insinuations about the characters’ psyches and maybe a hint or two of sex and violence, but really, it’s just a bunch of dancing that stalls the already-fragile plot cold. In 1943, this type of not-quite-literal storytelling was a major departure from the big dance numbers of the past, which were mostly about cute chorus girls showing off their cute legs. So, bravo for innovation, Agnes de Mille. And thanks, by the way, for introducing the world to the most distressing piece of theatrical formality I can even think of besides The Singing Curtain Call.

I hate dream ballets. I don’t hate them in a historical context, because I recognize how they helped to integrate dance into the musical. But I do hate them when they crop up in new works. They don’t make any sense anymore. Even in revivals, where they have a reason to exist, I get annoyed. Remember the brouhaha about casting Josephina Gabrielle in the Trevor Nunn revival of Oklahoma! because she needed to dance her own dream ballet, for reasons that are still somewhat unclear to me? (Usually, one actress handled the acting duties while another performed the dream ballet.) The only result was that they cast someone who could dance like a dream, but who couldn’t sing worth a damn. I guess everyone forgot that she had to sing for two hours and dance for 15 minutes.

So you can imagine how far up into my head my eyes rolled when a dream ballet showed up in the new musical Yank! I still can’t tell if it was the sarcasm or the resulting seizure, but it was bad. Of course, the show, which runs at the York Theatre Company through April 4, is really good. And a new musical is such rare and splendid thing—a comet that shows up once every billion years—that you want to properly appreciate it before it disappears and leaves you with nothing left to see but Wicked (again) and Memphis (ugh). And this new musical—a bittersweet story about two soldiers who fall in love during World War II—is worth appreciating. The songs are tuneful. The cast is first rate (right at you, Bobby Steggert). The book doesn’t sound like it was written by people whose first language was not English. It’s a worthwhile night of theater, and you should see it before it closes.

The best thing I can say for the dream ballet, though, is that it tries to be not-awful, and succeeds. But the alternate universe here is the future, the faraway dreamland where the central couple in the story can love each other openly. It’s a lovely idea. Except, you know, that it’s been done a thousand times, in a thousand other musicals, in the exact same costumes. (Standard dream ballet attire: tasteful riff on underwear in soothing neutrals.) The other problem is that the dreamland in question exists already. Or is on the verge of existing. Or, at the very least, exists at an event where, per the curtain speech, there’s a longer line at the men’s room at intermission than the ladies’ room. When it occurs in West Side Story—this dream ballet clearly inspired the one in Yank!, right down to the neutral underwear—a world where Tony and Maria could love openly really was out out of reach. It didn’t exist anywhere in reality, and wouldn’t for a long time.

In Yank!, the dream ballet mostly felt like old news. Worse, I got bored and wondered when the show was going to start again.

God knows, if you’re going to write a musical, you better know a thing or two about Michael Bennett, lest you embarrass yourself (right at you Duncan Sheik), but I think you can be too reverential, too. Reverence for theater shouldn’t be reverence for form.

Now, can we get rid of singing curtain calls, too?

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Photo credit: Gavin, Thoroughly Modern Millie official photographer; Jonathan, thealexsimms.tumblr.com.

I know there is a culture of understudy love amongst certain theater fans, but I’ve just never been able to get into it.  I’m not the kind of girl who seeks out understudy performances, who wants to see what the rest of the supporting cast or swings can do when the spotlight is theirs.  I’m just not.  Maybe that makes me shallow, but let’s be real, no matter how talented the understudy is, there’s always a reason they weren’t outright cast in the role.  For some reason, they didn’t quite fit the director’s vision for the show.  And when I drop my hard-earned money on theater tickets, I want to see the show as the director intended it to be seen.

That’s not to say I haven’t seen some great understudies.  Because I have.  For example, this past September, Jay A Johnson’s Claude in Hair was absolutely wonderful.  At that same matinee, Ryan Link stepped up halfway through the show when Will Swenson sprained his ankle and pulled together a brave performance.  And that’s just one show.  One afternoon, actually.  That’s part of the excitement of live theater; it is inherently never the same.  Never exact.  And I appreciate that completely.  But no matter how wonderful, how brave, how new and interesting an understudy was, I don’t believe I’ve ever left the theater thinking “Wow, I’m so glad I saw so-and-so’s understudy today!”

That is, until last Monday night.

Last Monday I saw understudy Vince Gatton take Michael Urie’s role in The Temperamentals and I don’t want to imagine the show any other way.  I’m glad I didn’t see Michael.  This is a first.

Gatton was just so dashing in that suit.  So at home in the character of Rudi Gernreich.  I imagine seeing Michael Urie would have been somewhat distracting.  His character on Ugly Betty is so outlandish it would have taken some time for me to put that aside and this play is too beautiful, it says things too important, for me to be distracted by any kind of outside force.  But it was more than just that.  In fact, it wasn’t about Michael Urie at all.  It was about Vince Gatton and his amazing work on that stage.  I just do not want to picture that role being played any other way.  His character felt so right that I cannot imagine any other interpretation working half as well.

The Temperamentals isn’t quite perfect, but I loved it.  I’d see it again.  I’d recommend that you see it.  The story of Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich and the Mattachine Society is something that should be passed along, told and retold and told again.  And as for the show itself, its characters are bright and engaging—I dare you not to laugh out loud at Bob Hull’s enthusiastic antics and bright humor—and in its finest, most human moments, The Temperamentals even moved me to tears.  I don’t know that I can ask much more from a play than to have learned something new and felt something real.  To have been transported.

So if you have a chance, head over to the New World Stages and check out The Temperamentals.  Let yourself be transported.  And maybe, if you’re very lucky, you’ll get the opportunity to see what I saw in Vince Gatton.

I’ve been trying to write about Yank! (A WW II Love Story) for approximately a week and a half now.  There are scraps of paper in my apartment.  Partially written documents litter my hard drive.  I’ve got dozens of potential beginnings, middles and ends.  Still, I haven’t been able to come up with something substantial and the worst part is that I don’t even know why.

It was a good show.  I think afterwards I even used the word ‘great’ to describe it.  I left the theater really happy I’d seen it.  So why can’t I think of anything intelligent to say?

In the interest of trying to sort things out and just freaking write something, I’ve decided to make a list.

Things About Yank! in No Particular Order:

• Bobby Steggert was aboslutely lovely.  He gets a bit ‘Leading Man-ish’ at times, like it’s something he puts on instead of something he just has, but I didn’t mind.  Boy can sing.  And act.  And he’s got some beautiful angles.
• Ivan Hernandez was likewise lovely.  And hot as Hades (in spite of the fact that he looks a lot like Mario Lopez.  A much hotter Mario Lopez, imho.).  I thought about throwing my bra up on stage at him, except…that would have been totally inappropriate on so many levels.  Instead I just imagined how nice it would be to have him sing me to sleep.  With no shirt on.
• Is it just me or did Nancy Anderson do her best Bernadette Peters impression for most of that show?
• I adored the supporting cast.  Tally Sessions’ Czechowski and Zak Edward’s Melanie, especially.
• This may mean nothing to most of our readers, but I really wanted to see Artie played by Sean Altman (of Rockapella and ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’ fame).  I have no idea why.
• Unlike the Times, I actually thought the First Act ran a bit long, and was a bit out of joint in its balance of Book and Music.  I also quite enjoyed the Second Act, though it probably could have used a bit more Book and a bit less Dream Ballet.  (And yes, I liked the Dream Ballet.  It just ran a little long for my taste.)
• I do, however, agree with the Times about things getting a bit mucky at the end.  You don’t need to throw in two other thematic veins right at the last minute (‘Be a credit to the uniform’ and ‘Gay love by nature can/can’t be committed love’).  Because seriously, Yank! is at its finest when it’s focused on one thing: the love story between Stu and Mitch.  And how the love story—no matter what gender those lovers are—is it.  Is love.  Is the same.  Because love is, in many ways, the greatest equalizer.  You don’t need to preach to prove that.  In fact, you prove that most beautifully when you’re not preaching.
• The York Theater is tiny and Lucky and I were in the second row.  It was sort of a weird experience seeing a show that felt big in such a small space.  I mean, we were close enough that if Stu had been played by Jonathan Groff and not Bobby Steggert, she and I would have left that theater soaked in saliva. Ew.
• Speaking of the Groff.  I couldn’t help but spend half the show thinking “this role was written for Jonathan Groff” over and over and over.  I don’t mean that to sound like a dig at Bobby Steggert, though I’m sure it does.   It’s just…Jonathan is the young Broadway actor I most identify with that shifting liminal space of youthful innocence and adult passion that I saw so much of in Stu.

I guess at the end of the day, it’s just a young show.  I know, I know, it’s been kicking around the scene here since 2005.  But it feels young.  And maybe in the life of a show in development it is still young.  Maybe it’s really not.  Ultimately, to me Yank! felt like the theater equivalent of a teenager or a college student.  It needs a little time in the real world before it can finish sorting itself out and actually be an adult, or in this case, finally take the big stage.

Jonathan “Pit Stain” Groff…

Gavin “Eight Pack” Creel…

Or Kyle “Dupe” Riabko…

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photos: Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld.com

1. Aaron Tveit is straight and nice.