The New Criterion

I’m no great fan of what can loosely be called the Les Miz style: the bloated score with great hunks of plot and exposition sung in recitative, the large chorus muttering ominously, the cumbersome and overdesigned scenery, the Pucciniesque penchant for high-volume wailing and howling. I was more than a little suspicious, then, of the new musical version of A Tale of Two Cities, especially on learning that it is more or less the offspring of Les Misérables. Its subject matter—high drama and epic history during the French Revolution—is echt-Lloyd Webber; its producers, Barbara Russell and Ron Sharpe, met while performing in Les Miz; its current cast contains nine Les Miz alums. The author and composer Jill Santoriello has produced a score which is all too obviously derivative of Lloyd Webber’s signature style, and a book without much wit or originality. And the set designer Tony Walton, old and experienced enough to have known better, has created a set which in awkwardness and complexity rivals anything perpetrated by John Napier (Les Miz) or Maria Björnson (Phantom of the Opera).

Nevertheless I found myself thorough- ly enjoying the show, and the audience seemed to be having as good a time as I was. What made it click? Principally, I think, it’s that A Tale of Two Cities is just such a wonderful story. Not that it’s one of Dickens’s best novels—as fiction it is certainly one of his less successful efforts—but just as certainly it has one of the neatest and most dramatically satisfying plots ever concocted, as perfectly constructed as The Count of Monte Cristo or The Mayor of Casterbridge. As the drama progresses, the tale’s disparate elements fall together in a manner that can only in retrospect be seen as inevitable. Its twinned heroes, the sunny Charles Darnay and the tortured Sydney Carton, are foils to one another both as plot elements and as characters. The interconnections between Darnay, his wicked uncle the Marquis de St. Evremonde, his father-in-law Dr. Manette, and Manette’s former servants the Defarges constitute a fine and elaborate house of cards. And the way Dickens has woven all this material into the boiling crucible of Paris during the Terror is very clever indeed.

The other thing this show has going for it is James Barbour, an attractive musical leading man who for the last few years has made a specialty of playing brooding anti-heroes with a dark side (Mr. Rochester, Billy Bigelow, Beauty’s Beast). He has taken the full measure of Sydney Carton, one of the greatest roles in all melodrama (who can forget Ronald Colman in the film?!), and milks it for every moment of pathos, romance, and humor Santoriello has provided—and then some, with his startlingly powerful bass voice and the satanic gleam in his eye. The material is over the top, of course, but Barbour plays it all with utter conviction: in musical numbers sentimental enough to defeat almost any performer, he belts out his lines with a straight-faced, defiant sincerity that seems to be daring anyone to laugh—and gets away with it. He even manages to pull off the famous last line—“It is a far, far better thing, etc.”—with his dignity intact.

The rest of the cast is uneven, though uniformly capable. Aaron Lazar (a former Les Miz principal player) makes a lovely, heroic Charles Darnay. As the beauteous Lucie Manette, Brandi Burckhardt is a nonentity, just your standard-issue blonde—but to be honest, the role Dickens created really doesn’t call for anything more. Still, a girl with more vulnerability, and charms that are a little less obvious, would have made a far more affecting heroine.

An even more misguided piece of casting is Natalie Toro as Madame Defarge. As portrayed by Toro, this supposedly fearsome revolutionary is a dead ringer for Elaine in Seinfeld, and looks as though she’d be more at ease noshing on a bagel in Tom’s Coffee Shop than wielding knitting needles in the Place de la Révolution. Gregg Edelman does reasonably well as the elderly Dr. Manette, though most of the stage business he has been given consists of stagey doddering and trembling. Les Minski makes a nicely sinister St. Evremonde, while as the rascally Cockney servant Barsad, Nick Wyman delivers a passable Stanley Holloway impression.

I was really taken aback by Tony Walton’s set, composed of large metal structures that lumbered ceaselessly around the stage like a herd of ungainly elephants. There seems to be no purpose for this design, which offers the advantages of neither verisimilitude nor convenience. Some of the units in fact, especially the Defarges’ wine shop, with its scores of bottles swaying and lurching, look positively dangerous. The only explanation I could think of was that Walton had been given far too generous a budget, in the misguided hope that he would provide an epic-scale spectacle.

In our modern age of irony, have we moved irrevocably beyond such straight-faced epic? A few years back the Ridiculous Theatrical Company put on a one-man version of A Tale of Two Cities that was screamingly funny and better theater, in truth, than this musical. But that kind of thing doesn’t invalidate the spirit of the original, any more than the current low-budget Broadway parody of The 39 Steps makes the Hitchcock film, or the John Buchan book that inspired it, any less wonderful as melodrama. In our more cynical moments we may be inclined to smirk at the heroics of a Sydney Carton or a Richard Hannay, but it would be a pity if we entirely lost the capacity to be thrilled by them.

In any case, even if you find A Tale of Two Cities corny it is infinitely more edifying than 13, the other new musical that opened at about the same time. Not to be confused with the disturbing and quite good film Thirteen, whose title the musical’s authors (Jason Robert Brown, Dan Elish, and Robert Horn) have shamelessly ripped off, it is an unutterably banal little piece remarkable only for having an all-kid cast: every one of the fourteen performers, as well as the six band members, are actual adolescents. Cute idea, but not enough to make the show interesting.

Here’s the premise: Evan (Graham Phillips), soon to celebrate his bar mitzvah, suddenly discovers that he is going to have to leave New York—the coolest city in the world, as everyone knows—and move to a God-forsaken burg in the Midwest: Appleton, Indiana, “a town where UFOs go to refuel.” Settling in at Dan Quayle Junior High School (the show’s condescension to middle America is one of its least attractive qualities), he tries to come up with schemes that will make him as hip and popular as he was back home. He kind of likes his cute neighbor, Patrice (Allie Trimm), but at school he discovers that she is considered hopelessly uncool, for one of those mysterious reasons that only thirteen-year-olds can understand. The in-crowd won’t come to Evan’s bar mitzvah unless he dumps Patrice and the other class geek, Archie (Aaron Simon Gross), who is widely shunned because he has crutches and a degenerative disease. After some tortured soul searching, Evan comes to the conclusion (what a surprise!) that real friendship is more important than mere popularity. The bar mitzvah proceeds without the in-crowd in attendance, and Evan symbolically becomes a man with Patrice and Archie, his true friends, by his side. Who needs the cool kids anyway?

As you can see from the summary, there is nothing to distinguish 13 from any run-of-the-mill after-school special except the music, which is hardly worth the price of admission. Will today’s kids, jaded by the far more sophisticated material that can be seen on any TV station, honestly take any interest in Evan’s moral dilemma and can they be in any suspense about its outcome? We have seen this same “message” delivered in countless films and TV shows, almost all of which set it up with more wit and edge than this show can muster. Mean Girls, for instance, was a truly funny and clever movie which, unlike 13, almost made you actually believe the goofy moral—so why fork out the big bucks to see 13 when you can rent Mean Girls, or Heathers, or Revenge of the Nerds, or any number of enjoyable films along roughly the same lines?

But what’s really disturbing about 13 is the poverty of the worldview it reveals. Here, in the richest and freest nation in human history, we have allowed our children to be consumed by the ugliest and crudest popular culture in human memory. The kids in 13, like kids all over the place these days, seem to spend all their spare time texting each other and making plans to “hook up.” The most popular competitive sport is shopping. The dialogue in 13, like that of the larger culture, resounds with a vulgarity that is made particularly poignant by the fact that it seems to be unconscious. For instance: one of the kids says he has “a powerful weapon.” Another replies, “Captain Hook also had a powerful weapon. Until he forgot which hand to wipe with.” Big belly laugh! And then there is a whole song in which the hunky football player, Brett (Eric M. Nelsen), makes plans to stick his tongue down his virginal girlfriend’s throat. Adorable! In one of the songs, the kids trill on about the magic moment “when your dreams come true.” What dreams? Being cool? Getting laid? No loftier ambitions are ever mentioned.

I had hoped that one or the other of my teenage daughters would accompany me to 13, but oddly enough they preferred to stay home and watch the vice-presidential debate. As I writhed in agony through the performance, I could only be relieved that I hadn’t inflicted it on them. Even the canned lines of professional politicians couldn’t possibly have matched 13’s for shallowness and fatuity.

The best that can be said for 13 is that it is not pretentious. This is not the case, alas, for Peter Shaffer’s Equus, one of the most pretentious plays ever written. Its very premise is bogus, and was bogus even at the time it first appeared (1973), when it was in absolute conformity with the zeitgeist. Like other plays, films, and books of the era (King of Hearts, to take a notable example), Equus proposed that madness is somehow more passionate, more creative, more alive than mere, drab sanity. Not many people believe this any more—the advances made in psychiatry and neuroscience have helped us understand how truly devastating and terrifying mental illness is to those who suffer from it—and Equus itself is hardly persuasive, for Alan Strang, the stable boy who blinds six horses in a religio-sexual-psychotic frenzy, is clearly in very deep distress throughout the action of the play. It is simply not credible that anyone could want to change places with him, certainly not Martin Dysart, the civilized, repressed, intellectual psychiatrist who sets out to cure him—or in Dysart’s own words, to make him “normal.” (“The normal both sustains and kills,” the psychiatrist intones sententiously.)

In terms of intellectual fashion, then, Equus is such a period piece that one doubts whether it would have received a Broadway revival without the participation of its two stars, Daniel Radcliffe (the screen’s Harry Potter, now nineteen and all grown up) and Richard Griffiths, who dazzled us all in The History Boys and who in fact also has a running role in the Harry Potter films—that of Harry’s wicked Uncle Vernon.

Both actors do an eminently respectable job without in any way delivering a star performance. Radcliffe possesses a fine intensity which has no doubt been honed in all those focused and reactive Harry Potter close-ups, and he even has a measure of personal magnetism, which I did not expect. His future as a leading man is doubtful, though, since he is short and stunted-looking, like so many former child stars. (Those who are talented and lucky enough, like Mickey Rooney or Roddy McDowall, sometimes go on to have adult careers as character actors.) Griffiths performs with admirable restraint, resisting the temptation (which Richard Burton, in the movie, most assuredly did not) of singing Shaffer’s insistently poetic lines rather than speaking them. Griffiths in fact is so restrained that he might be accused of underacting—or perhaps it is just that he is embarrassed by the material, as well he might be.

The most embarrassing aspect is the gay subtext (so close to the surface as hardly to qualify as “sub”) and the overtly gay imagery, which is never recognized or dealt with by the characters. Alan spends a good bit of his time on stage caressing the torsos of the six big muscley guys playing the horses and even kneeling in front of them suggestively. Granted they are meant to be horses, but they are costumed to look very much like men, and men right out of a gay fantasy at that. Then there is the scene in which Alan writhes to orgasm atop Nugget, his favorite horse; his repeated description of “cream” dripping from the horses; even the nonsensical advertising jingle he sings on his first appearance in Dysart’s office, with its celebration of a white candy bar full of delectable fluids. So when a human love object shows up for Alan, it’s a little startling to discover that it’s a female—a conventionally pretty blonde girl, in fact (Anna Camp), with whom Alan hopes to make love but whose advances, taking place in the stables within sight of the horses he has deified, send him into the frenzy which ends with him blinding the horses.

Shaffer’s mixing of sex and religion might have been daring in the 1970s, but now it has become merely predictable. We recognize all the stock elements: the devout, Catholic mother partial to gruesome pictures of Christ being flogged, or of his bleeding wounds; the atheist father who hangs out at the local porn cinema; the family’s repressed and narrow culture. As Dysart points out, Alan has no reading, no history, no physics—only TV. He’s “a modern citizen.” (Too bad he’s not a citizen of Appleton, Indiana, in 2008—he could text his friends and hook up!) Dysart’s interpretation of Alan’s religious fantasies and hallucinations is that “that boy has created out of his drab existence a passion,” and adds that “without worship, you shrink”—a questionable assertion. Dysart actually envies Alan his capacity to worship, realizing that his own treasured paganism is merely academic, a scholar’s vain fantasy.

Directed by Thea Sharrock and with scenery by John Napier, the production is nice to look at, with the horses’ stables opening onto the action upstage and large multi-purpose rectangular blocks used to suggest furniture and other scenic elements. (These come in handy for the vertically challenged Radcliffe to stand on, but the actors are too frequently required to rearrange them, and Griffiths can occasionally be seen sneaking a peek at the masking-tape marks on the floor onto which he is supposed to heave the units into place.) As is so often the case, the high quality of the design only serves, through contrast, to underscore the emptiness of the play itself. I would be very much surprised if Equus ever appeared on Broadway again.