The anti-Nazi resistance gets the Rent treatment in White Rose: The Musical (at Theatre Row through March 31), in which four plucky friends and their teacher at the University of Munich—who called themselves “The White Rose”—decide to take down the Third Reich with leaflets. Sloppy about their methods, they are soon discovered and put to death. The musical paints the quintet as noble freedom fighters who fueled a vigorous resistance movement, but since internal opposition had almost nothing to do with the destruction of the Third Reich, their actions, however courageous, were in vain. The musical must therefore struggle with the question of how to dramatize an obviously futile gesture, albeit in the right direction.
The siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl gained the glow of martyrs, which has been celebrated many times before. (See, for instance, the 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, which was nominated for an Oscar). Their stories might have inspired a wrenching, somber musical steeped in revulsion for the barbarism of the Reich as well as appreciation for the idealistic follies of youth, but White Rose has no gravitas whatsoever. Indifferently staged by Will Nunziata, thinly acted, underbaked, and plagued by banality in most of Natalie Brice’s musical compositions, it never makes the audience feel the immense danger or the world-historical stakes. Worst of all, both the book and lyrics (by Brian Belding) confuse clichés with insights: The truth changes everything! Don’t give up! Look to the stars! Dim millennial-speak keeps reminding us we’re in twenty-first-century America (the Führer “empowered us,” says a disillusioned former member of the Hitler Youth; Sophie asks her feuding colleagues, “Are we seriously doing this right now?”), and the multicultural casting is, in context, ludicrous, considering the famously monocultural nature of 1943 Germany. Of the five leading members of the White Rose brought to life onstage, one is black (as is an SS officer) and two are Asian. Why dilute a show in which 1940s Nazi master-race ideology is the pretext for every action on both sides by making it look like a guidebook for meeting 2020s artistic dei quotas? The actors appear so out of place as 1940s Germans that they might as well be costumed as astronauts.
The story’s tragic arc makes it perhaps best suited to opera (Udo Zimmermann composed one, 1967’s Weiße Rose, which was reworked and enjoyed several follow-up productions), yet the intrinsic frivolity of the musical-theater form can be overcome. This piece barely makes an effort, containing itself to depicting Sophie and Hans Scholl (Jo Ellen Pellman and Mike Cefalo, respectively), their friends Willi Graf (Cole Thompson) and Christoph Probst (Kennedy Kanagawa), and their professor Kurt Huber (Paolo Montalban) as the kind of plucky upstarts familiar from a thousand Broadway musicals. They take the actions that will lead to all of their deaths with no more thought of consequences than the upper-middle-class bolshies who staged a more-whimsical-than-dangerous East Village rent strike in Rent.
The show’s songs—nineteen of them are stuffed into a ninety-minute, one-act presentation—are largely nondescript ballads centered on violin, piano, and guitar, with overly aggressive drumming frequently drowning out the melodies. Some of them are pretty enough, such as the duet “Who Cares?” sung by the condemned siblings. But when the students declare “We Will Not Be Silent” in the closing numbers, it’s hard not to respond mentally that the guillotine is notably effective in silencing people. Since the Scholls and their friends didn’t accomplish anything, their story demands an entirely different and far bleaker approach, one that comprehends and absorbs the suicidal nature of their protest. What kind of personality can drive someone to throw away a life just begun? The day Hitler died, and Germany’s rebirth began, Sophie Scholl would have been only twenty-three, had she not been so heedless that she threw a handful of anti-Hitler leaflets in the air in 1943 in view of a Nazi janitor who immediately reported her to the authorities.
Instead of conveying the sense of an utter seriousness of purpose more or less alien to us today, the play chooses naivety. It seems to recast the members of the White Rose as the forebears of the last several generations of lefty American students engaging in the kinds of consequence-free political gesturing that have characterized campus politics and angry protest marches for the past sixty years. But the Scholls and their allies were not at all like today’s fake radicals, who have come to expect, with good reason, no worse than a pair of plastic handcuffs and a brief stop for a booking before they continue on with their lives. The Scholls’ group was extraordinary and, by today’s lights, incomprehensibly so. The characters in the show, and the actors who portray them, come across as lightweights who are barely aware of what they’re doing. As they prance around the stage burbling about hope and tomorrow, they never seem like anything more important than generic musical-theater dweebs.
The best current example of how to stage a serious subject for the musical theater without the whole project disappearing in frivolity is another horticulturally titled piece, Days of Wine and Roses (at Studio 54 through April 28). The familiar story about a convivial young publicity man and the teetotal secretary he corrupts with drink, then marries, then drags into sodden dissolution in the Eisenhower–Kennedy era was originally a play written for television by J. P. Miller in 1958, then adapted by Miller for the rightfully beloved 1962 film starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. The title resides within a line from the 1896 poem “Vitae Summa Brevis” by the alcoholic poet Ernest Dowson (who also created the phrase “gone with the wind” in another poem, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”). Both poems’ titles are references to Horace’s Odes. My, how the reference points of television writers have changed. Miller was guilty of a modicum of literalization when he supplied the male lead with a gig delivering roses for a greenhouse, but nevertheless the film is a standout for its era, raw and piercing about the hazards of excessive drinking at a time when Hollywood preferred the warm glow of sentiment to the harsh glare of verisimilitude.
With a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, the Broadway production directed by Michael Greif begins in the swagger of youth, when aboard a party cruise Joe Clay is getting happily sauced when he encounters the boss’s lovely, demure young secretary Kirsten Arnesen. The Broadway veterans Brian D’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara play the leads, and though James is sturdy and dependable, O’Hara is a standout. She is perhaps the leading lady of Broadway musicals these days, having been nominated for seven Tony awards. In 2015 she won one, which was richly deserved, for playing Anna in The King and I at Lincoln Center. O’Hara is forty-seven but even just a few rows from the stage she seems effortlessly to capture the spirit of an adorably inexperienced girl in perhaps her mid-twenties. Joe, associating alcohol with good times, and feeling a bit stymied by her prim air, seeks to get her to join him in bibulous festivity, but she doesn’t enjoy the taste. That changes with the first Brandy Alexander he orders for her on a dinner date. In a trice, she is lighthearted, buoyant, and sexy. Her song about needing some danger in her bookish life, “There Go I,” is properly foreboding. In the next scene, the pair have set up together, he has brought home some whiskey to celebrate a promotion, and the two drink it straight up.
Everyone in the audience will sense where this is heading—daytime drunkenness to chase the housewifey blahs, the specter of job loss, even near-catastrophe caused by a fire resulting from one character’s passing out with a lit cigarette. The story presents alcohol in all of its contexts—a tonic, a toxin, a shortcut to sociability, or a prison to which one sentences oneself. Kirsten, whose mother is dead, was raised by a stern Norwegian American farmer (Byron Jennings) and initially seems merely a passive victim, hence not very interesting. As the show goes on, however, the urge to break the addiction passes back and forth between the couple and she gains agency. She’d certainly have been better off never touching a drop, but nearly everyone has had a first drink, very often at the suggestion of someone else. Each sip is nevertheless an individual choice. Ultimately the show, which races through a single powerful act of an hour and forty-five minutes, demonstrates an admirably honest understanding of this. Some people simply can’t drink in moderation and hence shouldn’t indulge at all.
Kirsten’s taciturn father despises Joe and blames him for leading his daughter into self-destruction, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that. At one point, living under her old man’s roof, Joe suggests they celebrate a period of sobriety by . . . drinking. This doesn’t go well, leading to a dolorous reprise of an especially devastating scene many recall from the movie, in which a drunken Joe carelessly trashes the father’s greenhouse, destroying innocent flowers that might as well be potted Kirstens, while looking for a bottle he has stashed somewhere. Yet in the final third of the show, Kirsten becomes the tout and temptress while Joe, having recalibrated via Alcoholics Anonymous, tries to avoid falling back into the liquid trap. The show creditably avoids grandstanding about so-called toxic masculinity, or at least understands that femininity can be toxic as well.
The songs, played by a small orchestra as is necessitated by the tight confines of the theater, aren’t especially memorable. But they’re highly effective in their place, suggesting a sedate late-night cocktail lounge with their trembling reeds, soft trombone, and piano. The numbers have a sensuous but regretful and cautionary air that seems perfectly calibrated to match the relationship many problem drinkers have with alcohol.
From Supreme Court to sausage factory” is a wry son-in-law’s tart summation of the fortunes of the O’Donnell family into which he married in Aristocrats (through March 3), the second of three plays by the Northern Irish Catholic Brian Friel that constitute the Irish Rep’s thirty-fifth season. (First was Translations; next up is Philadelphia, Here I Come!). The family in question, whose patriarch, a retired judge, lies offstage in dementia-riddled agony muttering nonsense heard through an intercom, are Catholic gentry whose stately home is Ballybeg Hall, the “big house” in the fictional village where Friel set many of his plays. The judge’s three daughters and his son Casimir are all failures in various ways. Despite his pretentious Christian name, borrowed from a Polish prince, the flighty, possibly gay Casimir (adroitly played by Tom Holcomb) now works in a food-processing plant in Germany with his alleged wife Helga, whom no one else in the family has ever met. “Helga’s the real bread-winner,” notes his alcoholic sister Alice (Sarah Street). “She’s a cashier in a bowling alley.” It only takes a single generation for a family’s standing to collapse. It’s the mid-1970s, and the O’Donnells are clinging to their past glories as a bleak future stares them cruelly in the face.
When we meet Casimir, he’s having a wonderful time describing the environs to a visitor, an academic from Chicago, Roger Dominic Casey’s Tom Hoffnung (the translation of his surname is the only hope present), who has no dramatic function except to serve as an audience surrogate to elicit information about the family history. (His research area is the grand estates of Ireland, most of which are owned by Protestant Anglo-Irish clans, which makes the Catholic O’Donnell family a rare type). Casimir merrily shuffles around the place claiming, dubiously, that G. K. Chesterton fell off this stool, or W. B. Yeats napped on that cushion. He has three sisters, and there might as well be a cherry orchard on the grounds. Friel, who died in 2015, was an acolyte of Chekhov, and among his plays were adaptations of both Three Sisters (1981) and Uncle Vanya (1998). Friel even dramatized a couple of Chekhov’s short stories, “The Bear” and “The Lady with the Dog,” and his one-act play Afterplay imagines an entanglement between a character from Vanya and one from Three Sisters.
Aristocrats, tautly directed by the Irish Rep’s creative director, Charlotte Moore, probably could not exist without Chekhov’s spirit whispering in Friel’s ear, but if its creative debt is obvious, it’s also highly effective. As challenging as it is to create a work nuanced and subtle enough to be dubbed Chekhovian, Friel did so. The play has exactly the master’s tone of gentle, lightly comic sympathy for its downwardly mobile family, adrift in its cloud of self-delusion, disappointment, and generational decay. As is often the case in Chekhov, there is one clear-eyed, hence dryly amusing, observer present to explain wittily what has gone wrong. Eamon, Alice’s formerly working-class husband, superbly played by Tim Ruddy, managed to climb the social ladder by winning her hand, but now the couple lives humbly in London. He allows that he talks too much, but only because the others refuse to say anything much: “This was always a house of reticence, of things unspoken, wasn’t it?”
He might have married one of the other two sisters: once he even proposed to Judith (Danielle Ryan), who has instead settled into spinsterhood and spends her days living in the house and looking after the judge, who dribbles on his chin and soils his sheets. Claire (Meg Hennessy), who plays the piano almost obsessively, is about to be married to a greengrocer, hence the presence of the rest of the family in the house at this moment, but her melancholy air does not bode well. Offered a drink, she says, “The doctor doesn’t allow me to take alcohol when I’m on sedatives.”
The family may still possess a few tattered remnants of gentility, but they haven’t a cent. Should the old man die, and deprive the family of his pension, there won’t even be enough to pay for the upkeep of the estate. Unlike in The Cherry Orchard, in which poor business decisions hasten the family’s ruination, the O’Donnells have no options except dissolution. The way Friel uses the academic researcher’s innocent, friendly questioning to reveal the sad truth of the situation is the play’s finest moment, as cunningly designed as anything in Chekhov. A haunted, silent figure who occasionally drifts into the scene, Uncle George (Colin Lane, who also plays the aged judge) typically looks around, says nothing, and then shuffles off. The rest of the family assume he’s gone a bit mushy in the melon, but as we learn in an amusing twist, he hasn’t. He is quite correct in thinking there is nothing much to say.
Though the play would have been improved by folding these characters and their sorrows into a plot, as it stands Aristocrats is Friel at his very best. His characters are rich and human, his dialogue ranges from clever to insightful without ever sounding like a writer labored over it, and his feel for his characters is perfectly balanced by a bemused detachment that avoids easy satire or sneering condescension. Ballybeg may be fictional, but Friel made it breathe and sigh and ache and face its limitations.
