Good People, by David Lindsay-Abaire

In his 2011 play Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire confronts the knotty question of class in America with humor and insight. As the action opens, Margie (pronounced with a hard “g”, everything about Margie is a little hard) is fired from her undignified work as a clerk at a dollar store. She’s been late too many times, and Margie’s tough mouth makes everyone around her nervous. Even as she’s being fired, Margie takes shots at the manager’s thieving mother, her co-workers, the manager’s favoritism for a girlfriend who’s also a clerk, the potential girlfriend’s ethnicity, and the manliness of the manager’s visits to the local bingo game.  It’s not that Margie is wrong, but she’s more than a little bigoted and her filter just doesn’t work at all.

What makes this play work is that Margie, despite all her bad qualities, is sympathetic. The reason that she’s always late for work is that she’s trying to support an adult daughter who functions like a child, and taking care of her or maintaining a household on an insufficient salary often makes it difficult for Margie to get to work. Margie works hard, stands at the center of her social group, and displays an intelligence and humor that shine through her anger.

A conference with her South Boston neighborhood cronies, along with a healthy dose of desperation, convinces Margie that her best hope for work is Mike, a long ago high school boyfriend who escaped Southie and has become a doctor. That leads to confrontations at his office and ultimately at his luxury home, where the story culminates in a scene between Margie, Mike, and his young African-American wife. It’s there that Margie’s anger and bigotry, Mike and Kate’s well-intentioned inability to understand the limitations placed on Margie by poverty, family, and gender, and the sheer awkwardness of the situation lead to some sparkling, darkly comic conflict.

On the stage, the role of Margie has already been taken up by actresses such as Frances McDormand (who won a Tony for her portrayal) and Jane Kaczmarek. It’s an exceptional part, one that actresses who can blend comedy and drama will covet. It makes for entertaining reading too, leavening exploration of important, relevant issues with a hearty dose of humor.

Check the WRL catalog for Good People

Read Full Post »

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), by Stephen Sondheim

I would like to make you all love Stephen Sondheim as much as I do.

I admit bias. I’m working on my third Sondheim role in three years since returning to the stage. He wrote half the shows I’ve done, and I rarely pass on a production of one of his works. I’ve done Company, Merrily We Roll Along, and now Follies, and Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Assassins, Sunday in the Park with George, Road Show, and Into the Woods are all high on my bucket list of shows I’d love to try. Even people who aren’t theater fans recognize iconic shows like West Side Story and Gypsy, for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics.

But musical theater isn’t everyone’s thing, and even for fans, Sondheim takes work to enjoy: the books for his shows are often dark or satirical without the pat happy endings that many associate with the genre. While his music and lyrics are catchy, he also loves dissonance and uses big words liberally. Performing his music can be a love/hate proposition: Sondheim tests your ear, memory, breathing apparatus, and the muscles of your tongue and jaw to the maximum degree. Performers are warned off auditioning with Sondheim for other shows because the music is notoriously difficult to play, with tricky accompaniments and frequent changes in key and time signature.

Still, it’s hard to find a musical theater afficianado (at least one under 50) who wouldn’t put Sondheim atop the canon. His shows are revived more often than any contemporary and his songs frequently cobbled into new revues. Why?

There’s depth in his work that rewards years of listening, that leaves one finding new pleasures in even the smallest songs, appreciating another level of wordplay in a line that one has heard again and again. His rhymes are perfect and more often than not surprising. Lyrics are stuffed with internal rhymes, clever puns, and interesting ideas, but if one can stay in tempo, they come gracefully off the tongue, always well-matched (or cleverly undermined) by the underlying tune. And Sondheim’s subject matter is much more diverse than the variations on boy-meets-girl that dominate most of the genre.

Which brings me to Sondheim’s lyric collection Finishing the Hat, which collects lyrics from the first half of his career (everything I say here applies equally well to Look I Made a Hat, the second volume which covers work from 1981 to date). These two books are many things: a sort of memoir, a history of modern musical theater, a treatise on the art of songwriting, and a delightful collection of poetry all wrapped up in one package.

This is dense reading that contains not only all the lyrics (including those for numbers that were cut), but his honest opinion about his successes and failures, facsimiles of early drafts of his work, behind-the-scenes production pictures, and perhaps most interesting of all, his notes on each show and his thoughts about other composers and lyricists (those who have died; he assiduously avoids the subject of his living contemporaries).

Unless you’re a huge fan, don’t read this treasure chest from cover to cover. Read the introduction and the lead-in notes to each show, but after that, sample. Just as many re-read Shakespeare before attending a play, you might preview the lyrics of a Sondheim show to help you catch more nuances during the actual performance. Browse through favorite shows or numbers, preferably as you listen to a cast album or watch the film of a production that you checked out on the same library visit. Enjoy the pictures, and watch for sidebars, where Sondheim often has very pointed things to say.

Check the WRL catalog for Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes

Or try Look I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011)

Read Full Post »

August: Osage County, by Tracy Letts

As August: Osage County opens, Beverly Weston, a one-book wonder poet and the patriarch of a large Oklahoma family, is in the process of hiring a native American housekeeper. A little drunk, he reveals some of his family’s dysfunction. His wife Violet has mouth cancer and is addicted to prescription drugs, and Beverly admits that these are only part of her larger problems.

Tracy Letts’ pitch black comedy drama won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, along with the Tony, the Drama Desk Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and pretty much every other award available to plays. It’s in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, following the disintegration of an American family, in this case people of the central Plains, after years of slow decay from inside.

As the first act opens, we discover that Beverly has gone missing, and his three daughters, their spouses and fiancés, sister-in-law, and grandchildren have returned home to keep vigil. Violet is in terrible form, popping pills like candy and confronting her daughters with every ugliness in the family. Her barbs and those shot back by her daughters, especially the eldest Barbara, are hilarious, but so full of anger and pain that the laughter turns to acid in your mouth. Violet’s sister Mattie Fae bullies her 37-year-old son Little Charles, a boyish man, and bickers with her husband Charles. Barbara’s academic husband Bill seems nice, but he’s had an affair with a student and the couple are, unknown to the rest of the family, separated. Their daughter Jean is fourteen going on forty, pot-smoking, foul-mouthed, but not nearly as worldly as she’d like to believe. Beverly and Violet’s second daughter Ivy is soft compared to the other sisters, cowed by her mother’s bullying. Youngest sister Karen has had a life of unhappiness, but returns to the family with new confidence gained from her relationship with her older fiancé Steve.

Each of the family members are hiding a secret which comes out over the course of the long (for a play) and harrowing drama. It’s bitter, but epic, and like the best family sagas, the Westons are symbols of a deeper degree of societal rot. Violet is a terrifying matriarch, pushed beyond the breaking point and pulling the whole family down around her. She may be drug-addled and diseased, but she’s tough as nails and none of her family’s foibles have escaped her. The other twelve characters in this tragedy of dysfunction are all interesting too. Wait for a time when you can handle some darkness, but by all means, don’t miss one of the great American plays.

Check the WRL catalog for August: Osage County.

Read Full Post »