In Stage Door we tell you about our latest theatrical experiences here in NYC through our movie-mad filter
As you may recall I was out of the country this year when the Tony Awards happened and thus out of the theatrical loop. I didn't even realize until leaving the theater recently that the 'playsical' I'd just seen had been a multiple winner: Sound Design, Scenic Design, Costume Design (the great Ann Roth), and Original Music. Like one of those Oscar winners everyone thinks is exceedingly handsome but no one quite rapturously loves enough in the marquee categories.
I'm referring to The Nance as a playsical because it is a play with music, all of the music being performance-based. The incidental music and the main talk-sung song -- a disposable come-on "meet me round the corner in a half an hour" performed multiple times by strippers and The Nance -- plays a key minor role since the story takes place in the final days of the waning vaudeville circuit in NYC in the 1930s and one theater in particular which becomes a target of right-wing politicans. [more...]
Chauncey Miles (Nathan Lane), our titular protagonist, is the theater's big draw as "The Nance", the rough equivalent of black performers in minstrel shows since Miles sends up every last negative gay stereotype imaginable; The Nance is limp wristed, perpetually horny, woman-hating, and gay gay gay. The humor is broad, pun-based and double stuffed with entendres. BUT it's totally funny. I'd be lying if I pretended that my friends and I haven't been using The Nance's signature fey greeting every time we've seen each other since...
I said 'Hiiiii,' simpley 'Hiiiiiii"
The play begins with a wary pickup as Miles takes home a fresh-off-the-bus hottie named Ned (Jonny Orsini in his Broadway debut) who has wandered into a coffee shop that doubles as a down low cruising spot (everyone being closet cases in the 1930s). Miles is thrown the next morning when his very naked new pickup isn't eager to leave and the two begin an unlikely romance with Ned playing the hopeless romantic and Chauncey the jaded and unfortunately self-loathing politically conservative loner.
The Nance works well as a theatrical comedy, much of it being very funny. You should know that I am not, generally speaking, a fan of Nathan Lane's hammy theatricality but he's just superb here, nailing the performance within the performance (where the hammy theatricality is most welcome) and effective and even disarmingly moving at times in the dramatic portions of the play. It's the most charming performance he's given since The Birdcage (1996) and I'd argue his best work ever. That 90s blockbusters was coincidentally on cable the day I started writing this review and I stopped to watch it. It's a curious movie now in that it holds up as comedy but is incredibly and I must say thrillingly "dated"; how far we've come since this movie sheepishly asked us to kinda ponder or consider or maybe think about (please?) that a gay relationship was somehow, you know, valid!
For my tastes the play is a bit too long and hasn't quite worked out a cohesive union between its thematic political ambitions (Chauncy and his best friend , Cady Huffman from The Producers are foes politically one being right wing the other Communist) its romantic drama (Orsini's Ned is too blank or idealized to read like an actual person) and its slice of comic history. But better multiple provocative selves and ideas in a play than just one note hit repeatedly!
Like many self-serious entertainments, The Nance gets a bit clumsy in the messaging never quite earning its sermonizing. But it gets close enough that I ended up really liking it. It's been a couple of weeks since I'd seen it and more and more I've found myself wishing it were a movie to nab a bigger audience. It's about the theater -- and though it's theatrical it isn't so stagey as to be "stage bound" if it were reimagined for the screen. But mostly we need more historical films that touch on the struggles of the gay community. For a long time we only got coming of age dramas or AIDS narratives and now a lot of contemporary romantic comedies. Gay history is, at this point, a cave of hoarded treasures -- the greatest collection of untold stories for the cinema.
[The Nance runs through August 11th at the Lyceum]
Previously on Stage Door
"WS" a perverse fairy tale (NSFW) [Ends August 4th]
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike [Ends August 25th - Don't Miss It!]
Kinky Boots Best Musical at the Tonys. [Open Run]