The Tony Award Nominations are exactly one week from today, so we really ought to talk about the musicals that might be vying for top honors. Both of today's shows have movie connections, albeit one more tenuous than the other. Both are also likely nominees in the Best Musical category, which is the Best Picture of the Tony Awards. Yes, there are 3 other top prizes (Play, Revival of a Play, Revival of a Musical) but Musical is the most coveted prize and the one with arguably the biggest impact on legacies and box office. Ten musicals are eligible in this category for the 2014/2015 season and I'd be surprised if these two won't comprise half of the four-wide nominee list.
Two fine "new" musicals after the jump...
The cast of FUN HOME, now playing on Broadway
FUN HOME
Historians will have to suss out when The Bechdel Test became a ubiquitous topic online, but it's definitely become just that. It's been used as an educational tool, a conversation starter, a weapon, a plea, and in every way you can think of when it comes to the topic of gender in the movies. That's quite an achievement for a concept that started as a brief joke in Alison Bechdel's 1985 graphic novel "Dykes To Watch Out For". Bechdel has been a cartoonist for so long that it's nice to know that the Bechdel Test won't be her only lasting legacy. Her life story is now the basis for the musical Fun Home and it's such an amazingly intimate and assured work, that it deserves an equally long life and a film adaptation of some kind. I'm tempted to call it a masterwork and eager to give it a second go.
In this searching memoir the adult Alison Bechdel looks back on her formative years and her relationship to her closeted gay father (Michael Cerveris, suffering/distracting himself beautifully). It's the relationship that formed and haunts her. The title comes from the surprising fact that this famous cartoonist grew up in a funeral home. Right at this moment you're thinking "how depressing!" but you must resist the urge to flee. This new musical, with a score by Caroline or Change's Jeanine Tesori is so vibrant with feeling, humanity and truth that it's just as joyful as it is sad. I left it reconfigured, reenergized and frankly in awe of its accomplishments.
Picking a favorite scene or cast member is nearly impossible and I have absolutely no idea how Tony will divvy up the acting honors. Michael Cerveris and Judy Kuhn are above the title suggesting lead bids for Tony consideration but Kuhn is definitely a supporting player. You'll recall Kuhn as the singing voice of Disney's Pocahontas and her instrument is still a gorgeous thing to be entranced by. She only has one solo but it's a doozy, a heartwrenching number called "Days and Days" when she sings about how swiftly her life flew by in this compromised marriage.
While the adult Alison (Beth Malone) is onstage most frequently, she basically functions as the show's narrator so the bulk of the award-worthy material goes to Cerveris as the focal point of the musical, or rather, its cautionary counterpoint. Young Alison (Sydney Lucas) and Medium Alison (Emily Skeggs) are the heart of the show and they absolutely own their big show-stopping moments, two exuberant self-actualization anthems called "Ring of Keys" (an excerpt above) and "Changing My Major." I really can't recommend this new production highly enough for fans of musicals or even musical skeptics who are interested in memoir writing or LGBT history.
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
Yes, I know it's odd but this is a "new" musical per Tony's rules, even though it feels like a revival since it's based on such a famous work (Vincente Minnelli's Oscar Winning Best Picture of 1951 An American in Paris) with such instantly recognizable standards as "I Got Rhythm and "Our Love Is Here To Stay" and "S'Wonderful" If you've been keeping up with the season on Broadway it's tough not to note the similarities in plot between this story and the revival of "On the Town" (still playing, definitely worth seeing, and eligible for the Revival category). Both are about a trio of male friends just out of or on leave from military duties who search for the love in the big city, Paris in this case, New York City in the other. The chief difference is that An American in Paris is a dance drama, as opposed to a silly musical comedy, so the resolutions aren't so clean and the details are sometimes less than exuberantly happy.
Max von Essen better be Tony-Nominated!The "new" musical of this oldie is, if I'm recalling the film correctly, significantly darker. The adaptation acknowledges uncomfortable takeaways from war-time incuding depression and loneliness, anti-Semitism, American abrasive and entitlement... and even homosexuality, according to the New Yorker at least, but I think they're stretching in that regard. (There's a joke about a couple of characters thinking that Henri is gay but I think it's arguable to say that the show fully endorses that perception. It's just a suggestion.)
The production looks extremely handsome and expensive throughout and what it loses in spontaneity (every moment seems rehearsed to utter 'your foot points this way / your hands frame this detail' perfection) it makes up for in lux tableaus and eye popping color. Due to the dancing demands they went with mostly ballet performers but they managed to find some who could also carry a show with acting and singing demands. One of the most reliable stage performers Veanne Cox (Caroline or Change, Company) is superbly funny as the stuffy appearances-are-everything wealthy mother of the show's MVP, Max von Essen. He plays the Frenchman "Henri" who is friendly with the two American soldiers and engaged to marry Jerry's muse "Lise" (Leanne Cope in the Leslie Caron role -- she has absolutely insane toe shoe technique). It's impossible to live up to Gene Kelly's masterful once-in-a-lifetime quadruple triple threat genius (singer/actor/dancer/director) so I felt bad for the titular lead played by Robert Fairchild who works hard to try but the casting overall is a success. Still, Max von Essen's utter brilliance as Henri (I will feel like rioting if he isn't Tony-nominated) throws the love story off a wee bit. It's not that he's a scene stealer or romantic lead handsome... though both of those things are true. It's that he's so damn good in every scene and so thoroughly aces his big act two number which shifts from watching the actor playing an average nervous nightclub performer far less talented than himself to embodying Henri's dreams of himself as a fantastic show-stopping talent (i.e. Von Essen-sized gifts) and back again so endearingly that I couldn't help but root for him.
And, as you know if you know the Best Picture winner, that isn't wise: it's the American in Paris, not the Frenchmen, who dances off with the girl.