The Broadway season has ended with a washout – but it’s been far from one. In fact, the rain in 110 in the Shade – which opened last night at Studio 54 as the final opening of the Broadway season – is a cleansing, liberating sort; it ends a long drought in the rural farming community it is set in, but also in the life of its heroine, Lizzie Curry, who finally finds the possibility of love.
I saw it on Sunday, and it was the highlight of my recent trip – not that it’s the greatest of musicals, or even of productions, but this 1963 Broadway musical is thrillingly galvanised by the presence of Broadway’s greatest working musical actress, Audra McDonald. I don’t bestow the honour lightly; but in a city full of great performers, often doing great work, McDonald reaches parts that no one else comes near to: the deepest reaches of your heart.
She is such an inherently truthful actress, with not a false note in her (of either voice or of emotion), that you are utterly swept away by her, just as the character she is playing is finally swept away by the competing attentions of two men. I found myself surrendering to tears through much of the second act; and I was not alone. In a review in today’s New York Times, Ben Brantley points out, “ When you listen to Ms. McDonald’s Lizzie sing about the ache of loneliness or her disgust for the words ‘old maid,’ you don’t know how she feels; you feel how she feels. You’re likely to find tears in your eyes by the end of even comic songs.” As he also says of her, she makes a “dazzling case for the musical as a dramatic form that plumbs hearts and minds. She so blurs the lines between spoken and musical expression that one seems like a natural extension of the other. Singing for Ms McDonald is just a more emphatic and articulate way of talking, one that’s needed when emotions are so intense they can’t be captured without the texture and shading of melody.”
And what texture and shading she brings to both character and melody! The parched landscape that her character inhabits is only matched by the parched landscape of suitable Broadway musicals for Audra to inhabit; so it is essential to take the opportunity – any opportunity – to see her return to the Broadway stage where she has already won four Tony Awards and may well be heading for her 5th now.
It is the Tony’s, of course, that mark the official beginning and end of the “season” here – unlike in London, where we don’t really have one beyond that of the calendar year, New York marks its theatrical year out in Tony eligibility rules; the season ends at whatever date the Tony nominating committee deem is the final one for a production to open to be eligible for consideration for the current year’s Awards. And this year, that cut-off date was last night – hence the last minute flurry of openings here that I have blogged about here before.
And now Broadway’s favourite sport kicks off in earnest: Tony handicapping. First of all for the nominations – who will get nominated, and who will be left out of the running (particularly in the hotly-contested category of Best Musical, where there are generally regarded to be six possible contenders – Spring Awakening, Grey Gardens, Curtains, Legally Blonde, LoveMusik and Mary Poppins – but only four possible places, so two have to go); and then for who will win from those selected. The nominees — to be announced next Tuesday — are chosen by a small professional body of Tony nominators (26 in all); while the winners are selected from the poll of Tony voters, a much bigger group (some 700) made up of theatre professionals, producers and critics. Watch this space as the contest develops.
