On Monday evening, as I wrote here yesterday, I saw What’s that Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling, which is all about a fictional composer of bad musicals, with extracts from some of the shows he has written. Amongst them is a musical version of the classic Goldie Hawn comedy Private Benjamin — written as his graduate thesis from SPASM (the South Palo Alto School of Music) - from which we hear the song “He Died Inside Me”. And last night, entering the Schoenfeld Theatre to see the new Broadway production of All My Sons, who should be entering the theatre at the same time as my companion Mike and I but Goldie Hawn herself!
Mike, of course, couldn’t resist telling Goldie about it - and, as far as I was concerned, it was more entertaining to have shared that joke with her than to have experienced What’s that Smell myself. And it helped to take a little off the edge, too, of last night’s missing star from All My Sons itself - Dianne Wiest, who is cast in the co-starring lead role of Kate Keller, was off.
Theatre, of course, is a live art, and it’s always an occupational hazard that an actor can go ill; but the absence of double Oscar winning Wiest, for two of my favourite Woody Allen films Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and her Sisters, was a particular blow.
Of course, a lot of the attention on this production has been focused on the star presence of Katie Holmes - Mrs Tom Cruise - who is making her Broadway stage debut in it; but while it may have helped put the play on the gossip pages of the papers, she’s perfectly fine as the one-time girl-next-door who was betrothed to the missing son and is now planning to marry the surviving one in Miller’s fine play. More significant is the fact that the production has been cast in strength elsewhere throughout, from John Lithgow as Joe Keller to the excellent Patrick Wilson as his son Chris; and if New York lacks the kind of classical gravitas that the National and RSC bring to the British theatre, this proves that authentic Broadway classics can still have a place on its stages.
The only pity, then, is that it has been entrusted to Complicite’s Simon McBurney, who insists on providing his own commentary - both with intrusive film projections and a constant soundscape to underline the play - on the action, that doesn’t seem to trust the play to speak for itself. But then Broadway does seem to have to dress up its plays as events - audiences need to be given bang for their buck, and the presence of celebrities like Ms Holmes and the added directorial effects provide something of that.
Still, it is also heartening to at least find plays on Broadway still; while the West End has been threatening to catch up with Broadway in seeing them take second place to musicals, there are still eleven plays on the boards right now, alongside twenty musicals.
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