Buyer and Cellar Review: Barbra Streisand and the 2013 New York Theater Season

Michael Urie as Barbra Streisand’s employee Alex (and Streisand’s hand running through Alex’s hair) in “Buyer and Cellar”

“Buyer and Cellar,” which imagines a man (played by Michael Urie)  hired to work for Barbra Streisand at her Malibu home,  is no more important than the lacquer on Streisand’s fingernails, certainly no deeper. But it seems to sum up the Spring 2013 theater season in New York in several ways:

1. It’s a solo show.

This is the season for such shows, and they seem to be divvied up into two categories – the frivolous and the over-my-head.

There were a few in the Fall: Mike Tyson’s “Undisputed Truth” and Lewis Black’s “Running on Empty”, but the Spring has piled them on — On Broadway alone (and not counting Barry Manilow’s concert):  Ann, Macbeth, The Testament of Mary, I’ll Eat You Last.

2. It’s based on a book.

There have been many works of theater based on books. “Buyer and Cellar” must  surely be the first play based on a coffee table book  — “My Passion for Design,” Barbra Streisand’s 2010 tome about how she decorated her house in Malibu.

In it, she explains that she built a replica shopping mall in her basement, as an inventive way to store all her stuff – her costumes, her regular clothing, her antique furniture, precious jewels and bric-a-brac collected over the decades of her stardom.  In “Buyer and Seller,”  playwright Jonathan Tolins imagines that she has hired an underemployed L.A. actor named Alex to staff the mall, and cater to its single customer, Barbra herself.

3. It features Barbra Streisand
I don’t really understand why this performer, now 71 years old, continues to exert such a powerful hold on so much of the public (hey, not just gay people.)  She is a character in two different shows this Spring, although in “I’ll Eat You Last” she is a presence that hangs over the proceedings  (the subject of many presumably true stories told by Bette Midler as Hollywood agent Sue Mengers), but never appears on the stage.

In “Buyer and Cellar,” Urie, still best-known as the catty fashion assistant on the TV’s “Ugly Betty” who grew a heart by the end of the series, winningly plays about half a dozen characters. This includes Streisand, but without any of her mannerisms — just a hint of a Brooklyn accent. “Enough people do her already — even some women — so you don’t need me to,”  Urie as Alex  explains in a prologue in the beginning. Also in that prologue is a humorous disclaimer that this is entirely a work of fiction: “the premise is preposterous. What I’m going to tell you could not possibly have happened with a person as famous, talented, and” — he looks furtively around the room — ” litigious as Barbra Streisand”

What follows is a send-up of this celebrity — clever, delicious (but not mean),  well-researched (Tolins clearly actually read Streisand’s coffee table book cover to cover.) But one can take it as a look as well at the life of the celebrity-obsessed. Thanks to the many celebrities over the past few months who have made their New York stage debuts, or returned after many decades, this too makes “Buyer and Cellar” serve as something of a summary of the 2013 Spring theater season in New York .

Here Lies Love Review: Disco Night With Imelda Marcos By David Byrne

Ruthie Ann Miles as Imelda Marcos in David Byrne’s “Here Lies Love”

Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines, was known for two things in America –owning 3,000 pairs of shoes and dancing in discos.  “Here Lies Love,”  David Byrne’s inspired musical about her, ignores the shoes – the actress playing her wears just one sturdy pair for the entire show, and there is no mention at all of her vast collection of Gucci and Prada and Pierre Cardin  – but, as if to compensate, has turned her life story into a night at a disco.

The third-floor LuEsther Hall  of the Public Theater has been transformed into a dance club — complete with silver disco ball — for a thrilling production directed  by Alex Timbers, best-known for mixing revisionist history, politics, snark and rock in “Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson.”  Here the snark has been turned off and the rock ramped up — 25 original songs that take us through some 40 years of biography and history.  Although not traditional Seventies disco (if that’s not a ridiculous phrase),  the music is propulsive enough to make you want to dance. This is a good thing, since the staging not only allows for dancing; it sometimes nearly requires it. There are no seats*, and it’s impossible to stand still; the stages are mobile platforms, frequently moved around, with ensemble members in orange outfits that look like airport  baggage handler uniforms herding the audience around them.

“Here Lies Love” began life as a concept album in 2010, conceived by David Byrne (still best-known as the front man of the band Talking Heads) in collaboration with three other songwriters, including Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook), with most of the lyrics created out of the real-life characters’ actual words taken from speeches and interviews and public statements. (Not all the songs that were on the CD are in the show, and there are seven new ones. See the song list below.)

Timbers has done a brilliant job in turning the album into an exciting live event, helped immeasurably by Annie-B Parson’s choreography, and all the designers (set, costume, lighting, sound, projection) working literally in concert.  Best of all is the 13-member cast. They are not just first-rate.  Watching this cool, athletic, talented ensemble feels like an act of startling discovery,  like seeing the original cast of “Rent” and being able to say “I was there” when one by one they become stars. This feels true even for the actor portraying Ferdinand Marcos, Jose Llana, who is already a veteran of half a dozen Broadway shows.

For all its many pleasures, “Here Lies Love” is a superficial work of drama, with too few dots connected, little fresh psychological insight and insufficient political context: What politics does exist is fascinating, and chilling, but raises more questions than it addresses. Yet none of this matters much, especially while experiencing the show. The superficial treatment seems apt for a woman who first came to public attention as a teenage beauty queen — “A simple country girl who has a dream” as she sings in the catchy title tune, “Here Lies Love” (which is supposedly what she said she wanted her tombstone to read.)

Click on any photograph to enlarge it

Imelda (the pitch-perfect Ruthie Ann Miles) falls in love with Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), a rather astonishing fact, since Aquino went on to become the major critic of the Marcos regime. She first sees him (as do we) all dressed in white, in nerdy black glasses, but lithe and magnetic, committed to healing his country. The affair ends (“Ninoy was my first love/ But he said I was too tall/ A rich girl stole the sweetheart/ Of the Rose of Tacloban”)

When Imelda first meets Ferdinand Marcos, a war hero running for Senate (with video monitors catching him glad-handing members of the audience), she runs the full length of the theater immediately into a kiss — good theatrical shorthand for what was in fact a courtship that lasted only 11 days. (“Eleven Days” is one of my favorite tunes in the show.)

Imelda is enamored of her husband, who works his way up to the presidency with her help.  A pivotal moment occurs after she visits New York. A colorful number (“Dancing Together/Walk LIke A Woman”) has some of the most fruitful use of verbatim transcripts as lyrics:

Went to the house of Mary Lasker

Saw Matisse’s, Picassos, Renoirs and Gauguin’s

Golf course and flowers, statues and stables

I met a Whitney, Rockefeller and Brown!

And they were dancin, dancing together

Dancin’ so beautifully

While singing,  Imelda sheds her demure shift for a glittery disco mini-dress and dances with characters dressed as if for Mardi Gras, or Hell, or Studio 54.

The jet-setting abroad leads to extravagance at home, and Ninoy takes the lead in publicly objecting to her plans for a lavish cultural center while the Filipino people live in shanties. President Marcos clamps down on the growing criticism by killing some of his opponents, declaring martial law, and imprisoning Ninoy for seven years. Imelda springs him from prison, urging him to leave the country for good. But he returns, with tragic results — which directly result in what has come to be called the People Power Revolution that swiftly and non-violently leads to the toppling of the Marcos regime.

Almost all of this is told in song and dance, but there are some riveting scenes: We hear an actual lascivious recording made by the 20-year-old mistress of the President Marcos, then 60, which was made public at the time, causing humiliation for Imelda — and helping us to see her as more than just a self-caricature.

Some will inevitably compare “Here Lies Love” to “Evita,” but the similarities only exist on paper. The music is very different. And Evita Peron lived only to age 33. ”Here Lies Love” ends with Imelda’s expulsion in 1986 — which is how David Byrne has explained the absence of the shoes from the show: Her collection was not made public until after her exile, which is outside the timeline of the musical. Unlike Evita, Imelda did not die young.  She is still very much alive, and at age 83, having long ago returned to the Philippines, she is an elected member of Congress.

Here Lies Love

At the Public Theater

Concept and lyrics by David Byrne, music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Additional music by Tom Gandey and J Pardo
Alex Timbers (Director)
Annie-B Parson (Choreographer)
David Korins (Scenic Design)
Clint Ramos (Costume Design)
Justin Townsend (Lighting Design)

Cast:

Renée Albulario
Melody Butiu
Natalie Cortez
Debralee Daco
Joshua Dela Cruz
Jose Llana
Kelvin Moon Loh
Jeigh Madjus
Ruthie Ann Miles
Maria-Christina Oliveras
Conrad Ricamora
Trevor Salter
Janelle Velasquez

Running Time: 85 minutes with no intermission

*A very limited number of seats above the performance area are available.

The Whale Review

The main character of “The Whale” is 600 pounds, but one of the many pleasures of this funny and affecting new play by Samuel D. Hunter, being given a splendid production with a universally first-rate cast at Playwrights Horizons, is the realization that the title, like the play itself, turns out to be about much more than just Charlie’s morbid obesity.

At first we only see this huge man – played exquisitely by Broadway veteran Shuler Hensley – so hobbled by his own gluttony that he is literally killing himself. We are given to understand that Charlie, living alone in a smelly apartment in Idaho, is unlikely to last the week. (The play begins with Monday projected onto the wall, and goes day by day through Friday.) Yet he refuses to go to a hospital.

But it does not take long before we get to know him and the people around him – his exasperated nurse Liz; his cruel and angry teenage daughter Ellie whom he hasn’t since she was two years old, and offers to pay to visit him; his hard-drinking ex-wife Mary; and a seemingly random visitor to Charlie’s apartment, a young man on a Mormon mission. All prove to be more complex and more sympathetic than first impressions.

Charlie makes a living teaching expository writing online — an occupation that allows for great moments of hilarity as he assesses the students’ essays. It also gives the playwright sly and unobtrusive ways to introduce resonant themes….including those contained in both Moby Dick and Jonah and the Whale…which have a pay-off at the end.

Hunter, the author of the much-praised “A Bright New Boise,” offers a play that is full of moments of revelation that unfold with impressive craftsmanship.  There are big revelations: Charlie began to eat obsessively when his partner Alan – the man for whom Charlie left his family – suddenly stopped eating and wasted away, in effect starving himself to death, after a visit from his father, a bishop in the Mormon Church.  One or two of the revelations are perhaps too pat, such as a lie that  daughter Ellie unearths that Elder Thomas has been telling. But most of the revelations are simultaneously subtle and astonishing.  There is a richness here of characterization and interaction, helped along by wonderful performances,  that reveal in the tiniest details a playwright whose heart is gargantuan.