The Government Inspector Review: Michael Urie Triumphs Once Again, as Venal Bureaucrat

The vain, reckless son of a rich man is suddenly thrust into power by a venal group of citizens marked by their “ugliness, stupidity, greed, cowardice, corruption and sheer unpleasantness.” That’s the premise, more or less, of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 play “The Government Inspector,” as interpreted by Red Bull Theater’s broad, bawdy production.

What saves this play from a depressing relevance is the phenomenal physical clowning by Michael Urie.

Michael Urie entered into pop culture consciousness as the catty fashion editor’s assistant Marc St. James in the TV series Ugly Betty a decade ago, but the Juilliard graduate has proven with each successive New York stage role that he was born for theater — The Temperamentals, How to Succeed in Business, Homos or Everyone in America, Show for Days, and especially Buyer and Cellar, the play by Jonathan Tolin in which he plays every part, including that of Barbra Streisand.

Urie is certainly not by himself in “The Government Inspector.” Every one of the 14-member is positively vaudevillian in their portrayals, a testament not only to their own talents but to that of director Jesse Berger. But I was struck by Urie’s singular gift for physical comedy, which I don’t remember seeing from him before — gracefully and athletically bumbling around the stage drunk or suicidal, or full of lust or greed.

Urie portrays Ivan Alexandreyevich Hlestakov, a drunken, whoring wastrel who was fired from his job as a low-level bureaucrat and travels through two-bit towns in 19th century Russia spending his father’s money. The officials and administrators of the particular town in which he is at present visiting get the false intelligence that he is a Government Inspector rooting out corruption and incompetence. They do all they can to win his favor – they wine him, dine him and incessantly bribe him.

The school principal uses as bribe money what he was going to use to buy new books for the school board meeting, but he becomes philosophical: “They can burn old books just as easy.”

The townspeople are even dumber than they are corrupt – it’s a town, as the mayor’s wife points out, “where people eat soup with their hands.” The wife (portrayed by the extravagantly bedecked and hilarious Mary Testa) thinks herself above the rubes with whom she is forced to associate: “Mine was a very cultured upbringing. We had a book, and my mother whistled.”

Her husband the mayor (Michael McGrath at the performance I saw, since replaced) is certainly dumb – given the ceremonial hat to wear, he puts on the hatbox instead – but he may be the only one even more cruel and corrupt. Before he curries favor with the false inspector, his calendar for the day (as read by a minion) consisted of: “Evicted the corporal’s widow. Had the corporal’s widow jailed for vagrancy. Flogged the corporal’s widow.”

Their daughter Marya, as Hlestakov puts it, “talks like she wears a chastity belt, but she acts like she knows a lot of locksmiths.” Her mother chastises her for her blunt language. “Men don’t like a woman with a tongue like yours” she says.

“Oh, really? Ask around.”

Such banter is courtesy of the 2008 adaptation by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, which is so consistently funny that he’s excused for adding a twist at the end that doesn’t make very much sense. After all, so little in the world makes much sense these days that The Government Inspector feels almost as much documentary as farce.

The Government Inspector is on stage until August 20, 2017.

Tickets and details

Really Rosie: Maurice Sendak + Carole King Musical

(C) Taylor Caldwell (Rosie)

(L to R) Kenneth Cabral (Alligator), Eduardo Hernandez (Pierre), Zell Steele Morrow (Chicken Soup), Taylor Caldwell (Rosie), Ruth Righi (Kathy), and Anthony Rosenthal (Johnny)

Taylor Caldwell (Rosie)

Ruth Righi (Kathy)

Ayodele Casel and Kenneth Cabral (Alligator)

(L to R) Ruth Righi (Kathy), Anthony Rosenthal (Johnny), and Nicole Wildy and Jaiya Chetram holding Eduardo Hernandez upside down (Pierre)

(C) Anthony Rosenthal (Johnny)

Taylor Caldwell (Rosie)

A musical written by Maurice Sendak, with a score by Carole King?! Why isn’t it better known?

That question would seem to make “Really Rosie,” which is on stage at New York City Center through Sunday, a good choice for Encores Off-Center, whose aim is to allow audiences to give old musicals another look.

“Really Rosie” began life in 1975 as a half-hour animated special on television, but an expanded stage version ran Off-Broadway five years later. So the show qualifies for Encores Off-Center. But that doesn’t make it a great choice.

“Really Rosie” is strictly for kids, and, while sitting through its 70 minutes, I have never felt less “young at heart” in my entire life.

But that’s not the main problem. It’s that Sendak was beloved as a children’s book illustrator, who was best known for the hauntingly beautiful drawings in “Where The Wild Things Are” – and there’s nothing to look at in this concert-version of “Really Rosie” except kids, wearing pink feather boas and big professional smiles, showing off their impressive skills at dancing and singing like a juvenile America’s Got Talent.

Sendak cobbled together “Really Rosie”  from several of his books, most notably “Nutshell Library,” a collection of four related stories.

One of the stories from the collection is Pierre, and he gets his own song in “Really Rosie”:

 There once was a boy named Pierre
Who only would say “I don’t care”

Pierre keeps on saying “I don’t care” even to a lion who asks him whether he would mind being eaten. So the lion eats Pierre, his parents bring the lion to town, and the doctor shakes Pierre out of the lion’s digestive tract. The trauma apparently did some good, because Pierre’s alienation has been cured and he just wants to go home.

“If you would care to climb on me, I’ll take you there,” the lion says.

“Yes indeed I care!” — and the lion takes Pierre home on his back.

What makes this Maurice Sendak story so  charming on the page are the illustrations. Remember this?

Here’s what it looked like in the musical:

Lost on stage is Sendak’s complex tone, dark and full of dread, defiantly subversive, but at the same time beautiful and somehow gentle.

Instead, we get cuteness and ….razzle dazzle.

It’s accomplished razzle dazzle, helped along by King’s snappy melodies and Ayodele Casel’s choreography, sung and danced  by a cast of first-rate diminutive performers many of whom are already Broadway veterans —  of School of Rock, On Your Feet, Fun Home.

It doesn’t help that the various stories are tied together in a loose plot that involves Rosie (Taylor Caldwell) returning to the old neighborhood from stardom in Hollywood, and enlisting the other children from the neighborhood –Alligator, Chicken Soup (Rosie’s little brother), Johnny — to put together a Hollywood movie.

We know that Rosie and the other characters are just playing at being stars. The neighborhood stoop where they play is on Avenue P, which resembles Sesame Street. Indeed, several of King’s songs even count numbers or list the alphabet. Unlike Sesame Street, Avenue P  actually exists in Brooklyn, running through Bensonhurst and Midwood, close to where Sendak grew up. But if the characters live in Brooklyn, there’s barely a moment in “Really Rosie” when you’re unaware that the performers portraying them work on Broadway.

Really Rosie

New York City Center

Book and Lyrics by Maurice Sendak

Music by Carole King

Choreography by Ayodele Casel

Music Supervisor Chris Fenwick

Music Directors Mary-Mitchell Campbell and Carmel Dean

Directed by Leigh Silverman

Cast: Swayam Bhatia, Kenneth Cabral, Taylor Caldwell, Ayodele Casel, Jaiya Chetram, Eduardo Hernandez, Nanyellin Liriano, Chris Lopes, Zell Steele Morrow, Charlie Pollock, Ruth Righi, Anthony Rosenthal, and Nicole Wildy

Amerike The Golden Land Review: 50 Years of Yiddish Songs about Jewish Immigration

Near the end of this musical revue surveying 50 years in song of Jewish immigration to New York, one of the talented performers, Daniel Kahn, delivers an astounding rendition of “Roumania, Roumania,” a popular song written and recorded in 1941 by Aaron Lebedeff, a huge star of New York’s Yiddish Theater. In Kahn’s hands, the song is not just a lively, tuneful exercise in nostalgia for the old country; it’s somehow deeply powerful. Could that be in part because, just before the song, one of the characters announces that there was a pogrom in Yas, Roumania, in which hundreds of Jews had been shot?
Kahn is in a cast of some dozen golden-voiced performers in “Amerike: The Golden Land.” They sing more than 40 beautiful Yiddish songs, backed by a klezmer-inflected eight-piece band,wonderfully orchestrated. The songs, and brief scenes between them, are grouped in 11 segments organized more or less chronologically, from “Arrival” (in the 1890s) to “Rebirth” (after the Holocaust, in the 1940s.)
With its revival of “Amerike,” the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in its 103rd season is clearly trying for the Triple Crown — after its first  ever Broadway producing credit for the groundbreaking “Indecent,” and its hit revival/restoration of the charming 1923 Yiddish-language operetta, “The Golden Bride.” There are indeed other stirring moments like Daniel Kahn’s “Roumania, Roumania” in “Amerike.” But one longs for more of them. The show doesn’t quite reach the heights of Folksbiene’s recent productions, which would admittedly be a tall order.

Click on any photograph by Victor Neshay to see it enlarged.

A stumbling block is the surface familiarity of some of the subject matter, or what one can more bluntly call the schmaltz factor. How can a New York audience view as totally fresh any staging that involves huddled masses arriving at Ellis Island carrying broken down suitcases and exclaiming “Gold in the streets!” – even if it is in Yiddish? (With English and Russian sur-titles.) It doesn’t help that we don’t really get to know any specific characters, since, although there are a few recurring figures, “Amerike” is less a work of traditional musical theater than the stage equivalent of a concept album.
It is important to point out that the creative team, who first put the show together in 1982, works hard to unearth period songs intelligently and present them authentically. There is also much loveliness in the production, including the vivid costumes, lighting and set design, and Merete Muenter’s buoyant choreography, all of which makes the most of the small stage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. For the multilinguists in the audience, or those who are especially attentive, there are some clever moments even within the most clichéd scenarios. An official on Ellis Island asks Izzie in English what his name is. Izzie has been repeating his new English name in order to remember it, but says to the next person in line “I forgot already” – but he says it in Yiddish: “Shoyn Fargesn.”
“Sean Ferguson,” the official repeats. “Sign here, Mr. Ferguson.”
There are more accessible highlights. In the spirited and sardonic number, “Vatch Your Step,” the cast sings the 1912 melody (“Vatch your step…Amerike, a land of hurry up”) alternating with shtick re-enacting the various ways that the “greenhorns” were cheated and exploited. One of the few spoken scenes features a hilarious routine by the weatherman at WEVD, New York’s Yiddish language radio station in the 1930’s and 40’s (Another radio routine is literally about schmaltz, but it’s in a recipe that uses the word in its original meaning, chicken fat.) There is a Yiddish Theater version of the witches brew scene in Macbeth that I considered way too short. A vaudeville-like 1930 ditty, Steam Steam Steam presents a song-and-dance routine by two men initially complaining about the landlord, but naughtily segueing into an exercise in mild double-entendre.
“Amerike” ends with the whole cast singing Emma Lazarus’s famous 1883 poem “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor’ that Irving Berlin set to music in 1958. They sing in English, with the Yiddish this time projected on the curtain and backdrop – as well as Spanish, Chinese, French, Russian and several languages I didn’t recognize. Was this familiar; was it schmaltz? It would be hard to say no, but it was also easy to be moved by it.
Folksbiene and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are doing more than just this finale to connect the experience of Jewish immigration with the immigrants of today. Next Monday and Tuesday, they are holding an Immigrant Arts Summit, which includes a free concert in nearby Robert F. Wagner Park.

Amerike: The Golden Land
Edmund J Safra Hall at The Museum of Jewish Heritage
Conceived and written by Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld,
Directed by Bryna Wasserman
Set design by Jason Courson, lighting design by Yael Lubetzky, costume design by Izzy Fields, sound design by Patrick Calhoun, choreography by Merete Muenter
Cast: Glenn Seven Allen, Alexandra Frohlinger, Jessica Rose Futran, Daniel Kahn, Dani Marcus, Stephanie Lynne Mason, David Perlman, Christopher Tefft with Maya Jacobson, Alexander Kosmowksi, Isabel Nesti, Raquel Nobile, Grant Richards, Bobby Underwood
Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.
Tickets $35 – $60
Amerike: The Golden Land is scheduled to run through August 6, 2017.

Update: Amerike has been extended to August 20, 2017.