Speaking as someone who grew up with the Sondheim/Prince pentalogy, I would say definitely DO NOT skip this show, Brody. Although it's no Fosse or Jerome Robbins Broadway, it's one showstopper after another, so ultimately, it's thrilling.
The Follies section alone shows the ghostly quality that all subsequent productions have been missing. The masterful hand of Hal Prince is evident in the pitch-perfect restaging of "Waiting Around for the Girls Upstairs" with the four principals and their younger selves. He and Michael Bennett were the only directors EVER who understood that these were not merely ghosts but also the visions (and nightmares) we ALL see of our younger selves as we grow older. The moment after the four young characters left the stage, leaving the four older characters in stunned silence, mouths agape, filled with rue and regret and bemused disbelief, having just seen their youths pass before them was everything I remember from my own youth, 46 years ago, when I saw Company 4 times, Follies 5 times, and A Little Night Music 6 times.
Why has no subsequent director understood how to stage that song and those ghosts? Because Hal Prince and Michael Bennett were geniuses and everyone else is just a director.
And then, the thrilling performance of (most of) Michael Bennett's staging of "The Right Girl" by Tony Yazbeck was gasp-inducingly dramatic. No Buddy since Gene Nelson has been able to use dance as a means of expressing a lifetime of anger and resentment. And the show needs a Buddy who can dance his fierce anger the way West Side Story needs an Anita who can dance her fierce pride.
Go see the show for Tony Yazbeck--and for Brandon Uranowitz, for Karen Ziemba, for Chuck Cooper's "Old Man River" (more so than his Tevye) and Emily Skinner's Phyllis (more so than her Desiree) and Janet Dacal's Evita and Bryonha Marie Parham's Evita. But especially go see it for Tony Yazbeck.
Unlike Jerome Robbins Broadway and Fosse, which gave us the choreographic world views of those two geniuses, this show lacks any kind of unifying vision. I wish that Hal's words and JRB's lyrics had more dramatically told us what a producer does--and why he wanted to go from producing to directing. At the end, Jason Robert Brown provides a new song called "Do the Work"--why does that song not also OPEN the show? It would be such an easy bookend! Hello, Hal and Susan? Pardon me for giving advice to two people I acknowledge as geniuses, but do it! Do the work on the opening of your show.
Oh, and somebody please tell Michael Xavier he needn't emphasize every single word in "Being Alive." As Sondheim likes to remind actors who similarly overact his sings: Trust the material.
Updated On: 8/7/17 at 03:17 PM
