Starting with your comments about the plot and Martha (it's so easy to talk about her because she's just that good!):
Without wanting to say WHY she's a beaten woman in that scene (it would be a spoiler, right?), suffice it to say that she has to provide the plot twist. Greenberg had to create SOMETHING in the second act, because there IS no second act in the original. John O'Hara wrote a series of New Yorker short stories that were actually just letters from Pal Joey to his Friend Ted. There was no plot, and every adaptation since has had to invent one.
So Greenberg, like all the other adapters before him, had to make up something in the second act to propel the story. What he chose to do with Martha's character is actually true to the period: It was the Depression, jobs were hard to come by, and Gladys is a bit of a boozer who wouldn't be able to find another job easily. I totally bought her in that final scene. In fact, I think that scene should clinch her Tony nomination.
It's the OTHER plot twist I think is a little gratuitous and out-of-period--you know, the one I can't say anything more about because it really WOULD be a spoiler. But it drives the plot and gives Stockard a great moment in the confrontation scene.
So all in all, I think Greenberg did an excellent job of taking the best from the past structures and dialogue and giving it a new voice and shape.
Now let's talk about Matt: From the overture--which Graciella Danielle has smartly chosen to stage as a dance overture--you totally buy Joey as a hoofer (yay!), selling his money steps to a bunch of club owners, trying to get a job. Those first little dance scenes firmly place him in the tradition of hoofers and song-and-dance men like Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor and Gene Nelson.
Then there are those dark, brooding good looks of his. By the end of the overture, it's already working. We're buying him as Joey. Now he's got to open his mouth.
The odd structure of the show (going back to the original) requires him to sing two minor Rodgers and Hart nightclub songs ("Chicago" and "You Mustn't Kick It Around," with the chorus girls), immediately followed by one of their greatest love songs ever: "I Could Write a Book," which has always been somewhat disproportionately romantic for two characters who have just met.
In his fourth performance, he was surprisingly self-assured. His voice is rich and supple and his low notes are especially sexy. And in the dialogue, he's got the right edgy ambitiousness going, and he "gets" the combination of 1930s Chicago tough-guy-talk and 1930s Variety-ese show-biz lingo.
In the scenes and songs with Jenny Fellner as Linda, Matthew's youth gives him an interesting earnestness. The audience is actually confused--and in a good way: Is he just working her, the way he works every angle? Or does he actually capable of feeling deeper human emotions for this girl? It creates the perfect tension for the show. You believe him as the cad and the heel and you almost seduced into believing he's fallen for Linda like he has for no other girl. It's a delicious ambiguity.
But it's especially in the scenes with Stockard Channing that you really see a glimpse of a great Joey in Matthew. (She's that kind of great actress, a gift to other actors and the audience: Just standing on stage with her elevates everyone else's performance--and just seeing her onstage the entire evening for the rest of us.)
The difference is their ages is so obvious that it gives her something fascinating to play: She is totally disbelieving at first that he could be interested in her, then amused, then shocked, then offended, then turned on. And you see her go through all that in the very first nightclub scene.
The way Matthew handles the dialogue in that scene and the subsequent one with firmly establishes him as a good (and possibly great Joey). He is so sexual in his overture to her, so insinuating--so carnal--that the story takes on the eroticism it needs to be truly edgy and dangerous.
And it's in one of the most minor Rodgers and Hart songs that Matthew REALLY begins to own the role: "Happy Hunting Horn," which Greenberg and Joe Mantello have brilliantly used to illuminate the feral, predatory nature of Joey's narcissism. As he climbs the stairs to make his sexual kill--the poor Linda who believes in him--he becomes the ultimate user of people that John O'Hara first envisioned in his New Yorker short stories.
Just one quick note about Stockard: If you want to hear "Bewitched" sung perfectly, put on Ella Fitzgerald or Lena Horne. But suffice it to say that moments of her performance are still resonating with me the morning after, the way moments of her performances in the past in 6 Degrees and Blue Leaves are still with me years later.
I predict that by opening night, three great performances will be reasons to see this production: Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton and Matthew Risch.
Updated On: 11/26/08 at 08:40 AM
