Those of us who love theater love it for reasons best articulated by Shakespeare in his description of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” Recently I sampled that infinite variety in two vastly different theatrical experiences, a pair of performances that pretty much span the extremes of staged entertainments. In New York at Studio 54, once a famous (notorious?) nightclub and now a Broadway theater, I saw Tracy Letts’s new play, The Minutes, in a sold-out house. A couple of weeks later at the Mill Mountain Theater in Roanoke, Virginia, I saw the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home performed in the small confines of a black box with fewer than half the seats occupied. Oddly enough, perhaps, I enjoyed the local musical more than I did the twisty satire in New York.
At this point allow me to distinguish between going to see a show and going to see a cast. The people flocking to The Music Man at the Winter Garden Theater in New York are going to see a cast. Well over ninety percent of them have seen The Music Man already. Many of them have no doubt participated in a production of The Music Man. But they’re going back to see Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, Jayne Houdyshell and Jefferson Mayes, Shuler Hensley and all those young Broadway stars in the making. For these people the “show” elements are important, of course, and they’re rightfully expecting to enjoy great big Broadway production values, but the costumes and the size of the orchestra are secondary to them. They want to see the stars. They want to see this familiar script performed on the largest scale possible. By contrast, people who are still buying tickets to Hamilton are primarily interested in seeing the show. They don’t care who’s playing Hamilton or Burr on the night when they attend. They want to see the famous musical play called Hamilton, and while they’d be delighted if Leslie Odom and Lin-Manuel Miranda showed up for the performance, they aren’t expecting to see those who originated the roles.
When I went to see The Minutes, I was going to see the cast. And that was a poor reason to go in this season of lingering covid-19. Understudies have never been busier during this pandemic, and I should have known that the odds were long against my seeing the original set of eleven actors on my chosen Tuesday night. Still, I was dismayed when I opened my playbill and saw six of those little inserts they provide to let you know that an understudy would be appearing. Six out of eleven replacements! I did get to see excellent performances from Jessie Mueller and Noah Reid, but there was no Tracy Letts, no Blair Brown, and, perhaps worst of all, no Austin Pendleton, of whom I’ve been a fan ever since he played Moodus in the 1970 movie version of Catch-22. Did I enjoy the play? Absolutely. The realistic set missed no details in recreating the municipal chamber where the council of a small town would meet. The lighting and sound were flawless. And the script itself made me impressively uncomfortable. As Robert Scholes said of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” the play starts in realism and ends in allegory, and it turns out to be a deftly devastating indictment of current American culture. Still, despite the fine acting chops of the understudies, I couldn’t help thinking that the originals would have been better. The unexpected cast changes hampered my willing suspension of disbelief.
Now let’s go to the other end of the theatrical universe for a minimalist chamber musical set in a series of locales, most of them evoked by a scant prop or two and some shifts in lighting. Lisa Kron took Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, teamed up with composer Jeanine Tesori, and turned a graphic novel into a graphic musical. At the outset we learn that the Bechdel family lives in a funeral home (the “fun home,” get it?), that both Alison and her father are gay, and that the father is going to die of suicide. It’s not a show for those who go to The Music Man guaranteed of a happy ending. But it’s a hell of a show, and the cast at Mill Mountain was brilliant in rendering it. Nobody in that cast was famous (yet?), but everybody superbly inhabited each role. Without the burden of expecting to see a specific actor in a particular part, I could enjoy the story, the music, the surprises, the delights, the chance to live an experience with endearing characters. There will always be star vehicles, and seeing stars is always going to be fun. But I hope I’ll have enough sense in the future to buy my tickets and take my odysseys for the play, not for the names of the actors in it.