Musical Highlights of 2005
Singing "If I Were a Rich Man" in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, takeover star Harvey Fierstein demonstrated how an inventive performer can put over a musical number without possessing the greatest of vocal equipment. Fierstein's Tevye began the musical year, and it was a daring assumption that paid off.
One of my favorites among the current generation of musical theatre performers, Sherie Rene Scott, leading lady of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, had to wait almost an hour before making her entrance in the show. But when she did, she was immediately called upon to deliver two of the show's catchiest numbers, "Here I Am" and "Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True." And she did so with her usual elan and terrific voice. Scott deserved credit for more than holding her own in an evening dominated by the potent double act of John Lithgow and Norbert Leo Butz.
It's possible to maintain that the script for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is slightly superior to the score. But one number late in the evening, "The I Love You Song," performed by top speller Olive Ostrovsky Celia Keenan-Bolger and her absent parents, stood out. There were other delightful things in William Finn's Spelling Bee score, but that song reached the heart.
Adam Guettel is among that group of contemporary theatre composers who write fairly difficult stuff, often eschewing conventional song patterns and easily hummable tunes. But he does have sufficient theatrical instinct to give the leading lady of his The Light in the Piazza, the wonderful Victoria Clark, a big closing song, or rather aria, called "Fable," and it ends the show on a thrilling note. Like every other moment she had on stage in Piazza or in her earlier shows, Clark makes the most of the opportunity.
There were quite a few unsuccessful off-Broadway musicals in 2005, so Altar Boyz stood out as one of the year's best-realized small-scale shows. All five members of the original cast were perfect, even if the standout was probably Tyler Maynard's hilarious Mark.
In addition to its underrated Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty score, Dessa Rose offered the strong team work of its leading ladies, LaChanze and Rachel York. Dessa Rose wasn't a success, but LaChanze got paid back for it later in the year with the role of her career, Celie in The Color Purple, while York is filling in for Sherie Rene Scott in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Easy to overlook was the sweet ensemble cast of All Shook Up. The ten principal performers were all appealing, even if it was inevitable that the show's discovery, Cheyenne Jackson, dominated the proceedings.
Excellent was the five-member company of off-Broadway's See What I Wanna See. Outstanding in the second of the evening's two tales was Mary Testa, playing the cynical aunt of the priest hero played by Henry Stram. But that's not to overlook the other players, Marc Kudisch, Idina Menzel, and Aaron Lohr. As for the show, it was pure Michael John LaChiusa, which means thoughtful, intricate, and provocative. One looks forward to hearing the score again on disc.
The current Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd is notable for its sustained creepiness. True to the intentions of the show's authors, John Doyle's radically different staging manages to approach the degree of continuous tension evinced by Hal Prince's original production. Patti LuPone's Mrs. Lovett was notable for being stellar while remaining very much a part of an ensemble that ranks as one of the year's finest.
One can't overlook John Lloyd Young's sweetly appealing acting and terrific pop singing as Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys. For me, the show was most impressive for its ability to create interest in a subject and an oeuvre that, going into the theatre, I cared absolutely nothing about. But when, late in the first act, those Jersey Boys turn into the Four Seasons, the moment is stirring. It's probably those old hit songs that the audience has come to hear, but Jersey Boys benefits from a good script and staging. The genre of jukebox musical may have given us Lennon and Good Vibrations in 2005, but it also produced All Shook Up and Jersey Boys, which were rather better.
Realizing that the man her beloved half-sister Laura has married is a deceitful brute, Marian Maria Friedman pours out her anguish in the song "All for Laura," late in the first act of The Woman in White. Friedman's go-for-broke rendition of the number made one glad that this fine English performer had finally reached a Broadway stage.
I've always maintained that no matter who is playing Roxie and Velma in the current Broadway revival of Chicago, they could never be as good as Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera were in those roles in the 1975 original. Of course, I haven't seen the vast majority of the current revival's Roxies and Velmas, but I'll still stand by that statement. In Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, Rivera struts through "Nowadays" and "All That Jazz" and makes it clear once again what a perfect fit Chicago was for her.
And one can't resist mentioning In My Life, a show that was filled with highlights, at least for collectors of notorious musical flops. Perhaps most memorable was the number "Secrets," which featured the following lyric, referring to the hero's latest health problem: "They discovered, under the covers/There's this little lump of batter/Cranial engorging matter./Secrets--/There's a little rumor/Someone's got a tumor." Winston, the heavenly angel fashioning a reality opera about the hero, sang the number while dancing with a skeleton, from whose head he extracted a tennis ball representing that tumor. A projected chorus line of skeletons danced across an overhead screen, as In My Life danced its way into camp heaven.
