Critics don’t come to the theatre with empty brains and untroubled hearts, ready to take in a play and shun the outside world. No, we bring our hopes and stresses to our seats. The challenge is to put the show into jangling harmony with one’s own unspoken flow of feeling. That’s doubly true in New York City—which serves not only as the setting but also as a lead character in two new plays on Broadway. The other day, as I was on my way to midtown, I saw one guy noodling a version of “Sir Duke” on his violin while another sparked up a joint. How, in a town like this, could anyone arrive at the theatre as a pure, empty vessel of objective observation?
So please forgive me: when I showed up in a hurry, uncomfortably exact in my timing, to see “New York, New York”—a new musical at the St. James, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, with a book by David Thompson with Sharon Washington, a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda—I was preoccupied with worry about the Knicks. They’d started out Game Three of their first-round playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers in rare style and force, and at halftime they were up big. But then the Cavs came storming back, and, by the time I had to leave, the game was tied at fifty-nine points. There was an irony in this that I couldn’t quite name: being worked up over the Knicks—who, at the moment, are putting on possibly the best and most dramatic show in New York—while settling in for a play about strivers in New York.
“New York, New York,” set in 1946, is about a loose group of largely undistracted young people who use the city as the staging ground for their hungrily sought aspirations. Jimmy (Colton Ryan), an itinerant piano player who can’t keep a gig, is a well-worn type: the Irish trickster with a black streak of sadness in his past. Both he and his older brother, Mikey, served in the war—Jimmy as a lowly secretarial staffer, and Mikey, also a singer, as a private first class. Mikey, always the model boy, never made it home, and Jimmy’s prior stint as Kid Wonder, his brother’s sidekick, is long over. Now he’s heartsick and taking it out on every irritated venue owner in town. When we meet him, he’s arguing with one of them about the merits of a prospective new singer, Francine (Anna Uzele), a Black woman from Philadelphia with stardom on her mind. She doesn’t get the job, and Jimmy gets fired trying to get it for her. But soon he invites her to his instrument-bedecked apartment and begins the process of wooing her.
Around this central story float several others. There’s Jesse (John Clay III), a Black veteran who wants to play the trumpet, and Mateo (Angel Sigala), a young Cuban immigrant who—against the wishes of his abusive, homophobic father—wants to follow his dream of playing the bongos. You get it: everybody has a struggle, and the only fix is music.
There’s a smooth, impressively polished competency to every aspect of the show. Stroman’s direction is dancerly and strong—the company members move in flowing tandem, using their bodies to echo the lively churn of the city. Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design is evocative, sometimes fantastic. A dense set of fire escapes, from which an entire neighborhood looks down on the street, emphasizes the watchfulness (verging on nosiness) of closely situated neighbors and the casual beauty of even the most ploddingly functional aspects of urban design. A scene that takes place in the sky, on treacherous beams of naked metal at a construction site, turns into a tap-dance number, one of the best I’ve seen in recent Broadway shows. The songs are a mix of originals and classics from the big-band era—yes, the song “New York, New York” is sung, and, yes, it comes at a climactic moment—and the performers deliver them with charm and energy, even if none of the melodies or lyrics from the new numbers are especially memorable.
Theatregoers without much interest in story, or in how the seemingly indifferent city, hulking and unsentimental, is actually an intimate nudge, a goad to narrative, will find a lot to like about the show. But, its obvious excellence notwithstanding, “New York, New York” falters when it tries to match the common clichés about the city—that it’s a locus of focus and drive, a trampoline upward, toward a high, wild dream—with the less linear actualities of human behavior.
It’s strange: Jimmy and Francine are often talking, in one way or another, about Francine’s race, but the conversation almost never breaks the surface of a story whose only truly realized dimension is personal ambition. There are several oddly avoidant passages, such as a conversation between Jimmy and his harried booker:
There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m not sure I get it. Maybe the booker wants to use a different word that ends in “-er,” but none of the menace that ought to proceed from that possibility makes it across. There are racists out there, somewhere—nobody’s denying it—but their power can’t really be felt onstage, under the lights, where the true prize is a recording contract or a steady slot on a popular radio program. Similarly, the spectre of war, and its traumatizing aftermath, hangs over the whole show. One character is a violin teacher named Madame Veltri—played with heart and moving depth by Emily Skinner—who’s waiting and waiting for her son to come marching home. Still, the war never serves as anything more than part of the backdrop.
There’s no question that the narrative of upward motion through work is part of the lore of New York. But life, here and elsewhere, is never so singularly aimed. There are accidents and coincidences—the odd passion, thrillingly unanticipated, picks you up and drops you down on a street you’ve never seen. You think two things at the same time. At intermission—this show runs to two hours and forty-five minutes, unbelievable for a story that’s not even close to an epic—I realized that, although I loved the dancing and liked the singing, I didn’t care much about the fates of the characters. A moment later, though, standing in line for a Diet Coke, I learned that the Knicks had won the game. That’s New York: one story can fizzle while another shines.
The city’s production value, as it were—its nighttime vistas and accidental dances, its constant, unconscious song—works on the soul and the emotions only because of how it sometimes underlines and sometimes cuts against the vivid, plural lives of the people on the streets. A quick, melancholy spring rain, like the one I got caught in the day before seeing “New York, New York,” is memorable only if, for instance, you’ve been rushing around, looking for a place to have dinner with a new friend, trying to leave just enough time to—yes—make it to another show.
You get a better sense of this parallel music in “Good Night, Oscar,” a day-in-the-life bio-play by Doug Wright, directed by Lisa Peterson, at the Belasco. Sean Hayes plays Oscar Levant, a wisecracking virtuoso pianist famous for his interpretations of George Gershwin.
In Hayes’s hands, Levant—whose mental-health struggles led to bleak periods of depression and intermittent institutionalization—is a halting, harried, angry man, whose frequent hallucinations center on his regret about devoting himself to Gershwin instead of following his own muse. His wife, June (Emily Bergl), has hatched a plan, together with the great talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport), to spring him from a mental-health facility so that he can spend just one night chatting it up on late-night TV.
The production gets wooden when Oscar goes on long rants that are thinly veiled exposition, catching the audience up on every nook and cranny of his career. But Hayes, a classically trained pianist who puts this lesser-known gift to exciting use toward the end of the show, plays him with real soul, showing how rote ambition—being on TV, getting a bit of shine—isn’t all that’s at stake in the big city. There’s music to play, but there’s also, always, a life—one’s own—to save. You’ve gotta do two things at once. ♦
