Does "Deuce" double-fault? Advantage Lansbury.

I don't know any of Terrence McNally's prior work, but I'd been hearing bad things about Some Men, his play currently at 2nd Stage and Deuce, the new star vehicle for Marian Seldes and for Angela Lansbury's long-awaited return to Broadway. I'd heard such negative things about Deuce's first week in previews, that I was afraid I would be totally unsatisfied with seeing the play, which I had so wanted to be good from the moment I heard the cast announced and the subject matter - women's doubles tennis, which I'm quite fond of. The play is in previews, so what I saw was a work in progress, but I think it's too late to solve some of the play's problems.

The play concerns a women's doubles team, Midge Barker (Seldes) and Leona Mullen (Lansbury), who have reunited in the stands of the U.S. Open to be honored for their record-breaking careers. Accompanied by the distracting pops of tennis balls and the constant snapping of heads in order to follow the game, the two partners begin to speak about the past. Leona is reluctant; the past is behind her. But somehow the two can't help themselves, and soon enough it's as good as if they were back in the clubhouse 30 years ago. The two recall their marriages and their careers, which stopped just short of a Grand Slam title when Leona double-faulted at the Australian Open. Regret and remembrance are the themes of the evening. This is set out clearly to start with and carried throughout.

And when the two women are left to bandy their dialogue back and forth on their lackluster tennis court set, the play is fulfilling. There's nothing too noteworthy about McNally's dialogue, but watching Lansbury and Seldes go head-to-head transcends what they're given to say. They discuss how tennis used to be, before corporate sponsorship and the homogenization of the game. They discuss lesbianism in tennis and the great trailblazers for women in the sport. Sometimes things become a little too sentimental, but the audience is watching a play starring the legendary Angela Lansbury, who is back on Broadway for the first time in twenty years and may (who knows) never return again, so sentimentalism seems appropriate.

By the end of the play, Angela Lansbury, I realized, had made me believe her character. In the penultimate moments of the play, Lansbury calls out to one of the young players not to let her mistakes become her lifelong regrets, and, as I felt a few tears accumulate in my eyes, I realized I was crying for Angela Lansbury's character, not the actress, as I had feared.

Where the play fails is in introducing too many superfluous secondary characters. The play is about the doubles partners and no one else. McNally brings in two sports commentators, Ryan and Kelly, whose names I hadn't come to know well enough to recall them off-hand. They delivered stock tennis commentary in order to show the contrast between the new ways of tennis and the old. Boring. Also introduced is "An Admirer," played by the likable Michael Mulheren. He's amiable enough, but his purpose is simply to be the fan who comments on how there will never be anyone quite like these two women. Unless cast members are unexpectedly fired before opening night, there's no way to fix the problem of these set piece characters. Their diversion of attention wasn't enough to ruin the play for me, just a nuisance, but the play would be much tighter without an interruption to the build in the relationship between Midge and Leona. Their histories are strong enough and the topics discussed are pertinent enough that we don't need outside characters to tell us what we should be thinking. We're already thinking it.

As the lights dimmed on the play, the final line of dialogue is delivered by the character of the admirer, and it's a line specifically written to plumb the founts of audience tears, and it works, or at least it did for me and for the woman behind me. This time around, I felt I had been slightly cheated as an audience member, ribbed along by an easy sentimental punch in the kisser, but I was happy enough that the play had even gone so far as to move me that much - once genuinely and once contrivedly - that it didn't bother me too much.

I have to say, despite some flaws in the writing, Deuce was still a fulfilling night at the theatre. With lesser actresses, the play would most likely be a dud, but it has some important things to say about aging and how we treat older people in our society that should not be overlooked. These subjects could have been plumbed immeasurably more, but what we get as an audience is still thought-provoking. In the end, it's a chance to see Angela Lansbury back where she belongs on Broadway. And in that department, Deuce doesn't double-fault.

I got the chance to meet the lovely Ms. Lansbury after the show, and she was just as charming as you'd imagine. She looked quite spritely and was dressed in a fetching tweed jacket. I joked that we should have brought tennis balls for her to sign (a reference to a line in the play), and she came back with, "Don't think I would've signed it." Made me laugh. She's a class act.

On another note, I went to see the "Friends of Roundabout" reading of Christopher Durang's play The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Laura Pels Theatre on Monday. The reading starred Sigourney Weaver, Tyne Daly, T.R. Knight, Jame Naughton, Dick Latessa, and others, all talented. I have to say it was one of the funniest plays I've experienced in a while, and the audience seemed pretty uniformly to be loving it. The acting was great all around, with particular merit to be given to Heather Goldenhersh's quirky performance and Broadway legend Dick Latessa's side-splitting impersonation of a strip of bacon a frying pan. The cast was uniformly excellent, and I'd be surprised not to see this gem of a play on one of Roundabout's upcoming season rosters.

"Journey's End"

John Ahlin as Trotter, Stark Sands as Raleigh, Boyd Gaines as Osborne, and Hugh Dancy as Stanhope in Journey's End. Shown is the bulk of the set, which remains surrounded entirely by darkness throughout.

Several people had extolled the virtues of Journey's End on Broadway - friends, teachers, and theatre professionals. All that I knew about the play, written by unknown playwright R.C. Sheriff in 1928, was that it was about World War I soldiers in the trenches. Last night, I went on a whim. I hadn't been too eager, since I knew it was going to be depressing, but sometimes you just have to bear it for the sake of theatre.

The play focuses on a group of British soldiers fighting the Germans in 1918 during World War I. Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Stark Sands) reports for duty under his long-time schoolmate and hero Captain Stanhope (Hugh Dancy), reunited against all odds within the military structure, especially improbably because Raleigh's sister is waiting for Stanhope to return home to enter into a potential engagement. The men are left to wait for an imminent attack by the Germans, counting down the hours and attempting to distract themselves with books and talk of home (some of the most effective moments of the play). A rivalry also presents itself between Stanhope and Raleigh, who, Stanhope fears, may report home to his potential fiance about his constant drunkenness. As the action propels at breakneck speed, Stanhope's second-in-command, Lieutenant Osborne (the inherently charming Boyd Gaines), and Raleigh are chosen to conduct a raid that spells almost certain death for the both of them. What proceeds is terrifically powerful, aided by the near-perfect integration of theatrical elements that combine to present this squalid dugout.

Talk about PTSD: Post-Theatrical Stress Disorder. The play absolutely shook me to the core, physically and emotionally (you have to see it to believe it; I know it sounds silly). It's a play that absolutely needs to be experienced by those who love theatre. I generally hate wartime dramas, so I was most especially leery, but, like many works of art, the play essentially boils down to a study of humanity. I felt that I had gotten to know the characters extremely well by the end of the play, which is an underrated virtue in a work for theatre, where oftentimes stagecraft and design overpower emphasis on truthfulness.

While I consider myself a sophisticated theatregoer, I found myself succumbing to the same sorts of celebrity obssession that a lot of theatregoers nowadays seem to indulge in over the past few weeks, and Journey's End was an absolute shock to my system. It's nothing big or splashy, just sparse (but effective) sets and lighting (and especially sound effects) and a group of exquisite actors. Two thirds of the stage were taken up by darkness, and the audience is left in the dark just about as much as the actors onstage are, waiting by candlelight for the bombs that sound in the distance. It's unusual for me to even taken note of the sound design for a play, but for this one, the sound effects were absolutely spectacular and had a direct effect on the impact of the piece as a whole.

Word of mouth should be propelling this show, which has been running to shockingly small audiences (only the orchestra was full the night I saw it - a Saturday). For the most part, an average of about 35% of the house is filled over the course of a week. If you're a student and have $20 (cheaper than most rush policies), go take advantage of the rush policy. The seats in the first few rows provide an absolutely powerful experience, and you don't have to get there well before the show to get them. Take my word for it, especially if you're sitting nearby the speakers.

Go see Journey's End! Hands down the absolute most visceral theatrical experience on Broadway this season.

Another busy week: "Exits and Entrances," "All the Wrong Reasons," and "LoveMusik"

This has been one long week.

On Tuesday, I went to the Met (museum) with Ryan, who was an excellent tour guide. We saw the new exhibition, Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudi to Dali. It was quite cool. I hadn't known much about Joan Miro, and the exhibit introduced me to him.

That night, since I was already on the Upper East Side, I decided to go to 59E59 Theaters to see the new play by Athol Fugard, Exits and Entrances. I hadn't been familiar with Fugard, besides for knowing that he wrote the play "MASTER HAROLD"...and the boys. Having read the favorable reviews of this latest offering, I bought a copy of the play and read it and enjoyed it. Seeing it live was even better.

The play stars William Dennis Hurley as the Playwright, a character modeled after Fugard in his early years. The Playwright, a South African with dreams of an integrated South African theatre, befriends aging actor Andre Huguenot, played with great skill by Morlan Higgins, whose career is coming to an end just as his is skyrocketing. The play's subject matter -- the older mentor and his youthful charge -- is familiar, but the treatment is sensitive and well-written, at times quite poetic. It's definitely worth checking out, especially for those considering a career in theatre.

On Wednesday, I went to see John Fugelsang's one-man show All the Wrong Reasons at NYTW. I had no idea what to expect going into it. At first, his personality struck me as grating, but I got used to him over the course of the show and ultimately found much of what he said quite funny. The show's narrative also took quite a few unexpected turns that made the evening more interesting. He talked mostly about religion, politics, and his family, creating a pretty compelling portrait of his parents and their decision to turn away from their vows of celibacy to have him. It's not something I'd run out to see if I had to pay for it, but I enjoyed it considering I got a comp ticket.

Thursday was my most interesting evening of theatregoing this week. When a new Hal Prince show comes to Broadway, it's an event. The man, who has produced and directed more than a dozen landmark shows (a good number of original productions of Sondheim musicals, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, Cabaret, and more), is a legend, having won a record-breaking 21 Tony Awards for directing and producing and in special categories (the Lifetime Achievement Award last year, for example). LoveMusik at Manhattan Theatre Club is his latest project as director.

The team assembled for the project is extraordinary: Hal Prince, book writer Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Parade), and stars Michael Cerveris and Donna Murphy.

The show focuses on the life of composer Kurt Weill (Cerveris) -- most famous for composing "Mack the Knife" and The Threepenny Opera -- and his wife, actress Lotte Lenya (Murphy), detailing their life together and their complicated relationship, as well as the highs and lows of their careers. It's technically a "jukebox musical," using Weill's songs to tell the story despite the fact that jukeboxes weren't really around (I don't think) when Weill's music was written.

The scenery (by Beowulf Boritt) is particularly imaginative and works well with the sylistic staging of Prince, who ventures to tell the tale of Weill, a frequent collaborator of Bertolt Brecht's, in a style similar to how Brecht's works are often presented, using a proscenium within a proscenium to alienate the audience from the proceedings and utilizing a variety of methods of visual storytelling to change things up a bit. As the piece moves along and the couple move to America, the piece becomes more and more "mainstream," turning away from the odd style of Brecht's works toward a more classic Broadway style.

The cast does an excellent job. Cerveris is wonderful as Weill, though Donna Murphy absolutely steals the show as Lenya. It's a role unlike any other she's played, and she may just give Christine Ebersole a run for her money in the race for Best Actress this year.

As for what needed to be fixed, the biggest thing is that the show needs some tightening. Last night was only the first preview, so the show started late and the intermission ran long. That's not out of the ordinary for a first preview, but other than that there were a few too many songs, some of which didn't really move the plot forward and probably could have been excised. The book was, for the most part, very smart and effective. The sound quality also varied through the evening.

It was an evening of ups and downs. Overall, though, for a first preview, I think LoveMusik is going to be an absolute artistic success. It remains to be seen whether audience will really catch on (I doubt it), but it definitely deserves to be seen, probably even more so in a few weeks, when the show is a little bit tighter. I'm thinking of revisiting it before I go home for the summer to see how the show will change between now and when it's frozen.

Anyway, as I said, it's been a busy week. I'm looking forward to relaxing some this weekend.

"Frost/Nixon"

After taking the night off from theatre last night to watch The Departed, to which I felt rather indifferent (I much preferred Babel as Best Picture nominees go), I high-tailed it back up to the theatre district tonight to rush Frost/Nixon at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

This show had many promising things going for it to my mind: a script by Peter Morgan (who wrote the screenplay for The Queen), Michael Sheen (who played Blair in The Queen) as talk show host David Frost, and the legendary Frank Langella as Richard Nixon.

That said, the show was ultimately a worthwhile experience, but there were plenty of things I found lacking. The show centers around washed-up British talk show host David Frost, who hopes to revive his career by conducting a six-hour interview with former President Richard Nixon on national television. I hadn't known going into the play what a big deal this interview was at the time, especially since I don't immediately recognize the name David Frost, and it was interesting to hear what the play had to say about the impact of the interview, in which Frost gets Nixon to admit his shortcomings and failures in office and essentially apologize to the American people.

At first, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to accept Frank Langella as Nixon. I'd already seen another Nixon-themed play this year (Nixon's Nixon at MCC downtown), and the man playing Nixon in that production had a close physical resemblance to the former President. Langella has a more lanky frame and a longer face, but as the play goes along, his commitment to Nixon's intellectual and emotional misgivings, as well as his acute attention to Nixon's verbal cues, help to allow the audience to go along for the ride. He ultimately gives an extraordinarily nuanced performances, managing to transcend the label of "mimic" and tap into the pain that Nixon hid behind his defensive outer shell. He and Sheen, who's incredibly personable in the role of Frost, are the reasons to catch this show above all else.

Making the most of a drab 1970s set and overcoming the relatively distracting use of a 6-by-6 set of television screens on which short scenic segments and the interview sessions in progress are shown, the cast makes the most of a script that, after an overlong segment of exposition in the beginning, fails to pick up sufficient steam and never really transcends the level of docudrama. Stephen Kunken, as anti-Nixon writer Jim Reston, is given the role of narrator for much of the play, and, though he's an amiable enough presence, the use of this device grounds the piece awkwardly in a static, overly calculated sort of way. The play picks up steam as Sheen and Langella face off in front of the cameras, but even these more exciting sequences can't ultimately make up for the shaky start that Frost/Nixon gets off to.

Bottom line: Frost/Nixon is worth seeing if you're a fan of these actors, as they really do a formidable job in their respective roles, but it's not a play to see if one is looking to marvel at great writing.

Hanging "Curtains," Hello "Blackbird"

I'm on a theatrical roll, and boy is it exciting. Nothing excites me more than live theatre, good, bad, or mediocre. I'm here to report that, of the last two shows I've seen, one fell in the "good" category (Blackbird at Manhattan Theatre Club) and one in the "mediocre" (Curtains on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre).

In an effort to see three famous movie actors on three consecutive nights (after Philip Seymour Hoffman in Jack Goes Boating on Thursday and Kevin Spacey in A Moon for the Misbegotten on Friday), I did student rush on Saturday night with Austin for Blackbird starring Jeff Daniels and up-and-coming actress Alison Pill.

All I knew about the play was that it was about pederasty and that it won the Olivier Award for Best New Play last year. Swayed by the latter and by the two actors, both of whom I've admired in past projects, I took a leap, and boy was it worth it.

The play centers around Ray, played by Jeff Daniels, a 50-something-year-old office worker who gets an unexpected break room visit from Una, with whom he carried out an illicit affair when she was only 12 years old. As played by Daniels, Ray, a character who would be easy to flat-out villanize, is, thanks to the astute direction of Joe Mantello, humanized and given an inner life. We can at least identify his motivations, even if we don't condone them. As Una, Pill, whom I loved last season in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, gave a wonderful performance as a broken girl of a woman left to pick up the pieces of her life in the aftermath of this relationship that, though she needs so badly to turn away from, she ultimately finds herself still entranced with.

What was ultimately so great about the play was that it was ambiguous enough that my roommate and I were able to have a really heated debate about the ethics of the situation at hand and the characters' motivations. In that regard, it reminded me of Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, another show that I lauded for its ability to spark a social conversation.

The audience at the preview performance I attended seemed to be mostly older subscribers, and I think it's a shame this show won't reach a wider audience. It's a show that belongs Broadway, I think, particularly since it has something so different to say. No matter, the student rush policy allows those with an ID to buy tickets for $25. I recommend people check it out.

On the Broadway message board All That Chat, one poster recently posed the question, "What's David Hyde Pierce doing these days?" Another poster's response was, "A new musical called Drapes," which was followed up with, "Miss it and your life hangs in the valence."

Drapes could be the alternate title of Curtains, the new Kander & Ebb musical that recently opened on Broadway starring David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame and Broadway vet Debra Monk. Though the sets are lovely, the costumes fine, and the cast superb, something is missing behind the pretty packaging.

Mostly: the music. Kander & Ebb, the pair that brought us such Broadway staples as Cabaret and Chicago have written a score that recalls other scores, some theirs and some not, and ultimately ends up falling flat. Though there are toe-tapping moments, they never pay off. Where are those classic Kander & Ebb vamps we're used to? In Curtains, they're nowhere to be found. One has to admire that there's artistry in the attention to the lyrics here, but the cleverness in the rhymes never translates to genuine storytelling and sentiment. To quote a Damn Yankees lyric, first and foremost, "you gotta have heart."

The cast, especially the bold and brassy Debra Monk, keeps the show going at a reasonable pace in this murder mystery musical. We're meant to care about the suspence ratcheted up surrounding the murders of several key players in an out-of-town tryout of a musical in Boston, investigated by musical theatre-loving Detective Cioffi (Pierce) but the plot lacks in suspence and too many of the book's jokes fall flat and rely too heavily on tired cliches.

The closest Curtains comes to achieving the genuine thrill of musical theatre is in the fantastical dance and romance dream sequence, "A Tough Act to Follow," which features David Hyde Pierce and Jill Paice in an earnest and artful duet that came closest to whetting my appetite for some good old fashioned musical theatre magic. Don't get me wrong, I love plenty of different forms of musical theatre. This season, I was entralled most with unconventional musicals like Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening, but with this team assembled for this particular show, my expectations were high and specific -- for some classy, brassy Broadway fun -- and they were most certainly left unfulfilled. This is by no means a bad show, but there's something missing behind the curtains -- maybe a heart.