no one's home
by
Douglas Messerli
David Yazbek (music and lyrics), and Jeffrey Lane (book, based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown / New York, Belasco Theatre, the performance I saw was on November 12, 2010
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, shouted Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times "needs—immediately and intravenously"—Ritalin. The musical "is...a sad casualty of its own wandering mind." Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles McNaulty agreed: "all the frenetic activity — with Sven Ortel’s projections lending Michael Yeargan’s fast-moving sets the hyperactive feeling of a fashion video — can’t conceal the gaping flaws of the show any more than decorative icing can improve a cake made without enough baking soda or eggs." "By midway through the second act," observed the Chicago Tribune, "the audience can no longer track the multicharacter action through chaos suited only for film, and palpably checks out of the entire proceedings."
Anyone who has become acquainted with my
theater writing will know that I have not always been kind to Broadway shows.
But by the time I saw this original musical a week later, directed by the
admirable Bartlett Scher, I could only wonder what all this critical hostility
was about. Perhaps Scher had trimmed away some of his actors' frenetic motions
since its opening, or perhaps these critics had simply gone to another play,
for both I and the audience with whom I experienced this production thoroughly
enjoyed the musical—a far better work, it seems to me, than most other
musicals, originals and revivals, currently on Broadway. A woman in the row
behind me gleefully admitted that she never reads the critics.
I presume these critics had all seen Almodóar's film on which the musical was based. McNaulty even attempted to compare the two. Yet it seems strange that having witnessed the campy hysteria of the film, that they might not have expected a fast-moving theater event. Indeed, the whole metaphor of both film and the musical is that everyone, having lost or about to lose their sense of position or place (symbolized by love and home), is dropped into a whirling world of accidentally interrelated events. Accordingly, everyone is on the move: Pepa (Sherie Rene Scott), deserted by her lover Ivan (Brian Stokes Mitchell), wants to rent her penthouse and run off—unless she can convince Ivan to return—going so far as to burn her bed; her sexually active friend, Candela (stunningly performed by Laura Benanti), has fallen in love with terrorist and is desperate for advice and fearful of being arrested; Ivan's ex-wife, Lucia (Patti LuPone), having recently returned from a mental institution, is intent on tracking down Pepa and Ivan for revenge; her and Ivan's son Carlos, eager to leave his mother's troubled household, is intent on finding some new place where he and his fiancée might discover themselves. Add a passing Telephone Repairman and the gossipy/prayerful concierges of Ivan and Pepa and one is certain to create a farcical entanglement of people on the run.
Only the taxi cab-singing Danny Burstein
seems to truly comprehend the world in which he exists; prowling the streets to
provide services to Pepa and others, he has stocked his cab with medicine,
food, magazines, newspapers and anything else his customers on the move may
need. This is clearly a world where no one's home; the idea that constant
motion should be reflected on the stage is exceptional. Few other musicals that
I can recall—Mahogany and Sweeney Todd being obvious
exceptions—have so thoroughly taken to the streets.
The only stop to all this action is,
predictably, a Gilbert and Sullivan like magic elixir, in this case Pepa's
Valium-laced gazpacho. And it is in the arms of the sleep it awards them that
Carlos and Marisa, Candela and the Telephone Repairman, and the Chief Inspector
and his Detective can discover the joys of love and regain a sense of stability
and peace.
The two strong women at the center of this
work, Pepa and Lucia, must come to terms with their violent passions—and their
accordant commitments to constant motion—by themselves, realizing, in the case
of Lucia, that her husband had been "invisible" all along, and
perceiving, in Pepa's case, that she suffers from an "overdose of
love." Lucia's song, performed in Patti LuPone perfection, is perhaps the
most touching of the entire production.
And that is the real problem with Women on
the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The singers, the acting, even the sets and
costumes, the projections on the wall which some critics found so distracting,
are all quite excellent in capturing the sense of this fast-moving,
love-forlorn 1980s Madrid. Although David Yazbek's lyrics and music at moments
("Lie to Me," "The Microphone" and "Invisible")
rise to the occasion, over all they are simply not fetching and powerful enough
to glue this musical into a coherent whole. And without these two central
elements of musical theater, no production can long survive.
For all that, I think Women on the Verge
of a Nervous Breakdown is an admirable failure, a larger-than-life statement of
a culture that has lost its center and identity—clearly a subject that should
have great significance for US citizens today.
New
York, November 13, 2010
Reprinted
from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2010).
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