The Furious Opening Night Phone Call

I rushed home, absolutely furious, possibly foaming at the mouth. I did stop to get a caffeine-loaded Mountain Dew Code Red because I knew that I’d be up till the wee small hours and beyond. I’d be making that ritual of theatergoing — The Furious Opening Night Phone Call — to Paul in Boston, Alan in Florida, Jerry in California, and plenty of others, too. I’d get in touch with all the people I know who care about Broadway, who aren’t in New York but would want to hear every sordid detail of what I’d seen this evening.

In other words, I’d be replicating Act I, Scene One of Terrence McNally’s wonderful comedy, It’s Only a Play. There, an actor who’s attended a first night is now on the telephone calling his Paul, Alan, or Jerry. He gives a blow-by-blow post-mortem of the show, rating the leading man “terrible, just terrible” before using the same words for the leading lady and adding, “I haven’t seen a performance like that since her last one.” The direction? “Terrible, just terrible.” And the sets? “What sets? Hideous costumes.”

Back in 1985 when I caught It’s Only a Play at Manhattan Theatre Club, I laughed in recognition at this scene. How many times I’d make the same Furious Opening Night Phone Call to my pals, telling them what I’d seen and what they’d missed! Tonight it would happen again. Care to guess which show got me so angry?

A Raisin in the Sun? No, certainly not with Audra McDonald’s Ruth and Phylicia Rashad’s Lena. How nice for once to see a Lena Younger who’s younger — she could have married in her youth, after all — and one who weighs less than the apartment’s refrigerator. What’s more, many men are said to marry their mothers, and there is a nice resemblance between Rashad and McDonald. Director Kenny Leon also did well in casting David Aaron Baker as the play’s Great White Dope who comes by to buy the blacks out of their housing contract. From the film version, I was used to seeing namby-pamby John Fiedler, the quintessential mama’s boy who originated the role on Broadway; but now Leon had me realizing that Fiedler would never have been elected chairman of a neighborhood improvement association and that someone who looked like Baker was a cannier choice.

I know, I know, I haven’t yet addressed the issue of Sean Combs — but even he didn’t warrant a Furious Opening Night Phone Call. Combs may not be a great actor but I admired that he was well-prepared and eager to do a good job. Granted, just as I felt about Quentin Tarantino’s stint in
Wait until Dark a few years ago, Broadway is not the ideal place for on-the-job training. And I do think that Leon should have directed Combs to face front more often; too many times, he was speaking while facing the back wall and, with his untrained stage voice, was hard to understand. But you know something? I have a feeling that when Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play, she envisioned someone more along the lines of the rough, raw, and real Sean Combs than the far more polished and handsome Sidney Poitier. (At the time, Broadway theatergoers needed to be eased into the idea that blacks would be moving in their neighborhood.)

Speaking of that: Deep in the play, we hear, “You can’t force people to change their hearts.” But Lorraine Hansberry did indeed get people to change their hearts by writing this magnificent play. When Ruth feels the dream of a new home slipping away and says that she’ll work 24 hours a day with a baby strapped on her back in order to help pay off the mortgage, could anyone be so hard-hearted as to deny this nice person her due? I daresay that many whites who feared blacks in their neighborhood in 1959 came to a different conclusion after seeing this play. Alas, there are still people who need to be educated on this issue, and A Raisin in the Sun is back to help them.

Did Jumpers prompt my Furious Opening Night Phone Call? No. I’ll grant you that Tom Stoppard’s 1972 play is hard to understand more often than not. But I just let the whole thing wash over me and, every now and then, I caught a line that struck my fancy — e.g., “I belong to a crowd that believes any sudden movement is ill-bred.” I was also amused by a line in the middle of one of George’s many discourses to his students, “Papers have been distributed to all of you.” That’s because, in fact, papers were given to us critics when we picked up our tickets — three separate sheaves of papers! — to help us along. One thing was very clear to me throughout the evening: As George, Simon Russell Beale reminded me a great deal of Harvey Fierstein. If Jumpers is still running when this British actor leaves our shores, Fierstein could make a daring career move by taking over his role.

No, what made me make The Furious Opening Night Phone Call was — as you may have guessed from the mostly poisonous reviews that it received — Bombay Dreams. This four-alarm disgrace had me screaming at Paul, Alan, and Jerry for hours. I railed, “The Broadway version is worse than the London one that appalled me two years ago! We’re still supposed to like this poor boy Akaash but he’s insufferably cocky and believes that he’s hot stuff in the way that the worst lounge singers do! We’re supposed to care about developers coming in and bulldozing a neighborhood but the monstrosity that Mark Thompson has designed looks as if it should be razed!” I calmed down a bit and added, “Granted, people do get sentimental about their neighborhoods and I know that we’re not talking about rich people with a lot of options, but given that the program actually refers to this locale as a ‘slum,’ it makes me think that they couldn’t do much worse if they moved somewhere else. I’m more interested in someone like Ruth Younger, who’s willing to do anything to get out of her slum, than I am in people who want to preserve theirs.”

I admitted that Akaash would do anything to get out of his slum but not as nobly as Ruth: “He’s shallow from start to almost finish, and the way he learns his lesson isn’t convincing to me. Then we have the standard falling-for-a-rich-girl-when-he-should-love-another plot, which was
one of the most puerile conventions of 1920s musicals!” Jerry said something that has been pointed out to me a few times before, to which I replied: “Yes, I know that the show is supposed to be a musical version of a Bollywood film, but I still want quality when I go into a playhouse located between 41st and 54th streets. Don’t we always hear that a musical should be better than its source material? Well, Bombay Dreams dismally fails in that regard. This is like going into a world-class restaurant, expecting a steak, and being served a Big Mac instead. The worst thing about the show being produced in New York is that the Broadway musical canon now includes a song titled” — here, I paused to curl my lip in disgust — ‘Shakalaka Baby.'”

I also told Paul, Alan, and Jerry that, during the production’s final burst of pageant and spectacle, my girlfriend turned to me and said: “My mother would have loved this show. If she were still alive, I’d go out right away and buy her a ticket.” To which I responded, “Yes, I know she was very much into sets and costumes — but, after all, she was born deaf.” That condition would make Bombay Dreams much easier to take.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]