Ben Brantley
@BenjBrantley
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Allow me to echo re "Into the Woods": There have been many talented interpreters of the Baker's Wife since Joanna Gleason brilliantly originated the role. But Sara Bareilles is the first I've seen to match Gleason's human complexity, while providing her own free-wheeling spin.
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She was actually on Broadway only twice, decades ago. Yet somehow she seems to hover there, always, as one of the great and enduring lights of the Broadway musical. Happy birthday to that star of stars, Barbra Streisand, who clearly leaves a lasting impression.
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Goodbye, Stephen Sondheim. Truly without peer. The vacuum left is incomparable; so is the legacy.
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The first time I saw her, in 1973, she was sailing down the aisle of the Winter Garden Theater, puncturing the air with that inimitably piquant profile and purposefully calling, "Sing out, Louise!" And I fell in love forever. Farewell to the eternal Angela Lansbury.
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I think this is the moment when Mandy Patinkin is supposed to step forward and still the cacophony by saying, "Order. Design. Tension. Balance. Harmony.".
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New York theater as a religion doesn't have a more impassioned avatar than Jonathan Groff. I'm glad I stuck around.
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It was never this good before. It will never be this good again. Maria Friedman's inspired reinvention of "Merrily We Roll Along" makes Broadway -- and Sondheim -- feel newly and fully alive again. The season's most essential show, with an unsurpassable triple act at its center.
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Happy birthday to Bernadette Peters, whose voice is the sweetest trumpet sounded on Broadway. During a lifetime on stage, she has brought a child's wonder and a pro's discipline to every role she's played, creating -- among much else -- an unparalleled gallery of Sondheim women.
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This is awful. Gavin Creel has died at 48. He seemed born to channel and share the special joys of the American musical, and he did so in such a variety of parts, from the ingenuous hippie of "Hair" to the serpentine lothario of "She Loves Me." Also a swell Mormon in London.
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Chita Rivera - who ruled Broadway stages as the original Anita, Rosie and Velma - has died. Though she was 91, I had kept expecting to see her perform at least one more time. She emanated that kind of energy that felt endlessly, improbably rechargeable. Farewell to a solar force.
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Farewell to the peerless Maggie Smith, whose voice could stretch a single word into a prism of shades of disapproval, disappointment, amazement and amusement. She could commandeer a stage ("Lettice and Lovage") or a screen ("Bed Among the Lentils") with a single raised eyebrow.
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She did not sing or speak false notes. Watch her screen performances from the 1930s and 40s, where she's a wellspring of sincerity in the midst of artifice. It's the centennial birthday of Judy Garland, the most uncannily translucent of stars.
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A much-performed song sounds newly affecting here.
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The precision, the focus, the fire, the ability to shift gears in a second. And you sit there, open-mouthed, marveling that she's sustaining this for 100 minutes, all alone, never fading. Yes, I finally saw Jodie Comer in "Prima Facie." I am hoping my jaw will close by tomorrow.
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Jessica Lange unleashes her full star power in Paula Vogel's "Mother Play," and it burns so bright. Playing the many ages of one disappointed woman, she's all raw, explosive life in search of an outlet, with the lacerating fury of her great film roles. At 75 she is in her prime.
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A single song in a so-called musical comedy lands with the impact of classical tragedy, with its evocation of pity and terror. That's what Audra McDonald has given Broadway in a stunning "Rose's Turn" in "Gypsy." And it's a full-on, tear-drenched catharsis that we experience.
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Where am I? Why is it as if I've been under nitrous oxide for 90 minutes? The drug is actually called "Oh, Mary!" I finally went. Seeing Cole Escola is what it must have been like to discover Judy Holliday at the Village Vanguard in 1940. An awakeningly original comic presence.
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Happy birthday to Chita Rivera, whose career in Broadway musicals is unparalleled. She was Anita in "West Side Story" in 1957, Velma in "Chicago" in 1975, Claire in "The Visit" in 2015. For starters. Always bringing a stiletto-sharp attack to every step, note and intonation.
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Is there any man alive who more completely embodies what it means to be -- and what it once meant to be -- a Broadway star? It is the birthday of Nathan Lane, a first-rate contemporary actor who also summons a long-ago era of shining personalities who turned fully solar on stage.
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Happy birthday to Harvey Fierstein, the trailblazing playwright and actor. He moved from marginal downtown to mainstream midtown without diluting his defiantly comfortable queerness, making gay love, gay parenting and cross-dressing the stuff of heartwarming Broadway hits.
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Turner Classic Movies has been my television refuge, oasis and dreamland of choice for decades. It has seen me through sleepless nights and rocky mornings. It is the most essential cultural resource in American broadcasting. The consequences of its loss would be incalculable.
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Happy birthday to the incomparable Audra McDonald, who never fails to startle with the range and depth of her talent, matching style to substance in some of the richest performances ever seen on Broadway. A record-breaking (deserved) six Tonys. And ready or not, here comes Mama.
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Reasons to love live theater, 289. Its least fantastical character, a pragmatist with a grasp of fantastical "moments," becomes the accessible heart of the Sondheim-Lapine "Into the Woods." Joanna Gleason plays the Baker's Wife to sharp-edged, reflective perfection, Bway, 1987.
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Farewell to Glynis Johns, who has died at 100. The first Desiree in "Night Music," and the first person I heard singing "Send in the Clowns," inimitably. As a child, I saw her as Mrs. Banks in "Mary Poppins." Even then, I was enchanted by that tickling, quizzical voice.
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Happy birthday to Julie Andrews, my idea of the practically perfect movie star when I was a child, a singing nanny who brought harmony to disordered families with the application of a shimmering, soothing cool-warm soprano. It's a voice I shall never stop hearing.
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Farewell to Tom Smothers, who with brother Dick introduced primetime America to the off-center "stoner" humor that would flower on SNL. On late 1960s TV, they mixed trenchant satire with an amused/outraged sense of the surrealism of a nation in flux. He played dumb; he wasn't.
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Happy birthday to Bernadette Peters, who can unpack a whole lifetime of emotional experience in a single lyric. Celebrate by listening closely to the inflections of meaning she packs into a Sondheim song as Dot in "Sunday," or the Witch from "Woods" or Sally in "Follies."
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Reasons to love live theater, 422. A man of seemingly frozen detachment thaws by degrees into a bonfire of feeling (while emotively playing the piano!). A riveting Raul Esparza is Bobby the ambivalent bachelor in John Doyle's stark, elegant version of "Company," Broadway, 2006.
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This afternoon I became something I never expected to be: a married man.
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It's the birthday of Anne Reinking, the performer/choreographer who brought a military precision and hedonistic rush to every move she made. In reimagining the dances for the (still-running) revival of "Chicago," she coaxed a transporting joy from the sharp-edged Fosse cynicism.
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It's the birthday of Bob Fosse, the great cynic of showbiz who told us that its "razzle dazzle" was all a sham. Nah. When his dancers shimmied and shook, they changed how musicals moved for real. Also: His "Cabaret" is the best translation ever of a Broadway show to film.
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What a joyous, open-hearted communion between a show and an audience: tonight, the blessing called "Into the Woods." In this moment of chaos, anger, guilt and moral confusion, it is so necessary. No one leaves for good, says the song. Thank God that includes Stephen Sondheim.
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Happy birthday to Joel Grey, whose immortality was guaranteed when he crafted one of the great archetypes in musicals, on Broadway and on film: the M.C. in "Cabaret." His fruitful career embraces memorable turns in shows as different as "Chicago," "Wicked" and "Anything Goes."
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The Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout, who has died at 65, was a man of honor, kindness and a vast erudition he wore with unpretentious ease. His love for theater, and his eagerness to write about it, was inexhaustible. This is heartbreaking news.
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Well -- and I say this with incredulity -- that was terrific: fleet of foot and warm of heart. I can't remember the last time theater on tv felt so vital and inviting.
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45 years later, I can still see two dead people rising through the stage floor to ask us one last time to attend their sorry tale. They were embodied, harrowingly, by Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. What a coda! What performances! It's the Broadway birthday of "Sweeney Todd."
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A heartbroken farewell to Christopher Durang, one of the funniest of all American playwrights, who skewered sacred cows with absurdist rapiers and cleavers: marriage, Catholicism, gun craziness, our pathological addiction to being entertained. his most hallowed fellow dramatists.
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Reasons to love live theater, 54. A musical about art opens on Broadway in 1984 with a first act finale of incomparable beauty. It stars Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, at odds and in love, singing Sondheim. It is an astonishment: "Sunday in the Park with George."
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It is the birthday of Stephen Sondheim, whose music I listen to every day, if only in my head, as it annotates my encounters with an ever-changing world and an ever-shifting self. It sometimes comforts, sometimes challenges, always illuminates. My gratitude for it is boundless.
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Gwen Verdon, one of the most spectacularly talented of all Broadway song-and-dance stars, would have turned 100 today. Celebrate by watching her and Bob Fosse pose the great existential question, "Who's Got the Pain?," with some of the most eloquent body English ever recorded.
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Though it's great to see the bouquets being thrown to "The Gilded Age" for its use of Broadway performers, let's save some gratitude for television's biggest employer ever of Tony winners and nominees: the deathless "Law & Order," in all its incarnations.
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She was my first Mama Rose, and my first Mrs. Lovett. And what blessed introductions they were. A genius of musical portraiture, she was able to find the humanity within the monstrous, a delicacy within the exaggerations that the genre demands. It's Angela Lansbury's birthday.
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"Hair," "A Chorus Line," "Dreamgirls," "Angels in America," "The Producers" -- all milestone productions, each with its own startling and original visual vocabulary, summoned into existence by one profoundly inventive set designer. Farewell to Robin Wagner, who has died at 89.
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He bestrode an astonishing seven decades as a recording artist, with a voice that came from the heart he never left behind him. He performed duets with everyone from Pearl Bailey to Lady Gaga, from Willie Nelson to Amy Winehouse. Farewell to Tony Bennett, nightingale and phoenix.
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For the record, I was stunned by Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret" when I was a teen. Her eager ambition and hedonism made it so easy for me to experience vicariously being seduced and corrupted by Weimar Berlin. Too talented for Sally? Maybe. But her singing nailed the film's spirit.
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So last night, heaven help me, I watched Hannah Waddingham's Christmas special (yes, I'm still sick). I have concluded that she is the new Hugh Jackman -- an Entertainer with a capital E, a glittering throwback who spices shimmying showbiz seductiveness with a dollop of camp.
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Happy birthday to the undeniable force named Patti LuPone, who brings laser focus, atomic energy and a blazing zealot's passion for theater to every role -- from Evita (1978), to Mama Rose (2008), to Joanne in "Company" (tonight). Silence your phones and raise your glasses. Now.
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Farewell to the gigastar. Barry Humphries -- whose monstrous alter-ego Dame Edna Everage is the great comic creation of the age of celebrity -- has died. No one anatomized and exploded the raging narcissism of fame as acutely or hilariously as this lilac-haired diva of divas.
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And a kid stands up amid a cheering crowd and yells, "That's my dad!" and suddenly I'm bawling as if it's the end of a Frank Capra movie, "Mr. Walz Goes to Washington," maybe, or "It's a Wonderful Party."
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Happy birthday to Maggie Smith, whose expressively mannered performances make high artifice feel more natural than reality. She is the consummate comic theater actor, whose artful way with an epigram never precludes our sense of the melancholy behind the defenses of wit.
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So I have canceled my subscription to the shame-stained Washington Post. Which saddens me. But it must be done.
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For some reason, I started crying when Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris looked into a dressing room mirror and saw the real Kamala Harris, laughing in delight. It felt like a good dream. These are times for all kinds of tears, it seems.
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Of course I watched the first episode of the new season of "The Gilded Age." It remains as it was: Perhaps the most extravagant squandering of great stage actors in television history. Wooden dialogue, sit-com reaction shots. Oh, it's appalling -- and absolutely irresistible.
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When Victoria Clark first sang the word "beautiful," with all those shades of longing, I knew I was a goner. Finally saw "Kimberly Akimbo," that sly musical miracle: an expert, charming entertainment rooted deep in the ache of mortality; it shatters your heart by stealth.
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Goodbye to the experiment in democracy called the United States of America. Despite some unfortunate detours, it had a good and healthy run. I will miss it every single day.
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It's the birthday of Judy Garland, whose singing voice was incapable of insincerity and who acted with an unaffected openness rare among film stars of her era. Never let the clouds of myth obscure the radiance of a talent that still feels fresh, still startles, still enchants.
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At 6:55 p.m., I was a sad man. Some time after 7, I started smiling. I didn't stop for 3 hours. That's what great theater can do. My second, blessed time at "Stereophonic," a play that finds radiant clarity in life's messiness, and in the imperfect people who make art out of it.
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No one rivals Bernadette Peters in making every word in a cast recording count. In "Sunday," at the top of the second act, the Dot of the painting sings (thanking George) "and for the hat" -- parenthetically, yet it registers as a full acknowledgment of an artist's achievement.
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Reasons to love live theater, 231. The seismic force known as Patti LuPone is fully unleashed on Broadway in 1979. She appears in the title role of Harold Prince's Brechtian staging of the Lloyd Webber political poperetta "Evita." Like Buenos Aires, New York stands back, marvels.
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"Would it spoil some vast eternal plan/If I were a wealthy man?" Farewell to the lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who provided the infectious words for Tevye's prayers in "Fiddler on the Roof" and allowed Ilona in "She Loves Me" to ponder blissfully the miracle of a gift of ice cream.
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Reasons to love live theater, 249. "You don't have to be happy at all to be happy you're alive": the extraordinary affirmation at the center of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's beautiful, daring "Next to Normal." Alice Ripley amazes as a mother with bipolar disorder, Broadway, 2009.
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Reasons to love live theater, 170. When Betty Buckley, performing "Memory," commandingly wails the words "touch me," you realize that whenever this song is mentioned, you will always hear that voice. She is, fittingly, the most memorable thing about "Cats," on Broadway in 1982.
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Every so often, you get to watch a star being born. Lucky enough to have caught the cavalcade of glittering talent that is Encores' "Jelly's Last Jam" last night, and to watch an actor I hadn't known soar skyward in the title role. His name is Nicholas Christopher. Remember it.
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It is the birthday of Stephen Sondheim, whose presence has somehow become even more ubiquitous since he died in 2021. His words and music have transcended their original functions as songs in a musical. They're in the air we breathe now, rather like Shakespeare's language.
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Happy birthday to Daniel Radcliffe, who says he "won the lottery at 11." Who survived a tidal wave of early, outrageous fame with sanity and credibility intact. Who has repeatedly shone on stage in risk-taking performances in works by McDonagh, Beckett, Stoppard, Sondheim.
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It is the birthday of Al Hirschfeld, the most evocative illustrator Broadway ever had. He distilled the essence of entire performances, and the enduring personae of the stage's most inimitable stars, into lines, swirls and cross-hatches of ink. An immortal immortalizer.
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And for the record, Ariana DeBose never faltered or looked as if she was sinking under what must have felt like an Atlas-worthy burden. Already a pro's pro.
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She turns sentences into symphonies, with inflections that run the gamut of astonishment, indignation and aggrievement, as well as a purring satisfaction at her own expressiveness. No one spins an epigram or arches an eyebrow with more eloquence. Happy birthday to Maggie Smith.
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I love the relay race aspect of it, and the next act cheering those who just performed as they exit. This Tonys makes the best case I've seen on television for theater as an act of faith.
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Happy birthday to Carol Burnett, the warmest of comic performers, who exudes good will even in sharpest satiric mode. Her parodies of classic Hollywood movies honed both my sense of humor and nascent critical sensibility. And nobody ever wore a set of curtains with more elan.
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Reasons to love live theater, 270. A drag queen named Arnold asks Broadway audiences, and his mom, to think about what we mean by family values and how we embody them. Harvey Fierstein is the star and author of "Torch Song Trilogy" in 1982, and Estelle Getty is a Ma to remember.
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The choice of Betty Gilpin to succeed Cole Escola in the title role of "Oh, Mary!" makes me very happy, somehow. It bespeaks such a healthy, open-minded sense of what's possible in casting. Also, in "Glow," BG showed a sensational gift for the creative anger that Mary requires.
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Reasons to love live theater, 375. Coming of age means 30 for a composer who hears time passing -- quickly, loudly -- as that birthday arrives. 5 years after Jonathan Larson's death at 35, his introspective "Tick, Tick. Boom!," with laser-like Raul Esparza, debuts, NY, 2001.
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So far, I'm liking this more than most Tonys. Just show us the shows -- and the sentiment. Ariana DeBose is essential, quick on her feet in all senses. Also: Bonnie Milligan is seriously glamorous.
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Happy birthday to Stockard Channing, a rare, truly sophisticated presence in the American theater, whose distinctive smile melds wryness with wistfulness. Dazzling in "Six Degrees of Separation" and "Other Desert Cities," she demonstrates how a well-honed wit cuts both ways.
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Oh no, they're taking away "Schmigadoon"?! That was such a happy place to visit. For those of us whose fantasy lives have been sparked and enriched by classic musicals, it spoke our language, intimately, in a way no other show did.
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Happy birthday to Angela Lansbury -- my first Mama Rose, my first Mrs. Lovett, my favorite Madame Arcati. I've seen her on stage seven times, and she has never failed to deliver a finely detailed character portrait, shaped by the great theater paradox of subtlety writ large.
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Farewell to the wonderful Linda Lavin, who could find depths of both wisdom and melancholy within a single one-liner and within the archetypal Jewish mother - per Neil Simon, Richard Greenberg, Charles Busch, Nicky Silver. She made us see that good comedy was a serious business.
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Reasons to love live theater, 227. "Sunday in the Park with George" returns to Broadway in 2017, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford. And its note-by-note, dot-by-dot case for the necessity of art, and how it teaches us to see with new eyes, feels more urgent than ever.
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How is that this woman who existed only in my peripheral vison for four years has emerged so completely as what the world needs now? I was worried her big convention speech might fizzle. But there she was -- so confident, so reassuring, so very adult. Last night, I slept well.
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Put on "Fun Home" for the first time in several years and found I was in tears as soon as I heard "Welcome to our home on Maple Avenue." What a beautiful work, with its peerless evocation of a family, and a father, seen in ambivalent hindsight. The "Glass Menagerie" of musicals.
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It is the birthday of Anton Chekhov, the greatest of modern playwrights, who has never been surpassed in capturing the deep, aching ambivalence; the frustration and the fleeting joy, that come with simply being alive.
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And happy birthday to Raul Esparza, who fully found the fire beneath the ice of Bobby (baby) in "Company," and is never less than electrifying. He gave good menace per Pinter ("The Homecoming") and Brecht ("Arturo Ui") and adrenalized manic manhood Mamet-style ("Speed-the-Plow").
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Hooray! Marie Friedman, who directed the two best versions of the wonderful, impossible "Merrily We Roll Along" I've ever seen (in London and Boston), is going to try it on in New York. Her leading man? One Daniel Radcliffe. Scheduled for fall/winter New York Theater Workshop.
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Happy birthday to a woman who cooed, exclaimed, kvetched and sang into my ear for more than 48 hours last year via her inimitably phrased self-narrated audio memoir. Her name is Barbra, as if you didn't know. And I went through a tough withdrawal when her book came to an end.
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Happy birthday to Laura Linney, who makes thought visible. She acts without obvious tricks, flourishes or showy transformations, yet she makes you feel you know her characters better than they know themselves. Onscreen she's terrific; onstage, she's a quiet miracle.
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Amber Gray is a heaven-sent asset to any play. Following her dazzling sojourn in hell in "Hadestown", she returns to Broadway in another part with Stygian dimensions: Banquo (and presumably Banquo's ghost) in "Macbeth," with the not-too-shabby Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga.
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The full magic of "Merrily" can't ever translate to television.
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It's the birthday of Madeline Kahn, an impeccably off-center comic actor and one of the great pastiche artists of the late 20th century. Her reinvention of Dietrich's jaded saloon singer in "Blazing Saddles" is satiric perfection.
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Farewell to Charles Kimbrough, a TV actor who was also an incisive stage presence as a delightfully uptight interpreter of Gurney ("Later Life," "Sylvia") and as the withering rival of Seurat, in Sondheim's "Sunday." I first saw him as a sprightly Pangloss in "Candide" in 1975.
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Just a reminder, to anyone who doubts it, that there really is a world somewhere over the rainbow. And that life is so much better with a full spectrum of colors. Don't stop wishing for it. Happy pride month.
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Reasons to love live theater, 388. The most delirious "I don't" in musicals keeps stopping the show. Insisting they're not "Getting Married Today" in revivals of "Company": Veanne Cox, Matt Doyle (NYC, 1995 and 2021); Alice Ripley (D.C., 2002) and Jonathan Bailey (London, 2018).
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Happy birthday to Harvey Fierstein, who moved from theater's iconoclastic margins to the bosom of Broadway with "Torch Song." His enduring formula, then as now as a writer and actor, of folding audacity into cozy sentimentality, helped make queerness an everyday mainstem staple.
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The best new American play I've seen in I-don't-know-how-long; the most miraculously transformative revival of a musical I've seen perhaps ever -- this a.m. both were gratifyingly heaped with Tony nominations. Oh, of course I mean "Stereophonic" and "Merrily We Roll Along."
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At 80, she returned to Broadway in 1999 - for a single staged reading - to play a role she'd originated 37 years earlier. For just one night, she blazed again as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and it was a night I'll remember forever. It's Uta Hagen's birthday.
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Reasons to love live theater, 328. Nearly 40 years after she captivated New York as Eliza Doolittle, Julie Andrews returns to Broadway in 1995 as the title character(s) of "Victor/Victoria," based on her 1982 film. The voice is still crystal, she still looks great in white tie.
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A chance to see one of the immortal musical performances. Part Dickensian caricature, part raw human need: Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett.
SWEENEY TODD, starring Angela Lansbury and George Hearn, will air on TCM on October 28.
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I have seen Imelda Staunton in 3 major musical roles and have been struck by the bracing, near-clinical psychological specificity in which she grounded each, especially her Sally-on-the-verge in "Follies" and her compulsively driven Mama Rose. And now Dolly. wow wow wow indeed.
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Happy birthday to Donna Murphy, a genius at translating styles and sensibilities of the past into a rich, vital present. Musical breadth and depth of character to match in "Passion,""The King and I," "Wonderful Town," "LoveMusik," "Dolly!" and at Encores "Whistle" and "Follies."
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It is the birthday of Vivien Leigh, the British actress who delivered two unflinching, diametrically opposed screen portraits of Southern women: the determined, amoral survivor Scarlett O'Hara and the doomed, delicate Blanche DuBois. They are performances that do not date.
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