On Broadway

This month, we go way Off-Broadway to the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and their co-production with Toneelgroep Amsterdam of Wings of Desire, a play based upon the famous Wim Wenders film about an angel (Damiel) who seeks to become human so that he can spend his life with a beautiful trapeze artist (Marion). The show uses a lot of sound, from an audio montage of the inner thoughts of citizens to an occasionally noisy two-piece group (guitar, bass, vocals), to help recreate the world of the epic film, and trapeze artist Mam Smith elegantly performs with silks to poetic effect.

Already a classic children's book and animated television program, Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas! also became a hit movie with Jim Carrey and a popular musical theatre production that has run seasonally in San Diego for eight years in a row. Now, Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical is tantalizing Broadway in its first holiday run. The Grinch team does a great job of replicating the look of the book, collecting a good ensemble cast, and delivering a charismatic Grinch (Patrick Page). Sound designer Tom Clark, one of the powerful triumvirate that is Acme Sound Partners, took on the show without having been involved with the original production. He treated The Grinch as if it was a brand new show. The 70- minute production moves quickly but does not overwhelm the audience, nor does the unobtrusive, but well-layered, sound design.

I guarantee that you've never seen anything like Slava's Snowshow. It will transform your perception of clowns in the way that Cirque Du Soleil has reinvented our idea of the circus. The two-act show features a yellow clown and his green companions wandering the stage, improvising various gags and parodying many famous movie or theatre clichés, from two people lost at sea to two lovers parting at a train station. And they do so in brilliant and unconventional ways. The costumes are wild, the set pieces are surreal, and the climactic "blizzard" that engulfs the audience has to be experienced to be believed. Make sure you stay during the intermission, too, as the clowns come down from the stage to wreak havoc and play around with the audience.

Playwright Martin McDonagh crafted a morbid masterpiece with his Tony-winning drama The Pillowman, which was covered in this column last year. If you thought he couldn't match the intensity of a show about an author of dreary children's stories whose grisly endings are replicated by a real-life murderer, think again. The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, which recently completed a four-and-a-half month run on Broadway, focuses on the fear and anxiety that spreads through a small Irish clan following the death of the cat of the one family member who happens to be a nasty local terrorist. The irony of a brutal killer who loses his marbles over the death of his closest furry friend is rich with irony and very black humor. The production features loud gunfights, hacked limbs, a blood splattered stage and an actual live feline.

The Tony Award-winning spectacle The Drowsy Chaperone features plenty of singing, dancing and vaudevillian sketches in the old school tradition, but it is also a funny sendup, and loving homage, of those conventions. Essentially the show takes place in the living room of a Broadway aficionado (Bob Martin) who tells the audience about how he likes to sit and listen to his favorite shows of yore, including The Drowsy Chaperone. As he plays the soundtrack on his turntable (remember those?), his living room is transformed into a Broadway stage (albeit with his furniture) as the 1920s story of a rich movie star whose impending marriage to a stranger (and its potentially disastrous consequences) plays out before him. During the show, which he is essentially recreating in his mind, our narrator watches and even interacts with the performance, even if the actors do not know he is there.

John Shivers is one of the busiest soundmen on Broadway, even though he's not frequently there. He was associate sound designer for Aida, The Producers, and Hairspray, the sound designer for 700 Sundays, In My Life, and the new Tarzan, and also productions of The Producers, Hairspray, and The Lion King around the country and across the globe. In fact, when he chatted with FOH recently about Tarzan, the newest Disney production to hit the Great White Way, he was getting ready to go to Shanghai to relocate the Australian production of The Lion King, then check on that same show in Hamburg and London, perform a preliminary survey for a Tarzan production in Holland, then fi nally do preliminary associate design work/research on Mary Poppins by visiting the running London production before opening it in New York later this year with sound designer Steve Kennedy.

It is actually surprising that the revival of Stephen Sondheim's classical musical Sweeney Todd, which stars Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone, was nominated for this year's Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical and won for Best Direction of a Musical for John Doyle and Best Orchestrations, done by Sarah Travis. It's not because the show is brooding and sinister, although that could be considered. After all, it tells the tale of a man who seeks revenge on the judge who unfairly imprisoned him, resulting in a bloody path of retribution via a barbershop that also leads to a reinvention of the idea of "mystery meat," thanks to a pie-making accomplice. But this unorthodox production, which features ten actors who also sing and play instruments and who often do not face each other during conversations, is unusually abstract for the Great White Way. The fact that it won two Tonys is an artistic triumph, and the fact that it continues to do well months after it opened is a testament to an audience that wants to see something dark, unusual and completely different than a huge production with lots of glitzy musical numbers.

Moody backdrops. Exotic locales. Brooding characters. Vicious vampires. They're all part of the dark drama that is Lestat, the musical inspired by the novels of Anne Rice and set to music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Despite its epic story, the production finds a balance between over-the-top showmanship and intimate performances. FOH engineer Simon Matthews juggles a lot of audio for Lestat, and he has been with the production since its preview run in San Francisco prior to its Broadway debut. Here he talks about the transformation of this horror tale, which includes classic Broadway numbers, a gothic showstopper ("To Kill Your Kind"), and even a New Orleans dance number.

I was wondering how Alice Walker's deeply poignant and deeply disturbing drama The Color Purple would be interpreted as a Broadway musical, especially at a time when so many literary and filmic adaptations are gratuitously brought to the Great White Way, but I was pleasantly surprised. The wellwritten show has a magnetic lead in LaChanze, a highly talented ensemble cast, and a score that spans African music, R&B and blues. And the multilayered story–on its most basic level, about a woman named Celie who struggles through life with an abusive, controlling husband after having grown up with an abusive, controlling father–is incredibly powerful.

One of the most dynamic theatre experiences in New York is Drumstruck. If you liked Stomp, you'll certainly enjoy this show, which features a South African troupe that plays drums, sings and educates the audience about their musical legacy and heritage. But there's a twist: Every audience member gets a hand drum to play along during many sequences. It's fun for attendees, but undoubtedly a challenge for live engineer Kevin Brubaker, not to mention sound designer Tom Morse, who helped Brubaker land his first gigs in New York.

One of the hottest tickets on Broadway is Jersey Boys, which tells the mostly-unknown behind-the-scenes story of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons; their rise from a working-class New Jersey town, where they were connected to the Mafi a, up through their staggering pop success and eventual dissolution. What's impressive are not just the dramatic performances, multiple set changes, live musicians and two-tiered stage with projections, but the quality of the lead actors' performances and their musical abilities. Audiences really buy them as the Four Seasons, and John Lloyd Young, making his Broadway debut as Frankie Valli, brings down the house every night.

While the movie industry claimed it was in a slump (not factoring in mega DVD sales) and the music industry was hurting, Broadway had its best year on record in 2005, raking in more than $825 million in ticket sales, a whopping 10% over the previous year. In fact, according to Broadway.com, the week ending Jan. 1 was the best ever in the history of the Great White Way, with $25.2 million in gross sales and an average capacity of 93.9%. No wonder Hollywood brought out big-screen adaptations of Rent and The Producers (which, ironically, was a movie in the first place).