Theater Roundup: 'Chaplin' on Broadway; Shepard and Fugard at the Signature

Chaplin: The Musical

Music and lyrics by Christopher Curtis; book by Curtis and Thomas Meehan 
Directed by Warren Carlyle
With Rob McClure, Jenn Colella, Erin Mackey, Michael McCormick, Christiane Noll, Zachary Unger

Performances began August 21, 2012; opened September 10

Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47^th Street

chaplinbroadway.com

Heartless

Written by Sam Shepard; directed by Daniel Aukin
With Jenny Bacon, Gary Cole, Betty Gilpin, Julianne Nicholson, Lois Smith

Performances began August 7, 2012; opened on August 28; closes September 30

Signature Theatre Company, 480 West 42^nd Street

signaturetheatre.org

The Train Driver

Written and directed by Athol Fugard
With Leon Addison Brown, Ritchie Coster

Performances began August 14, 2012; opened on September 9; closes September 23

Signature Theatre Company, 480 West 42^nd Street

signaturetheatre.org

McClure in Chaplin: The Musical (photo: Joan Marcus)

The makers of Chaplin: The Musical have some pretty big shoes to fill. No, I'm not talking about Richard Attenborough's 1992 biopic Chaplin, which garnered raves for its star Robert Downey Jr, even though the stage show shares similarities with that equally earnest and fitfully entertaining enterprise. No, I mean Charlie Chaplin himself: can one of the greatest and most beloved artists of the 20^th century get his due in a 2-1/2 hour Broadway musical? The answer is obviously not, but there are compensations.

Christopher Curtis and Thomas Meehan's book tracks Charlie's entire career as one long mommy issue as he tries to atone for his mother's' fall from grace—after her drunk husband left her, she raised Charlie and brother Sydney alone while failing to make her London music hall career work, finally succumbing to mental illness. There are numerous, and predictable, flashbacks to Charlie's reminiscences of his mum that he interpolates into his films. Some of this is well handled, but after awhile, Mum and young Charlie's repeated returns end up far sappier than the unapologetically sentimental Chaplin ever was in his films.

The same goes for Curtis's lyrics and music, which combine for pleasant songs that are neither embarrassments nor an embarrassment of riches. Sorely missing, of course, is Chaplin's memorable music for his movies (he won an Oscar for his Limelight score): his immortal tear-jerking ballad “Smile,” for example, blows Curtis's score out of the water, but there are faint nods to its graceful melody buried in the orchestral arrangements, which will bring a smile to those who recognize it.

Chaplin's serviceable music and melodramatic plot are outdone by the show's stage trappings. Director-choreographer Warren Carlyle never ceases to be clever, especially in his use of Beowulf Boritt's black, white and grey sets that visualize Chaplin's movie artistry: the lone time there's bright color—a literal red carpet for Charlie's return to the States in 1972 for an honorary Oscar after two decades of exile following accusations of him being a Communist—works effectively if blatantly. Also coming up aces are Amy Clark and Martin Pakledinaz's period costumes and Ken Billington's pinpoint lighting, which provide more allusions to Chaplin classics The Circus, The Gold Rush, Modern Times and his still potent Hitler satire, The Great Dictator.

The actresses playing the women in Charlie's life—Christiane Noll as his mom, Jenn Colella as Hedda Hopper, who spearheaded the campaign against Communist Charlie, and Erin Mackey as Oona O'Neill, his last wife of 34 years and mother of 8 of his children—are excellent, while Zachary Ungar is an astonishingly poised young Charlie. As the star, Rob McClure makes a marvelous Broadway leading-man debut; like Downey in Attenborough's movie, McClure never merely apes or caricatures the great one, but rather hints at his artistry with dexterous physical agility and disarming charm. He can sing too;despite its many flaws, so does Chaplin.

Bacon and Nicholson in Heartless (photo: Joan Marcus)

As the Signature Theatre Company ends its first season at its new, multi-stage space on 42^nd Street near 10^th Avenue in Manhattan, two plays by veteran playwrights who are no strangers to the Signature are having their local premieres. Too bad both are pale imitations of their more powerful, earlier works.

Sam Shepard returns with Heartless, which in many ways seems a sketchy blueprint for a more complex character study. In the Hollywood Hills, wheelchair-bound Mable and her daughters—antagonistic Sally, who had a heart transplant when younger, and introspective Lucy, who seems jealous of Sally's “specialness”—deal with many skeletons in their family closet, which all come tumbling out in the poetic (or, in this case, pseudo-poetic) dialogues that are Shepard's forte.

Shepard has a harder time of it with the play's other two characters: 65-year-old former hippie turned moviemaker Roscoe, who is Sally's new boyfriend but ends up leaving, improbably, with Lucy; and Elizabeth, the young nurse taking care of Mable, who is so symbolically contradictory that even in such a bizarre context she makes no literal or figurative sense.

Heartless is filled with obvious symbols and metaphors, starting with its clunky title; too bad there's not one character, no matter how idiosyncratic, that's worth spending two hours of stage time on. The actors—particulary blustery Lois Smith as Mable and touching Julianne Nicholson as Sally—smooth over some of the script's rough patches, but director Daniel Aukin is unable to get a handle on Shepard's arbitrary surrealism, something which Eugene Lee's spare set does a better job with. Shepard hasn't written a first-rate play since A Lie of the Mind more than a quarter century ago; his Heartless has little pulse.

Brown and Coster in The Train Driver (photo: Richard Termine)

When apartheid raged in South Africa, Athol Fugard was a voice in the wilderness, writing humane plays that took the measure of how people against all odds lived under such an oppressive regime. But post-apartheid, Fugard's plays no longer have such political and personal urgency, as his more recent work shows.

His latest to come to New York, The Train Driver, is 90 minutes of speechifying and cardboard characterization. We are in familiar Fugard land: in contemporary South Africa, an elderly black grave digger in a squatter's village, Simon, is met by a white man, Roelf, looking for the graves of an unnamed young woman and her baby. It turns out that he was the engineer of a train in front of which she threw herself and her baby, which pulverized them instantly.

The intermissionless drama, which Fugard frugally directs on Christopher H. Barreca's hard-scrabble set of dirt mounds and post-apocalyptic touches like a burnt-out car and tin roof shack where Simon resides, is static to the point of monotony. And, despite the best efforts of Leon Addison Brown (Simon) and Ritchie Coster (Roelf), who give Fugard's grandstanding speeches as much humanity as possible, The Train Driver nearly goes off the rails.

Chaplin: The Musical

Performances began August 21, 2012; opened September 10

Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47^th Street

http://chaplinbroadway.com

Heartless

Performances began August 7, 2012; opened on August 28; closes September 30

Signature Theatre Company, 480 West 42^nd Street

http://signaturetheatre.org

The Train Driver

Performances began August 14, 2012; opened on September 9; closes September 23

Signature Theatre Company, 480 West 42^nd Street

http://signaturetheatre.org