'PICTURES FROM HOME' & 'DEAR WORLD:' Here's To The Actors

Sometimes in the theater, you just want to watch the actors work. The play is not the thing. The work is. Actorly craftsmanship — call it artistry, in an artisan’s sense — is what keeps you in your seat. It isn’t that the play being performed is lousy, necessarily, it just isn’t as engrossing as the folks acting it.

I’ve had two theatrical outings along these lines lately and I wouldn’t have missed either. One was a new drama: Pictures from Home, the other, an old musical: Dear World at Encores.

I’m a fan of the playwright Sharr White, whose play, The True, about political chicanery in Albany, New York, I especially enjoyed when it was mounted by The New Group in 2018. White has fashioned Pictures from Home out of an award-winning photography book of the same name; a 1992 “photo memoir” by the late-Larry Sultan. Sultan spent a decade, beginning in 1982, returning repeatedly to his childhood home in the San Fernando Valley to photograph his aging parents, candidly and in images eerily restaged from family photographs.

The book broke new ground as a work of art. Pictures from Home does not, though it is populated by the same Sultans — father, mother and son — with Larry Sultan’s character serving also as narrator, telling the story of his parents and his pictures to us directly. This self-conscious breaching of the fourth-wall — such a contrast to the brute realism of The True — is here just clunky and off-putting. Actor Danny Burstein plays Sultan at a winsomely ingratiating pitch, appealing to the audience for approval shamelessly — at whose direction, the playwright’s, or director Bartlett Sher’s? I do not know. Burstein works like hell to overcome the obsequiousness of it all. I appreciated the effort.

Nathan Lane and Zoë Wannamaker, on the other hand, transcend actorly effort, inhabiting their somewhat opaque parental characters with sublime transparency. Neither is overtly loveable, which I loved. Each plays off the other in a duel of opposites. Where Wannamaker is stoic and earthy, Lane is edgy and splenetic. They remain, needless to say, theatrical treasures — Lane, still a comedic wonder, nailing punchlines that are often barely there, as written; Wannamaker matching him without breaking a sweat. Together, they mine laughter from roles that are a minefield of discontent and resentment. Out of this laughter, an unexpected current of love emerges, as only a family can contort it. And a great photographer can capture it. And great actors can act the hell out of it.

As for Dear World, it was a musical in conflict with itself when it first opened and flopped in 1969, and that conflict was not resolved by its brief revival at Encores. The contradiction is stylistic. As a musical adaptation of The Madwoman of Chaillot, Jean Giraudoux’s wartime play about madness and authority, Dear World emphasizes the concertina-drenched, misty music of the Parisian streets and cabarets. Wistfulness and rue are the rule. Dear World’s fundamental narrative, however, as adapted from The Madwoman of Chaillot by book writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee,  is all about oil and the venal capitalists venturing to capitalize on it. Corruption and environmental annihilation are the subjects of Dear World, comically confronted by the righteous Madwoman and her fellow mad women of Paris, leading to the ultimate triumph of love, art and, above all, nostalgia over murderous modernism.

Brecht and Weil would have slashed and burned with this deliciously nasty story. Instead we have a Jerry Herman score as winsome as Danny Burstein’s narration in Pictures from Home, and as derivative of other upbeat Jerry Herman scores as only a Jerry Herman score can be.

This inherent conflict does not deprive Dear World of pleasures altogether. The music, mismatched though it may be, is often quite pretty. Jerry Herman could surely write a fetching melody, and a catchy march. The apocalyptic ecological shenanigans also make the show far more relevant right now than it has any right to be.

What the Encores production really offered, though — as Encores productions usually do, thankfully — was a cast of superb actors at work, resuscitating the theatrically deceased.

What a joy they were to watch and hear — a parade of players who should be performing always, somewhere, and I guess usually are. Christopher Fitzgerald and Brooks Ashmanskas, Ann Harada and Andréa Burns delivered varying shades of perfectly honed daffiness, while singing superbly.  Kody Jauron, as the inevitable Marcel Marceau-like mime figure, danced eloquently and mimed to the outer threshold limit of anyone’s patience for mimery. Young Samantha Williams and Phillip Johnson Richardson belted beautifully. And the eternal Donna Murphy, as the Madwoman herself — even with script in hand, after losing most of her rehearsal time to a Covid bout — reminded all present how a true musical star commands a stage and drives a musical to the peak of its possibilities.

I gotta say that the pandemic shutdown on Broadway made me miss Broadway actors even more than shows. I don’t take their return for granted, even now, so many months on. They give us everything.