Star-Crossed Revivals

“We’re looking at movie stars! My God, it’s so exciting,” the sixty-year-old man in the seat next to mine exclaimed to his wife. Precisely. In today’s theatrical environment, to revive a play on Broadway seems to require movie stars, or at least television stars, to create the excitement. To become bankable on Broadway, a classic play itself is not enough, and arguably not even required. What counts is to include two or three actors whose first appearance will be interrupted by applause from groundlings so delighted to see a face familiarized by the mass media they cannot contain themselves until the familiar face has spoken a line or done anything specifically deserving of applause on this occasion.

The first-entrance applause phenomenon has been deplored for years by various Broadway reviewers, but it is especially wince-worthy when the initial applause is much greater for actors whose previous service to the legitimate stage is minor or even nonexistent than it is for their colleagues who are true thespians. This kind of applause is a shout-out by the theatrically unsophisticated to the performers who make them feel safe. And it’s a shout-out over the heads of the more knowing audience members. It seems so unnecessary: does Broadway really intimidate the uninitiated to that extent?

Of course, when mass-media gods and goddesses deign to tread the boards on the White Way, they necessarily bring a kind of economic scarcity with them. They all have shooting schedules that will enable them to play thespian for only a short while, so the runs are almost always time-limited. A hit musical, by contrast, will just wheel in a new cast member or three when original contracts expire; for a play whose drawing power is pretty much limited to the marquee names in the original cast, however, the window of opportunity closes when, in short order, that original cast becomes unavailable. And that in turn will mean three- or four-month runs, and a concomitant investor pressure to make the money back through higher ticket prices. Investors, like the rest of us, can only make hay while the sun shineth.

This is not a good thing. By any earlier standard, the cost of admission is thereby forced too high. Economists might differ, because almost every seat was filled at the three shows I am about to discuss, and clearly willing buyers and sellers were present at the transaction over each seat. Call me an adherent of medieval just-price theory if you like, or acknowledge with me that this expensive dependence upon mass-media stars has driven out the sorts of productions that might have been viable if career Broadway actors were more consistently recruited as leads. What survives the new marketplace realities may well be enjoyable, but it tempts directors to under-direct and dumbs down audiences.

I cannot even honestly say that I enjoyed the revival of The Heiress with Jessica Chastain, Dan Stevens, and David Strathairn. Chastain, fresh from her triumphs in The Help, Zero Dark Thirty, and Mama, is a Hollywood star par excellence. She brings a watchful intelligence and an ability to command the attention while saying little, that remind one of the early Clint Eastwood. But even with her initial training at Juilliard, she is not a stage actress, or at least was not directed like one. As the titular heroine, she seemed to have but one trick responsive to the challenges of the script, which calls for her character to alternate between reticence and disclosure: she drops her voice a few pitches and projects languidly but loudly when required to move from the former to the latter. But the script expects more, a heroine whose reticence conceals a secret life, and whose occasional loquaciousness bespeaks more than a truculent willingness to surprise listeners who did not credit the character with depth of feeling. This one trick cannot convey all that.

Not that the script would provide much to work with even if the central figure had been cast with a more robustly theatrical actress. Adapted in 1948 from...