KING KONG
Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway (between 52nd and 53rd Streets), kingkongbroadway.com. 2 hours 30 minutes. Open run.
APE STATS The true star of “King Kong” is, of course, the animatronic title character. Height: 20 feet.
“A STUDY IN MOOD disorder.” “Overwrought, out-of-place choreography.” “Tacked-on, artificial uplift.” And that was just one review (The New York Post’s).
O.K., let’s get the bad part over with. As numerous reviews have suggested, “King Kong” is a terrible musical. The ape, however, is spectacular
NOT MUCH TO DANCE ABOUT Christiani Pitts as Ann Darrow, an aspiring actress arriving in 1930s New York.
And not just in a special effects way. But in that best of possible combinations — special effects used to convey emotion to a higher power than a mere mortal could — like some of the remarkable work in the film “Titanic” two decades ago.
You can see Kong’s wires, his strings and his handlers putting him through his paces. But it doesn’t matter. There is so much emotion in this creature. It’s (obviously) all an illusion of posture, head tilts, sounds, but it’s also devastatingly effective. Whatever pathos and heart you may have seen in the “King Kong” movies, from 1933 onward, that was mostly in your head. This isn’t.
There is not a single affecting musical number in all two and a half hours of this show. Some pleasant generic numbers, but that’s all. Christiani Pitts, who plays Ann Darrow, sings her heart out, but it means nothing. Kong’s growls, in various combinations of mournfulness and threat, call up far more emotion.
YOU’VE GOT DESPERATION — I MEAN, TALENT — WRITTEN ALL OVER YOU, KID! The filmmaker (Eric William Morris) with Pitts.
Characterizations are flat. Ann is good because she feels, recognizes, responds to Kong’s heart and soul — and she’s modern because she’d rather roar back at the giant animal than scream at his appearance. Carl (Eric William Morris), the director, is 100 percent bad guy. He pretends to have saved Ann’s life, but he only happened upon her in the process of deciding and trying to capture Kong.
BEAST MEETS BEAUTY The original movie Kong admires Ann Darrow.
My press-nights guest, SS, shared his opinion as we edged our way up the aisle at the Broadway Theater: They shouldn’t have done a musical at all; it would have been better as a play. My thought was that it should have been done as a better musical. I loved the Depression-era New York City sets, but the dance numbers never connected with them. There’s a nice distancing at the beginning — oh, look at how funny and naive people were about promotion and business 80 years ago.
THE LOOK OF LOVE Pitts and Kong in their classic pose.
Jack Thorn, who did the Harry Potter plays last season, wrote the book. The music is by Marius de Vries, with songs by Eddie Perfect; Drew McOnie directed and choreographed.
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AMERICAN SON
Booth Theater, 222 West 45th Street,Theater District, americansonplay.com. 1 hour 30 minutes (no intermission). Limited run: Closes on Jan. 27, 2019.
WAITING-ROOM ANGST Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale as an estranged couple whose teenage son is missing.
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SHE’S A PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR. HE’S an F.B.I. agent. She’s black. He’s white. Their marriage didn’t work out, but they’re together again tonight — in the waiting room of a Florida police station — because their teenage son has gone missing.
The New York Times review admitted right up front that “American Son” was far from subtle. “It barely feels like a play at all,” Jesse Green wrote. “With its unrelentingly high tension on every level — maternal, marital, societal — it’s more like a slice of a nightmare.”
‘NO AMERICAN DREAM FOR US’ Washington, Pasquale and Eugene Lee, who plays a police lieutenant.
Then he devoted paragraphs to praising Washington’s heartbreaking performance. I second that motion. I also want to praise Eugene Lee’s performance as John Stokes, the veteran police lieutenant. Stokes, who is black, has only two scenes, but both are monumental. Here is a man who knows what he thinks and knows how to say it, and if the truth is god-awful, then there’s nothing to be done. The kind of man who would (and does) say to Kendra (Washington), “For us, there ain’t no American dream.”
The missing boy-man (he’s 18) is Jamal, and Scott (Pasquale) considers himself the most open-minded of men to have agreed to such an African name for his son. Jamal has spent the last few years at a very expensive prep school, where he was one of only three black students. Since his parents’ split, Jamal has felt a little lost — and a little angry. His car, a gift from his father, now bears a bumper sticker that says “Shoot cops” in large letters, with the explanation about “with cameraphones” during “traffic stops” in much smaller type.
POWER PLAY Washington, Pasquale and Jeremy Jordan’s characters differ on how information should be shared.
“AMERICAN SON” IS ROUGHLY 90 minutes of this couple’s waiting and fretting and begging for information, hoping for the best but — at least in Washington’s case, at least on some level — knowing not to be terribly hopeful. Paul Larkin (Jeremy Jordan), the young cop on duty, appears to be a nice guy who just wants to maintain respect for his job and the force, but when Scott arrives at the station and Paul mistakes him for the senior officer he was expecting, he jokes that Kendra “went from zero to ghetto in nothing flat.” Oops.
The director is Kenny Leon, who won the 2014 Tony for directing “A Raisin in the Sun.” The playwright is Christopher Demos-Brown, making his Broadway debut. The set is by the gloriously talented Derek McLane, and it’s certainly one of the most glamorous police stations i’ve ever seen. At first, I thought surely we were in Kendra’s home. But the floor-to-ceiling windows do allow us to see as well as hear the middle-of-the-night rainstorm. Nature comments on humanity. The word “torrential” comes to mind.
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THE NEW ONE
Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, Theater District, thenewone.com. 1 hour 30 minutes (no intermission). Limited run: Closes on Jan. 20, 2019.
THE SHOW BEGINS WITH a long talk about Mike Birbiglia’s couch — “a bed that hugs you.” Then, finally, he gets to the having-children question. “I’ve lost a lot of great friends to kids,.” Birbiglia says. When he becomes a parent and needs to fill the role of dispenser of wisdom, he doesn’t feel quite up to the task, confessing, “I’m not 100 percent sure why it rains.”
MANHATTAN TRANSFER Mike Birbiglia in the Off Broadway production of “The New One” this summer.
Parenthood strikes like a tidal wave: “And then we bring home this monkey, and then she wouldn’t sleep for a year.” Birbiglia soon realizes he has been demoted in the family hierarchy: “You’re this pudgy, milkless vice president of the company.” At least there’s Mazzie the cat.
GREAT WHITE WAY Birbiglia in the Broadway production.
Mike Birbiglia has done a bunch of other stuff and been very funny, When he did “The New One” Off Broadway this summer, at the Cherry Lane Theater, Alexis Soloski, writing in The New York Times, was not consistently amused:
“The first hour, about his wife and cat and brother and vascular repair, is gorgeous, just the right amount of wrong”
SOURCE MATERIAL Birbiglia, wife and daughter.
.”The testicle jokes?” Soloski continued. “They kill. But once Mr. Birbiglia actually has a kid, most of what makes him so immensely appealing — his acuity, his empathy — goes down for a nap.”
The Times liked the Broadway version from beginning to end. Seth Barrish is the director.
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