PAPA'S GOT A BRAND-NEW BAG Idina Menzel stars in "Skintight" as a divorced lawyer who comes home to find her father living with a 20-year-old man with an Oklahoma accent and a great body.
LIKE A LOT OF THEATERGOERS, I first saw the spectacular Idina Menzel when she ensemble-starred in "Rent" in 1996 and brought down the house with her big number "Over the Moon." (Cher was in the audience that night and didn't get up at intermission.) Now Menzel is playing a 40-something divorcée visiting her rich father and dealing with his big surprise. He's living with a 20-year-old boy who likes to wander around the family's elegant Horatio Street townhouse in his jockstrap.
OVER THE MOON Menzel in "Rent," which opened at the Nederlander Theater in 1996. The video is from a 10th-anniversary cast concert.
Menzel is 47 in real life now, and she's done a lot: Won a Tony Award (for "Wicked" on top of her two other nominations (for "Rent" and "If/Then"). Immortalized her rich mezzo-soprano, performing "Let It Go" as Elsa's voice in the hit animated movie "Frozen." Been married twice (she and Taye Diggs divorced in 2014; her second husband is Aaron Lohr) and had a son.
This Roundabout Theater production, at the Laura Pels, is her first big non-singing stage role. But, as one critic wrote with tongue in cheek, you can't really call "Skintight" a straight play.
Because two, maybe three, of the four main characters are not straight. Get it?
JOCKSTRAP CHIC Jodi (Menzel) at her father's home with her son, Benjamin (Eli Gelb), and her father's new boy toy, Trey (Will Brittain), in a scene from "Skintight."
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THE PLOT: DADDY! I'M HOME!
Jodi Isaac (Menzel) claims to have flown from Los Angeles to New York as a happy 70th-birthday surprise for her father, Elliot (Jack Wetherall), a world-famous, deeply botoxed fashion designer whose Greenwich Village townhouse looks as if it had been interior-designed by Calvin Klein. But Jodi has selfish reasons for the trip too.
THREE GENERATIONS From left, Jack Wetherall as a fashion designer ; Menzel as his daughter, whose ex-husband is marrying a much younger woman; and Gelb as her son, who wishes he were anywhere else.
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Back in Los Angeles, her 50-year-old ex-husband is marrying a 24-year-old, and she didn't want to be in town for the engagement party. "What do they even talk about?" Jodi asks rhetorically about the May-December couple. She appeals to her father: "There's got to be more to life than sex with a hot young thing."
BODY LANGUAGE If you need a hug and can't get one, give one. Gelb and Menzel share a mother-son moment. Costumes by Jess Goldstein.
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Jodi needs to feel surrounded by love right now. Unfortunately, her rich, famous, self-involved father, whose ego seems to be a clone of Donald Trump's, isn't good at that sort of thing. (When he visited Hungary, the country his Jewish forebears fled not that long ago, the only thing that impressed him was the huge crowd at his store opening.)
It doesn't surprise Jodi that her father is sleeping with a man. She's known, since her parents' divorce, that Elliot is gay. But this new boy, Trey (Will Brittain), is different; he insists on describing himself as Elliot's partner ("Daddy cycles through boys pretty fast," Jodi warns him) and seems to think he owns the place. He's also clearly an idiot. And he's rude to the servants.
THE SERVANTS, YOU SAY?
You don't see a lot of maid and butler humor in 21st-century theater. In Shakespeare's day, the joke was that servants were inherently stupid, lazy or both. By the mid-20th century, the new consensus was that the people downstairs were often wiser than their employers, and that was funny. Joshua Harmon's script finds laughs in the staff's stoicism in the face of ridiculous treatment.
BROADWAY BABY Cynthia Mace, who plays the maid.
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Poor Orsolya (Cynthia Mace), the Hungarian-born maid, doesn't complain about carrying Jodi's suitcase up the steep, stark, contemporary staircase. Or about carrying the enormous suitcase of Jodi's son Benjamin (Eli Gelb) to the fourth-floor guest room. Or bringing it all back down when Benjamin confesses that his luggage is mostly full of dirty laundry. Would Orsolya mind? Of course she wouldn't.
The chic youngish manservant, Jeff (Stephen Carrasco), who doesn't pick up anything heavier than a cocktail tray, takes deadpan stoneface to glorious new heights. Even when stupid Trey barks at him and complains that Jeff hasn't put a coaster under Trey's Diet Coke. The characterization gives us bonus texture, because Jeff's voice and demeanor are a lot like Emory's in "The Boys in the Band" -- if Elsa in "Frozen" had covered him in ice.
There's another staff member, Antony, but he is never seen.
NO GOOD REUNION GOES UNPUNISHED
Jodi has forced Benjamin, a.k.a. Ben, a.k.a. Benji, to come to New York, even though Grandpa Elliot has virtually no interest in the boy, who has been studying abroad, and the feeling is mutual. Gelb plays Ben as a lovably awkward blend of general schlub and entitled trust-fund kid.
Ben has nothing but disdain for the clueless Trey. After all, the guy had never heard the term "studying abroad" before, didn't know what Yiddish was and calls the boats he saw in Venice gon-DO-las. Still -- when Jodi goes upstairs to bed, because she's feeling a little creepy, inches away from Trey's bare ass-cheeks on the sofa, and Ben decides to stay with Trey to watch TV -- it's worrisome.
The next thing you know, the two 20-year-old men are making a motorcycle-riding date. Obvious explanation? Even a sophisticated gay man like Ben can't ignore those pecs, those biceps, those abs, those glutes! (Gluts?)
But wait. While the guys are talking about their world travels (Trey's are limited to the last two years, since he hooked up with Elliot), Trey mentions how impressed he was by one piece of art, Michelangelo's "David," which he saw in Florence. It wasn't just him, he insists; other people couldn't take their eyes off the statue either.
"There's this long hallway, and you can see their faces change as they get closer," Trey recalls. "Like there's something in their bones or something, like they can't walk away, 'cause they can't deny the power."
So maybe this hillbilly, as Jodi and Ben see him, has the capacity to appreciate art? Maybe, if he and Elliot stay together and he's exposed to a broader world, he'll grow into a sensitive, intelligent, insightful human being?
REASONS TO BE PRETTY
Or maybe this is all just part of Joshua Harmon's theme here: Physical beauty is the only thing that matters, no matter what you try to tell yourself.
I'm a definite Harmon fan. Sadly, I missed his "Bad Jews," but I was very taken with "Significant Other," and I loved "Admissions." In his 30s he's already a star student of human motivations and behavior.
If the message hadn't been right on the "Skintight" Playbill cover, though, I might have forgotten it. Until Elliot, near the end of Act II, launched into a four-minute-or-so speech about why being hot is the only important thing in the world.
In short, he feels old. He's convinced he smells the stench of approaching death on his own person. But waking up next to a young, beautiful body makes him feel much better. In fact, physical beauty here is synonymous with youth. (One does acknowledge a strong correlation, but they're not exactly the same thing.)
O YOUTH AND BEAUTY! Daniel Aukin, the diretor, and Joshua Harmon, the playwright, when they worked together earlier, on "Bad Jews."
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If Jodi doesn't quite understand or agree with her father's point of view, there may be a gender distinction at work. No 70-year-old woman, finding herself naked in bed with a handsome movie star in his 20s, would believe that proximity rendered her younger and more desirable. Not to stereotype here, but at least some women I know would be looking at their own veiny, thinning skin and sagging body parts and just comparing themselves unfavorably with their young partner.
Men -- O.K., some men -- still seem to define themselves by what they have, by what they "own," rather than who and what they are. So a rich male in his 80s, even one with a skeletal frame covered in liver spots, may be under the illusion that having a young, beautiful woman on his arm (and in his bed) turns back the clock for him too.
DOES THIS BLONDE MAKE ME LOOK YOUNG? The oil multimillionaire J. Howard Marshall with his third wife, Anna Nicole Smith. She was 62 years his junior. Marshall died a year after their marriage.
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Youthful energy is like a drug, it's true. You can admire it and you can bask in it, but you can't steal it, unless you're a vampire. And even if Harmon's message, that youth and beauty are all that matter, is valid, what on earth are theatergoers to do with that?
The bottom line: Get thee to the gym. And to the cosmetic surgeon. But if you're already over 25, it won't really help.
IN LOVE The "Skintight" set, by Lauren Helpern, represents a four-story Greenwich Village townhouse owned by a fashion designer who appreciates beauty in many forms.
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NOTE: There's no "In Love With the Set" feature on Press Nights this month, because this one would have been the choice. Granted, any man who has just bought his boyfriend a $450,000 Rolex could probably afford to install a discreet elevator, but don't blame the Lortel Award-winning designer, Lauren Helpern. The playwright really wanted the stairs.
"Skintight," Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Theater Center, 111 West 46th Street; 212-719-1300, roundabout theatre.org. 2 hours 20 minutes. Limited run: June 21 - Aug. 26, 2018.