PLANNING A BRUNCH ON THEIR OWN BEHALF …. Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald — clockwise from top left — join voices in a special pandemic version of “Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s seminal 1970 musical.
IT WAS THAT KIND of year. In mid-March, theater shut down in New York and in Washington and just about everywhere. Just for a few weeks, they said at first. Then: Just for a few months. And now we’re beginning a new year, hoping for a round of opening nights in the summer. Please!
Luckily, in 2020, streaming, star power and general innovation helped get us through the nights. Peter Marks, theater critic of The Washington Post, published his top 10 list— with nine items — on Dec. 9, 2020. He later added a No. 10 but still won’t name it.
(1) SONDHEIM’S BIRTHDAY CONCERT
Peter Marks made this event The Washington Post’s No. 1 choice, and we couldn’t agree more. On April 26 (one month and four days after Stephen Sondheim’s real 90thbirthday), a bevy of Broadway stars got together and presented a live-streaming concert for the man of the hour. “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90thCelebration” gave us an evening of Sondheim compositions and guest stars including Patti LuPone, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kelli O’Hara, Bernadette Peters and Brian Stokes Mitchell. One of the highlights was “Ladies Who Lunch,” the paean from “Company” to women whose lives are missing something.. Meryl Streep, Audra McDonald and Christine Baranski starred, showing us that if you want to drown your sorrows with midday booze, grilled fish and your BFFs, you may have to do it from home – in your white terrycloth robe. The concert was a benefit for Artists Striving to End Poverty (ASTEP).
(2) “YOU CAN’T STOP THE BEAT”
“You Can’t Stop the Beat” is the infectious, relentlessly optimistic finale of the musical “Hairspray” and has been since the show opened to giddy reviews in 2002. In May, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman turned it into a music video with a cast of – hundreds. A benefit for the Actors Fund.
(3) MARY NEELY
Sometimes, in the middle of a crisis, a relatively unknown 29-year-old actress (-writer-director-editor) in Los Angeles steps up. Neely really missed Broadway musicals, so she fought the lockdown by filming and starring in her own series of classic numbers. She posted them on Twitter and saved thousands of emotional lives in the process. She was lip-synching, but she went all out with costumes and wigs. In “A Heart Full of Love,” from “Les Misérables,” for instance, she played both Marius and Cosette.
(4) GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE
Just a highly respected Los Angeles theater until this past year, when Marks declared it “the hottest digital theater company in the land.” Projects like the web series “The Geffen Stayhouse” made a huge difference.
HAPPY HOUR, 1770s STYLE From left, Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos and Lin-Manuel Miranda in the big tavern scene in the filmed version of “Hamilton,” streaming on Disney Plus.
(5) “HAMILTON” STREAMING
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the Revolutionary War, love and politics seemed to defy all the rules. But when Broadway shut down, so did it. Miranda and the Broadway cast had filmed the show – in the theater, on two different nights in 2016 – planning to turn it into a theatrically released feature film.. As a lifesaving gesture, Miranda and Disney Plus offered it up as a streaming production. Not only could you actually get tickets — with great views of the “stage” — but the most you’d end up paying was $6.99 a month for a Disney Plus subscription. The high point? Opinions differ, but it doesn’t get much better than “The Greatest City in the World.” Or “The Room Where It Happens.” Not to mention “It’s Quiet Uptown,” “What’d I Miss?” and King George III’s misguided ballad of entitlement “You’ll Be Back.” Immigrants – they get the job done.
(6) “TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD” AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
I have some reservations about Aaron Sorkin’s version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which he brought to Broadway with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch, a white Depression-era Alabama lawyer with a social conscience. But the decision to perform the show free, for one day only (Feb. 26), to roughly 18,000 New York City public school students was a slice of heaven. It was two years after the Broadway opening, and Atticus was now played by Ed Harris.
YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? Joaquina Kalukango and Paul Alexander Nolan in “Slave Play” at the John Golden Theater. Kalukango grabbed one of the production’s 12 Tony Award nominations.
(7) “SLAVE PLAY” AND THE TONYS
Let’s start with a spoiler alert. Don’t read the next sentence if you don’t want to know: Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” exists on two levels. In the 19th-century scenes that we see taking place between black and white adults, the enslaved and their masters. And in the present, when we learn that these “actors” are our 21st-century peers in a psychological workshop to help them deal with the complexities of interracial relationships.
NOW start reading again: “Slave Play” actually opened in October 2019 but ran into the third week of January 2020. And it’s been nominated for a solid dozen 2020 Tony Awards (should they ever be awarded – we’ve been waiting for almost three months for a date), including best play.
(8) “THE AMEN CORNER”
James Baldwin’s 1950s gospel play, about a black female minister in Harlem, doesn’t get revived that often, but Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington did it in February last year.
(9) “NEXT TO NORMAL” KENNEDY CENTER REVIVAL.
A musical about a manic-depressive wife and mom may have sounded unlikely a little over a decade ago, but “Next to Normal” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2008. In January 2020, Marks was swept away by this production, part of Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage series, starring Rachel Bay Jones and Brandon Victor Dixon. He described it as a story of the “ups and downs of a mind wrestling with its own defective circuitry” and praised it as “a musical of extraordinary ambition.”
(10) UNNAMED (THIS ONE WAS LEFT BLANK AT FIRST)
Marks calls Item No. 10 the Tomb of the Unnamed Production. All we know is that he’d just seen it in March (in a late preview, obviously) and had just written the review when word came that the show wasn’t going to open after all, at least not right away. Theater as we knew it was shutting down – for a while. Now which shows were just about to open last March? “Diana”? “Mrs. Doubtfire”? “The Lehman Trilogy”? We’ll find out soon. Thank God.