Broadway Bound, at MTC's Biltmore Theatre
When the Manhattan Theatre Club gets things right, memorable theatre is the inevitable result. But because I didn't care for The Loman Family Picnic, Donald Margulies's 1989 play, my expectations for Broadway Boy, which augured to mine the same territory, were not high. The identity crises of Brooklyn Jews who have grown up to be successful aliens to home base have if anything been overexposed on Broadway in the past ten or fifteen years. (Why, wasn't there a touch of this in Sight Unseen, the Craig Lucas play that MTC revived last season?) But Mr Margulies has reinvented the genre. His hero, Eric Weiss, isn't having the identity crisis. Everybody else is. The switch makes for a very funny play. Along the way, we watch a horror show, as the full horror of America's reading habits are only slightly exaggerated. To this base, add perfect casting and perfect everything else, and you've got a hit. Ralph Funicello's set, centered on the façade of a city walkup that was almost always in the background, was fluid and minimal but always convincing; I always felt that the spaces were real (as I never quite did while watching Democracy earlier this year, right across the street). Chris Parry's score contributed to a melancholy that you didn't really notice until it was replaced with a Hollywood glare in the penultimate scene. Jess Goldstein's modest, self-effacing costumes were spot on. Michael Roth's music established a somewhat sombre background that was the perfect foil to the play's humor. I kept wondering if the play would follow Doubt to Broadway, but, with a production directed by Daniel Sullivan at MTC's Biltmore Theatre, Broadway Boy is already on Broadway.
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