Theater Review

Stereo Types

Even in its most comedic passages, Raisin is about real characters in genuine conflict; Beneatha, too, faces a choice, between two very different suitors. We can empathize with these problems. To be sure, if Stoppard’s play were better (as some of his are), the difference might not matter so much. Hansberry’s play isn’t perfect either; it is not art, merely adroit boulevard drama that pushes all the right buttons.

The current productions of both plays tend to highlight their strengths and weaknesses without solving any inherent problems. Jumpers is gaudily overdirected by David Leveaux, with Vicki Mortimer’s set—part Art Deco, part techno-modern—tawdry and obtrusive. Dotty’s frequent changes of Nicky Gillibrand’s garish costumes don’t help either. Especially damaging is the George of Simon Russell Beale, the most charmless prominent actor of the anglophone stage, often unintelligible in his rattled-off, guttural delivery. But Essie Davis (Dotty), Nicky Henson (Archie), Nicholas Woodeson (Bones), John Rogan as a philosophical janitor, and Eliza Lumley as the secretary who swings but never speaks do very nicely, as do the acrobats and the onstage band.

Under Kenny Leon’s meat-and-potatoes direction, all the principals in Raisin—Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan, and young Alexander Mitchell—do admirably. As for Sean Combs as Walter Lee, his eyes widen a bit too readily, his limbs are so loose as to threaten flying apart, and his face is curiously babyish. Still, he has genuine presence, and his emoting, except in a moment of utmost dejection, has alacrity—no diddling or puffery—and shows potential, if not quite yet heart.

Bombay Dreams? I don’t know about “. . . ay Dreams,” which may or may not allude to Hamlet’s “to dream, ay there’s the rub,” but “Bomb” it assuredly is. I’ll go further: It almost manages to make The Boy From Oz look good. The perpetrators, rashly ignoring Rudyard Kipling’s warning about East and West (never the twain shall meet), have concocted an olla podrida—a stew of oily East and putrid West clumsily combining the dregs of each. Worse than mindless, inept, and boring, it defeats any pejorative trying to sink to its level.

Yes, it may replicate on stage a Bollywood movie (although a film critic, I’ve never set foot in one), but what may work on a Bombay screen does not work on a Broadway stage, never mind Don Black’s desperate lyrics and Thomas Meehan’s doomed tinkering with Meera Syal’s clichéd book. The story—slum boy makes good as movie star, repudiates his untouchable granny and trannie friends, gets involved with the wrong woman and crowd, finally comes to his senses, returns to slum and grandmother, and marries the right girl—could give banality an even worse name. The music by A. R. Rahman—who besides selling 200 million albums worldwide is, the program tells us, “involved with several charitable organizations”Â—is itself a charity case, starved of originality and choking on triteness, and has successfully defied the efforts of four arrangers and orchestrators to make a silk purse of it.

Anthony Van Laast and Farah Khan’s choreography is an unholy mix of mudras and aerobics; Mark Thompson’s papier-mâché temples and inflated-elephant gods, plus a relentless parade of ever-more outré costumes (the show cost $14 million), is not so much conspicuous consumption as conspicuous presumption. As for the staging by Steven Pimlott—how do you direct a show that doesn’t know where it is going? In the cast, only Madhur Jaffrey is able to cook up a performance, and Anisha Nagarajan can at least sing sweetly; as for the hero, Akaash, the convulsive cavortings and strained vocalization of Manu Narayan are no better than his misleading-man looks. If you owe a present to your most hated relatives, you might want to buy them tickets to Bombay Dreams.