When history books come to discuss the Broadway year of 2016, expect some puzzlement. Some years tend to cohere around a few ideas or arguments. Some don’t. In its latter half, this one has seemed unusually fragmented, wrenched between innovation and provocation on the one hand and ineptitude and the easy sell on the other. At least we can all agree it was the first year producers saw fit to gussy up a love ballad with a chorus of drones wheeling overhead like mechanical pheasants.
The early part of the year, before the deadline for the Tony nominations closed, was a resolutely downbeat affair, with shows about dementia (The Father), pedophilia (Blackbird), sexual enslavement (Eclipsed), economic anxiety (The Humans), mass hysteria (The Crucible), urban anomie (Hughie), serial killing (American Psycho), multigenerational alcoholism (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), and pie (Waitress). Just kidding. Domestic abuse and pie. Revivals of the sardine-obsessed Noises Off and the restaurant-set Fully Committed offered some brief farcical relief, but only a sublime production of She Loves Me – with its art nouveau sets, trilling leads, and air of unabashed delight – meaningfully lightened the mood.
Then things got very strange. The first show of the new season in May was Cirque du Soleil’s drone-happy Paramour, a feat of such staggering incompetence that it had its own perverse originality. Months later I still don’t understand what the zombies were doing there or the incestuous twin aerialists or the most of the musical numbers. Elements of what seemed a straightforward plot – will ingénue fall for machinations of ritzy movie director or stay true to her piano man sweetheart – still baffle me.
Much of what’s followed hasn’t been a lot more explicable. There have been an unusually large number of short runs designed to fill empty theaters before spring shows move in: Black to the Future, Alton Brown Live, The Illusionists, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons on Broadway, My Love Letter to Broadway. There was also a glut of revivals of shows that didn’t need reviving: An Act of God, Motown, Cats, an oddly unsexy Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and a frenetic The Front Page, that last livened by a yapping, scenery-gulping, deliciously baroque turn by Nathan Lane.
At least the first Broadway revival of Falsettos showed the musical as both a period piece and continuously resonant, while a new version of The Cherry Orchard didn’t seem to know what period – or genre, or style, or wardrobe – it was in. And the outlier in an already disparate season was probably Heisenberg, a serious and kooky riff on the romcom aided by two superb actors, Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt. Rather more conventional were two new musicals that felt like old ones, in a wilted rather than a wistful way: the Irving Berlin compilation Holiday Inn and the doo-wop and soul adaptation of A Bronx Tale.
Most of this probably sounds dispiriting. It was. But there were still pleasures to be found, although they little resemble each other. Dear Evan Hansen, a new musical about a friendless teenager, displayed unusual psychological acuity and a relentlessly vulnerable and irrepressibly star-making performance from Ben Platt. If Evan Hansen remakes the teen musical, then Oh Hello, on Broadway, a riotous goof from the comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, nearly turns old geezers cool again – and it renders tuna sandwiches genuinely frightening.
Simon McBurney’s solo Amazon travelogue, The Encounter, might have seemed merely clever and indulgent were it not for the use of binaural audio, a thrilling technology that sends voices and sounds beaming straight into the head of each attendee. Even more innovative was Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, a riotously pleasurable electro-indie-folk adaptation of War and Peace and a radical recalibration of Broadway stage space. Inventive set and lighting design allowed the actors to perform throughout the theater, racing even up to the outermost reaches of the mezzanine in the course of an exuberant and moving evening.
As the year wanes, I know I’ll continue to think of Platt’s tenderly revealing work and of the vivacious, audacious use of space and song in The Great Comet. But when I really want to cheer myself up, I’ll probably think of Paramour and how those three color-coded acrobats swung helplessly while the singers beneath fretted: “Can’t let go as I dangle/ From the corner of this love triangle.” Unless trepanation really catches on, this is a show I can’t forget.
