Best: Hamilton
“I wanna be in the room where it happens.”
That’s the signal line in a show-stopping number from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius musical Hamilton. It’s hard to imagine a ticket buyer who hasn’t nodded in agreement or spilled out on to the sidewalk humming it. Hamilton was the best thing to happen to New York theater this season, which wasn’t at all a bad season, and if the histrionic gods are kind, it will have an impact on Broadway for many seasons to come.
Broadway has for too long been a place of safe bets. Home to the imported, the focus-grouped, the star-studded, the critic-proofed. Hamilton was in some ways a safe bet, too. It had won rave reviews during its off-Broadway run at the Public Theater. But it still took some guts to back the son of Puerto Rican migrants rewriting the history of our nation’s founding as a story of spirited young men, played exclusively by actors of colour. As Lafayette and Hamilton say: “Immigrants, we get the job done.” Then they high five.
Manuel himself was brave and right to imagine that he could combine classic Broadway show tune fare with the rest of the music on his playlist: the rap, the R&B, the hip-hop – and that audiences of all backgrounds would enjoy it. It’s too soon to tell what effect this will have, right now the more diverse Broadway shows – Allegiance, On Your Feet! – take far fewer risks and have narrower appeal.
Let’s hope before too long there are more shows that take the brash lessons of Hamilton to heart, shows that take a smart and unruly approach to received wisdom and accepted form, shows that can fuse the music of the street and the club with the music of the piano bar and come up with something richer than either.
Worst: Star casting
It’s a good thing that Bruce Willis gets to spend most of Misery in bed, because he doesn’t seem especially interested in getting out of it. His jaded performance and Keira Knightley’s curiously flat one are two of the worst examples of star casting on Broadway this season.
Casting has never been a level playing field. Maybe some roles go to the best actor, but more often they go to the most attractive, the most tried and true, and, at times, the most famous. Of course producers wouldn’t do this if ticket buyers didn’t then come running to the box office and we nearly always do, especially when a star of Willis’s caliber is on offer. We want to see what he or she is like in the flesh, if he or she can handle the rigors of live performance and if the charisma translates.
This means that we are saddled with banal revivals of mediocre plays like The Gin Game, simply because delightful stars like Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones are attached. We get the misguided reboots of great ones, like Old Times, simply because Clive Owen has obliged us by showing up and looking charming in a suit. (As it happens, Owen is very good in the show, but his talent alone shouldn’t have greenlit the muddled revival.) Sometimes the play or the revival is perfectly inoffensive and yet would still never have made it to Broadway without some movie icon, witness Bradley Cooper’s studied efforts in The Elephant Man, or Helen Mirren’s eminently graceful handling of the history lesson lite that is The Audience.
And yet this season we also saw Eclipsed, an important play that probably only arrived Off-Broadway because Lupita Nyong’o threw her considerable power behind it. Nyong’o gives a careful and unglamorous performance, subsuming a lot of her natural appeal. She isn’t the best thing in the play, but she’s very likely the reason we have it and for that we should be grateful.
