Something is broken at the Roundabout Theater. I'm not just referring to its current production of Bye Bye Birdie, although it is indeed atrocious. No, I'm talking about the organization's show-development process. For the most part, they pick decent shows, choose talented performers to star in them, and get experienced pros to helm the productions. And yet somehow they consistently turn out dreck.
Bye Bye Birdie is, of course, an enervating case in point. How do you make this many truly talented people look this uncomfortable? The primary culprit here is director/choreographer Robert Longbottom, who doesn't seem to have had any idea about how to bring this show to life. I know that many will disagree with me here, but in my estimation, Bye Bye Birdie as a show doesn't really work; it's a charming but creaky period piece that requires a sure-handed director (Gower Champion, anyone?) to make the fragments whole.
Longbottom is apparently not that director. Nobody on stage in this production seemed to have any idea what character they were playing, or even what decade they were supposed to be in. Perhaps Longbottom spent too much time on the choreography and not enough on scene and character work. That would be ironic, since the dance here is ineffectual at best, distracting at worst. Particularly amateurish in execution were "Put on a Happy Face" and "Rosie," which featured pointlessly complicated and meaningless stage business that did nothing but fill stage time. Many of the numbers have no focus, including the confusingly muffled "A Healthy, Normal American Boy," which featured so much diffuse action, it was hard to tell what to pay attention to.
Again, it's really hard to fault the talented cast of Birdie for the production's failings. We've been hearing for weeks about how Gina Gershon wasn't really working out as Rosie. And, indeed, she was pretty awful. But Gershon was terrific in the recent revival of Boeing-Boeing, so again I blame Longbottom for casting her in the first place, then setting her adrift. Gershon's singing voice isn't awful: she mostly stays on pitch. Mostly. But she did tend to compensate for her lack of vocal power by egregiously scooping her notes. ("ooooo-When ooooo-will he find out...") And although she's not that bad a dancer, it does seem as though her every move has been painstakingly dictated, which removes any possible joy or spontaneity from her dance segments, rendering them joyless and mechanical.
The rest of the cast doesn't fare much better. John Stamos is miscast and ineffectual as Albert Peterson. He tries gamely, but ultimately he wears the part like an ill-fitting suit, all forced gawkiness and angular limbs, creating what is essentially a pale Dick van Dyke impersonation. The marvelously talented Bill Irwin is unfortunately nothing less than an embarrassment as Mr. MacAfee. Faced with a clear lack of direction, Irwin falls back on his clowning shtick, and he really could have used someone who could tell him, "Uh, Bill, that's really not working here." At first I thought he was playing one of the lizards from Edward Albee's Seascape, but then his performance morphed into Violet Weston from August: Osage County, all slurred speech and spastic tics. It brought a certain irony to the "Kids" lyric "Who can understanding anything they say?"
Newcomer Nolan Gerard Funk as Conrad Birdie is clearly a Zac Efron wannabe, although you'd really think he'd want to aim a bit higher than that. He's not awful during the group numbers, since all he really had to do was repeat the same mechanized movements. But when he got to sing alone during "A Lot of Livin' to Do," it was clear he lacked the requisite spark for the role.
At numerous times throughout the show, the gentleman sitting next to me was snoring audibly. At one point, his companion asked, rather loudly, "Do you want to go home?" I get the feeling that she was vocalizing what many of us in the audience were already thinking. The torpid, lifeless nature of this sorry production gave an unintentional resonance to the "Rosie" lyric that Albert sings at the end of the show, "I could watch a daisy for hours, and all I'd feel was several hours older."
Indeed.
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