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It's been a busy and fairly eclectic spring on Broadway, so it seems fitting that the season should wind down with the two very different shows that opened Thursday night: a revival of the Samuel Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot and a new musical adaptation of the frothy feminist film romp 9 to 5.
No 20th-century play has been more influential, or more avidly deconstructed, than Godot. Yet it's a measure of the challenges it poses that it hasn't been produced on Broadway in more than 50 years.
In the new Roundabout Theatre Company production (* * * ½ out of four) at Studio 54, Beckett's hobos Estragon and Vladimir — Gogo and Didi, as they call each other — are played by Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin, with John Goodman in a supporting role. But like the current revival of Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King, this Godot is noteworthy less for its cast members' marquee value than their ability to make the existential, universal questions posed by the text accessible to a mass audience.
Granted, Godot is the trickier work. Every aspect of Gogo and Didi's bleak existence and co-dependent isolation is, and has been, subject to endless interpretation. There is no real action, only interaction, with the characters waiting in no particular place for someone who will never arrive. At the end of two acts, all we're sure of is that they've made no progress.
Under Anthony Page's brisk but sensitive direction, Lane and Irwin mine the humor and pathos in this simple but richly symbolic dilemma. Watching Irwin's thoughtful, restless Didi and the sad clown that is Lane's needy Gogo clash with and cling to each other is like watching two boys in a sandbox, learning primal struggles that will never stop informing their lives. When a red-faced Lane recoils from Irwin, telling him, "Don't touch me," then in the next breath pleads, "Stay with me," the terse lines speak volumes about the need for and impossibility of human connection.
Goodman and John Glover lend excellent support as Pozzo and Lucky, a blowhard and his miserable but oddly passive slave. Both men are, like Didi and Gogo — like all of us — prisoners of themselves. Santo Loquasto's scenic design and Jane Greenwood's costumes enhance the dim, ambiguous atmosphere: gray suits, gray rocks, a gray sky and a thin, sad tree that sprouts a few leaves in the second act.
We'll never know what the growth means — is it a false promise, an allusion, a glimmer of hope? — but Page and company ensure that we are profoundly entertained, and moved, as we wonder.
Those who prefer absurdity to absurdism will get some kicks out of 9 to 5 (* * ½), the latest musical lifted from a beloved screen chestnut. For those who haven't seen the movie, released nearly 30 years ago, it follows three working women driven to extreme measures by their boss, Mr. Hart, a lecherous, foul-mouthed capitalist pig — and those aren't even his most loathsome qualities.
The libretto, adapted by Patricia Resnick from her original screenplay, has a populist bent that, if timely, can take on a self-conscious earnestness. But she has also retained a flair for wry, cheeky humor that is well served by the cast — particularly Allison Janney, who deftly fills Lily Tomlin's shoes as long-suffering office manager Violet Newstead. Janney may not have a mellifluous singing voice, but her delectably tart delivery, of songs as well as dialogue, is one of the production's two strongest assets.
Marc Kudisch's divinely dastardly Hart is the other. If there were a Tony Award for best sport, Kudisch would be a leading contender; his villain is bound, lassoed, shot and poisoned — and that's just in a Disney-themed hallucination sequence that's one of director Joe Mantello's more inspired touches.
Some of the goofiness feels more gratuitous, though Dolly Parton's original songs tend to be quite forthright. Predictably, the country icon — who co-starred with Tomlin and Jane Fonda in the movie — has injected plenty of twang into the score. But there are also ballads that wouldn't be out of place in most contemporary, pop-influenced musicals and nods to Tin Pan Alley and '70s funk.
The tunes are served with dutiful virtuosity by Megan Hilty and Stephanie J. Block, who respectively play blond bombshell Doralee Rhodes, Hart's sweet-but-tough secretary (Parton's old role), and Judy Bernly, a meek housewife forced to seek employment when her husband dumps her (Fonda's part).
At a recent preview, Block nearly stopped the show with a song called Get Out and Stay Out— directed at her ex, though she would have pleased the crowd equally belting it out to Hart. If seeing Y-chromosome-addled cartoon characters get their due is your idea of an empowering experience, or at least a good time, 9 to 5 has your number.
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