Recently Jane and I took in two Broadway hits starring astonishing actors. Audra McDonald in Gypsy and Sarah Snook in The Portrait of Dorian Gray must be seen to be believed. When the curtain falls, audiences erupt as if ejected from their seats. The roar deafens. “How does she do it? Night after night – and twice on matinee days!” Just cheering on these heroic performers exhausts.
The expense and ordeal of getting to a Broadway show necessitate such oversized rewards. Some people thrill to Times Square’s human scrum and flashing skyscraper-tall billboards; an agoraphobe, in a jostling mob, I grow tense, confused, panicky, fearful of injury, mockery, theft. This allergy is pathology, not snobbery. I am most together with my kind when most alone.
Crammed into our pricey seats, I doubt these outings could be worth the wear and tear. Both are. Both performances are natural wonders, no less than the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo’s David. And how different the experiences! While both are prodigious feats of impersonation, they reflect contrasting, even contradictory attitudes towards an audience.
Gypsy debuted in 1959, when I was seven. I saw it first at one of its frequent revivals when I was a young brash theater critic and have several times since. A great show with a great story and great tunes, Gypsy is a warhorse middle-aged musical actresses can ride to late-career glory. Most musicals recoil from wrinkles, except in patronizing character parts.
Dorian Gray is a new adaptation of the familiar creepy novel. Oscar Wilde meant his tale of a corrupt louche sensualist to shock us and he continues to succeed. Much as I admire Wilde’s wit, his prose makes me feel I’ve been wallowing in a word that rhymes with wit. Snooty and snarky are not my preferred modes.
The makers of Dorian Gray have contrived to make their prima donna play all – all – of the dozens of roles, by using video (recorded and live) and live action, sometimes displaying half a dozen Sarahs in various personas and sizes simultaneously. If you’ve trouble visualizing this, I don’t blame you – the technical wizardry is dumbfounding. And the show mostly succeeds as a show (though Jane and I felt it got frenetic and drubbing toward its close).
Audra McDonald’s performance as Momma Rose invites the audience into her searing experience. We are meant to feel this woman as real, someone like us, and we do. More than once, at her anguish, I wept as if it was mine. Great acting can do that.
Sarah Snook, while no less dazzling, was a puppet in a fantastic contraption. Her humanity was swallowed by technology. Often one wondered which image of her was “live”, which being recorded currently, and which recorded previously. The audience was meant to gawk, not feel. Gawk we did.
During my lifespan, with dumbfounding rapidity, technology has shrunk humans to iotas. Huge structures reduce us to the status of ants. Electronics shrivel us to passengers in self-driving capsules, whose mechanics only experts can understand. Times Square’s giant billboards make us immaterial as dust specks; its pulsing crowd demotes us into one of a faceless multitude (1.4 million folks visit here each year). Our politics are devised as cynical deception, misleading voters with tricky online lies. AI seems poised to make many of us onlookers in the work of the world. The way to be a human, it seems, is to pipe down and do as we’re told.
My bias in this contest between humanity and technology may be gleaned from my words. I write, in part, not to be a gnat.