It can feel almost cruel to watch Chekhov’s great late plays from the smug vantage point of the present: we can see, all too clearly, the future that awaits his bewildered Russian gentlefolk. In 2016, I saw the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg perform “The Cherry Orchard” at BAM. When the ambitious serf’s son Lopakhin announced that he had bought the aristocrat Lyubov Ranevskaya’s estate out from under her, the director, Lev Dodin, had him croon “My Way,” a startling anachronism that perfectly transformed the boorishly triumphant upstart into a vainglorious karaoke hero. Lopakhin represents the overthrow of the Russian landowning class by capital and those who wield it—though things didn’t quite work out that way. Dodin ended his production with the cast members lined up as if before a firing squad; Chekhov was right about what would happen to Ranevskaya, but we know that the Revolution would claim the Lopakhins of the world, too.
Political upheaval is one thing, human nature another. How much has the heart changed in the past century or so? Hardly at all, according to Halley Feiffer’s antic and sneakily affecting “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow” (zippily directed by Trip Cullman, at the M.C.C.). The play is at once a rude millennial reboot and a fairly faithful adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” which was first performed in 1901. The year is still 1900, the place still a house in the Russian provinces, where the Prozorov sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, have languished since their father, now dead, transplanted them from their beloved Moscow, eleven years ago. Home is the usual Russian affair—chaise longue: check; samovar: check—but the women’s clothes, and their language, are jarringly modern. Irina (Tavi Gevinson), fresh-faced and cheerful, wears a sparkly unicorn-horn headband; the disillusioned schoolteacher Olga (Rebecca Henderson) sports a chic Rodarte T-shirt. She’s sexy, but telling her so would only feed her ferocious self-pity. “I look like shit, but what else is new,” she complains to Irina and Masha (Chris Perfetti), who reads poetry in order to tune her out. “Even when I was born, I looked like a little baby-shaped turd. ‘Hey, Shit!’ That’s what everyone calls me. That’s not true I’m just making a joke but still.”
Only male attention can diffuse Olga’s competitive self-loathing, but Irina gets the lion’s share of that. Chebutykin (Ray Anthony Thomas), the old doctor who loved the sisters’ mother, dotes on Irina; the insecure Baron Tuzenbach (Steven Boyer) longs for her, as does the odd, sadistic Army captain, Solyony (Matthew Jeffers). But what Irina wants is dignity on her own terms—if only she can figure out what those might be. Her older brother, Andrey (Greg Hildreth), is no help; his intellectual aspirations, already deflated by the dullness of provincial life, are snuffed out altogether when he falls in love with Natasha (Sas Goldberg), a déclassé local who thinks that Juicy Couture sweatsuits are still a thing. The sisters mock her mercilessly. Bad move: unlike them, Natasha is a woman of action, and in no time she’ll have that tacky fanny pack they love to laugh at strapped snugly around their throats.
Watching these Russians snipe and complain in our own ditzy online-speak gives the lie to the nostalgic fantasy that people were better, kinder, and more “connected” before our atomized era of screens. What is there to connect to, when everyone’s so bored and lonely (“blonely,” in Feiffer’s coinage)? Irreverence can be a form of homage, and the thirty-four-year-old Feiffer gets cheeky with Chekhov’s delicate realism, sending up his habits of exposition and repetition, along with his play’s central conceit. “Wait sorry really quick maybe this is dumb but like why can’t we just go back to Moscow?” Irina asks. Every time the holy city is mentioned, the sisters whip around to gaze at an enlarged picture postcard that glimmers, like a mirage, on the back wall. Better to worship that idealized image than to admit that their unhappiness will follow them wherever they go.
Cullman keeps this ninety-minute piece moving along with a quick-cut, absurdist pacing that owes a lot to the A.D.H.D. style of TV shows like “30 Rock” and “BoJack Horseman.” So it comes as a surprise when the play begins to deepen and darken, to make room for Chekhov’s questions about loss, survival, and hope. The sensitive, comedic cast is uniformly excellent, but I was most moved by Chris Perfetti, who gives sardonic expression to Masha’s dreaminess and rage. The decision to cast a man as one of the sisters can seem like a gag (Perfetti wears a black silk skirt, which gives off a gothic rustle when he moves), but it turns serious when we realize how much Masha cherishes her sense of her own difference. Stuck in a stultifying marriage, she’s in love with the dashing lieutenant-colonel Vershinin (Alfredo Narciso), whose optimism she secretly clings to. “In two or three hundred years,” Vershinin is always saying, “everything will change!” The others scoff, but Vershinin means it, and so did Chekhov. We justify our suffering with the thought that our descendants may inherit a better world. In the meantime, we turn our bloredom into art.
“Moulin Rouge!” always seemed destined to become a Broadway musical. Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie was a pop-fuelled fantasia set in a Belle Époque Paris that was mostly constructed on soundstages in Australia; theatrical artifice was the substance of its aesthetic and the thrust of its minimal plot. Now it is a musical (directed by Alex Timbers, at the Al Hirschfeld), and the form fits the material like a cancan dancer’s glove. The movie was a hit, as was the soundtrack, but it never really got my heart rate up: too much schmaltz spooned in between songs. What a difference it makes, in this story about the delights and demands of spectacle, to see it on a stage, where we can get close to what makes performance, and performers, real: sweat trickling down a collarbone, a little rip in a pair of fishnet stockings, the throbbing moment after a big dance number ends, when the ensemble holds a pose as their collective pulse gallops wildly on.
Get to the theatre early, so you can see the actors begin to appear, in their corsets and codpieces, on Derek McLane’s appropriately maximalist set, which gives priority to the film’s lush reds. It is 1899; Christian (Aaron Tveit), an American romantic in Paris, falls in with an amiable group of Montmartre artists and bohemians led by the spunky Toulouse-Lautrec (Sahr Ngaujah). They need a songwriter for their new play; Christian is just the man for the job, so off they go to the Moulin Rouge, to recruit the courtesan Satine (the wonderful Karen Olivo) to star in their production. It’s love at first sight for Christian, but Satine has been promised by the club’s impresario, Harold Zidler (Danny Burstein, having fun), to the Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu), whose lucre Zidler needs in order to keep the lights on and the absinthe flowing. Add a touch of consumption to the proceedings, and you have the makings of melodrama.
Tveit’s Christian is adorable, a Disney prince come to life, but the Duke, louche and slinky—“Sympathy for the Devil” is his signature tune—steals the show; if I were Satine, I’d throw my lot in with him. Still, what little story there is in “Moulin Rouge!” is almost too much. We are here for the music, which rolls through the audience in wave after wave of dopamine; there’s nothing like hearing the orchestra strike up your song—or Elton John’s “Your Song.” The credits take up two pages of tiny type in the program, a testament to what must be one of the great producing feats in recent Broadway history, and the score has been updated so that, along with Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade,” we now get a big hoofing ensemble rendition of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” and Olivo belting out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and Katy Perry’s “Firework.” A cast album is in the works, for which the rights had to be secured all over again. Zidler would be proud. Behind all the glitz, the show is pure biz. ♦
