Open door: Revitalized Broadway leads 2019-20 Wharton Center season

Seldom has so much hung on the fate of a pair of slippers.

Stovepipe hats and parasols are still standard equipment in the classic Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” but the revered, revived show will come to MSU’s Wharton Center Feb. 26-March 1, 2020 with its baggage deftly leveraged for a new era.

This time around, Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle handles the bullying Professor Henry Higgins a bit differently, evoking cries of “go girl!” from the audience.

Last week, we sat down with Wharton Center director Michael Brand and his staff to preview Wharton’s 2019-20 season. As usual, a full slate of music, dance and unclassifiable extravaganzas are in the works, but an invigorated Broadway series is leading the way.

Themes of isolation and suicide (“Dear Evan Hansen”), post-9-11 panic (“Come From Away”) and misogyny (yes, “My Fair Lady”) wouldn’t be out of place in a black box theater, but Wharton’s Broadway series is tapping into a new wave of energy.

Broadway is in a phase of deeper engagement with the broader culture, with new shows and revivals that treat serious material in inventive and life-affirming ways.

“The door has opened up,” Brand said. “It’s no longer the same 10 or 15 white producers that were there for decades. New writers are tackling a lot of different subjects and issues.”

Up in lights

Two or three decades ago, Brand didn’t foresee Broadway shows skimming so high on the zeitgeist.

“In the 1990s, we were thinking, how are we going to pay for this industry?” he said. “Now the producers are bringing so much more human interest into the Broadway theater. These stories and the music and choreography are associated with all kinds of things that are current today.”

It seems that there is nothing in American life and culture Broadway can’t put up in lights. The all-conquering “Hamilton,” with its African-American cast, avid absorption of rap, and a treasury secretary for a protagonist, re-established that idea with a vengeance.

Next season’s Wharton opener, “Come From Away,” and 2020 closer, “Dear Evan Hansen,” are state-of-the-medium productions. Both shows opened in the past two years and are still among the hottest Broadway tickets.

“Come From Away” will run during the week of the 9-11 terrorist attacks (Sept. 10-15), the exact period covered in the show.

The story follows a group of American airline passengers unexpectedly grounded in Newfoundland after the 9-11 attacks. Amid the uncertainty and panic of the day, the Americans find a haven in the small town of Gander.

If someone told you in late 2001 there would someday be a musical about 9-11, you probably have sprained your eyes rolling them.

Brand was skeptical about “Come From Away” when he first heard about it.

“It was in its reading phase, before it was developed in smaller theaters,” he said. “I thought ‘How are they going to do that?’”

Yet “Come From Away” touched a deep chord with audiences in San Diego and Seattle before hitting Broadway in 2017 with such an impact that even the previews were standing-room only.

The theme of welcoming strangers into your town — with Americans on the receiving end of the welcome — only grows more pointed by the week.

“It’s very poignant. You think about it for a long time,” Brand said. “That’s very significant for us, setting the theme of including everybody in our community.”

The season closer, “Dear Evan Hansen” (June 16-21), is a fitting bookend to “Come From Away.” Both shows are original and not derived from a movie, book or any other previously existing property. “Dear Evan Hansen” plunges straight into the complications of contemporary life, as a lonely high school student becomes an Internet sensation and struggles with the fallout.

“The whole environment of that show is totally directed at young people,” Brand said. “You go to New York and see lines wrapped around the block — young people — and it’s just incredible.”

‘Go girl’

“My Fair Lady,” the Pygmalion-esque fable of an overbearing linguistics professor and his young female “experiment,” didn’t have to be tweaked very much to reflect the sexual politics of the MeToo era.

At the end of the show, after an extended estrangement, Eliza Doolittle finally shows up at a lovelorn Professor Higgins’ doorstep, whereupon he imperiously demands that she get him her slippers.

In the 1960s, the line was a signal to the audience that all is “well” again. The new production adds a silent, delicious jolt.

The lights dim and Eliza simply turns and walks out. Brand saw it in New York with staffer Doug Miller and they both sensed the revival’s huge potential.

“Very subtle — she walks toward the audience, no fourth wall,” Brand said. “There were cheers — ‘Go girl.’ The thing’s still doing a million and something a week.”

Any show with memorable, well-written characters and musical bones as solid as “My Fair Lady” has great potential for meaningful revival. Several crown jewels of American musical theater are showing new facets as history’s light wheels around them. A 2008 revival of “South Pacific” struck a chord with modern audiences with its treatment of racial prejudice. A 2015 revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” ended with the inhabitants of a Jewish shtetl becoming refugees and marching off to an unknown fate. The “Cabaret” revival of 2014 ended with a shocker, as the habitués of the Kit Kat Club are shipped to a concentration camp.

Earlier this month, New York Times critic Ben Brantley called a new, stripped-down Broadway revival of “Oklahoma” “wide awake” and “jolting,” “a mirror for our age of doubt and anxiety.”

Broadway’s durability, and adaptability, continues to amaze audiences. For more than a century, doomsayers have predicted that each new wave of mass media, from radio to television to the Internet to social media, had the potential to kill live theater, but the Broadway amoeba has absorbed it all.

In a bravura sequence in “Dear Evan Hansen,” the young protagonist is bombarded by a montage of tweets, Instagram images and social media posts, projected behind him.

Far from killing theater, social media not only gives Broadway more fodder for drama and song. It also gives people like Brand and his marketing team a potent promotional tool.

“So many new platforms are available to help us connect,” Brand said. “Broadway is an art form that’s alive and dynamic. There are more and more people getting involved, who are going to take it into all kinds of different places. It’s very exciting because it’s never been this big in its history.”

Song and dance

Wharton’s 2019-2020 dance and music offerings stick largely to proven artists, with a few experimental forays.

It took some patience and timing to get a longtime Wharton favorite, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (March 25), performing choreographer Septime Webre’s lush re-envisioning of “The Wizard of Oz.” Webre drew upon the original book by L. Frank Baum as well as the classic 1939 film. (It required a bit of legal dancing to negotiate the use of the ruby slippers and other signature elements of the movie, which are still under copyright.)

The full-length ballet has already broken records in Denver and Kansas City, hitting the box-office sweet spot between sophisticated dance connoisseurs, newbies and kids who are seeing their first full-length ballet.

Webre said the exuberant production is about “living life as if it were a big adventure.”

Brand said despite a longtime relationship with the Wharton Center, the company couldn’t afford to tour for several years after the 2008 recession.

“They had two little windows of time on this mini-tour and we grabbed them,” Brand said.

Wharton’s strong dance card is rounded out by the acrobatic, polymorphous Pilobolus (Oct. 30) and Parsons Dance (Feb. 22,), a contemporary New York City troupe that rummages through cultural markers as diverse as Indian tabla rhythms, New Orleans second line processions, retooled classics from Mozart and Debussy and Broadway tunes.

In the realm of music, The Oct. 12 teaming of hyper-caffeinated singer Storm Large and Michael Feinstein, the master interpreter of the Great American Songbook, looms larger than Large. Between full-on vocal blitzkriegs, the unholy offspring of Freddie Mercury and Betty Hutton loves to yell “sing that shit, motherfuckers!” (to herself or the audience, it’s not clear).

On that note, classical music in 2019-20 is represented at Wharton by a sparing few, ultra-high-quality artists.

Snagging the Emerson Quartet (Oct. 18), arguably the greatest string quartet alive, is a coup. It’s been 10 years since the Emersons played in East Lansing, and they’ll do a three-day residency at MSU while they’re here. The Emersons are sticking to classics like Dvorak and Beethoven, but another top ensemble, the Imani Winds, brings an adventurous program Nov. 8, and will stick around at MSU even longer, for a full week of classes and workshops.

Two of classical music’s most venerable names, virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell will and the 60-piece Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, will perform a Paganini concerto and Brahms’ epic Fourth Symphony Feb. 20, 2020.

Transcendent pianist Jonathan Biss will tackle the Holy Grail of the keyboard, the complete Beethoven sonatas, Jan. 8 and 10.

The sonatas make an epic cycle, not just a series of sonatas piled on top of each other, and Biss is the kind of artist who commits to the journey with his body, mind and soul. (He’s also written eloquently about the experience of playing the Beethoven cycle.)

The classical slate will be livened up by Black Violin (Oct. 16), a multiple-threat salvo of classical, funk, hip-hop and anything else violinsts Wil B. and Kev Marcus and their D.J. deem def.

To draw more young people to key music events like these, Wharton plans to offer reduced price tickets for students and teaching faculty, as they did for the Czech Philharmonic and opera diva Renee Fleming last year.

Wharton’s concerted effort to market to students, on multiple platforms, is paying off. (Wharton has set up a marketing team as a registered student group.) About 7.5 percent of tickets to all events were sold to students. Out of about 17,000 tickets sold to the musical “Anastasia” last November, 3,000 were sold to students.

“We want to develop groups like these because they’re going to be the people who will keep the Center alive 10 to 20 years from now,” Brand said.

In recent years, keeping up the local jazz scene has largely been a job for the MSU College of Music, with its succession of stellar guest artists, star professors and outstanding students. But Wharton is throwing some aces on the table in 2019-2020. One of jazz’s greatest pianist-composers, Kenny Barron, will do a double bill with blazing trumpeter Sean Jones Jan. 30. It’s been six years since Barron came to Wharton with vibraphonist Stefon Harris for the memorable world premiere of a suite composed by Barron. Pianist Keiko Matsui, whose lyrical jazz has only deepened in resonance and emotion as her career moves into its fourth decade, will return to the Wharton Center Oct. 25. The double bill of Davina and the Vagabonds and the Hot Club of Cowtown will crank the time machine to the World War II era of big band swing May 13.

Some musical wild cards on the Wharton schedule in 2019-20 include the athletic Taiko drumming machine “Tao: Drum Heart” (March 13) and the Klezmer-and-beyond effusions of The Klezmatics (March 26).

And then there are shows that defy categorization. It’s tempting to shame the Wharton team for lazy work in launching a collaboration with the people next door. But the Wharton’s neighbor happens to be the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or the FRIB.

“Of Equal Place: Isotopes in Motion” (March 21) is billed as a dance, video and “physics” performance (aren’t they all?) hurling professional dancers of the Maryland Dance Project and local youth from Lansing’s Happendance together into the choreographic equivalent of a particle accelerator.

FRIB is footing the bill for a full week of children’s shows, public shows, tours of the FRIB and workshops meant to smash science and art together.

The FRIB collaboration is a foretaste of the creative, cross-disciplinary mashups to come, Brand said. A side effect of this changing performance landscape is that after over 25 years, the Wharton’s guest lecture series is done. The series brought some major luminaries in its day, from naturalist Richard Dawkins to author Toni Morrison, but now it’s “run its course and ran a little dry,” Brand said. The traditional lecture model of big-names lecturing to a large, passive audience is giving way to smaller, interactive formats. Brand is looking for ways to bring guests, chosen by deans and faculty, to smaller spaces like the Pasant Theatre for “deep conversations” and less hierarchical setups.