About the show:
The real-life stars to inspire the show were conjoined twins who performed a vaudeville act. In the musical written by Bill Russell and Henry Krieger, their lives first played out on Broadway in 1997. The premiere run nabbed five Tony Award nominations and inspired a cult following, but the show only ran three months.
Director Bill Condon is out to resettle the score for Daisy and Violet with a revised version of "Side Show" that opens tomorrow. Previous productions of the "revisal" in Washington, D.C. and La Jolla, California received rave reviews. The show marks Condon's first time directing for the stage.
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Bill Condon directs a darkly glittering, substantially revised production of 'Side Show.'
REVIEW from Washington Post:
A big, beautiful “Side Show” on Broadway
NEW YORK — “Side Show” looks fabulous and sounds gorgeous on Broadway, the place it establishes through director Bill Condon’s sterling handiwork that it truly belongs. Let’s hope a substantial audience still exists for a sophisticated musical, the moving sort that aspires to more than conspiratorial snickers, over-commercial family fare or a stroll down memory lane.
For this offbeat 1997 musical, revived by the Kennedy Center this summer and transplanted to the St. James Theatre, where it had its official opening Monday night, requires you to set aside some preconceptions about what constitutes a likely subject for a Broadway show. It asks you to put yourself in not one, but two pairs of shoes, belonging to a set of conjoined twins, and imagine the effect on a person of having to synchronize — “evermore and always” — one’s choices, one’s urges, one’s tastes, with another being’s.
The miraculous thing is that this unsettling circumstance becomes, via Bill Russell’s book and lyrics and Henry Krieger’s music, the platform for an emotionally transporting, melodically rich and, yes, profoundly entertaining evening. It’s the tale of how the twins trade a degrading “career” in the carnival for the more glamorous exploitation of the vaudeville circuit and, later, Hollywood. Though it has a lot to say about the “you” the world perceives, “Side Show” addresses with more provocative urgency an even bigger question: how you live with yourself.
And while the story of Violet and Daisy’s journey toward a soberer recognition of their limits is not joyous, the art and craft that have gone into Condon’s production are full of joy. They are evident in Paul Tazewell’s dazzling dresses for the sisters, Dave and Lou Elsey’s camera-ready special effects for the gallery of sideshow “freaks,” and the luscious resonances of Harold Wheeler’s superb orchestrations.
And of course, at the poignant center of theatrical gravity are the mesmerizing performances of Erin Davie and Emily Padgett as Violet and Daisy Hilton, the real-life twins who, linked by a small piece of flesh, were plucked from tawdry midway tents and remade into Depression-era showbiz sensations. Since the Kennedy Center run that ended in July, their portrayals have matured and their characters grown more finely calibrated to one another — even, paradoxically, as each of the sisters’ personalities seems more clearly defined.
The Oscar-winning Condon, whose movie credits include the screenplay for “Chicago” and the direction of “Dreamgirls,” guided the show’s creators, in workshops and trial runs at La Jolla Playhouse and the Kennedy Center, through some painstaking rewrites of “Side Show.” More than half of the show is material that wasn’t in the short-lived, 1997 Broadway original. It’s now a tighter piece — even tauter than at the Kennedy Center. Bolstered by David Rockwell’s impressively unfussy, malleable sets, the show lays out the sisters’ back story with more finesse and acknowledges with more cunning tunefulness our squirmy curiosity over the twins’ personal lives. “Stuck With You,” the vaudeville number kicking off Act 2, cleverly presents their situation as both a public joke and private ordeal; later, the novelty song “One Plus One Equals Three” takes the joke to more humiliatingly prurient lengths.
The “Side Show” songbook may contain Broadway’s most ravishing score at the moment; to their pair of leading ladies, Krieger and Russell give a pair of showstoppers, the heart-melting “Who Will Love Me As I Am?” and the soaring musical loyalty oath, “I Will Never Leave You.” (Among other endearing moments, they perform a song, “Typical Girls Next Door,” that, courtesy of choreographer Anthony Van Laast, adorably tests their skills with mirror-image dance moves.) David St. Louis, as the sisters’ devoted protector, Jake, delivers the sorrowful “You Should Be Loved” with a shattering fervor, and Ryan Silverman, as the slick vaudeville huckster, Terry, who falls for Daisy, adds leading-man suavity to his plaintive solo, “Private Conversation.”
If there’s any aspect of “Side Show” that has been resistant to successful play-doctoring, it’s the musical’s final sequences, built around a cynical P.R. event, the wedding before a sold-out crowd in a Texas stadium of Davie’s Violet to Terry’s business partner, the sexually unavailable Buddy (a splendid Matthew Hydzik). Condon and company have tinkered with it anew since Washington, reworking and re-titling a song, now called “A Great Wedding Show,” that leads us into this rockiest of interludes, when all the romantic threads have to be tied up and the Hiltons propelled onto a higher plane of self-acceptance. It may be too much to expect that this moment will ever be unassailably resolved.
But so much of “Side Show” goes so right, you don’t mind that it still seems to be wrestling with itself, just a bit. Because you’ll struggle a bit, too, as you sort out what you and the rest of the world make and made of Violet and Daisy.
Hmm: a Broadway musical with beautiful music that forces you to think. What a concept.
Side Show
Book and lyrics by Bill Russell, with additional book material by Bill Condon; music by Henry Krieger. Directed by Bill Condon. Choreography, Anthony Van Laast; sets, David Rockwell; orchestration, Harold Wheeler; costumes, Paul Tazewell; lighting, Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer; sound, Peter Hylenski; special makeup effects, Dave Elsey and Lou Elsey; music direction, Sam Davis. With Robert Joy, Matthew Patrick Davis, Josh Walker, Jordanna James, Kelvin Moon Loh, Charity Angel Dawson, Blair Ross. About 2 1/2 hours. Tickets, $46-$145. At St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St., New York. Call 212-239-6200 or visit telecharge.com .
