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Broadway Bulletin

What is a plot? It's an effort one character makes to get what he wants. If you have an ambition, duplicitousness will almost certainly follow. It's in the nature of human behavior. You package your motives in nice, fancy paper, and you hope that no one looks too closely. You try to get other people to behave in the way you desire--and misunderstandings and comedy almost certainly pop up, as a result.

For Shakespeare, a metaphor for life's messiness was cross-dressing. You have a grand dream? The realization of that dream will almost always entail pretending to be a boy, when you're a girl, or vice versa. At least in the land of Shakespeare. For John le Carre, a wish almost always involves spying. You pretend to be an ally when you're not, and you gather info covertly, and the tension inherent in a "performance" is the tension that keeps readers turning pages.

In my view, one of the most scintillating recent Broadway plots is not actually from a play or a musical. It's a backstage story. It generated some murmurings on Page Six. Here's the rumor. Cynthia Erivo was working on "The Color Purple." Her American debut! She was so nervous, on the flight to America, she began crying. She thought she didn't deserve Broadway.

As part of the show's arrangement, Jennifer Hudson was given The Grand Dressing Room. Hudson had a small part, yes, but she was an Oscar winner; she was the reason people were buying tickets. So: No grandeur for Erivo. Grandeur for Hudson. But then the show happened. People were no longer very interested in Hudson. It was Erivo who was the knock-out. Causing heart palpitations, night after night. Standing ovations. People sobbing in their seats. Hudson left the show quickly--having issued, then deleted, a petulant Tweet about her Tony snub--and she was replaced by a Broadway goddess, Heather Headley.

Here's where the story gets twisty. Headley inherits Hudson's dressing room. Is this right? Headley is not a household name. She is not the box office draw. Erivo is now the box office draw. Erivo has also started to find her voice, as a negotiator; self-advocacy, and really outspoken advocacy of all kinds, is now her "thing," and you need only check her Twitter account to get confirmation. She wonders: If she is the star of the show, and also an icon in the making, why is she not granted the ultimate in backstage real-estate prestige?

I don't know what happened with this story. But, to me, it has the makings of a brisk, delightful comedy. Power, diva personalities, the necessity for uncomfortable diplomacy, the issue of pettiness: All of this can be addressed in a backstage tale. An "All About Eve" for 2018!

It maybe doesn't really matter what the "want" is. Hitchcock would famously talk about the Maguffin--the mystical item that everyone wants, the thing that sets the story in motion. What delights me is the variety of Maguffins you can find in the world. The new play "American Son" recognizes a Maguffin I haven't spotted before: Wanting to know whether or not your child has been murdered by the police can be a kind of plot engine in 2018. (Brilliant!) A musical-theater "want" can be fairly wholesome: Think of Maria hoping to civilize the children, or think of Elphaba wishing to attain the respect of the Wizard. But a musical "want" can also be a bit icky. Sondheim built a musical around a repressed young man who wants to do unsavory things with his bosomy new stepmother. I love that!

More later.

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