Review: Mark Nadler's HART'S DESIRE Is Newfangled Art On Fire At The Laurie Beechman Theatre

I'm not sure what Mark Nadler is presenting these days over at The Laurie Beechman but I can say that it's fantastic. HART'S DESIRE is two hours of pure entertainment and performing arts perfection, and no mistake - Mark Nadler should be given a pat on the back, all the congratulations, and an award or two for it. What category those awards would fall into will have to be decided by somebody else, though, because Hart's Desire defies any label, in fact, it defines what it is to be an artist looking to create something new. And that is precisely what Mark Nadler did: he created something new, in more ways than one.

Hart's Desire is playing a cabaret room. Hart's Desire stars one of the cabaret industry's most endearing and enduring cabaret artists. Hart's Desire features famous songs from the canon of Broadway compositions and (subsequently) The Great American Songbook, being performed by a man sitting behind a piano. Hart's Desire has cabaret written all over it. But Hart's Desire is not a cabaret: it is a play. It even has two acts and an intermission - and a run-time of over two hours, including that intermission. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, then, is why is Hart's Desire playing a cabaret room? Because Hart's Desire is still in diapers, still learning to walk, and still finding its way in the world. Once Hart's Desire has completed these small tasks, it will know what it is, and where it belongs.

What Mark Nadler has done with Hart's Desire is sit down and arduously, laboriously, lovingly read every single line of dialogue ever written by the legendary creator of theater Moss Hart, as well as every single lyric ever written by the equally legendary creator of musical theater Lorenz Hart (always referred to as Larry). Mark Nadler has deconstructed the sentences of one Hart and the songs of another Hart and systematically and meticulously reconstructed them to create a brand new musical play. Now, when they wrote a new play and added songs by Gershwin they called it a new musical named My One And Only, or Nice Work If You Can Get It or Crazy For You. Technically speaking, these could be called "Jukebox Musicals," although that moniker really does seem best applied to shows like Mama Mia and All Shook Up - to call a Gershwin musical a Jukebox Musical seems inappropriate. Still, these brand new Gershwin musicals exist (as well as others like Play On!, which uses the Duke Ellington catalogue) but all of these properties are built around completely new scripts. Hart's Desire is a new script, but the lines are all Moss Hart's. What is more, the skeleton of the script is the play Light Up The Sky, Moss Hart's solo-penned play about the production of a play and the wacky characters involved in that production. Although there are influences from other Moss Hart-penned pieces, Hart's Desire is essentially Light Up The Sky with songs added, like when they added songs to The Women and made it into The Opposite Sex. It is not a complete marrying of Light Up The Sky to Larry Hart's songs, though, because Mr. Nadler has (without altering one line of Hart's dialogue) made some important changes in the script, to give the world, and Moss, and Larry something that might have been very nice for the two Harts to have achieved during their mutual lifetimes: a gay storyline.

Mark Nadler explains, in his program notes and to his audience, that Larry Hart was a gay man (this is not gossip, it is well documented) who lived in the closet during his life (which ended in 1943, an indication of why he was closeted). Moss Hart was a bi-sexual man (also publicly documented and not mere conjecture) who was married to a woman and who kept his sexual predilections private. Hart's Desire is Mark Nadler's homage to his late, great LGBT brothers, and the play that he imagines they might have written had they not been forced to hide their true selves. It is, in fact, a noble effort and a beautiful epilogue to the two Harts, and it is wonderfully crafted, using (mostly) the Light Up The Sky characters and situations with a little Merrily We Roll Along and The Man Who Came To Dinner sprinkled in for good measure. By using the bones of the one play, Nadler has ensured a storyline with strong continuity but he has also locked in the laughs. Light Up The Sky is no longer a well-known play, and it is a play with some structural flaws, but it is a play with dialogue that crackles (and Wednesday night's Beechman audience was cackling as it crackled). In his reconstruction of the piece, Nadler deftly swept away the original elements of Light Up The Sky that don't work, making Hart's Desire more than just a musical version of the play, he made it a better one. He also has made the gay storyline a strong one, but not the central one - a brilliant move because if this were indeed the play that Moss and larry would have written during their lives, they would not have made the gay theme the central one. It was a wise and masterful choice for Nadler to make, as wise and masterful as the curation of Larry's songs and their placement into the storyline, which he orchestrated with precision and panache, for Hart's Desire is structurally sound as a play. It could probably be cast and produced and audiences would come and see it. But the big question is: if it were cast and produced, would it be as interesting as it is now? You see, at this moment in time, Hart's Desire is a one-man show.

At the start of his program, Mark Nadler stands before his audience and explains the concept of Hart's Desire, and then he introduces to them his cast of characters. One by one, he strikes a physical affectation and speaks in the voice of the character being presented; he tells the audience a sentence or two about who they are before moving on to the next character, providing the audience with an arsenal of audio-visuals to help them follow along. And it works. Eight affectations and eight voices later, the people sitting in the seats out front know who, exactly, will be leading them into storyland for the evening. The scene set, Mark Nadler takes his seat at the piano and The Olympics of Acting begins.

For two hours Mark Nadler charges around the stage like some bizarre, demented, thrilling amalgam of Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Noel Coward, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, and Lesley Ann Warren, prancing, strutting, stamping, striking poses, pulling faces, spitting, sweating, threatening, cajoling, mugging, blushing, belting and tap dancing (yeah, tap dancing) in his successful efforts to tell the tale of the opening night of a play upon which hangs everyone's very existence... with the underlying ribbon of a budding love story between two men. Nadler's acting in Hart's Desire is what they mean when they use the term tour-de-force, and it is what drives Hart's Desire. The script to the piece is good, and the musical selections are perfection; but if placed in the hands of a cast, it might play, it might be pretty, it might be pleasing, but the true reason to see Hart's Desire is to see Marc Nadler deliver this epic performance (and, to be clear, epic is a word I use from time to time, but this is really and truly the gold standard of the word epic). There have been shows like this in the past, in which two actors portray a coterie of characters to successful silly screams of laughter - the one that comes, most readily, to mind is Greater Tuna, which involves a series of lightning-fast quick changes. But this is a single actor presenting all these characters without costumes, the way high school students do when competing in the Dramatic Interp category in their forensics tournaments. But those teenagers are given ten minutes, this actor has two hours to fill, all on his own (and I don't remember seeing Mark even take one sip of water, though he moves so fast, he might have and I may have missed it). And even as Nadler powers through the material, like a child walking into an airplane propeller, he never allows the adrenaline to rush him. Segueing with ease from brassy, blaring numbers like Stella's "The Lady is a Tramp" to wistful weepers like Carleton and Owen's duet of "Glad to Be Unhappy" and "Falling in Love," Mark Nadler allows each and every moment of Hart's Desire to live and breathe in real-time. There is no fear or worry that the show might be feeling too long, there is no throwing- away of a significant sentence or emotion: every word written, every sentence spoken, every note sung has merit, and Mark Nadler gives that merit to the audience, by way of hilarious comedy or heartbreaking pathos, and even though the script structure demands a fair bit of hammery and schmacting, never, at any time, is Nadler false, self-conscious, or insincere. This is probably the most important key in the success of the piece: Mark Nadler believes everything he is doing, and he believes IN everything he is doing. Everything expressed by each of the eight characters in Hart's Desire is the most important thing they will ever say, until the next thing they say. That kind of commitment in character is what makes for proper storytelling of the Thespianic variety.

So what do we have here? Is Hart's Desire a cabaret show? Mark Nadler is certainly a cabaret artist, and there is music and a piano, so it could certainly play a cabaret room. Is Hart's Desire a one-man comedy piece or innovative performance art? It could absolutely have a run in a black box space off or off-off-Broadway. Is Hart's Desire a niche show designed to play LGBT-populated resorts and venues? Or is it a salon piece to present to the intellectuals, the aesthetes, and the esoterics? Is this a Mel Brooks comedy, a High School Dramatic Interp, a new brand of show most easily described as The Book Revue, or a play for Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre Company?

Wait. That's it. That's what Mark Nadler is presenting over at The Laurie Beechman these days. Theater. Theater, excellent and exciting: the best kind there is.

Mark Nadler will play HART'S DESIRE at The Laurie Beechman on August 24th at 7 pm. For information and reservations please visit the Laurie Beechman website HERE.

THIS is the Mark Nadler website.

Photos by Stephen Mosher

Visit the Stephen Mosher website HERE.

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