Master Class Broadway Reviews

McNally’s play may be a bit schematic, punctuated by soul-searching monologues about the diva’s tortured affair with Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, but it’s an entertaining vehicle for Daly, and McNally is skilled in balancing bitchy humor and pathos. Moreover, the staging by opera veteran Stephen Wadsworth is stately and dignified without being fussy.

In Tyne Daly's striking turn as Maria Callas, it's not so much Callas's imperiousness that comes across, as the ferocity of her self-belief...[Master Class] is about 99 and 44/100 percent Callas, a proportion that works just fine with Daly cracking the whip.

Thomas Lynch, the set designer, turns the stage of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre into a ghostly opera house for the two monologues in which Callas recalls the splendors and miseries of her youth. This is a gratuitous touch-Ms. Daly sets the scene far more than adequately all by herself-but it's in keeping with the scenes themselves, which are too ripe for comfort. They work, though, as does the rest of 'Master Class,' which is completely successful on the level of intelligent entertainment.

Daly, a forceful, convincingly complex presence in the coaching scenes, seems uncertain and unfocussed in the reveries (where Stephen Wadsworth's scattershot staging doesn't help). The four colleagues who play her students and their accompanist do well. It's particularly reassuring to hear Sierra Boggess produce her lustrous upper register without the belting that made her Little Mermaid an earache-causer, proof that well-trained voices can withstand even Disney disasters.

Opera queens can sniff all they want about Tyne Daly not having the right kind of chops to play Maria Callas in 'Master Class,' Terrence McNally's 1995 tribute to the flamboyant opera diva as she neared the end of her life. But while the dynamic Daly might not possess the air of self-dramatizing tristesse that hovered over Callas after her blazing career came to an end, Daly brings something better to the character -- a sense of vulnerable humanity that makes her courage to survive all the more admirable.

Lacking Callas's elegance, the estimable Tyne Daly nonetheless controls the stage and the audience with command, and lends shading to the writing wherever she can; less successful are the three actors playing her students, guided with a heavy hand by Stephen Wadsworth. The pedagogical sequences, at least, have a patina of high culture, unlike the pair of vulgar, melodramatic flashbacks about Callas's doomed affair with Aristotle Onassis that form the climaxes of both acts. 'This is a master class, not a psychiatrist's office,' she announces early on-to no avail. Stripping La Divina of both mastery and class, McNally shrinks her with a vengeance.

McNally's love song to Callas may be, like his heroine, a more florid and flawed piece of work. Still, Daly and her fellow performers make this Master Class well worth attending.

During the intermission, I found myself wondering how Daly and her excellent director, Stephen Wadsworth, would keep all this intellectual and emotional splendor aloft. Though they’d captured my heart with the first half, there was the worry that exhaustion or lack of imagination would cause the acting or the directing to topple ... What Daly understands about her role as Maria Callas is that Callas can’t put herself on: she doesn’t distinguish between her life and her performance. Her life is a career, and her career is her life—a fact that becomes even clearer in the second act, when she must deal with a strong-willed diva-in-training, Sharon Graham (the appropriately haughty Sierra Boggess).

It should be no surprise that someone with six Emmys and a Tony is an accomplished actor, but Tyne Daly is doing something extraordinary in Master Class...Bottom Line: Tyne Daly's mercurial performance gives equal exposure to her character's formidable outer shell and to the corrosive solitude within.

You don’t have to be an opera buff, although it certainly helps, to appreciate the incisive portrait that the playwright has created of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic performers. And Daly, like Caldwell and LuPone before her, delivers a commanding performance that is a master class all by itself.

As directed by Stephen Wadsworth, Daly combines the character's tough exterior and emotional ferocity with pitch-perfect comedic timing, the theatricality of a diva, and apparent signs of insecurity and vulnerability. Sierra Boggess ('The Little Mermaid'), Alexandra Silber and Garrett Sorenson make charismatic turns as Callas' brave students and offer impressive vocal renditions from several bel canto operas.

'Master Class' is not, by even a generous reckoning, a very good play, though it can be an entertaining one. Mr. McNally is an opera buff who here mixed a passionate fan's knowledge of myth, gossip and music into one pulpy, Broadway-ripe package. Yet Ms. Daly transforms that script into one of the most haunting portraits I've seen of life after stardom.

Daly achieves a decent approximation of Callas' look thanks to spot-on makeup and a wig. But while she's a terrific actress, her basic earthiness is at odds with the role of the refined woman nicknamed 'La Divina.' Daly nails the catty asides about Callas' peers and can switch from imperious to coyly flirtatious in the blink of an eye. But there are also times when you wonder if Callas is coaching aspiring opera singers or a softball team. And when she drops the soprano's signature 'eh' at the end of sentences, Daly's lands in the Atlantic somewhere between Italy and Canada.

Problem is, in Wadsworth’s Class, the world just doesn’t feel that dangerous. And while Daly, with her clipped, rabbit-punching rhythms and deep reserves of phlegm, is often wickedly funny (“Does anyone know what time it is? I have a beauty parlor appointment after this”) and unspeakably poignant (“Never move on your applause. It shortens it”), I sometimes felt her playing less the tragic has-been than the self-deluded never-was. For the true diva, maybe there’s not much difference. And maybe that’s why I have trouble caring.

Terrence McNally's brusque and brilliant rendering of Callas is the sort of meaty role actresses love to sink teeth and claws into. Zoe Caldwell won a Tony originating the role. Dixie Carter and Patti LuPone assumed the part in that run. Now it's Tyne Daly's star turn. Dressed in chic black pants suit and scarf, she cuts a glamorous image far from her 'Cagney and Lacey' cop days. Ditto from her grasping Momma Rose in 'Gypsy.' Daly's sturdy-looking singer isn't exactly the picture of the svelte jet-setter Callas was in 1971, and the actress' skittering accent sometimes visits France, Germany and beyond. No matter. The portrait is complicated and charismatic.

McNally's well-crafted, quip-filled drama — which depicts Callas teaching at Juilliard, circa 1971 (her voice was virtually destroyed by then) — is less a biography and more a love letter to La Divina. So who knows if she really made a singer puke before the poor girl performed Lady Macbeth's letter scene in the Verdi opera, or if Ari actually spoke about his 'big thick uncircumcised Greek d---'? Incidentally, the soprano with the shaky stomach is played by Sierra Boggess — best known as Broadway's original Little Mermaid — who reveals a lovely vibrato but a surprising lack of stage presence; as for the other students, Alexandra Silber is sweetly endearing as the self-professed 'fiery' soprano who, poor thing, doesn't have a look, and Garrett Sorenson is splendid as the cocky tenor doing Cavaradossi's aria from Tosca.

The sad reality of Broadway is that, because this is a limited run that will close long before the season's finish, it's unlikely this production will be up for any Tony Awards. But Tyne Daly's performance in this sturdy mounting is certainly bound to be one of the highlights of the season.

Terrence McNally's funny, reverential and wholly engrossing 'Master Class' brings us all too briefly into the distinctive orbit of Maria Callas...And as the play recreates a master class in singing, so Tyne Daly as the singer offers a master class in technique to inspire any acting student or colleague.

Manhattan Theatre Club has imported this production of 'Master Class' from the Kennedy Center's 2010 tribute to playwright Terrence McNally, where it was a sizeable hit. Spruced up with some recasting and featuring an improved turn from star Tyne Daly, the show should repeat its D.C. success.

Tony Award-winning Daly puts everything she's got into portraying Callas in a new revival of Terrence McNally's play, directed by Stephen Wadsworth, which opened Thursday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Daly is sometimes ragged, but always courageous.