Grand Hotel

Grand Hotel: Fort Worth Star-Telegram review

Theater review: ‘Grand Hotel’ at Irving Lyric Stage

Mark Lowry

IRVING — There’s a phenomenon of people with significant savings and financial resources — and no offspring to leave them to — who upon being diagnosed with an incurable, fatal disease, start blowing their money. Extravagant travel, the finest hotel rooms, expensive meals. You can’t take it with you, right?

That idea pervades the 1989 musical Grand Hotel, based on a Vicki Baum novel Menschen im Hotel and the 1932 movie Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo and John Barrymore.

It’s 1928 Berlin and the American stock market hasn’t crashed yet and the real threat of the Nazis rise to power hasn’t been fully discovered . Those are facts that we know now, and the high-living of the guests at the opulent hotel is taken with the grain of salt that good times don’t last long.

Although it premiered in the late 1980s, the musical — with music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest and additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston — feels like a grand work of decades earlier, when the hope for grand orchestrations with large orchestras was still in sight.

With original direction and choreography by Texas native Tommy Tune (who brought in Yeston to expand on the original work from Wright and Forrest), it’s a glorious, rich musical that’s perfect for the Lyric Stage treatment.

With a 32-member orchestra, music director Jay Dias and director/choreographer Len Pfluger (working from Tune’s staging and orchestrations by Peter Matz and vocal arrangements by Jack Lee), Lyric’s production deserves every superlative that can be heaped on it.

Under the two-story frame of John Farrell’s set (originally designed for the Pittsurgh Civic Light Opera), simple gold-gilded chairs are used throughout to tell the intermingling stories of these guests, with the ensemble sitting around the edges even when they’re not in the action, watching as voyeurs. Col. Doctor Otternschlag (James Williams) sets up the story as the ghosts of the guests appear and the hotel lights up.

Flaemmchen (Texas Christian University student Taylor Quick) is a typist with stars in her eyes. Front desk worker Erik (TCU alum Anthony Fortino) is working hard for his sick wife and get get time off.

The Jimmys (Mark Gerrard Powers and Ivan Jones) are African-American entertainers hoping for notice. Felix von Gaigern (Christopher J. Deaton) is a handsome and broke Baron who has a debt to pay off and receives threats through a Chauffeur (Mark Oristano), and then unexpectedly falls for a fading and wealthy ballerina Elizaveta Grushinskaya (Mary-Margaret Pyeatt).

Then there’s Otto Kringelein (Andy Baldwin), a dying rich man given a new lease on life through unexpected sources.

Deaton does his best work here, loosening up for a character facing dire consequences; and Quick is a terrific find, bringing spunk and pathos to her character. It’s a solid ensemble all around, but Baldwin is the standout — he’s been praised for his physical comedy prowess, but here he transforms from the shrunken man to a rubbery and agile dancer in a stunning second act dance number featuring him and Deaton.

The music constantly underscores the action, and rises to numerous big moments with lush strings in big ballads and fanciful reeds and brass in fun, upbeat numbers, with Dias adjusting the dynamics perfectly throughout. Lyric has given us some highly memorable full-orchestra revivals of musicals both popular and rare over the years, and this might be its finest resurrection to date.

Grand Hotel: Critical Rant review

Magnificently Grand: GRAND HOTEL at Lyric Stage

Alexandra Bonifield

Normally discussion of a show’s music jumps first off the page in a review of a work staged by a regional leading musical theatre presenter. In the case of Luther Davis, Robert Wright and George Forrest’s Grand Hotel, with additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, running though November 8 at Lyric Stage in Irving, the set warrants first mention. Designed by John Farrell, originally designed and built for Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, it dominates the full playing space of expansive Carpenter Hall beneath a resplendent 1928-style chandelier. Displaying mesmerizing opulence in red velvet swag and dusky hints of lurid affairs and financial shenanigans from its sweeping second story railed balcony to dimly suggested hallways leading far upstage, the set creates a regal, imposing backdrop for every scene in the show. It’s the kind of set to appreciate even if performances disappoint (which they don’t here, not by a long shot).

Stage director/ choreographer Len Pfluger, always an asset at Lyric Stage, makes apt use of every inch of the playing space and weaves his dynamic cast of thirty plus performers effectively through moments of high comedy, realism, romantic interlude, soul-baring anguish and expressionistic fantasy with Tommy Tune-inspired flourish. Grand Hotel isn’t just another sitcom of a hotel romance with naughty bits, emerging jazz artists and flashes of inspired dance by leggy girls. It reveals a world of desperation and hope, where rich and poor teeter elbow to elbow on icy edge in 1928 Berlin before Nazi Germany’s emergence and the Stock Market Crash turn the world into a very ugly place.

The hotel lobby setting drives all twenty scenes forward. It’s never static, always bustling along with the revolving entrance set piece that floats in from upstage or the hand-carried “barre” that moves downstage to define freestanding hotel locations. The most suspenseful theatre scene I’ve watched this year takes place near the end of Act One, when the financially challenged, opportunistic Baron Felix Von Gaigern (Christopher J. Deaton) climbs outside the railing on the second story balcony to creep perilously across its full length in half light to enter another guest’s room. Deaton is a strong singer for this type of multi-dimensional work that Lyric Stage frequently mounts, as clearly demonstrated in the Act One finale duet, “Love Can’t Happen”. Watching him climb out over the balcony railing to inch across its length with no safety harness visible, a bold, unanticipated demonstration of agility and risk, astonishes the viewer and whets the appetite for the romantic duet he masters eloquently with Elizavera Grushinskaya (Mary-Margaret Pyeatt).

Although some singing voices are more powerful and tuneful than others, every actor cast in this show brings a dimensionality and flair to his or her role that makes them “right” for the part and “right” for the ensemble. Of particular note is character actor Andy Baldwin, playing the health-challenged bookkeeper Jew Otto Kringelein. He creates such an unforgettably empathetic character through his unique blend of physicality and acting that his less than classic musical theatre voicing of “Who Couldn’t Dance With You” makes the character seem more real than if he were a Julliard graduate with perfect tone, pitch and vibrato. An enchanting performance, at its height in Act Two dancing with the Baron in “We’ll Take A Glass Together”.

Outstanding debuts at Lyric Stage grace the production. TCU senior Taylor Quick dazzles as the enterprising ingénue Flaemmchen, outstanding as a singer, actor and dancer.

Barry Phillips as predatory businessman Hermann Preysing brings dramatic depth to his role, never descending into caricature as his desperate ploys escalate him towards disaster. The mysterious lesbian Raffaela, confidante to aging prima ballerina Grushinskaya, gets a rich, riveting realization by Lyric newcomer Jacie Hood Wenzel, adding an element of dark, surreal anguish to the melting pot of tomfoolery and expressive emotion wafting across the stage.

The world grows harder and colder as the musical proceeds, with hopes dashed, fortunes lost, hearts broken and babies born. All the while Jay Dias conducts Lyric Stage’s phenomenal 32 piece acoustic orchestra with defining style and clarity, the backbone of the show its music with soaring, complex tunes representative of the era and always, always, so pleasing to the ear with Carpenter Hall’s acoustics.

Lighting Design by Julie N. Simmons and and Sound Design by Bill Eickenloff. Costumes coordinated by Margaret Claahsen.

Grand Hotel: Dallas Observer review

Make Reservations at GRAND HOTEL, Lyric Stage’s Latest Five-Star Musical Revival

Elaine Liner

They don’t build musicals like Grand Hotel anymore. They don’t build lodging like Berlin’s Grand Hotel anymore either. Even in 1928, when the musical is set, the “guests” are aware that an era of opulence is fading. Characters check in for their last fabulous fling, one more waltz under the crystal chandelier, a final sip of Champagne at the brass-railed bar. Wes Anderson’s movie The Grand Budapest Hotelcaptured some of that same bittersweet nod of nostalgia, that feeling of something stylish and wonderful sliding gracefully into oblivion as something ugly and menacing marches in to replace it.

That sense of das Lebewohl accompanies every one of the marvelous old musicals that Irving’s Lyric Stage revives — always with the original orchestrations, a full pit orchestra (38 musicians for this latest) and as lavish a staging as possible on a not-so-lavish budget. It’s as if Lyric is giving going away parties for big, complicated shows like Grand Hotel, Lady in the Dark, The Golden Apple and others they’ve produced recently. We watch, applaud and weep a little when they are packed up and returned to the vaults whence Lyric’s founder and producer Steven Jones found them.

Grand shows like Grand Hotel are American musical museum pieces. They’re too expensive to put on now, too hard to cast and, frankly, a little dusty around the edges compared with the fresh, quirky vibes of hip-hop Hamilton (Broadway’s current smash) or this year’s Tony winner, Fun Home. Grand Hotel hasn’t had a production in North Texas in 22 years (last done by Fort Worth’s Casa Mañana). And though it ran for over 1,000 performances in its Broadway debut in 1989, winning five Tony Awards, including two for Texan director-choreographer Tommy Tune, it has never had a full revival there. A “25th anniversary reunion concert” last May brought together some of the original cast members for a one-night-only event in a Manhattan nightclub. A stripped-down version with minimal set and costumes and only seven musicians ran five weeks last summer at London’s Southwark Playhouse.

For all these reasons, and because Lyric’s production is superbly cast with local musical theater pros giving spectacularly good performances, Grand Hotel is an important moment in the fall theater season. Based on Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel, later turned into a play and a 1932 movie starring Greta Garbo (uttering her famous line “I vant to be alone”), the musical features a lush, sweeping score (music and lyrics by George Forrest and Robert Wright, with additional numbers by the great Maury Yeston). And it moves. From the opening number as guest after glamorous guest whirls through the revolving doors on the richly detailed two-story hotel lobby (set rented from Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera), to the finale as they depart, Grand Hotel offers a panoramic view of the upstairs-downstairs lives of bellboys, maids, gangsters, businessmen, an aging ballerina and a bankrupt baron.

The heart of the story is scrawny Jewish bookkeeper Otto Kringelein (achingly fine Andy Baldwin), spending his savings on a suite because he’s dying and wants his first taste of the high life. The slightly larcenous baron (Christopher J. Deaton) befriends Otto. Their joyous duet at the bar, “We’ll Take a Glass Together,” is, as it was on Broadway, the highlight of an evening crowded with great singing and dancing.

In cinematic crosscuts, we see the baron romance the ballerina (a too-stiff Mary-Margaret Pyeatt, Lyric’s only bit of miscasting) and flirt with a pretty typist (impressive TCU senior Taylor Quick). While a nervous bellboy (Anthony Fortino) awaits news from the birth of his first child, two jazz dancers (Mark Gerrard Powers, Ivan Jones) put on a Charleston show as a crooked tycoon (Barry Phillips) concocts a scheme to seduce the typist.

Director/choreographer Len Pfluger, using Tune’s original dances, keeps everyone on their toes, heels and other movable joints, including dozens of golden chairs that seem to appear and disappear like velvet-cushioned apparitions. Musical director Jay Dias and his orchestra let the score’s soaring ballads and dance numbers perfume the air, and during the underscore beneath dialogue they, like Chanel No. 5, never overwhelm.

“Life resides in people, not places,” Kringelein says at the end of the show. He’s right, of course. But sometimes it takes revisiting a fictional place like Grand Hotel to be reminded.

Grand Hotel: Dallas Morning News review

Lyric Stage puts the grand in aching, intimate ‘Grand Hotel’

Nancy Churnin

IRVING — Life is a cabaret for some. For others it’s more like Grand Hotel, with guests checking in and out of your life, with glimmers of desires, dreams and despair colliding and skimming the surface of overlapping conversations.

Lyric Stage puts the grand in this rarely done 1989 Broadway hit, with a lush, 32-piece orchestra, and striking 28-person cast. More remarkably, even as Len Pfluger’s direction and choreography embraces the complexities of the original vision by Texas’ Tony Award-winning Tommy Tune, Pfluger powerfully paces the revelation of the story’s aching intimacy.

Jay Dias’ conducting and musical direction of the Robert Wright and George Forrest, Maury Yeston score enhances, teases and warns of dangers to come in exquisite synchronicity with each staged moment. Rarely has nearly two and a half hours flown by so fast.

Everyone working or staying in the Grand Hotel in Berlin in 1928, ten years after the end of World War 1, longs for what they don’t have. Many crises revolve around a lack of money. It’s a telling reminder of the desperate times that played a role in the start of World War 2 just 11 years later.

The Baron, a handsome young nobleman, is trying to live a privileged life he can no longer afford. In addition to charm and a powerful voice, Christopher J. Deaton conveys touching surprise as his character discovers his capacity to love.

Flaemmchen, a typist, wants to escape a hardscrabble existence by becoming a Hollywood star. Taylor Quick, a senior at Texas Christian University, gives a break-out performance as a young woman with dreams and a sparkle that becomes streaked with disillusionment and fear.

Andy Baldwin brings a winning mix of wit and melancholy to Otto Kringelein, a dying Jewish bookkeeper anxious to catch the last dregs of a life that’s passed him by. In one of the show’s dancing highlights, a sideways nod to “L’Chaim” from Fiddler on the Roof, Baldwin hoofs comically alongside Deaton for the joyful “We’ll Take a Glass Together.”

The Baron flirts with Flaemmchen, whom he introduces to Kringelein. Then the Baron meets Elizaveta, a fading ballerina, played by Mary-Margaret Pyeatt with fragile vulnerability. The Baron finds himself sinking in unexpected seas of feeling. His debtor’s threatening henchman (a tough, unyielding Mark Oristano) puts pressure on the Baron to pay what he owes by any means possible.

The show, based on a 1929 novel and 1932 film, was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won five. The rented, elaborate two-story set, with its large, sparkling chandelier, is a throwback not just to 1928 elegance, but to a time when big casts and orchestras like this were more common.

The players make every moment count in this hauntingly lovely show. Even those with the smallest parts give tantalizing glimpses of their characters, reminding us that there are so many stories waiting to be told.

Performance reviewed was Friday. Running time: 2 hours, 24 mins.

Grand Hotel: TheaterJones review

Check In Right Away

At Lyric Stage, the divinely decadent Grand Hotel thrills with big orchestra, ’30s glamour, doomed romance and a dark score spiced with giddy numbers.

Martha Heimberg

Irving — In a lamp-lit corner room high on the dark stage, a tall crippled man injects his tightly bound forearm with a hypodermic needle and the lights go up across John Farrell’s two-story, three-dimensional set, revealing the red-drenched, gilt-chandeliered lobby and private rooms of the Grand Hotel.

The morphine addicted Doctor Otternschlag (a sardonic James Williams) descends the stairs, takes a stage-side seat and explains who’s who, with telling remarks on the baggage they’re bringing along. All at once, swaggering or staggering guests, alert bellhops in red caps, and sassy maids in white ruffled aprons march front and center in the handsome Lyric Stage production of the show at Irving Arts Center.

The sultry opening waltz, played by Jay Dias’ 32-member orchestra, creates an atmosphere so thick with gilded decadence and doomed romance, you could slice it with a sharp staccato of trumpets. Bring on Berlin in 1928, and the melodrama of strangers lurching toward each other in a famously uncertain era, with new fortunes and old titles at stake and Nazism on the rise.

The musical, with music by Robert Wright and George Forrest (and additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston), and scripted by Luther Davis, was based on the 1930s novel by Vicki Baum, the source also of the star-studded 1932 MGM film. The Lyric Stage production of the show is directed with dramatic pacing by Len Pfluger, adapting Tommy Tune’s 1989 Tony Award-winning direction and choreography.

Grand Hotel lives up to its weighty title, with a cast of 30 including eight major characters, from typists to financiers, and no less than 20 scenes, all magically woven into two entertaining hours of sheer theater, with some rousing dance, strong, coherent voices and elegant costumes, coordinated by Margaret Claahsen.

The strongest center of this tornado of storylines is the buzz surrounding the debonair young Baron von Gaigern (the handsome, virile tenor Christopher J. Deaton), a penniless aristocrat and sometimes thief whose high-living lifestyle is financed by his escalating debt to menacing mobsters. He stuns himself by falling for the aging ballerina Elizaveta (a delicate, petulant Mary-Margaret Pyeatt), whose love of dance is rejuvenated by his attentions. The love affair happens fast, like everything else in this show, but the chemistry between the two is convincing, and their duet, the melodious “Love Can’t Happen,” generates some real heat. Pyeatt is more convincing dramatically as a desperate aging woman than as a one-time dance diva, and her voice is somewhat course for her light-hearted morning-after song “Bonjour Amour,”  Her devoted lesbian companion (a glowering Jacie Hood Wenzel) looks on the lovers angrily, as she sings a throaty “What She Needs,” meaning herself.

Taylor Quick, a beautiful, fresh-faced Texas Christian University student, is sexy, sassy and totally winning as the flirty young pregnant typist eager to make it on the big screen any way she can, a wish exuberantly expressed as she kicks up her heels and rolls her eyes in “I Want to Go to Hollywood.” Maybe the corrupt American businessman (a bald, beleaguered Barry Phillips) is her only ticket to cross the Atlantic.

Ivan Jones and Mark Gerarrd Powers, as two Carolina boys hoofing their way across Europe, have the show’s best cabaret song, singing and dancing “Maybe My Baby Loves Me,” a jazzy, high-voltage number delivered with spark and style.

Andy Baldwin, a terrific triple-threat singer, dancer and actor familiar to Lyric Stage audiences from many roles, is a touching and funny Otto Kringelien, a dying Jewish bookkeeper with Groucho appeal blowing his savings on one last fling at the posh hotel. Although such gymnastics on the part of the dying could only happen in a musical, we’re cheering Otto on when he and the love-besotted Baron deliver their show-stopping song and dance Charleston routine ”We’ll Take a Glass Together.” Toasting each other in six different languages, they slide down the bar (an actual 20-foot metal tube brought on for the bar scenes) and execute the heel-toe dance steps in happy unison. Whoa-ooo, Otto! Bravo, Baron!

Phone operators in filmy dresses and a quartet of pan-clanging kitchen guys have a noisy protest song, voicing their discontent in “Some Have, Some Have Not,” but the show is not especially interested in the latter—and neither are we.

The emotional focus is on the longing, the desire of everyone to find a connection, via the phone or in the flesh, and get some good news going before “The Grand Parade” is over. The tangle of interconnected stories and “radiograms” is resolved—at least for this round of guests—as the revolving door whirls them out to make room for the next customers.

Check into Grand Hotel while reservations are still available for this haunting and tuneful evening of theater.

Grand Hotel and the legacy of Lyric Stage: TheaterJones review

Ain’t It Grand!

As Lyric Stage opens Grand Hotel this weekend with a full orchestra, we interview Steven Jones, music director Jay Dias and director Len Pfluger about the musical’s legacy.

Katy Lemieux

Irving — Twenty-two years ago, Steven Jones had an idea: produce a musical that had rarely been seen in North Texas. That year he created Lyric Stage, which held the regional premiere of Romance/Romance. Lacking any sort of budget or funding, it was a four-character musical by necessity. Lyric needed a show not dependent on technical elements. It was a perfect opportunity to showcase the performers. It was a success.

Jones has a soft spot for musicals, and he wants to see them done properly. This has been the mission of Lyric Stage since that very first production in 1993, the mission has been to the preservation of the musical art form through producing new and rare works, and later restorations of classics. In 1997 Lyric had its first world premiere musical, After the Fair, based on a Thomas Hardy short story. It went on to play off-Broadway.

2007 was a turning point for the company. Its full-orchestra production of Carousel caught the attention of a local donor. It was also a year that Lyric began to receive better support from the City of Irving, as well as artistic grants. It marked a change that allowed the company to pick larger musicals to stage.

The decision to seek out little known classics to restore has been tricky at times, says Jones. Getting attention for a musical many people have never heard of can be hard. “It’s a balance of finding a title that gets people in the door and something that needs to be seen but may not be well known.” Hits like Into the Woods are easy draws, but demanding to pull off.

That September production was critically loved. Prior to that show The Golden Apple (directed by University of Dallas drama professor Stefan Novinski), based on Homer’s epic poetry, was the first to feature a full 36-piece orchestra playing Jerome Moross and Hershy Kay’s original orchestrations. In February of 2015 it was announced that the first ever complete cast recording of Golden Apple would be produced based on Lyric’s production; that recording has since caught the attention of NPR’s Fresh Air and other national media.

It is no surprise that Lyric will once again roll the dice on a modern classic you probably haven’t seen in these parts: Grand Hotel, which hasn’t had a professional production in North Texas since 1993, when Casa Mañana in Fort Worth staged it. Grand Hotel is based on the 1929 novel by Austrian writer Vicki Baum and was later adapted into a play, Menschen im Hotel by the same screenwriter who turned it into a movie. In 1932 the movie premiered (which won an Oscar) starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford. In 1989 it debuted on Broadway starring Michael Jeter as well as a young Jane Krakowski. It earned 12 Tony Award nominations and won five, including best direction and choreography for Texas native Tommy Tune. The musical has a book by Luther Davis, music and lyrics by George Forrest and Robert Wright with additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. Yeston, the composer of Nine, was called in by Tune to fix an awful first run of the show and add additional music and lyrics. The show was a hit.

Jones and his production team have created an homage to that original production by giving as faithful a recreation as they possibly could. Director Len Pfluger, who returns after last season’s South Pacific, says the Grand Hotel set is based exactly on the original set, which is, of course, a big hotel. The surprise is there’s nothing except chairs onstage.

“It is a very minimal and extremely faithful production. The choreography is Tommy Tune’s original idea, which is exciting because this never gets done,” says Pfluger. “I think it will be great for audiences today, who are used to so much scenery and so much flash to see how simple flash can be. And it also keeps the story on the characters rather than relying on tricks. But it’s also so imaginative.” Pfluger is referring to the stunning dance numbers in the show. A YouTube search will bring up a number of outstanding performances from the original, including Michael Jeter’s legendary dance at the hotel bar. It is certainly an ambitious feat to attempt.

“It is a theatrical experience,” says musical director Jay Dias. “The audience is forced to participate in the story—they become a part of it. You can’t sit back and become a passive observer.” Dias will conduct the 32-piece orchestra.

“The novel is not linear, Tune wanted to make [the musical] more cinematographic, to have the action appear in flashes,” Dias says. “The team created this kind of storytelling with the music. They blended it together to sound like one composer did it all. It’s truly brilliant.”

Neither Dias nor Pfluger will say much about the chair choreography, afraid of spoiling what they promise will be a truly magical experience. “What they do with the chairs, it’s just incredible,” says Dias, “Tommy Tune wanted a minimalistic experience, but what it achieves with so little is unbelievable. It’s incredible.”

Pfluger and Dias are a great team, both rattling off in German from time to time. They are eager to see this unique and rarely staged show come to life. Dias even saw the original production on Broadway, “many years ago. Well, not that many,” he laughs.

The show will be one to see, they say, with many of the original production’s team traveling to Dallas from New York for the opening, including the original music director. “No pressure!” interjects Pfluger.

“It’s an extraordinary score. If you’re a musical theater fan it’s very, very powerful. They’re all coming out of the woodwork to see Grand Hotel!” says Dias, who is thrilled to celebrate with the visiting New Yorkers in Irving.

Grand Hotel recalls much of the feel of Cabaret, of pre-war Germany and a celebration where anything can happen. The characters, many of them misfits, are blissfully unaware of the horror ahead. It is a fascinating time-stamp of a play, all occurring within the lobby of a hotel. The characters each bring a different dream to the lobby. Some of the dreams are budding hopes in the hearts of the characters, and some are the memories of a life that’s already passed them by. It is the action that happens before the doors are closed.