Word: perestroikas
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When Angels in America opened its Pulitzer-prizewinning first half, Millennium Approaches, in May, the producers' main worry was keeping it afloat long enough to get the second half, Perestroika, up and running. They feared Millennium's gay outlook might limit audiences to homosexuals, sympathetic straights and the relative handful of theater mavens who see everything. Nobody worried about the logistics of using the same eight actors to perform one 3 1/2-hour play and rehearse another, let alone installing sets for the sequel on the same stage where Millennium was playing...
...third of its investment. And as for the supposedly easy part, mounting the second half? One $2 million nightmare later, after daily rewrites, stagehand mania, 49 foregone performances (to the occasional rage of ticketholders who traveled from as far as Maine) and cuts of nearly an hour once Perestroika was already in previews, the most awaited -- and beleaguered -- dramatic event of the Broadway season officially opened last week. If less profound than it pretends to be and a bit repetitively in love with its own bitchy-queen wisecracks and celestial effects, the show proved an absorbing entertainment worth the bumps...
...producers profess only delight. Says Rocco Landesman, president of the Jujamcyn theater-ownership group that is co-financing and housing Millennium and Perestroika: "When we look back on this in five or 10 years, we are not going to remember our exasperation at the script coming in late or how much money it cost. We are going to remember that we are the producers of Angels in America, the most important play in a generation...
Extravagant as that sounds, and deeply flawed as Perestroika's metaphysical and ideological passages often are, the claim may not be far off. Angels is very far from the best play in a generation, and Nicholas Nickleby keeps it from being even the longest. But Angels has been hugely significant. More than any other work in a theater era of gay self-assertion, it has brought that perspective to the mainstream. Angels was not only the first gay-centered play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, it came to the fore just as the argument about gays...
Works by both the country's most successful veteran playwright and its most idolized newcomer opened on Broadway. Neil Simon returned to the stage with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a nostalgic comedy based on his days as a writer for Sid Caesar. The other debut, Perestroika, is the second half of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-prizewinning age-of-AIDS epic, Angels in America. Critics were far kinder to Kushner than to Simon...