NEW YORK (AP) - Lee Hall, who told a story of dreams and coal mining in "Billy Elliot," has returned to Broadway with familiar themes.
Hall's "The Pitmen Painters," now playing just two blocks from where adorable Billy makes his grand jetes, is another tale of goodhearted, ordinary people from a hardscrabble, mining town in northeast England who tap into their inner artist.
This time, though, there's no dancing.
Here, the art in question is painting, and the play's initial brushstrokes are light and funny before it grows darker and more political in the second half.
"The Pitmen Painters," inspired by a book by William Feaver and based on real events over 14 years, is the latest work to hit Broadway that's centered on art. It joins an esteemed company - and sometimes plumbs similar themes as "Art," ''Sunday in the Park With George" and "Red." In this case, the work explores how exploitation can happen above and below ground.
The sparse, dialogue-heavy play directed by Max Roberts begins in 1934 when five men, mostly miners, gather for an art-appreciation class in Newcastle offered by the local Workers' Educational Association. They've hired an art professor (an excellent Ian Kelley) from a nearby university to lead the class.
The professor begins a fussy lecture - supplemented with slides of the Sistine Chapel and paintings from the Renaissance - only to realize that his audience have really never encountered art before. They're eager to learn, but lack the language.
"The point is not to examine a painting - the point is to 'feel' a painting," the professor tells the group in his velvety smooth, upper-class accent.
"It's just going to be flat," one of the men shoots back in a thick drawl.
The professor then comes up with a solution: The best way to learn about art - to understand color and perspective and meaning - is to do art. His appreciation class soon becomes a painting one.
The five novice artists - played by Christopher Connel, Michael Hodgson, Brian Lonsdale, Deka Walmsley and David Whitaker - debate their respective works in earthy humor, take field trips to museums and grow more sophisticated in their analyses.
NEW YORK (AP) - Lee Hall, who told a story of dreams and coal mining in "Billy Elliot," has returned to Broadway with familiar themes.
Hall's "The Pitmen Painters," now playing just two blocks from where adorable Billy makes his grand jetes, is another tale of goodhearted, ordinary people from a hardscrabble, mining town in northeast England who tap into their inner artist.
This time, though, there's no dancing.
Here, the art in question is painting, and the play's initial brushstrokes are light and funny before it grows darker and more political in the second half.
"The Pitmen Painters," inspired by a book by William Feaver and based on real events over 14 years, is the latest work to hit Broadway that's centered on art. It joins an esteemed company - and sometimes plumbs similar themes as "Art," ''Sunday in the Park With George" and "Red." In this case, the work explores how exploitation can happen above and below ground.
The sparse, dialogue-heavy play directed by Max Roberts begins in 1934 when five men, mostly miners, gather for an art-appreciation class in Newcastle offered by the local Workers' Educational Association. They've hired an art professor (an excellent Ian Kelley) from a nearby university to lead the class.
The professor begins a fussy lecture - supplemented with slides of the Sistine Chapel and paintings from the Renaissance - only to realize that his audience have really never encountered art before. They're eager to learn, but lack the language.
"The point is not to examine a painting - the point is to 'feel' a painting," the professor tells the group in his velvety smooth, upper-class accent.
"It's just going to be flat," one of the men shoots back in a thick drawl.
The professor then comes up with a solution: The best way to learn about art - to understand color and perspective and meaning - is to do art. His appreciation class soon becomes a painting one.
The five novice artists - played by Christopher Connel, Michael Hodgson, Brian Lonsdale, Deka Walmsley and David Whitaker - debate their respective works in earthy humor, take field trips to museums and grow more sophisticated in their analyses.
Like "Billy Elliot," which is set against the backdrop of a bitter miners strike in the mid-1980s, politics is never far away in "The Pitmen Painters." The miners here dream of a socialist utopia and the play ends with the government's nationalization of the coal industry in 1947, a euphoric moment for the miners but one we learn will dissolve into disillusionment.
The personal journey of one of the men, played terrifically by Connel, is particularly poignant and told without sentimentality. He is the most talented and self-aware of the group and is offered a real artist's career - and a way out of the mines - by a wealthy patron (Phillippa Wilson), whose motives grow cloudy. His wrenching decision involves weighing class, honor, independence and fear. The art professor is also not entirely altruistic; he is happy to leverage his celebrated artists for a better job.
The cast has been with the production since it premiered in England 2007 and it shows. They exude an easy comfort on stage, their dialogue and movements timed with military precision. It could have been a temptation to play these so-called unsophisticated men like buffoons; they have not, and each character's personality shines through.
Gary McCann, the scenic designer, has added an ingenious way for theatergoers at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre to see the paintings under discussion: Each work is projected onto three roll-down overhead screens. They light up the darkness with life.
The rest of the set, a stark space with folding wooden seats, resembles a gloomy basement at a community college and it hardly changes during the production, which is composed of a series of small vignettes. Sound designer Martin Hodgson fills the time between the scene changes with the ferocious sounds of heavy machinery - drilling, drilling, drilling.
That's the only real visceral feeling we get of the stakes at hand. The miners, who appear on stage always dressed in suits, only briefly speak of the dank world underground and the physical dangers they daily face. Their exploitation does not always hit us, making their desire for political change - or a life in the leisurely pursuit of making art - not as urgent as it must have been.
"The Pitmen Painters" comes to New York after a rapturous reception in England and high expectations here because of its playwright. It may not be "Billy Elliot," but, in it's own way, it dances.
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Online:
http://www.manhattantheatreclub.com/current-season/pitmenpainters
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