It’s a great celebration, Broadway-style

If you call yourself “great” every week, what do you do for a special occasion?
Well, it had better be something good or maybe almost great. Fortunately, it is. “Great Performances” is wrapping its 50th season with a Broadway blitz. At 9 p.m. on PBS, it has:
— May 12: An anniversary celebration filled with potent voices and frisky dancers. Sutton Foster hosts a romp through musicals, from Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber to Carole King and Sara Bareilles.
— May 19: “Richard III,” filmed in Central Park, with Danai Gurira portraying Shakespeare’s villainous hero. “Is there anybody else like this in contemporary drama?” Stephen Segaller, who supervises the show via the WNET station, asked the Television Critics Association. “Maybe Tony Soprano.”
— May 26: The opposite of Richard’s ferocity. It’s a rerun of Foster singing and tapping in “Anything Goes” (shown here), with a flimsy story connecting vibrant Cole Porter songs.
That mixture – music, dance and drama – has been the goal. No one else, “even among the new world of 500-channel satellite dishes, has shown this kind of commitment to the arts,” the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein wrote in “Great Performances: A Celebration” (1997, Bay Books).
In the early days, commercial networks expected to offer artful shows. Pat Weaver, an NBC president, talked of making TV “the shining center of the home,” a place for ballet and opera and beyond.
TV debuted a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein musical (“Cinderella”), a Menotti opera (“Amahl and the Night Visitors”), a taut Reginald Rose play (“Twelve Angry Men”) and more.
But as the audience grew, networks aimed for shows with more basic appeal. Producer Jac Venza wanted to counter that. The “Great Performances” goal, he wrote in “A Celebration,” was “to re-envision television not simply as a vehicle for lowest-common-denominator entertainment.”
He was in New York, at the center of what he called “post-war America’s dazzling preeminence in theater, music and dance.”
“Great Performances” began in January of 1974, with its main focus on theater … plus a few British mini-series, including “Brideshead Revisited” in ‘81. But it also went beyond drama. It added classical concerts (Rubinstein, Bernstein, Solti) in 1974, opera (“Pagliaci”) in ‘75, dance (Joffrey Ballet) in ‘76.
In ‘77, it spotted an off-Broadway show. “I believe I am a playwright because Jac Venza chose to produce my first play, ‘Uncommon Women and Others,’ for ‘Great Performances,’” Wasserstein wrote.
One of the stars, Glenn Close, was unavailable, so Merle Streep was cast. It was only her second performance on camera; her first (“Secret Service,” a year earlier) was also in “Great Performances.”
For its 50th season, “Great Performances” has ranged from new concerts by the New York Philharmonic and Josh Groban to a look back at an old one by divas Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle. It has had Metropolitan Opera performances, the “Movies For Grownups” awards, the globetrotting “Now Hear This” documentaries and a concert that linked dance, Americana music and Shakespeare’s sonnets.
There have been plenty of other Shakespeare shows on “Great Performances,” but not like the new one:
Richard III has pretty much always been white and male; Gurira is neither. She’s an Iowa native who grew up in Zimbabwe, her parents’ native country. She’s alternately known in theater and in “The Walking Dead” and the Black Panther movies.
“I’d been doing a long, big, big film,” she told the TCA. “I wanted to step back into the rigor and into the language and the world of something that you won’t get a rewrite in the morning.”
She does a searing job as Richard, but Shakespeare is still not for everyone. Sandwiched around that are two shows with song, dance and Sutton Foster.
The concert includes some of Broadway’s top voices – Brian Stokes Mitchell from “Ragtime,” Norm Lewis from “The Phantom of the Opera,” Raul Esparza from “Barnum.” But it also has newer stars – Ledisi, Solea Pfeiffer, Mamie Parris, Britton Smith, Patina Miller and many more.
And it has a song that tries to mention all of this century’s Broadway musicals in a three-minute blitz. Brilliantly written by Michael John LaChiusa, it’s tackled by Rob McClure … in a great performance.