Last week, my wife and I did another Broadway blitz, flying to New York to see four new plays. This week, I offer reviews of all of them for you. I began Monday with “Yellow Face,” followed Tuesday by “The Hills Of California.” Now, here’s the third…
“Left On Tenth” is a new play by Delia Ephron, based on her autobiography, in which she revealed how her life changed after her husband died and later when she was diagnosed with leukemia, the same disease which killed her sister, Nora, in 2012.
Ephron is a very popular writer, with more than a dozen books and several screenplay credits to her name, including “You’ve Got Mail,” “The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants,” and “This Is My Life.” She also worked with Nora on “Sleepless In Seattle.” Seeing titles like that should give you an idea of the genre she’s most comfortable in: romcoms about upper-class white people.
“Left On Tenth” qualifies as another one.
Delia is played by Julianna Margulies, who knows how to handle the highs and lows of a story like this because she did it for so long on TV shows like “ER,” “The Good Wife,” and “The Morning Show.” Delia’s new romantic partner, a widowed California psychiatrist, is played by Peter Gallagher who, unfortunately, doesn’t quite have the necessary chemistry with her. I couldn’t tell if that was the fault of Gallagher, Ephron, or director Susan Stroman, but the connection didn’t work for me.
What did work was watching the other two cast members, Kate MacLuggage and Peter Francis James, who play all the other roles in the play. They change costumes, wigs, and accents, often leaving on one side of the stage and appearing less than a minute later from the other side as a completely different character.
They frequently had to move props and furniture around during their entrances and exits, too. There’s a scene where Delia’s in a hospital bed getting chemo and other treatments over the course of several weeks. To mark time jumps, Stroman has MacLuggage and James (in medical outfits) roll in a blue hospital curtain and occasionally spin it around while stagehands and costumers work out of sight to give the leads different looks. It was an effective technique.
Now I have to correct myself, because there are two other cast members in “Left On Tenth” — a couple of small dogs that get an “Awww!” from the audience every time they appeared. I’m not a pet person, but I did admire how well trained the animals were, with the help of treats Margulies and Gallagher kept in their pockets to feed them.
When we saw “Left On Tenth,” it was at a Thursday matinee, a rarity on Broadway, where the vast majority of shows only have matinees on Wednesday and Sunday. But I suspect the producers added one on Thursdays because they know the target demographic for all things Ephron is older women who are more likely to buy tickets for a show which starts at two in the afternoon than seven at night.
I know that’s a rather broad statement, but so was everything I saw in “Left On Tenth.”
Tomorrow, my review of the fourth play, “The Counter” (which also stars an “ER” alum).