Master Class by Terrence McNally • Starring Tyne Daly • Directed by Stephen Wadsworth • Manhattan Theatre Club, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre • Through Sept. 4, 2011
Sometimes actors, even the most familiar ones, can throw you a curve so emphatic that it becomes necessary to reevaluate the performer almost from the ground up.
Something of the sort is being demonstrated by veteran performer Tyne Daly. In a sterling new production of Terrence McNally's excellent but underappreciated 1995 triumph, Master Class, she gives an absolutely superb performance as Maria Callas. The show is based, in part, on a series of voice classes the late diva gave at the Juilliard School in the fall of 1971.
Callas gave those classes three years after the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis, who had been the center of her life since 1957, dumped her in favor of Jacqueline Kennedy. He married the former first lady in 1968, inflicting a wound from which the singer never fully recovered.
Stephen Wadsworth's sensitive, incisive new staging, a production of the Manhattan Theatre Club, will be playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through September 4. One member of a recent audience was heard to say that he intends to see the show 10 times before then, and, considering the complexity and subtlety of Daly's work, it's easy enough to see his point.
The audience is the class, and Callas speaks directly to them: cajoling, flattering, scolding, and in short indulging whatever emotion happens to have her in its grip at the moment.
Playwright McNally, one of the theatrical world's more avid opera enthusiasts, was present for at least some of the Callas sessions, so it is fair to assume that much of the star's behavior is based on the writer's personal notes and observations.
Tyne Daly would probably not be routinely thought of as a beautiful woman, but, like most intensely gifted actresses, she can achieve something resembling beauty when she needs to. Her hands are, in fact, quite beautiful, and she uses them with genuine brilliance, to make her points and underscore her feelings without ever quite overusing them, or drawing excessive attention to them.
Those great hands appear on the Playbill cover, and in most of the production's eloquent advertising stills, framing Daly's thoughtful eyes and the brilliant wig Paul Huntley has provided for the occasion.
There is virtually no hint of the hard-headed Irish-American realist Daly played in television's "Cagney & Lacey," in which she gave a performance which won her four Emmy Awards.
Maria Callas, born unloved and unlovely as Maria Kalogeropoulos in the Borough of Queens in 1923, was the last of three children born to working class parents originally from Athens.
Her older brother died in childhood. In 1937, her parents divorced, and her mother, Evangelina, took Maria and her sister, Jackie, back to Athens. There, a knowledgeable instructor was found to work develop the musical talent demonstrated by the awkward, overweight, unpromising Maria.
In McNally's play, Callas is confronted by three student singers, two sopranos and one tenor, and asked to coach them, show them how to make entrances and exits and to demonstrate something resembling presence.
In so doing, Callas, whose career was winding down and who would be dead in another six years, revealed at least as much of herself as she did of the young singers.
The sopranos are Alexandra Silber and Sierra Boggess, and the tenor is Garrett Sorenson, and all are excellent, as is Jeremy Cohen, who brings considerable charm to the role of Emmanuel Weinstock, the rehearsal pianist Callas seems unable to remember from class to class. Clinton Brandhagen is the unnamed stagehand who's on deck to satisfy Callas' demands for drinking water, cushions and so forth.
Thomas Lynch's set is serviceable, breaking away and disappearing for the few moments when Callas becomes lost in memories of her own past.
"Master Class" is Tyne Daly's finest hour. She richly reserves the star billing she appears to have rejected.
