The Best of 2011!

As we rapidly approach the end of the year, I'm pretty proud of myself for actually sticking with this blog and sharing a whole bunch of random opinions with the few dozen of you who have kept checking in. Thanks for that! I had three goals when I started: get 10 loyal readers, get free tickets to at least one show, and actually get through the year. Done, done, and...so close!


So while I still have two shows to write up and, who knows, could still see things next week (Porgy and Bess, anyone?), I'm ready to look back at the 114 shows I saw this year (yeah...114. christ.) and offer up my own list of my ten favorite shows and ten performances. Because you know what I love almost as much as live theater? LISTS!


Looking over everything I saw, I realize I attended shows in hotel rooms, converted warehouses, an abandoned church, an old town house, and a few basements. I saw a disconcertingly large number of actors naked (Burning and Hair alone pushed the number past 25, but there seemed to be an extra lot of nudity elsewhere this year as well). I railed against things everyone else loved (War Horse) and advocated for things people thought were abysmal (The People in the Picture). Mostly, though, I just had a ton of fun.


So without further ado...


My ten favorite shows:


Once

The reviews of this show weren't across the board raves: proof that people who aren't me are idiots. On the plus side, it's transferring to Broadway in the new year, so a) I can see it again and b) critics will have a chance to realize that they missed out on the strongest new musical of the year, if not the past few years. And no, I'm not forgetting The Book of Mormon (see a teeny bit below). You can argue that the show is overly sentimental, but you'd be missing the point. It is disarmingly earnest and hopelessly romantic--two things that usually make my teeth itch--but the beauty of the production is that the reality of life is always lurking in the background reminding us how ephemeral the central romance is. With some of the most beautiful simple stagecraft I've ever seen and one of the strongest ensembles around, I found it impossible not to be won over.


born bad

If Once made me cry at the capacity of goodness in many people, born bad shattered me with our potential for hideousness. With its fractured dialogue holding us at remove from the start, the play reveals itself in fits and starts as the story of one woman whose pleas to her family to listen to her experience being sexually abused by her father fall on deaf ears. Without ever actually speaking of what happened, Dawta rages against her family only to be met by denial, anger, and avoidance. Running less than an hour, it was one of the shortest plays I saw this year, but it was also the most impactful.


The Book of Mormon

I mean...listen, what am I going to say that hasn't been said? It's sold out until doomsday, won every award known to man, and was greeted with rave reviews across the board. Why? Because it's seriously fucking funny. But beyond that because it actually has a beating heart, tells a real story, and is strangely relatable. This is the show that every Fringe Festival jokey musical wants to be. None of them can touch it. I've seen it three times and will head back next time I can score tickets. So...maybe for my 50th birthday?


Sons of the Prophet

Here's something I'm noticing: my top choices were mostly shows that made me laugh really, really hard or cry real tears. This did the former and had me on the verge of the latter. It was the year's funniest tragedy--an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink play that piled woe upon woe on its main character but never missed a laugh, it somehow also never cheapened itself or its characters. It's a high-wire act of writing, and I still don't know how it managed not to fall off the edge. It didn't hurt that it was so precisely directed and given life by a brilliant team of actors.


The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church

One man surrounded by audience on all four sides, detailing the treasure trove of thousands of suicide letters he found in the attic of a house he was considering buying, this was another amazing feat of writing and imagination, brought to life by its nerdy, lovable creator Daniel Kitson. The whole story may have been made up, but that didn't make it feel any less honest. Kitson is stateside again in the new year with another one man show. You can bet I already have tickets.


Black Watch

In the "you never know" category, I avoided this history of a platoon of the Scottish army the first two times it came through New York. And even halfway through the experience of watching it, I remained on the fence, wondering if it was glamorizing the armed forces, whether the construction by way of interview snippets leading in and out of flashbacks was lazy technique, and whether it really had anything all that interesting to say. And then a small voice in the back of my head told me to shut up and just watch. I fell further and further into the entire production and by the heartstopping wordless finale, I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I was actually trembling. Without Stephen Hoggett's unreal movement design, the show might not be the dazzler it is. It should be mentioned that Hoggett also did the musical staging of Once. And that he might be a genius.


SWAN!!!

I swear I'm not just including this because it got me a ton of blog hits when I was linked to random Randy Harrison fan pages. Hey again, Queer as Folk fans! If all I was doing was pandering, I'd just name the show that got me the most Google hits at all this year: The Motherfucker with the Hat. And I'm just not that desperate for attention! I kid, I kid. For real, though, this was five people in chairs hamming it up as they performed the script of Black Swan. Jenn Harris is simply the funniest chick in the game, and she and her friends dazzled with a camp fantasia. Sure, it was slight. But it was also the hardest I laughed all year.


Follies

It's fucking Sondheim. Did you think I wouldn't include it here? Now, I may only have seen it three times (so far!), but I'll certainly be back before it closes next month. Because let's be real: there isn't a better score on Broadway right now. I know a lot of people have their quibbles with this production, but Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Terri White, Rosalind Elias, Jayne Houdyshell, Elaine Paige...the amount of talent and theater history on that stage combined with the stunning music make it essential.


Hello Again

I was about to say this was the most divisive show on my list, but then I looked at what I have down for number 10. We'll get there. Meanwhile, I know some folks didn't buy the environmental staging which, let's face it, was pretty hokey. And the sound design was wonky, and yes it's ANOTHER show based on La Ronde. But you know what? I fell head over heels for the score, loved the intimacy of the entire production, and thought that while it was easily the most cynical show about relationships I saw this year, it was also the sexiest.


The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World

So here's a show that some people HATED. To me, this is the show that crazy ass play Burning thought it was being. Deliberately awkward, highly stylized, and just really, really weird, it approached the story of a possibly insane man deciding to make his three musically challenged daughters into a girl group by giving us hints of how each character saw things, abstracting all of it, and slamming it together in a wistfully atonal mishmash that refused to outright moralize. It rewarded the audience that stayed on its toes and approached it on its own level.




And my ten favorite performances:


Stockard Channing as Polly in Other Desert Cities

I had so much trouble with this show Off-Broadway but really came around to it when it transferred thanks in large part to Rachel Griffiths and Judith Light as the new cast members. But this isn't about them. Its about Stockard Channing as the ice-cold mother of an upper-upper-class Palm Springs family. Her repeated refrain, "I know who I am," begins as a frightening peek behind the curtain of a woman capable of threatening to cut off her own child before ultimately revealing itself to be more of a warrior cry. She does know who she is, and that's something she must desperately cling to since almost no one else around her is let in on her secrets. It is a truly great performance and while there's a possibility that she isn't my true number one (see below) the distance between the two is a hair's breadth.


The cast of born bad

Yes, it's a cheat to include an entire cast, but if I didn't, there'd be so little room for everyone else! Heather Alicia Simms was raw with rage as Dawta. Crystal Dickinson was horrifyingly relateable as the sister who chose to deny what was going on. Quincy Tyler Bernstine (always brilliant) was hauntingly elusive as the sister whose spotty memory may or may not have been a choice. Michael Rogers' mostly wordless role as the abusive father showed just how huge a presence an actor can be even at their most still and silent. LeRoy James McClain was heartbreaking as the brother who eventually breaks the family secrets wide open. And the look on Elain Graham's face as a mother finally coming to terms with the truth of her past was the single most haunting image of the entire year. It is to her credit that I can't shake the image, even if I may want to. In a year of strong ensembles (Black Watch, Book of Mormon, Sons of the Prophet, Once, etc.), no other cast moved together as flawlessly as this one.


Mary Louise Wilson as Vera in 4,000 Miles

One of the great ladies of the theater, Wilson played a nonagenarian whose 21-year-old grandson arrives on her doorstep having biked his way across the country. She offered an extraordinary portrait of a woman frustrated by her diminished faculties who finds it incredibly difficult to understand her emotionally brittle grandson but whose compassion is never diminished. A beautiful, honest portrayal of elderly life that never relied on cheap sentiment or easy humor.


Mark Rylance as Rooster in Jerusalem

One of the two showiest performances on my list, Rylance's portrayal of a hard-partying older traveler surrounded by young people, refusing to grow up, and clutching tight to the loose joys of childhood was big and wild enough to carry Jez Butterworth's depiction of small events rendered nearly mythical in scale. This is a man who I think would be more than happy to literally chew the stage, but the mania and energy and feeling of unpredictability are all the more impressive when quieter moments occur and you realize just how carefully calibrated the performance was for all three hours of the show


Lucy Taylor as Brett in The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Hemingway's drunken sex bomb tease would be so easy to play as a simple slut, but Taylor's Brett perfectly captured the depression and loneliness fueling her escapades. It was terribly simple to see why so many would fall in love with her, even knowing that she was destined to let them down. A natural born heartbreaker rendered with immense empathy.


Linda Lavin as Rita in The Lyons

Joining Rylance in the "Hey, look at me, I'm acting!" club, the ever-delightful Linda Lavin didn't steal this show from the rest of her cast. She simply refused to let anyone else ever come close to possessing it. Great this year in Other Desert Cities Off-Broadway and Follies in DC, she skipped both of those transfers to Broadway for this small Off-Broadway show, and it was easy to see why. The disgruntled Jewish mother has been seen before, but Lavin played her like a sitcom dream and looked to be having more fun than anyone else on stage this year.


Danny Burstein as Buddy in Follies

In such a diva-heavy show, it's surprising to me that my favorite performance came from one of the male actors, but Burstein is so sad and so lovable as the shat-upon husband of Bernadette Peters' potentially crazy Sally. Burstein's second act opener, "The Right Girl," is a highlight of the entire show, the character's entire story of vacillation between love and disappointment rendered in miniature. More than anyone else for me, he nailed the balance between good humor and real sadness that the show needs to be its best.


Annaleigh Ashford as Maureen in Rent

I did not love the off-Broadway revival of Rent. It's a show that meant a lot to me as a teenager and which I saw many, many times on Broadway. To bring it back so soon after the original closed, I was hoping that something amazing and new would be brought to the table. It wasn't. Except in the case of Annaleigh Ashford whose Maureen felt completely different from any other portrayals of the character I've seen but also completely fitting with the role as written. The production was vibrantly alive when she came on stage. If only the rest of the cast had gotten the memo that they needed to figure out their own way to play familiar characters.


Jenn Harris as Clarice in Silence! The Musical and Nina in SWAN!!!

There's a reason that Harris seems to star in shows that require exclamation points in their titles. She's too funny for vaguer punctuation. A spot-on mimic with perfect comedic timing and a sense of utter fearlessness, she is the only performer this year that I saw swallow a can of cold baked beans for a laugh. And if you don't respect that...I just don't know what to do for you.


Chris Perfetti as Charles in Sons of the Prophet

Almost anyone from this cast could have made it onto my top 10, but I'll give it to the new kid in town. In a supporting role, Perfetti shone as the gay younger brother in a family that can't manage to escape tragedy. Whether coming on to the football player who ran over his dad or trying to convince his brother that there's somehow a message for them from the afterlife, he stays grounded and real and very, very touching.


Bobby Steggert - A Minister's Wife

No one else liked this show as much as I did. A musical version of Shaw's Candida, I thought the show was delicate and lovely. And at its heart, Steggert played a lovelorn, naive young poet who believes himself to be terribly mature. A sophisticated portrayal of youthful innocence by one of my favorite current actors.


I started the blog this year with a list of my favorite performances of 2010 and named Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur as one of them. I'd actually give her the number one slot here, but I've rhapsodized about her enough!

Krapp's Last Tape

Okay, so I'm ending the year with a whimper. Seeing less shows, writing about them less frequently, so on and so forth. BUT GODDAMIT IT, I'M FINISHING THIS YEAR!

Ahem.

So.

I saw John Hurt is Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at BAM. I don't want to say it was blissful. I mean...it's Beckett. It was sad and thoughtful and funny and...lonely. Can a play be lonely? I would (now) argue: yes. One of the things I love most about live theater is the communal experience. You're in a room with tens, hundreds, or thousands of people all experiencing the same thing. There's something beautifully collective about it. Krapp's Last Tape sort of flips that feeling on its ear. Yes, I watched this in a space with about 1,000 people (give or take), but the takeaway really was...we were all there alone.

I remember reading this play in college and having not the slightest idea of what it was about. Either I was dumber in college than I am now or it just greatly benefits from being viewed as opposed to read. Or, frankly, both. Here's the snapshot: Krapp's having a birthday. As he does every year, he intends to record a tape detailing what he's done since his previous birthday. In the meantime, we listens to a tape from the past. On that recording, he discusses a fleeting moment of connection lying in a boat with a woman he (I believe) just slept with.

The end.

No, really...if you don't know it, that's all the play is about. Oh sure, there's a ten minute or so silent opening in which he mostly clowns around a bit and eats bananas. But most of the play's 50 minute running time is watching one man listen to recordings of himself. And if that doesn't sound dynamic, it may just be that you haven't seen John Hurt do it.

With his craggy face and thousand yard stare, he looks not so much old as worn. And the gravelly depths of his voice support the notion that it's not JUST age that's taking its toll. It's monotony and sadness and (most of all) loneliness.

Krapp's Last Tape, as I took it, is like a love letter to romance wrapped in a faux-existentialist presentation. It dares to ask us why we bother living while managing to answer that we probably do it for quiet moments on boats. For shimmering slivers of connection. I won't pretend it's optimistic about our chances of finding those things that truly matter. But perhaps it's simply a cautionary tale.

What I KNOW is that it was lovely. And that a dozen or so years after I read it, I'm glad to finally understand it.

December Catch Up!

This is so lame, but as I approach the end of the year and go into holiday hyperdrive, I just haven't had that much time to sit down and write (hence the two weeks silence). So I'm going to smash the last four things I saw into one post because there isn't a TON to say about the majority of them as it's some stuff I've seen before and some stuff I wasn't inspired by. Which is gonna make a fascinating read!

I WILL be back to individual posts for the last few shows of the year, and more excitingly (to me at least), I'm working on my Best of 2011 lists. I live for lists, so I'm terribly excited. Keep an eye out for that VERY soon.

So let's kick it off with a Rufus Wainwright concert for the New York City Opera. They're doing his opera in the Spring, so it's not as totally out of left field as it could have been. But the decision to have four pro opera singers perform his album "Songs for Lulu" as a song cycle yielded incredibly odd results. Not bad. But probably not good either.

The man himself took the stage in a second act and performed some of his bigger hits (such as they are) which really drove home how much his plaintive whine sells his songs. The opera singers weren't necessarily helped by the fact that his most recent album isn't his best work--convincing me that some people really just are more interesting before recovery.

All in all, it felt like half a night of the weirdest covers ever and half any average Rufus concert which I always love.

Speaking of unusual concerts: Liza Minnelli and Sam Harris joined forces at Birdland for Schmoolie and Minnooli, a delightful evening more for the banter and the strangeness than for the song choices themselves. (Mis)guided into thinking that going for some Borscht Belt style yuks was right in their comfort zone, the two sang and chatted about their long friendship and then took some solo moments in the spotlight.

I've never been the hugest Sam Harris fan. His voice is a little too crisp and his image a little too cookie cutter. Even when talking about drug binges and getting his life back on track, he has this vague blandness about him. Liza, of course, is Liza. Carried out by two buff men in tank tops with a bedazzled cast on because she broke her leg, she was as on as she was off. By which I mean, she's the sort of person who might stand up to emphasize a point in a song even when she's got a broken leg, but whether she'll remember the lyrics at that moment is questionable. Bottom line: I watched Liza from ten feet away in a tiny room, and she was a glorious mess. Sparkle, baby. Sparkle.

From concerts back to plays, I hit the revival of Private Lives with Kim Cattrall. And you know what? No more Noel Coward plays for me. I don't care how charming and witty I'm supposed to find him. His stuff bores me to tears. It didn't help that this production was pretty solidly one note, especially in the performances. And it certainly didn't help that Act 2 featured what I am nearly positive was the ugliest set I have ever seen on stage. It wasn't even just ugly. It was distractingly ugly. I spent a solid half of the play thinking, "Christ, who approved THAT aquarium" or "Why is this all happening in a circular apartment?" or "Why must they assault my eyes like this? Do they hate me?" (little bits of the set viewable in the photo above) Suffice to say: I don't recommend Private Lives. Which seems to be on point since it announced yesterday that it's closing early.

Lastly and most excitingly, I saw Venus in Fur again. I caught it Off-Broadway last year and just flipped for it. Not even for the play itself, though I do very much enjoy it, but for Nina Arianda's performance in it. This lady has gotten such a ridiculous amount of press for this part and the crazy thing is: she deserves ALL OF IT. Here's what I said about her in May: When I saw Nina Arianda in David Ives' Venus in Fur last year at the Classic Stage Company, I was convinced it was one of the best performances I had ever seen. Crazy, then, that it was also her first major production. If there is such a thing in the theater anymore, it felt like a star-making performance. With her striking features, biting humor, and capacity for stunning (but controlled) rage, she tore the stage up. You can throw any cliched adjective at the performance she gave: breathtaking, incandescent, stunning... Basically, she was fucking brilliant, and I couldn't rip my eyes away from her.

And that's all still true. She's now more happily matched by Hugh Dancy than she was by Wes Bentley although, to be honest, the male role is pretty much just set decoration. I love the play in spite of it being admittedly a bit thin and predictable, but it's incredibly dun nonetheless, and it's just the sort of performance you get to see maybe once or twice a year. And the sort of debut that you see maybe...once.

Once, A New Musical

Fuck it. I'm going out of order. I'm a few shows behind, but I'm going to jump to today's because I want to talk about it while it's still fresh. Not that I have any expectation that it's going to slip from my mind that soon. It's just that it was so, so good.

I didn't see the movie Once in the theater. For some reason I didn't expect to like it very much in spite of all the good buzz. But when I finally did see it, I thought it was a wonderful movie--warm and sweet and tender, if a little thin. I'm going to go ahead and say that the stage version is incredibly faithful to the movie, but if anything, the emotions have been refined and this boy meets girl story maintains the intimacy and realness of the movie while somehow blowing the emotions up bigger than life. It's really just a love story between two people and their music and how their love for each other may not be strong enough to overcome life's complications, but at the very least, it strengthens their songs.

As soon as you enter the theater, the bulk of the cast is already on the stage which is not only designed to look like a bar but is actually a fully functional one. Audience members are invited to head on stage and grab a drink before the show and during intermission. And the ten or so cast members up there perform music together, singing and playing their instruments straight through until ever so subtly, the show itself begins. Steve Kazee as the guy (the guy and girl aren't given names and somehow this doesn't feel gimmicky) performs a song as a busker. And then in a smoky mirror at the back of the stage, you catch sight of Cristin Milioti as the girl, awestruck in dusty lighting. I wish I could say why I teared up at that moment, but I can't quite place it. It's simply one of those rare moments when everything seems perfectly aligned--actor, set, lighting, song. And the simplicity of it combined with this beautiful, dreamlike transition to the world of the show is complete. So before the two leads in this everyday tragedy have spoken to each other, I was already misty. A feeling that didn't go away for the duration of the show.

Milioti and Kazee are fantastic. He plays the guitar; she the piano. Her accent is Czech; his is Irish. Between them, they carry the bulk of the show (the ensemble is brilliant, but the heavy lifting is all on the leads--a weight they bear with ease). But let's talk about that ensemble for a moment. The actors also handle the music and are the stagehands and are called upon to handle Steven Hoggett's astonishing choreographed movement. And while none has more than a couple scenes of their own, they register so fully from Anne Nathan as the girl's mother Baruska seeming sexy and matronly and a little devilish at the same time to Paul Whitty's brash, silly, overbearing, lovable shop owner and Elizabeth Davis as Reza, the sexy Czech girl who loves to seduce men, cares deeply about her friends and family, and is there for the people she loves.

Hoggett also choreographed Black Watch and American Idiot, and I've mentioned him with regard to those shows before. I'm starting to think he might be one of the most singular voices in theater today, putting a very modern dance style on stage while making it accessible to the audience and working with actors who aren't dancers. There's a stylized moment showing someone being folded into an embrace that I think might be the most beautiful three seconds I've ever seen on stage (I could be exaggerating, but I might actually not be).

Another moment turns the body of someone who has kneeled to cry into part of the cityscape of Dublin by way of a subtle and lovely use of lights. And that's the thing about this show: the whole is wonderful and tremendously moving, but there are these little tiny moments of stage magic that are so well in tune with the show itself that they bolster and deepen everything happening at the heart of the story with GUY and GIRL. Everything seems effortless only because you know there's a team of people behind the scenes and an ensemble on stage all working together perfectly, all on the same page. Whether it's a group a capella song or a few bars of transitional music, every note adds to the show even though the songs aren't actually integrated into the piece in a traditional way. This is a show about musicians, and the numbers performed are almost exclusively their own, just reinforced and expanded by this on stage band.

Every cynical shred of me thought that this could end up being just another cheap ploy to turn a movie into a musical in order to cash in on the film's popularity. Seeing it, you feel exactly how unlikely it is that anyone involved did this without the fullest and deepest commitment instead to putting together a show that honored and enriched the movie itself. Rumor has it that even though the show hasn't opened Off-Broadway yet, the producers are looking for a Broadway theater to transfer it. Everyone should root for it to happen. It's a bittersweet show of true beauty that is as near to perfect as these things can be.

Seminar

As someone who works in publishing, the fact that there are so many plays lately about writing is not unwelcome to me. Other Desert Cities and Venus in Fur and now Seminar, Theresa Rebeck's somewhat thin but entirely delightful new comedy about a vicious writing instructor teaching a private workshop to four young writers.

Alan Rickman is that instructor, Leonard, and if seething with disgust and decimating writer after writer doesn't seem like a particularly huge stretch for him, that doesn't make him any less of a joy to watch, and some of his barbs are so incisive that they're squirm-inducing, all the more so because there is the sense throughout that while there is a lot of bluster (and a great deal of offensiveness), quite often he's very likely completely right.

And here comes the sort of giant caveat I feel like the show requires: you're asked to believe, repeatedly, that all it takes to judge someone's talent is skimming one or two pages of their work. While of course I don't want to just sit and watch people read for several hours, and while I can accept that you can know a lot about a writer from any sample of their work, the strain to push aside incredulity does become more intense throughout the show. There are other believability issues throughout as well, but when it comes down to it, the show is just fun enough that for me they were all worth overlooking.

Not only did it tickle me that essentially the play was a love letter to writers of true talent and passion (and a mourning for how difficult the road can be for them), but the show is so perfectly cast that it's a delight to simply sit back and watch a great group of actors tear into the material with so much glee. Lily Rabe is stupidly fantastic as the student hosting the seminar but also whose work is treated to the first and most vicious criticism. She is conflicted, brittle, and annoying as hell, but she's also sympathetic and believable. You can feel her playing against some of the most obvious choices, but not in a mannered way. It all feels so organic. Brilliantly so. Jerry O'Connell is making his Broadway debut, and he's suprisingly great. It feels like a throwaway part at first--the dopey, well-connected douchebag. But as things start to break down for his, a tenderness and affability snuck in and caught me off guard. And Hamish Linklater is Martin, the writer most reticent to share his work. It's almost a sneaky performance because while it seems like it might be Rickman's show or Rabe's for most of the time, in the end, it ends up that Linklater is really the one it all hangs on. Beautifully.

Ultimately, though, it's just a great ensemble in a great ensemble piece. It's got a real hint of the God of Carnage about it--a small group of great actors being vicious and funny in service of a show that's maybe not especially brilliant, but fuck it you're loving it anyway. And you know what? I'll take it!

Wild Animals You Should Know

I maybe wasn't suuuuuper excited to see a play about Boy Scouts and sexual abuse because, frankly, it's not the freshest topic. Molestation plays have not only been done. They've been done brilliantly: Doubt, anyone? How I Learned to Drive? What sets Wild Animals You Should Know apart, though, is that it's got a little bit more of a Lolita sensibility. The kid is definitely the pursuer. The counsellor is most resistant. But to hold onto Doubt for a second, like that play, we never know whether anything actually happened.

Sure, I can describe the play entirely in terms of how it relates to its predecessors, but there was a vague undercurrent of nastiness that kept it just fresh enough to be, if not necessary, at least entertaining. So lets just say it's the funniest molestation play you're likely to see?

Jay Armstrong Johnson plays the potential sociopath Matthew, and he's the kind of blandly good looking, sincerely charming guy that you can imagine would have been able to twist people around his finger in high school just as he does in the show. Believing that he's in high school now is slightly more challenging, but I guess casting 15 year olds as sexual aggressors whose first appearance on stage is doing a striptease to the Boy Scout motto is maybe potentially challenging. And can I take a moment to talk about how weird it is that the two biggest trends on stage this fall are plays about books and plays about teen boys having sex with adult men? well, this show is considerably more tasteful than Burning. AND less interesting. But...well, let's say that Burning might be the first show that gets a second post out of me, but that's for another time.

Meanwhile, Matthew's best friend is gay teen Jacob played to perfection by Gideon Glick who I think I've now seen in every major gig he's had. He was brilliant as the gay teen in Spring Awakening. And the gay teen in Speech and Debate. And even as the non-specifically gay teen in Spider-Man before his part was cut prior to opening. I will admit that with his strange voice and relative flamboyance, he's a specific enough performer that he will likely always be at risk of being typecast, but goddam he's good at what he does.

Matthew's mannered father, Patrick Breen, serves as a chaperone on a scouting trip along with the charming drunk Lenny. It's on this trip that Matthew confronts their scout counselor Gordon about the fact that he discovered that Gordon is gay and will out the counselor unless he admits that he finds Matthew attractive. It's an incredibly strange scene and it's here that things seem like they're really getting good because what the playwright does best is hint at the complexities and ambiguities of teendom. Sadly, he then shifts to focus on Matthew's father and the other counselor.

We come back to Matthew in the end and a really tantalizingly open to interpretation ending. Which is strong enough to send you out on a good note, not really knowing what happened, but with enough hints to be really curious about what did. And there's skill involved in that. If you're going to end on an ellipses, you need to give people enough to ponder so they aren't just unfulfilled and frustrated. And he did that. I just wish that when he did put periods on his sentences and scenes, they were just as satisfying.

Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway

Hugh Jackman's not really a great singer, and he's not really a fantastic dancer, so it's a little confusing that his show Back on Broadway is so stupidly fantastic. There's something about him that just gives him the ability to put material over even when it shouldn't work. A cheesy cover of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" set to images of the outback and with two didgeridoos should be saccharine enough to make my teeth itch. His sort of sexless sexiness is so bland that it shouldn't even register, but there's something appealing even in its crisp safeness. And while the show is just covers of stuff he's done before and tributes to the most obvious of notions (I love my wife, New York's awesome, my dad really loved me), it's all strangely, wonderfully compelling in his hands. He's like the world's most charming used salesman. He may not have anything great to sell, but you're not leaving the lot empty-handed.

And if that all sounds bitchy, I don't mean it to. Because truly, Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway, is a stupidly good time. Because no matter his specific limitations in particular areas, Jackman is a capital Entertainer. And his joy at bringing his audience along for the ride is, in fact, pretty infectious. He's got that sort of Tinkerbell/Lady Gaga I'll-live-if-you-applaud quality. Some of the show is obvious and silly, but at no point is the man coasting, and I respect the crap out of that.

The banter between the songs was up-to-the-minute fresh. Whether joking about Rick Perry's debate gaffe the night before, bringing out the four dancers having their first opening night on Broadway that night, or engaging a member of the audience in a genuinely amusing back and forth, Jackman was at his best on his toes. It's that charisma and relatable quality that set him apart.

There were musical highlights, certainly. I loved his version of "Tenterfield Saddler," and his "Soliloquy" from Carousel was the best showcase for his particular vocal qualities. A big movie musical medley was bubbly and fun and engaging, but not as much so as his Act 2 entrance decked out in gold lame to do a little Peter Allen tribute. Still, though, if it weren't for his peculiar blend of star quality and humility (real or imagined), none of it would register as big as it does. Bottom line: he just always looks so fucking happy. So yeah...that's infectious. There's no depth to the show, but sometimes a night of candy coated entertainment is just fine too.

Lillias White at Aaron Davis Hall

I first saw Lillias White in The Life, the mid 90's musical about mid-80's Times Square. More specifically, it was about the hookers in Times Square. I went to see it instead of going to my junior prom in high school. How did my mother not know I was gay?! Anyhoo, Lillias played Sonja, a 26-year-old prostitute who had been tricking for ten years and was feeling worn out. Which led to the song "The Oldest Profession," possibly the most legit show stopping moment I've seen next to maybe Patti Lupone's "Rose's Turn."

White is one of thoseperformers that I'll drop everything for. And, as it turns out, go to 137th St. to see. Triple digit streets? That shit's just crazy.

Like a lot of musical theater performers, I tend to think she's best when she's broadest and biggest. She CAN kill it with a slow, simple number, but give the woman a song big enough to encompass her personality, and she goes from merely great to uniquely spectacular. She covered a lot of stuff I've seen her do before and could watch her to forever more. Her ode to loving plus sized men, "Big Fat Daddy" came with plenty of audience interaction and a big-hearted prurience that can't be contained. Covering Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror," she really just brought the pain. Because what you always feel is that she's just so present. Which doesn't mean she can do ANYthing. A reggae-tinged cover of Jessie J's "Price Tag" was one of the most baffling things I've ever encountered.

But the whole show really ended up just being a prelude to the encore. Lillias played Effie White in Dreamgirls back in the day, a fact that did not escape the two extremely (and I mean extremely) enthusiastic men next to me in the front row who started shrieking for her to sing "I Am Changing" as soon as she came back on stage. No one had the music, but not one to disappoint, she just stood center stage and served it. Here's something about me: I don't do outwardly enthusiastic. It's not my thing. The two men next to me? They were squealers. The fact that I was so fucking impressed that I didn't want to stab them through their four minute vocal orgasms? Truly a testament to how amazing the performance was. When all is said and done, I'm just a sucker for a gigantic voice taking on a dynamic song. And you just don't get bigger sounding, more dramatic songs than Effie's. I don't want to say it was transcendent or anything. But I might have tinkled a little. She's just that damn good.

Other Desert Cities

How weird is this? I already get to talk about a (semi-)new production of something I already wrote about this year. Because Other Desert Cities which I didn't like so much Off-Broadway has transferred to the big leagues, and you know what? I liked it a lot more.

Off-Broadway, I had two major problems with the show. The first was that the twist at the end felt heavy-handed and false. I didn't but it for a second and felt so pissed that the play veered into melodrama when it did that it colored my perception of the whole thing. My second concern was that it pandered to its liberal audience for its entire duration, making a lot of really facile arguments about why Republicans are terrible people. It still panders, for sure, and that plot twist is still the crux upon which the play turns, but it plays so, so much better than it did.

Why? Rachel Griffiths took over for Elizabeth Marvel as the clinically depressed daughter of an uber-conservative couple who has decided to publish a memoir about the tragic loss of her brother years before and its implications for the family. She has come home to get her parent's blessing. Hijinks ensue. Now, Elizabeth Marvel is a pretty amazing actress. Her performance in The Little Foxes was ferocious and heartstopping. But while she played the depressed daughter aspect of her role brilliantly in this show, I was unconvinced by a late-game transition to pathos and rage. Griffiths, on the other hand, seems built for this kind of soapy material. Her early scenes seemed to lack a little of the zip that had been present before, but once the play got moving, it occurred to me that what was happening was that she wasn't approaching any of the material as just lines that she could land or moments she could make sing. She was building to something greater from the very beginning. And by the end, she made a moment that in its first incarnation had me thinking, "You have to be fucking kidding me," into a moment of real beauty.

Judith Light has also taken over a role, replacing Linda Lavin as Aunt Silda. It would be difficult to imagine two more divergent takes on the part of the drunken old screw-up. Lavin was the good-time-gal. The lady you'd love to get drunk with because she'd always make you laugh. Light...well, you'd probably shift a few seats down the bar when she came in. She spotted the ugliest things about the character, and she dove at them. I loved Lavin's approach. But Light's seems to make more sense and probably does a better service to the play itself.

Before I swing over to the last female actor in the play, let it be known that I think Stacy Keach and Thomas Sadoski are giving great, great performances. Sadoski is nothing if not relateable as the moderate screw-up of the family. And Keach is endearing as the low-key father but allows the character his own moments of despair and animosity.

But let's talk about Stockard Channing, shall we? Because she's unreal in this play. As the nipped and tucked ice queen mother who rules the roost, she is acerbic, witty, and brittle, and yet at the same time, she plays the woman's dedication to her family to the hilt. But that can only be pushed so far. She says repeatedly through the show, "I know myself," and you get the sense that beyond anything else in her life, her fierce belief in her self-made identity is really the single thing of the utmost importance. She has incredibly vicious, bitterly cold moments, and she appears (and likely is) unbreakable, but she never loses that barest hint of fragility. She's extraordinary now as she was before. The real achievement of the transfer from Off-Broadway to Broadway is that the rest of the show has risen towards her level. She is still, to my eye, the best thing about this play, and she still burns brightest, but to the credit of all others involved, she no longer threatens to completely unbalance the entire evening.

Love's Labour's Lost

We already covered my 100th show of the year, the deeply disappointing and pretty ridiculous Thomas Bradshaw play Burning. Now it's time for the 100th post! Which means...well, it's another disappointment. Don't worry: I know the next three posts are going to be about stuff I liked!

I love that the Public Theater has a "Lab" program where they workshop shows. I love that I got to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson there for $15 a few years back. And I love that they're tackling some of Shakespeare's less produced plays as part of the series because, ever the completist, I set the relatively stupid goal of seeing every Shakespeare play performed at least once. This program let me knock Timon of Athens off my list. Next month, it will take down Titus Andronicus (because the movie doesn't count). And this month, it allowed me to cross of Love's Labour's Lost.

I'm happy to report that the problems I had with the show have nothing to do with Shakespeare himself. Sure, the plot about four men taking a vow of chastity in order to further their academic pursuits only to be shortly thereafter visited by four beautiful women is as ridiculous by today's standard as most of his work, but that's just the nature of the beast. Someone had to establish the cliches.

The problems aren't even with the cast (well...mostly). Instead, I lay blame at the director's feet for turning out a show that felt somehow frantically dull. First of all, the script must have been hacked apart to turn this into a two hour show with no intermission. I don't know the show, but you can feel that pieces are missing. And say what you will about Shakespeare, the man was thorough. I never had the sense that his plays were incomplete, if you see where I'm going with this.

But let's move on to something more troubling: "Hangin' Tough." Yeah--the New Kids on the Block song. Which the four leading ladies ever so briefly do a little dance to. Well before they do the Beyonce "Single Ladies" dance. You want to give me a new interpretation of something that interpolates contemporary(-ish) pop culture? Fine. Do it. You want to jar me out of the moment forcefully? Go for it. But if you do? You better make a point. And I sure hope it's significant.

Little moments of ridiculousness are scattered through the show as though to highlight its outlandishness. Letters are monstrously large. Costumes are black and white except for the occasional burst of silly bold color. But here's the thing: the show is already silly. So why not just play it straight? The worst offender (and I'm not fully prepared to blame the actor in lieu of the director) is the performance of Samira Wiley as the page Moth who manages to add excess to excess and seems not a clown as much as a buffoon.

Other performers far significantly better. Stephanie diMaggio is delightful as the lusty wench Jacquenetta. And Francis Jue's curate might not have the biggest part, but he left the most significant impression.

In the final moments of the show, the cast joins together for a joyful musical number that jars us out of the ennui that set in almost imperceptibly over the two hour running time. But I have to say, I'd rather be let down by the last two minutes of a great show than lifted up by the finale of something so deeply mediocre. Ah well. Good reviews a'comin', I promise!

Justin Vivian Bond

I miss Kiki & Herb. For those who don't know, they were played by Justin Bond and Kenny Mehlman and were an old-timey lounge act with a hilarious back story and a penchant for covering increasingly bizarre songs. Who can say they've lived unless they've seen a trans woman in old-lady make-up do a balls out performance of "Wu-Tang Forever?" No one. That's who.

I first saw Kiki & Herb in the basement of the NYU Catholic Center (obviously) in '98 or '99. I also notably saw their farewell concert at Carnegie Hall (downtown goes uptown for real), their subsequent "second coming" at the same venue, and most notably for me, a concert at the Knitting Factory shortly after 9/11/01 that was searingly bleak, uncomfortably hysterical, and ultimately one of the most memorable things I've ever seen.

Point is, since the "second coming," they haven't been back on the scene together, but I've caught up with each many, many times--Kenny regularly at Our Hit Parade and Justin wherever she happens to play.

It was with great pleasure that I got a chance to check out her show the night before Halloween at Joe's Pub. The on stage chatter veered from estrogen therapy to Samhain Eve to lap dances and Casey Anthony. The tone, as ever, was caustic with an undercurrent of warmth and a hint of wonder, as bitter and bold as ever.

I really enjoyed the show which was loosely organized around the theme of "songs by dead people." So loosely, in fact, that many of the songs were by people who are alive and simply old. Which was confusing to be sure and did lead to a moment of genuine concern when she started singing Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat." Leonard is happily still among us.

Justin's voice perpetually sounds just this side of fully shot and always in danger of just tumbling over a cliff, but she can use that to find these incredible moments of pathos and humanity. But here's the thing: when she goes for funny, no one else can do what she does. When the target is earnest, I feel like there are wonderful moments but that they lack a level of transcendence that I know is possible. So maybe she doesn't want to be funny all the time. That's fine. And we still get shows that are pretty wonderful. But I walk away with that niggling voice suggesting I could have had an even better time. So...yeah. I miss Kiki & Herb. But in the meantime, I'm certainly not going to turn down an evening with Mx. Bond.

Burning

I've had my eye on when I'd hit 100 posts because then I'd have seen my 100 shows, but now that I'm at post 98, I realize that I did skip writing about that one concert way back when and also did one post about two shows a few months ago. Which means that my 100th show of the year was The New Group's production of Burning at the Acorn Theater in Theater Row. The same space I saw my first show of the year in when I started the blog. OMG FULL CIRCLE.

So yeah, that might seem like kismet except...Burning. Umm...what to say?

Let's start here: at intermission, I had the following conversation:
Friend: "We're leaving...right?"
Me: "I know it's fucking weird, but I maintain that this COULD end up being brilliant."
Friend: "..."
Me: "No, I mean, it's experimental and interesting and going fascinating places, and we should keep an open mind and hey, I haven't been bored at all, so...yeah, it's super weird, but can you honestly say you have any idea what's going to happen next? Doesn't the fact that anything can happen make you at least curious enough to stay?"
Friend: "I bet the neo-Nazi fucks his sister."

Spoiler alert: act 2 opens with the neo-Nazi fingering his sister. FINE, friend. You were right. Whatever. I still wasn't bored.

Let's just try to do a reallllllly quick plot overview, mm-kay? Brace yourselves. So this 14-year-old wants to go to acting school but his mother dies of an overdose. He heads across the country to interview anyway and convinces an older gay couple to take him in, let him into the school, and have sex with him. Meanwhile, German neo-Nazi's sister is paralyzed as a result of a car accident that also killed their parents. Back in America, a black artist is preparing for an exhibition in Germany when his cousin dies of an overdose. Cousin's son wants him to pay for the funeral but blah blah class issues blah.

So we cover neo-Nazi's, race relations, pedophilia, AIDS, drugs, incest, and a whole bunch of other stuff over three hours as the storylines eventually work their ways together. It's about 14 times too absurd to take seriously as a drama, 5 times too facile to really work as a satire, and half as funny as it needs to be in order to be a comedy. So instead it's just a mess. A big, flailing, did-no-one-EVER-suggest-any-cuts mess.

Out of the 15 person cast, I'd guess maybe three of them kept their clothes on, so if you see the show you can take bets on who'll disrobe next. The nudity, like everything in the show, feels extraneous at best, seemingly there to shock or titillate but falling flat. The worst part is that pieces of the show feel like they could have had an impact. And other parts might legitimately challenge the viewer. But it's all so muddled that the only logical response is to sit back and think, "Really?" It's like every cultural fear of 1996 got together and decided to have an orgy.

Which is not to say I didn't find any moments affecting and other parts very funny. The line "I was in a vagina for a moment" was a stand-out in a too-offensive to actually be offensive monologue about a hermaphrodite rapist (I'm still not making any of this up).

It's telling that in a show that I THINK is aiming to be unnerving and funny, the only time I actually laughed in discomfort was in a quieter scene as two actors whispered to each other when an old man a few rows behind me (oh yeah--I should mention I was in the front row) suddenly screamed, "LOUDER!"

Any time I see something new that I think is crazy dumb I worry that somewhere down the line, that play will become a classic that no one understood when it was first performed. That I'll be the idiot decrying Genet or walking out on Chekhov. But in the case of Burning, I'm pretty secure saying no, it was actually just fucking stupid.

Willie Nelson

It's not a secret that I have a list of performers I want to see before they die. High on that list was one Mr. Willie Nelson. Now, Willie's only 78, but some people just look like they've really LIVED, you know? In any case, I wasn't going to take my chances and let his most recent concert slip me by, so I headed out to Jersey to catch his show.

There's something charming to me about a performer who is fully willing to be exactly who their audience wants them to be, to the extent that they almost parody themselves. And watching Willie line up a bunch of bandannas and then tie them on for a bit before throwing each into the audience...that was adorable. If only because he seemed to do it all in good humor. He was nothing if not a pro. Songs charged into each other, banter was kept to a minimum, and on we plowed through decades worth of material. It could have felt cold and calculated (and who knows, maybe it was), but with his voice sounding completely unchanged by the years and his guitar playing energetic and enthusiastic, it was a near perfect concert for someone who had never seen him before. From "On the Road Again" to his version of "Me and Bobby McGee," he played everything I could have hoped for. I would argue that he was never the most forward-thinking or innovative musician, but he writes a damn good tune nonetheless. And his new songs , a few of which he played amidst the two hour set showed the great humor and heart that he's always brought to the table.

The audience at the show was a pretty fascinating cross-section of people that went from business suits to neck tattoos. And the curiosity factor about who would get thrown out for drunken misbehavior next definitely added a level of tension to the show. For the record, the first two people ejected didn't even make it to the end of the first song. And there was a 47-year-old woman who wasn't about to go without a fight (which oddly involved her hollering her age repeatedly).

What else is there to say? Willie Nelson is the flannel pajamas of music--cozy and warm and possibly going to lull you into a slumber--in a good way. And if he does an 80th birthday tour, I'll get out there to see him again for sure.

Chinglish

I don't totally understand how Chinglish ended up on Broadway which I don't mean in a bad way. It's just a little small and specific for a large house, and while it certainly has a lot to recommend it, I didn't find it outstanding enough to fully understand who thought it needed to come to New York in a production this big.

Gary Wilmes plays Daniel, a white American who heads to China to land a job making signs for a new stadium in Guanxing. He lands a British translator who agrees to act as his consultant to land the contract and offers to exploit his contacts with the minister Cai Guoliang to make that happen. There are two major complicating factors. The first is the minister's top aide Xi Yan who seems alternately desirous of sabotaging any possible deal and of making sure it goes through. The second, more thematically important, is that communication across language and cultural barriers proves challenging.

Mistranslation is the theme of the evening and the basis for much of its truly amusing comedy. Angela Lin as an overwhelmed/under-accurate translator in the first scene was the highlight of the show for me. Since much of the show is in Mandarin, the actors seem to have been directed to really oversell everything. Lin best masters acting at full volume while also seeming immediately knowable. As the show goes on, the issue of translation becomes less about words than about concepts--the challenge of crossing cultural barriers not only professionally but personally. Daniel and Xi Yan begin an affair, and through it, we explore the differences between the two as individuals but also as cultural emissaries. The language gags of the early parts of the show give way to meatier emotional issues that lend the show weight. And while the resolution is genuinely moving, I found the play to be a touch unbalanced, never really settling on a tone that felt fully committed.

Still, it's strong material with moments alternately hysterical and deeply affecting. If anything, it felt like a great, great show that should have been one act and run under two hours which could have been done with relatively minimal editing. It's one of those plays that really drives home how artificial the two act structure can feel.

It's nice to see a show hit Broadway that isn't cast with stars. It would have been nicer if I was more fond of the lead actor who felt a bit limited in terms of range, playing the entire show mildly baffled and affable. He's charming, but he never seems to develop very much so his performance just felt really static. I found myself wishing they HAD star cast because I would have loved to see what Jason Segel from Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been like in the role. If only the producers had called me... Jennifer Lim as Xi Yan fares better. Excellently, in fact. She projects a sincere confidence throughout even when frustrated, angry, or wounded. She plays Xi as a relatively non-expressive woman (at least compared to the mugging going on around her), but she conveys more about her character than anyone else and ends up the emotional and intellectual heart of the show. Which is maybe a touch unfortunate for Wilmes who is so completely outshone.

So in the end...very good. And thoughtful. It just seems not 100% finished, and that's a shame because I think it could have been legitimately great.

Taylor Mac

I don't actually remember the first time I saw Taylor Mac, and this seems like a hideous lapse in my memory since I'm now pretty sure he's a genius. I do know that I found him totally intimidating with his crazy make-up and pseudo-drag. His look read a bit confrontational to me. And maybe it is, but now when I look at him, I see a stellar performer with a ton of heart and a surreal sense of humor who also gives really good face.

Taylor's epic five hour masterpiece The Lily's Revenge was one of the greatest nights I've spent at the theater (or really anywhere). It actually felt magical. Like for real magical, not I'm-hyperbolizing-magical. His show The Walk across America for Mother Earth earlier this year didn't fully hold up in comparison, but how could it? It was still wonderful.

And last Sunday at the new and improved Joe's Pub, he told the audience of a new show he's working on that I would actually think about killing someone to get a ticket to. A history of pop music in 24 consecutive hours of concert, it's not only about covering the ground. It's about endurance, what happens to the voice under duress, and I assume, the impact of sustained viewership on an audience. Because what his work always has, even at its most outrageous and outlandish, is a depth of humanity that it seems can only be authentically captured by moving into the realm of the abstract.

At the first of a series of evenings trying out songs for the 24 hour show, he tackled on decade only-the 1970s. From "Bohemian Rhapsody" to "Put the Lime in the Coconut" to a Broadway song so obscure that even I had never heard of it, he dove into disparate seeming material and managed to make it all feel of a piece. He may not have worked out a narrative yet, but the bits of patter between songs did loosely connect to his goals with the concert, his family history, and his own connection to music.

Though he has the capacity to shock and the greater capacity to make just about anything amusing, it's his ability to cut through every layer of artifice (his own and that of the material) to moments of breathtaking sincerity that draw me to him. He just fascinates me, and I'd watch him do anything. Even for 24 hours.

The Phantom of the Opera

Phantom of the Opera has the very special distinction of being the first Broadway show I ever disliked. Drunk on the wonder of live theater, I stepped into the Majestic Theater 15 years ago prepared to be dazzled. I found myself curiously underwhelmed and rather confused. Not just confused as to why the show was an enormous hit (it was already 10 years in though still well off becoming the longest running musical of all time) but confused as to what the hell was actually happening.

Revisiting the show for the first time ever, I still don't know why it's the biggest hit ever, but I at least know why I was so confused about the plot: it's insanely stupid. Not the idea of a murderous phantom living beneath an opera house and training a young ingenue to be a star. That's silly, but it's also just good gothic campy fun. What's stupid is how many storylines the show crams in without ever really bothering to allow any of them to accrue any gravitas or get very deep. Or even very spooky. Hey, isn't it kind of upsetting that the phantom just killed that...oh shit, look at all the candles!

One might wonder why I bothered going back to a show I knew I didn't like. First of all, the tickets were free. But more importantly, I thought that my taste for camp might be more developed than it was at 16. And I also thought it would be great fun to watch a show staged at a time when hundreds of costumes and hugely involved sets were still financially feasible. "Masquerade," the opening of the second act, is almost gasp-inducing in its sheer scale. An enormous staircase filled with dozens of actors in hugely involved costumes for a masked ball, it's pure eye candy. It also happens to be (in my opinion), the best song in the show. And there's a certain charm to the fact that during an early opera scene they pull on a life-sized replica of an elephant. An elephant! These days, we'd get a projection on a scrim and two folding chairs.

But as it turns out, lavish doesn't equal entertaining, at least in my book (see my previous review of Zarkana). And while there's so much potential here, I'd rather just read the book. As many people as there are on stage, the show feels deeply impersonal. No one has to do all that much acting (least of all the Phantom) because every role is painted in the very broadest strokes.

The musical staging (I hesitate to call it choreography) is stilted at best; the songs mostly all sound the same; and there's essentially no ending. Which makes sense for a show that mostly also has no backstory.

So why do I think it's been running forever? A few reasons: some people do just love seeing their dollars at work on the stage; the show at this point is its own brand which is probably self-sustaining; you can plop probably ANY halfway decent actor into any role and not gain or lose much; the show requires very little of its audience except the most facile emotionality; and who doesn't love to hear some big belty notes...even when they're prerecorded. AHEM.

I don't want to sound super snobby or contrary. I feel compelled to point out that I loooooove Les Miz. And while I think some of the lyrics of Miss Saigon are crazy stupid, it's lovely, admittedly silly, and still wonderful. I'm actually really fine with big dumb shows. As long as they're big dumb and FUN. Or moving. Or entertaining. Which is why I think Wicked should close tomorrow but Sister Act could run for years.

So...yeah. I hate Phantom of the Opera. I hate that it's the longest running show on Broadway, and I hate that it's probably got another 10-15 years in it. But if it ever DOES close, I'd love to play dress-up in all those costumes.

The Lyons

Linda Lavin was amazing in Other Desert Cities earlier this year off-Broadway. She was fantastic in Follies at the Kennedy Center this summer. She could have transferred to Broadway with either of those shows. Instead, she chose to do a small off-Broadway play at the Vineyard Theater. Things this makes me think:
1) She wasn't willing to let her role in The Lyons go to any mere mortal.
2) She is fabulous enough (and old enough and successful enough) not to need "Broadway" to legitimize her.
3) She is Linda Lavin. Bow down, bitches.

The Lyons is a dysfunctional family comedy, and that should make it not work. This is all very, very familiar territory, but it's plumbed with such aplomb (see what I did there?) that the show is a refreshingly bitter pill that I very much enjoyed swallowing.

Linda plays Rita Lyons who sits by her husband's deathbed wondering aloud how to redecorate her living room as he, Ben (Dick Latessa), learns to let all of his feelings show in as profane and vituperative a manner as possible. Rita and Ben haven't told their children that their father is dying of cancer...so as not to upset them unnecessarily. And thus, they spring it on both son and daughter as Ben is knocking on heaven's door. Kate Jennings Grant plays daughter Lisa who Rita thinks should get back with her ex-husband. Rita also thinks one of Lisa's children might be "a little retarded," but that's a minor point. Michael Esper plays Curtis who Ben thinks is pretty much a big, gay waste of space.

The show beautifully toes the line between vicious and tender and while ultimately it's a bit unfocused, it has deeply earnest and yet thoroughly unsentimental things to say about the tenuous bonds of family. The twist here is that the author glibly takes down the notion that family is the most important unit.

The first act zips by. It's a single scene set in Ben's hospital room, and it just has a great pace. Things in the second act get a bit more unwieldy. There's a quick scene at an AA meeting, a longer scene with Curtis looking at an apartment, and then we're back to the hospital where everything comes together again beautifully. Curtis's apartment hunting scene is masterfully uncomfortable building from awkwardness to forthright animosity so smoothly that I had that knife-in-the-gut feeling that I love so much...when tension builds steadily enough that you can only zero in on the action and wait for what seems with each passing moment to be inevitable.

So yeah, it's a vicious little play filled with a ton of really big laughs. Lavin is a natural comedian. It's such a cliche to say you can't take your eyes of someone, but there were whole stretches of the first act where I realized I wasn't looking at anyone else even when they were talking. There isn't a single tic wasted, and while you could argue (probably correctly) that she upstages her fellow cast at every opportunity, every one of those moments is so right and so specific that it hardly matters.

I mean, bottom line: go for the Lavin, stay for the laughs. Or vice versa. Just don't go with family.

The Threepenny Opera

The last time The Threepenny Opera played Broadway, Cyndi Lauper was making her Broadway debut in it, and I somehow ended up at the unveiling of a portrait of her in the basement of some midtown restaurant attended by her and all of her castmates. I'm not going to say that night was the reason I haven't had a drink in several years, but if Ms. Lauper happened to remember a somewhat slurrily aggressive fan from that night, I would simply say that said fan is likely very apologetic (and still wonders what happened to the leather jacket he wore that night). Suffice to say, when I saw the actual production two weeks later, I watched through a sheen of humiliation that STILL wasn't sufficient enough to disguise how poorly conceived every single moment on that stage was.

Anyone who ever sat through a drama theory class knows that Brecht's goal with "Epic Theater" was for the audience not to identify with the action on stage in order to achieve some sort of catharsis but to remain distant enough to be critical of the action on stage. Which is simply to say that he wanted people to think more than they felt. But which many a lazy director has interpreted to mean you can throw whatever the fuck you want to at a Brecht play and excuse it as emotionally distancing. Who cares if a golden Pegasus and a messenger in hot pants doesn't make sense for the final scene, the director of the last revival must have asked. It's not SUPPOSED to make sense. It's Brecht!

Happily, the production of Threepenny that I caught at BAM recently (performed by Brecht's own theater troupe, the Berliner Ensemble) was directed by Robert Wilson with a singular vision that, while cold and detached, made perfect sense with the piece itself.

The story of criminal mastermind Mack the Knife, his friend and co-conspirator detective Tiger Brown, his young "wife" Polly, and the various denizens of underclass Victorian(-ish) London, it's a viciously cynical piece presented here in a style that crosses noir cinema with Weimar cabaret, grounding it in the time and place in which the piece was written, giving it a singular stylistic vision without resorting to gimmickry OR to realism. It helped that the piece was performed entirely in German (there's something I never thought I'd type). Okay, okay, there was one out of left field Lady Gaga reference, but it was so out of place that it almost felt like the director was winking at the terrible productions that have preceded his. I MIGHT be giving too much credit on that one, but what can you do?

I heard someone in the audience complaining that the cast had "the worst voices" they had ever heard which made me feel a little stabby because while not traditionally beautiful, each singer's voice seemed instead perfectly situated within their songs. They may not have made those songs sound lovely, but they're not lovely songs.

Apparently I knew this show better going in than I had realized because there were some noticeable cuts that I thought sacrificed a bit of clarity. And if you're going to do a three act show, you can't skip the first break and have intermission two hours and 15 minutes into the show, especially if the last act is only 40 minutes long. But those are quibbles. From the moment the cast first paraded across the stage to a tinny version of "Mack the Knife" to the deliriously absurd denouement, I was entranced. Threepenny is a disconcerting theatrical piece that still feels not only vital and relevant but brazen and experimental. It's not a joy to watch, but it's not supposed to be. And in the very confident, thoughtful hands of the Berliner Ensemble, it provided a slick, dark, funny, macabre beginning to the Halloween season (yes, I think that there's a Halloween season).

Brandi Carlile

I got all proud of myself in the last post about actually sticking with this blog so far. Now suddenly I'm four shows behind and haven't been doing my fair share of typity-typing. Got a couple good ones to talk about too. First up, a break from the theater stuff for a quick discussion of the wonder and glory that is a Brandi Carlile concert.

I first heard Carlile a few years ago when browsing iTunes. Her folk/country/rock vibe isn't what I usually listen to (think top 40 minus the whiniest and the whitest; yay to Ke$ha and Kanye, boo to the Arctic Fire Monkeys), but I'm also a sucker for female singers across genres who can really get under your skin (think anywhere from Erykah Badu now to Loretta Lynn ever). Point is, Brandi can blow. And there's a tremendous emotionality to her vocal delivery that gets me a little teary eyed.

And the lady knows how to put on a show with minimal glitz and maximum impact. I first saw her at Irving Plaza a few years ago. I had the flu and planned on catching three or four songs before cutting out. When she came to the front of the stage and belted out a song with no amplification at all to the suddenly pin-drop silent crowd, I knew I was in it for the long haul. I don't even mean the end of the show (a rollicking cover of "Folsom Prison Blues"). I mean the long haul as in fan-for-life.

Since then, I've seen Brandi at venues of increasing size up to the Beacon Theater. At Town Hall, she had the best acoustics I've heard for one of her New York shows, and she seemed so genuinely excited to be performing that I could have stayed forever. Because here's the thing...not only is she hugely talented; she also just seems so damned likeable. Touring with the same twin brothers she has for years, one of whom is married to her sister (who also made an appearance for a song), the vibe of her onstage persona is so familiar and familial. You almost get the sense that if you knocked on the stage door, she'd open it herself and invite you in for a drink. And as sad as many of her songs are, she's the first person to joke about them, good-humored enough to make you wonder where the songs come from, but so fully committed to each that you never doubt they're rooted in a very authentic place.

I will also say this: the bitch knows how to pick a cover. It takes nerve to tackle Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" when Cohen and Jeff Buckley each seemed to have perfect versions, but she still finds something fresh in it. And her version of Radiohead's "Creep" is astonishing.But this is totally besides the point since she steered clear of covers this time instead doing hits and new material. It hardly matters. The point is this: I have yet to see her do a show where I wasn't moved to tears at least once before being driven happily into the night. Town Hall was no different. She is the only singer out there I will drop anything to go see anytime she's in town because she just strikes a very personal chord. Which is the very long way of saying I have no objectivity when it comes to her and am pretty sure she can do no wrong.

Sons of the Prophet

When I started this blog in January, my goal was to keep it up for an entire year. My expectation was that I'd make it to February. Maybe. I'm pretty proud of myself for making it this far and equal parts shocked and thankful that I've gotten as many hits as I have. Not that I'm rivaling Perez Hilton or anything, but how can one compete with photos of Lindsey Lohan with coke spots added under her nose using MS Paint.

The point is, nine months in, I'm feeling pretty confident that I'll make it all the way and have an accurate record of everything I saw in 2011, and you know what that means...there will be top 10 lists. Safe to say that when I compose them, barring an end of the year crush of brilliance, Sons of the Prophet will be featured pretty high up.

I saw Stephen Karam's last play, Speech and Debate, at the Roundabout Underground a couple years back, and I really, really loved it. It was funny and smart and while maybe not a play for the ages, it was a wonderful entertainment for the present. And as an early work by a young playwright, it was full of remarkable promise. I'm exceedingly happy to say that Sons of the Prophet builds on that promise while maintaining the first show's wistful humor, endearing characters, and delicious roles for character actors.

The plot in a nutshell is this: a Lebanese-American family with very, very distant familial connections to philosopher Khalil Gibran has suffered through more than its fair share of tragedy. The play opens with the death of the father in a car crash. The mother has already passed away. The eldest son may be developing a degenerative illness. The uncle is elderly and pretty much falling apart. Obviously, this is a comedy.

Joanna Gleason plays the oldest son's boss, a book packager hellbent on getting a family memoir out of them, linking the stories of their various sadnesses through the folksy "things are bad, and you should be thankful" wisdom of Gibran. Gleason doesn't so much steal scenes as stage all out Ocean's 11 style heists on them. She is utterly perfect, and it's a testament to the rest of the cast that they register at all against her. That they hold their own is a miracle of casting and directing genius. Santino Fontana is a perfect lead and it's almost unfair to even pick out other stand-outs in an all-around exceptional cast, but I'll give special mention to Chris Perfetti as the adorable younger brother whose sincerity, wit, and hints of childlike wonder beautifully balance the sadder impulses of Fontana.

There's something youthful about the writing of the play, and it almost has that kitchen sink approach that so many new playwrights fall prey to. It's about philosophy and ethnicity, sexuality and disease, depression and yearning...it doesn't just tackle big themes but also big concepts. By all means, it should go off the rails, but there's also something oddly easy about it, a tremendous warmth and heart that keeps the proceedings grounded and in human scale. I loved this show, full stop.

Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me three times, and I'll never see another one of your stupid awful plays, Adam Rapp.

Holy christ, I hated this show. So I was glad to see it eviscerated by the New York Times who conveyed how truly impossible it was to believe in the reality of the show. The trouble is, I sort of thought the reviewer was willfully ignoring that the forced stylization was actually intentional, and we weren't really supposed to believe in these people in a traditional sense. The characters of this hollow disaster are too extreme to consider in any naturalistic sort of way, instead seeming to represent the unrefined id of some vicious people being satirized.

Of course...the show doesn't work on that level either.

I'm not going to bother looking up the character names because like everything else on stage, they hardly matter. Christine Lahti is a spoiled rich bitch in Connecticut who hates her milquestoast husband Reed Birney and lusts after their close friend Cotter Smith. She convinces Cotter to murder Reed for convenient plot purposes. No--seriously. It's a poisoning that happens at a dinner party. Why not pour the poison yourself, Christine? Huh?

Anyway, Cotter Smith's son had some sort of breakdown. Christine and Reed's daughter is a pretentious artist. And Quincy Tyler Bernstine is utterly wasted as the maid but delivers an incredibly compelling performance in the midst of the inanity because I don't believe she's capable of less.

To be fair, the whole cast is quite good, but there are lines so simpering and stupid that even Christine Lahti can't save them. There are metaphors so blunt that an actor as great as Reed Birney will stagger under the weight of them. And there are shows so shallow that even Cotter Smith seems drifting through the murk.

Dreams of Flying is the kind of show that can only be amazing or terrible. At a time of economic downturn, there are few artistic statements easier to make than a satire of the rich which is why it's been done so many times before and why (partly) Adam Rapp fails to bring anything fresh or new to the table (other than a lion carcass--spoiler alert).

Here's the play in under a dozen words: People are animals. Even the rich aren't dignified. Oh, the humanity. FIN.

When a show is 85 minutes long and I check my watch, I know it's a bad sign. With this show, I was checking 20 minutes in. Legitimately great actors are wasted on a shallow, silly play of juvenile angst and depression that rings false at the start and falser by the end. I feel like the one plus here is that I was provoked to a strong reaction. But man, that reaction was negative.

Cymbeline

A few months back, chatting about the Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure, I posited that the problem with Shakespeare's "problem plays" might be that they're just not very good. Not to leap right into excessive praise, but I'd like to revise to consider that in fact, the problem may simply be that they aren't all being performed by the Fiasco Company whose bare bones vision of Cymbeline is a celebration of this downright silly play's stunning language as well as a farcical presentation of a storyline that makes most actual farces look timid.

The last time Cymbeline was on Broadway, it had a cast of 26. This production has a cast of...6.Doubling, tripling, and quadrupling roles, the actors manage to convey each character with a specificity that is particularly remarkable when you consider that none of them leave the stage at any point, costume changes are mostly restricted to accessories being swapped, and the entire set is (if I remember correctly) six chairs, two stools, and a box.

I won't even bother explaining the plot other than to say there is a princess in love with the wrong man, her stepmother is trying to get her to wed her son instead, attempts are made at poisoning, characters crossdress with incredible success, a woman's virtue becomes the subject of a bet, a husband ponders killing his wife, a war is fought, and when you think there may not be anything else you can shove into the story, two long disappeared siblings show up with the woman who kidnapped them.

The magical thing about all of this as text is that the bastard who wrote it manages to sneak in these incredibly incisive passages about the way people relate to each other. There are threads of humanity there that connect us so cleanly to the past, really highlighting how inherent some behavior is across hundreds of years. The magical thing about the performance is that this theatrical troupe manages to display those truths while simultaneously mocking the structure they're set within. Not only is nothing lost; much is gained. It's a master class in how to make great material out of mush. I loved the whole thing. It has my heartiest support.

Too bad that artwork is mega-hideous though, amirite?

Knock Knock; Who's There?; 9/11; 9/11 Who?; You Said You'd Never Forget!

Someone asked me last week what it was like to be in New York on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. And the answer is, well...a shitload better than being here on 9/11/01. I spent most of last weekend not turning on the TV, ignoring newspapers, and definitely not reading the countless "Ten Years Later" magazine cover stories. I didn't especially need an anniversary in order to remember, you know?

That morning, I did exchange some texts with someone I was with on the day, each of us contributing pieces of memories that the other had forgotten or, more likely, blocked out. We were both RAs at an NYU dorm, and our dining hall became a place where people who had family or friends in the towers went to await news. I had actually slept through the towers falling somehow, and she was the one who told me what happened. She had no memory of this. It's better that way.

That was Remembrance, Part 1. Part 2 came in the form of a "political cabaret" at the Highline Ballroom that night. Earnest and sad, I could have done on my own. What Knock Knock did was provide a space where boundaries would be pushed, good taste obliterated, and remembrance filtered through the offbeat art of a bunch of self-described freaks. It was, in short, exactly what I needed.

Burlesque star Julie Atlas Muz put the whole thing together and opened with a heartfelt speech about memory and about the need of artists to reflect the world around them, heavily quoting Nina Simone. It was a good place to start. What followed were three acts: one for New York, one for the fractured world, and one called "Oh No, You Di'int!"

Rather than take you through every act (I was there for four hours and it was still going when I packed it in), let's talk highlights and lowlights. The Stanley Love dance troupe dressed as iconic New York buildings as the Twin Towers danced to "This Used to Be My Playground." It was the sort of overly earnest, deeply sentimental performance that in any other space I would have laughed off the stage. Instead, it was lovely and appropriate. Silly, yes, but in a loving and sensitive way. Justin Bond hosted the second act and provided the most cutting commentary of the night, comparing the powers that led to the AIDS pandemic to those that created the level of animosity driving the 9/11 terrorists. "I told you I'd complete a thought," he said after teasing the audience with threads of ideas throughout his set. "I never said you'd like it."

The night was heavy on burlesque: a firefighter couple stripping naked and covering themselves in ash to David Bowie's "Hero," a woman pulling dollar bills out of (well, YOU guess) to "I'm Proud to Be an American," and so on. If you were going for an overall theme, it was this: New York is awesome. America is a little sleazy. Hey: what did you expect?

There were also some acts that seemed to have no idea where they were. A breakdancing crew did a legitimately amazing number that had nothing to do with anything. Everyone's favorite trannie, Amanda Lepore, tried to sign along with a backing track and took off all her clothes because...well, that's just what she does.

Most alarmingly, butch transgender woman Rose Wood did a sort of strip-ish thing that involved homeless garb and fake feces showered on the audience. I actually shouted, "Oh shit!" before realizing how literally it could be taken. And Breyer P-Orridge sang/slammed a song/poem she called "a big downer." And it was. In that it was hideous, not in that it actually touched a nerve.

Here's the thing: sometimes simply being provocative is enough for me. Is it easy to just be outre? Sure. Is sarcasm and low humor the sucker's way out? Absolutely. But on a day when you just want to be shocked out of your misery, there's absolutely nothing wrong with mixing moments of tender emotionality with some brutally distasteful shit jokes. It's the downtown way.