Green Eyes

When I heard I could see a Tennessee Williams play in a hotel room with an audience of 14, I knew I had to go. It could be so exciting! Or, y'know...I could end up crammed into a row of large men behind a row of rather tall people in a sweltering, small hotel room in midtown, leaning back and forth to try to catch as much of the action between to mostly unclothed people in a 40-minute play that is rarely performed, possibly for a good reason.

I love Tennessee Williams. His plays are sultry and melodramatic, touching and funny and sad. And Green Eyes is like that. But it's also exceedingly slight and when performed in intimate confines, the melodrama starts to feel oppressively larger than life, like it might just force you right out of the room. Which would be a problem if there's literally nowehere for you to go, you can't stop sweating, and the claustrophobia sets in.

Listen, there were things I liked about this. The actors were gutsy and committed, and the incredibly small audience made the experience pleasantly communal. But what a weird show. After a bizarre opening song, which has no place in the play, a newly married couple fights about whether or not the wife cheated on the husband the very night that they were married. It's directed in such an affected way that I kept thinking it might stop at any moment and I'd have missed some sort of key revelation that was quietly seeded throughout. But hello, it's Tennessee Williams. There's nothing quiet about his plays. And my concerns were for naught because the truth comes out and all is revealed in a verbose and vaguely absurd monologue.

The two actors did an amazing job at the push and pull between the characters--bouncing from playful to sexual to violent, they portrayed the emotional and power shifts of two people who might be in love, might be at war, and might be both. But any time the emotions settled into place for long, they were pitched so high that I couldn't quite believe anything. Was it the directing? The writing? The fact that the actors were a foot in front of us? I'm not quite sure. But I do know that I had expected the performance to be uncomfortable. I just thought that discomfort would come from the intimacy of the space and the performance, not from the temperature on the thermostat. I'd have been missed if I missed this, and I'm glad I had the experience. But I didn't love anything about it. Ah well. Win some, lose some.

Our Hit Parade

'm the sort of person who gets caught up in other people's nostalgia and find myself wishing I could have been there WHEN. I wish I could have been in New York when Studio 54 was here, or Truman Capote threw his Black and White ball, or Ethel Merman was in Gypsy. I wish I was at Woodstock, CBGB's in it heyday, Altamont...okay, maybe not Altamont. Regardless, it's vaguely ridiculous, since I know there are concerts and performances I'm seeing now that someday I do believe I'll be able to say, "I was there when..." and make some other bitches as jealous as I get. And ideally, I won't be so specifically of a single moment that I end up being one of those old people in documentaries who are grasping onto the memories of how amazing their lives were when...

Point is, one of the performers who always makes me think, "Fuck then, I'm here NOW," is Bridget Everett. Do I ever anticipate that she'll break out in the mainstream in a big way? No. But have I ever left one of her performances without having been entertained, laughed my ass off, and worried slightly about my personal safety? Also a no.

Bridget's a big white girl, often decked out in House of Dereon, who takes a stage with a vengeance. She's aggressively sexual, hysterically funny, big voiced, and completely shameless. I've seen her drink people's wine, lick strangers, strip down, and fall over, all while ripping through pop songs with what is (or certainly looks like) drunken abandon. She is, in a word, mesmerizing.

I caught her on Wednesday at Our Hit Parade, the show she cohosts with the also fabulous Neal Medlyn and Kenny Melman in which a bunch of performers are invited to take to the stage to perform their renditions of the current top 10 songs. Each time I see the show, something amazes me. And each time, something is deeply excruciating. This week was no different. Hank and Cupcake ripped through a version of "Like a G6" that actually made me enjoy the song. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson's Jeff Hiller changed into drag while lip-synching "Only Girl in the World," in a hysterical effort to woo a straight man. Erin Markey delivered a delightful mash-up of "Grenade" and "Rose's Turn" while decked out in a Speedo for no reason I could identify. On the flip side, Cole Escola did some bad church lady drag as he tried to add humor to "Firework." And electronic band The Fancy tortured "Whip My Hair" (and the audience) for a distressingly long time. The hosts did what they do best. Neal Medlyn performed a wonderfully creepy "Raise Your Glass." Kenny Mellman dove into "Fuckin' Perfect" and amplified every ounce of pathos. And Bridget took the stage (and the rest of the room) to rip through "Tonight I'm Fucking You," which might be the most perfect song she's ever done. Hey, she even took the glasses off my face. She tossed them back to me eventually, which...a person without their glasses has little hope of actually catching their glasses. That's all I have to say.

In any case, as always, I loved the show. I probably catch one out of every three--it's the last Wednesday of every month. And it's just flat out tough to beat in terms of sheer entertainment value.

The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church

When I bought tickets for a show called The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church, I wasn't necessarily thinking, "Well, I bet this is the funniest, most heartwarming thing I'll see on stage. And when a mildly dopey looking man with impressively thick glasses and beard walked to the center of the floor, surrounded on all sides by audience to deliver a 90-minute monologue, I'll be honest, I wasn't thinking, "I bet this will be the best show I've seen in months." And yet. And yet...

Daniel Kitson is a British comedian who has crafted a show around the idea that while house hunting in the UK, he came to discover (and then possess) over 30,000 letters written to and from one Gregory Church. He finds the last letter first, still in the typewriter. It's a suicide note, and the realtor eventually explains that Church was found dead in the house next to a bottle of pills and with a noose hanging in the living room. After he has sorted the letters out chronologically, he finds that the first 57 are, in fact, also suicide notes. From 24 years earlier. What follows is a description of his attempt to piece together Church's life from the contents of his correspondence to find out why he wanted to kill himself, why he didn't, and then, again, why he came to that act.

Crucially, Kitson begins the show explaining that most of what we'll hear is made up, but "this part is completely true." He then launches into the full show, never letting us know when that part that was true stopped, allowing us to hang on in a sense of suspended disbelief. As he pieces things together, we come to feel that we know Gregory, but also that we'll never know him. Some of the most intimate details of his life are available to us. Others remain out of sight forever.

Kitson is disarmingly charming, winning over the audience (for the most part) in seconds, and holding attention ever so tightly to his chest. Not everyone was entranced. At one point, the actor stopped himself to tap someone in the front row to wake them up. "Truly, I don't mind!" he shouted, seemingly in earnest. "I really just wanted to tap your leg. The audience was his. Most impressively, the person he woke up, after what was surely a moment's embarrassment, was guided back into the show with a bolt of charm and good humor.

Watching the pieces come together, dreading the approach of the last suicide note, hoping against realistic hope that it was all in jest, we were gifted with a life, knowable and unknowable. the show is, ultimately, a celebration of life shown through a peculiar prism. It is also extraordinary. I immediately wrote to the playwright/actor/good-time-guy to see if he'd consider turning the piece into a novel. I will now hope against hope that he will write me back. I could go on about this forever, but I'll stop here. Mostly because I'm running running late to...you guessed it...another show

American Idiot

If I'm going to do this honestly, not every post will be about the most thoughtful shows. Sometimes I might have to talk about going to see what essentially amounts to a live action rock video...for the third time.

American Idiot isn't a great show. There's virtually no script, the story that's presented is super-thin and deeply cliched, and it's occasionally a bit embarrassing how openly it tries to be "edgy." Hey, look, that pregnant lady's drinking a beer! And let's be honest, there are few things less authentically "punk" then charging $137 for the "rock opera" based on one of your albums. Also, unlike The Who's Tommy, American Idiot ISN'T really a rock opera. The lyrics don't really tell the story. They capture a mood, but the story has been grafted on. You could replace all of the music and not really change the content of the show.

So...three times? Yeah. Here's the thing. It's a pastiche, but it works. Not only is the show incredibly fun to listen to, but it boasts some of the best set and lighting design, choreography, and direction in town. It's energetic; it's enthusiastic; and if I was 14, I suspect I would have found it life changing. What surprises me about return visits is that I actually like it more each time. Well, the first time, I was sitting behind someone with the largest head I've ever seen. We're talking encephalitis big. I was pissed off by how much I couldn't see, particularly since the storytelling is all visual. The second time, I was in the front row and, frankly, it was a little overwhelming and difficult to get the big picture. Third time was the charm. I had my best seats and was surprised to notice a lot of really subtle touches--how carefully calibrated the video and projections are, how intricate the set is (it really just looks like a few stories of sloppy at first, but it's surprisingly specific in retrospect.

I went back this time to see Billie Joe Armstrong in the minor role of drug dealer St. Jimmy. Admittedly, he's way too old to be part of this cast, but y'know...he wrote it all. So I'll let it slide. Especially because I was surprised by how powerful his voice really is. And he's just damned charismatic. The crowd was crazy enthusiastic that he was there, and that really can make all the difference sometime. The only other show currently playing that I've seen multiple times is La Cage, and each time I go to that, the crowds are less enthusiastic, so it sort of feels like diminishing returns for me as well, even though the performances and show are just as good. Enthusiasm is infectious--that's one of the things I most love about live performances.

Not everyone was excited to be at American Idiot. The couple next to me HATED it. She took her cell phone out after every single song to check the Playbill to see how much longer it was. He stated talking about not being able to follow what was happening (which I'm pretty sure means he was braindead. There's just not enough to it to be confused!).

In any case, bottom line: I get why people can't stand it. But I also get why people love it. It's simply too fun not to appreciate. I admit: I might be tempted to go back in a few weeks to see Billie Joe's replacement as St. Jimmy: Melissa Etheridge. Another decade older than the already too old Armstrong, I can't even begin to imagine what that's going to be like. I don't care that she's the wrong gender for the part, but she's gonna look like someone's mom! It could be a trainwreck! And you know I'd LOVE to see that. Also, if they keep stunt casting, I'd be willing to pay full price for the third time in my life if they got Courtney Love in the role. I love me some Love.

Being Harold Pinter

Tony Kushner maintained an office down the hall from where I work for several years. Our building required each floor to have a certain number of fire wardens and "searchers" in case of emergency, and for some reason, all of these positions were held within our office. As much as I love my colleagues, I wouldn't say that we're actually the sort of people you'd want to leave in charge of other people's safety. That said, we did have a pact that if any emergency did occur, one of us would make sure to go down the hall to save "national treasure Tony Kushner." Now that he's no longer in the building, let's be honest: everyone else is screwed.

This has little to do with the performance I saw tonight beyond the fact that Tony cohosted a presentation at the Public Theater, with Tom Stoppard, of the Belarus Free Theater's production of Being Harold Pinter. Here's some backstory: after massive political unrest led to members of the company being arrested for oppositional points of view, the members had to sneak out of the country to make it to the States to perform this work, a mash-up of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech, excerpts from his plays, and interviews with Belarusian political prisoners. The two week run sold out before I got tickets, so I scoured the internet to try to snag one. When the Public Theater announced a special encore performance, I was determined to see it, cost be damned. Then I saw that the $50 and $100 tickets sold out (it was a benefit). Remaining seats? $500. Um...no. Long story short(er), I eventually got a $50 seat.

Confession: I've never really understood Pinter. I read his plays back when I was a Dramatic Literature student (before dropping that major because the lighting class demanded WAY too many hours, and why did I need to take a lighting class anyway?); I saw The Homecoming on Broadway. What I read? What I saw? Baffled me. My reaction in short: What the huh?

So...you know what's more confusing than a Harold Pinter play? Harold Pinter...in Russian. And Belarusian. Okay, yes, there were supertitles, but as I ping-ponged between them and the action of the play, I occasionally got very, very lost. At least unlike the schmuck next to me, I didn't fall asleep on anyone (he's lucky he didn't drool).

No, I didn't understand it all. But there were moments of incredible power, particularly in the last third of the play which explored the politics of torture and was the most cogent and coherent piece of the evening, at least for me. A man is stripped and tortured for unnamed crimes. His wife is brought in, and we learn she has been brutally raped. His seven-year-old son is questioned. When the original prisoner is told he can leave, he is given his own clothes to put back on...and his son's shoes. It's an excruciating moment, made all the more painful by the knowledge that the people on stage are legitimately at risk, that their families are broken up by their decision to speak out, and that they can not go back and perform there without risking a similar fate.

In an odd turn (and presumably to give people who paid benefit prices some star quality), a small section of the play was performed in English by the likes of Mandy Patinkin, Lou Reed, Kevin Kline, and other luminaries, most of whom conveyed gravitas by speaking too quietly to hear them in a theater that only had seven rows. I wanted to shout, "Speak UP, national treasure Olympia Dukakis!"

It was a strange evening--poorly organized since it was put together in 9 days and difficult and dense. But being able to step back and watch people for whom the act of conveying their own truth is a literal act of revolution...it was blisteringly sad and immensely moving, and it made me feel so, so small. If only national treasure Tony Kushner was still down the hall, maybe he could have explained the finer points to me.

Gruesome Playground Injuries

Rajiv Joseph will be having his Broadway debut this Spring with a play called Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo. Robin Williams is starring in it. As the tiger. Yeah. I don't want to be excited about this. I can't stand Robin Williams. And yet, after seeing Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries at 2nd Stage yesterday, damned if I don't know I'm gonna shell out the bucks to check out the tiger play. GPI stars the weirdly attractive and startlingly unphotogenic Pablo Schreiber and the incredibly skinng Jennifer Carpenter from Dexter. I'm always alarmed by Hollywood actors when they're on stage. They're so distressingly small that I want to deliver a muffin basket to them during curtain call.

Regardless, age 8: Doug has ridden his bike off the roof of a school and goes to the nurses's office. Kayleen is there because she's been vomiting. Let the cycle begin. Flashing back and forth over the course of 30 years, we see Doug continue to injure himself (losing an eye, driving a nail through his foot) and Kayleen continuing to display increasingly troubling signs of mental wounds. The two are best friends in high school and continue to be extremely close, even when they disappear from each other's lives for years at a time.

The playwright was there for a talkback after the show and talked a lot about wanting to show (in an obviously heightened way) the ways in which people allow themselves to be hurt by and for love. And yeah, that's kind of walloping you over the head with a metaphor, but the show is so specific and so funny, that it really does seem like the early work of someone destined for great things.

The talkback was genius. You've gotta love a matinee crowd asked to share it's opinions. As I looked around the audience, I noticed a solid 80% seemed to be 75+. And one of the first comments actually began with, "The thing about kids today..." and carried on with, "My generation was self-destructive, but we didn't cut ourselves! This is so bleak. I see nothing redemptive here." What is it with old people not understanding that a q&a is a time to ask questions, not air grievances? Other folks openly disliked the play (TO the playwright! Old people!), but the majority seemed to be pretty won over. It's a slight play (maybe 75 minutes including several on stage costume and set changes), but it's really enervating and engaging.

My issue was with the ending. I was not alone. Joseph explained that he does know there's a difference between having a play end and having it simply stop. Methinks he has a bit more work to do. Still, great fun and surprisingly insightful, if bearing the slightest imprint of a heavy hand.

Favorite moment: after Doug and Kayleen have both thrown up in the same trash can (note: not a play for the squeamish), someone behind be loudly declaring, "Ohhhhh God. I'm gonna vomit." Probably not the feeling the playwright was going for, but hey, that's a visceral response!

The Walk Across America for Mother Earth

Taylor Mac was responsible for one of my favorite ever nights in a theater. A year or so ago, he put on a show called The Lily's Revenge that told the story of a flower who fell in love with a real girl and wanted to marry her. It was four and a half hours long. I know, it already sounds amazing, right? Here's the thing: it was five acts told in different styles (film, dance, theater in the round) with the theatrical space completely rearranged and redefined throughout the night, and the intermissions which ranged from 30-45 minutes were filled with dancing, face painting, open dressing rooms, blow-up punching dolls, ukulele strummers in the bathroom, and (most importantly) a request that everyone leave their cell phones off for the duration of the show and actually, y'know...interact. With a cast of 30+ performers, it wasn't as much a play as it was a carnival, a celebration, and an investigation into how we build communities. Some of the performances were amateurish, sets were chintzy, and certain sections bordered on silly, but taken as a whole, it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever had. Flash forward to last night. Taylor has a new show: The Walk across America for Mother Earth playing as part of the Under the Radar Festival. Opening night, front row, ready to go, you couldn't have slapped the smile off my face.

I'll be honest: my expectations were unreasonable and unfairly high. When you anticipate perfect, great can still disappoint. And at intermission, I was impressed but not blown away. The show is about a group of activists who decided to literally walk across America in 1992, from New York to a nuclear test site in Nevada, to protest nuclear testing. The costumes were outrageous, the makeup was insane, and it was fabulous to look at, but it left me a little cold.

I should have kept the faith. The show didn't just come together in the second act. It bowled me over. Using this exceptionally heightened theatricality to show off a bunch of misfits, punks, queers, and crazies, the play ultimately was an incisive and challenging look at how communities can fail to unite, how activists can fail so spectacularly that they actually harm the cause, and then, ultimately, how beautiful the human spirit is that people are ever inspired enough to even try.

There are incredible moments throughout--a vicious flower child named (sigh) Flower pondering how hard it is to join a group of outsiders and still not fit in, a woman dying from cancer hijacking every group vote by exploiting her illness to get her way, a mental patient who believes another group member raped him...in a former life, and the moment when innoncent, wonderful Taylor himself breaks down and finds that this event he joined to enrich the world is making him hate people. Confronted with the news of a town in Utah downwind from a nuclear site which has ended up having the highest rate of cancer in the country, our heretofore idealistic teenager finally snaps with a devastating (and devastatingly funny), "Fucking MOVE!"

Ultimately, it's just a beautiful look at one sweet, sweet idealist growing up and learning that no one is perfect, but when people do genuinely try, it can be a beautiful thing.

And, of course, at intermission, there were henna tattoos, free popcorn, a talent show, and the chance to take pictures with protest signs inspired by the show. We missed the chance to get the official ones where they screen in a background behind you, so here's a quick cell phone pic on the way out.

Other Desert Cities

I checked out Jon Robin Baitz’s new play Other Desert Cities last night. Alternate title: What Happened to Stockard Channing’s Face? You can’t quite tell in this photo (because there’s a curious lack of close-ups of Ms. Channing on the production site), but she’s looking a little bit like the lovechild of Joan Rivers and a chipmunk these days. Regardless, she’s still fabulous. The play she’s in? Mmm…less so.



What I knew before the show started was that it has a killer cast—Channing, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, Thomas Sadoski, and Elizabeth Marvel. What I didn’t know before the show started was that it was written by the guy who created Brothers & Sisters. If I HAD known that, I might have been less surprised when midway through the second act, the entire show dissolved into a crazy soap opera or moronitude (fake word alert).

Here’s the story: daughter writes memoir about family secrets. Family reacts badly. It’s nothing revolutionary or surprising, but hey, I work in publishing, so I thought there were some really interesting questions posed about the appropriateness of cashing in on other people in your life and when writing a book is or isn’t a good idea. So I was cruising along, enjoying the play, if not loving it. Well, I was loving Linda Lavin as the aging hippy aunt with a drinking problem. I could have watched her for hours. She’s no less than brilliant, even if she has to spend the last 20 minutes of the play sitting around quietly watching other people talk.

Here’s the thing: there’s a bit of a twist ending. In retrospect, I think I saw it coming but shoved the possibility aside because: who would do something so stupid? Well…Jon Robin Baitz. For the sake of the two people who stumble across this blog, I won’t spoil it. But let me say this: twenty minutes into the second act, an old lady in front of me got up and left. I couldn’t figure out why she would do this at that particular moment. Then I found out: she’s psychic. She must have had a vision of what was coming. Because while the play has mostly taken pains to this point to give a balanced approach to the various characters, suddenly Elizabeth Marvel stops acting and starts ACTING. She gets so shriek, high-strung, and self-righteous that I decided I would agree with anyone who wasn’t her. Then Stacy Keach starts screaming about bigger secrets, and I watched the play come to pieces.

Beyond the rank stupidity of the ending, Baitz really bashes the audience over the head with political talk. Republicans are soulless. Democrats feel too much. Listen, I’m so far to the left that the right can’t even see me, but I even got exhausted by the facile attempts to explain why conservatives are bad.

The director, Joe Mantello, was sitting right behind me. I avoided the urge to suggest that someone simply remove the last 30 minutes of the play. Ah, restraint. At least SOMEONE in that theater had it.

Men Go Down

I sat on this one for a few days. Last Thursday, I went to 3LD on Greenwich and Edgar St. (did anyone know there even WAS an Edgar St.?!) to see Men Go Down, another part of PS 122’s COIL Festival. I had reserved my ticket that day and trucked on down to the middle of nowhere to catch some experimental theater. As I went to enter the building (which looks suspiciously like a spaceship--see below), I was informed that it was dress rehearsal and members of the public weren’t allowed in. Oopsies! After an absurdly awkward back and forth with the delightful woman at the door, I headed home. But is there anything more motivating than being turned away from something? I hopped on the train thinking, “If I can’t see it now, then I MUST see it soon!”



Two nights later, I did.

And…well, let’s be honest, I’m not totally sure what it was about. Hyper-stylized and beautifully designed, it’s about a king who has been asleep for over a millennia, a woman who has been carrying his child for that entire time, and some fae and goddesses whose lives he’s intersected with in some ways. See, he was a bad ruler—selfish and incapable of making decisions. He ran away from his fiancée, abandoned his kingdom, and hey look, the pictures on the wall are moving!

I didn’t hate this. I found it convoluted, overwrought, and unnecessarily oblique. But the visuals! From the king’s entrance through a low, low cabinet on the floor; to the projection design with flowers, fireworks, and living portraits; to the deeply haunting sound design, there were little pieces that were so stunning that you never want to look away. Plus, there were a bunch of really pretty naked people, so that’s fun!

I was hoping that some more people would review it so that I could get a better handle on it. Alas, that didn’t happen. It’s a show I’d never recommend to anyone because I feel like they’d just get mad at me for how contrived it was, but at the same time, I’m very glad I saw it. So…there’s that!

Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell

Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell apparently had a six month run off-Broadway a few years ago. I wasn't aware of that when I snagged tickets to see it as part os PS 122's COIL Festival. What I did know was that Gray was best known for full-length theatrical monologues about his own life. I'd read a few--Gray's Anatomy and Swimming to Cambodia stand out most. But I'd never seen him perform. And never will since he killed himself a few years ago.

For COIL, four actors are performing pieces from his monologues combined with pieces from his unpublished and unperformed journals, each focusing on one aspect of his life: love, family, adventure, and journals. A rotating actor is standing in as Career. Last night, that was done by Oscar nominee David Strathairn who, I'll note, is way more attractive in real life than any man in his 60s has any right to be.

Regardless, it was interesting to watch five actors perform different pieces of one man's life, trying to draw one entire picture. Hazelle Goodman, reading about adventure, was a stand-out: laugh out loud funny recounting a trip to a Native American sweat ritual. She brought a sense of enthusiasm to each section that felt authentic and real. Others, like the usually unbelievable Kathleen Chalfant, showed a bit more effort in trying to become one with the late writer.

What's so interesting to me about Gray is that he lived the ultimate examined life. His work was brutally honest, and he seemingly had no shame, or at least no need to hide behind that shame. He was the ultimate over-sharer. Nothing, it seemed, was off-limits. For someone from a generation known for feeling ever-compelled to talk about themselves publicly, he's sort of a spiritual godfather. One gets the sense that he would have looooved blogging.

His suicide is dealt with near the end of the show. After a car accident in Ireland, he is left with titanium over the front of his skull, bone shards in his frontal lobe, 21 shock therapy treatments that later doctors said he never should have had, and a severe depression that seems likely it sprung from the brain damage, though his family history didn't help: his mother killed herself years before.

The show is co-directed by his ex-wife, and it seems fitting that in processing her husband's death, she too turned to the theater to make sense of a life. And in as much as one can summarize a life in two hours of stage time, she seems to have done a fantastic job. It's funny and moving, and it presents a rich overview of one man trying to understand everything.

This is the first show I saw at the COIL Festival this year. It and the Public's Under the Radar festival are going on concurrently. All the shows are cheap, and of them all, this was the least experimental. In other words, I'm probably going to be seeing a bunch of stuff over the next week. And shit's gonna get real obscure on here for a bit. I hope to see something brilliant and can almost guarantee that I'll see at least one show that I despise. Sadly, the site-specific Green Eyes at the Hudson Hotel won't be one since it sold out (it's in a hotel room, so only 20 people at a time can go). Likewise, unless I get in off a waitlist, I won't get a chance to see the Belarus Free Theater do Being Harold Pinter which I'm sad about because it's gotten great reviews, and the company has apparently been bravely fighting authorities for years to spread their message about their country's political dysfunction--two members were arrested only weeks ago. Regardless, updates to come!

In the Heights

Another show closing on Sunday! I resisted In the Heights for such a long time. Every time I heard any of the rap from the show, it just sounded unbelievably corny. I had also seen original cast member Karen Olivo in the Hair anniversary concert and HATED her. She had this lisp that drove me completely insane, and her take on “Easy to Be Hard” didn’t work for me in the slightest. Of course, I went on to love her in West Side Story. And I went on to love In the Heights. Whoops!

I saw it for the first time about a year and a half into the run. Star and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda was already gone, but most of the original cast was still in the show. Except that there were understudies on in about five major parts that night. Still, I loved it. It’s kind of a silly show—the dramatic structure barely exists, the best music is frontloaded in the first act, and it never really seems to know where to focus--but it’s so dynamic and charming that it really won me over.

I wanted to go back and see it again before it closed, particularly to see Miranda, but also for Olga Merediz and Andrea Burns who I had missed before. All three were fantastic, and I have to admire the two women not only for having stayed with the show since day one but for appearing to still be having a total blast with it.

Unexpectedly, I also discovered that I don’t actually hate the character Nina. I just hated Mandy Gonzales. Who knew?! Once managing to be shrill and shriek at the same time, it seems that not only can be Nina played as sympathetic, but her songs actually aren’t all the low points in the show. Mesmerizing. Arielle Jacobs has only had the part on Broadway for two months, but she’s a blast. Sweet but determined, with a lovely singing voice and a ton of charm.

I’ll be sad to see the show go not just because of it's own merits, but because it leaves us with a sad bunch of Best Musical winners still playing on Broadway: the profoundly overrated Billy Elliot, the execrable Memphis, the totally pleasant if uninspiring Jersey Boys, and the war horse that will not die: Phantom. It’s enough to make me want to start a campaign to bring back Hairspray. At least Avenue Q is still around, even if it did have to move off-Broadway!

La Bete

There's not a whole lot to say about a show that opened months ago that hasn't already been said. But I won't let that stop me. When La Bete was announced for Broadway, very little about it appealed to me. Sure, Mark Rylance is supposed to be one of the greatest living stage actors, but I already missed him in Boeing-Boeing, and that didn't kill me. And Joanna Lumley's great, but let's face it: I'd really be going to see AbFab's Patsy, not the actual actress. David Hyde Pierce is charming, but I've seen him before and found him very talented but wasn't desperate to get back. And the play. The play! Written entirely in verse (shudder), it was loathed when it first played Broadway, and it sounded like a big wad of pretentious. The character name Elomire is an anagram for Moliere. The title's in French. Did I mention it's in verse? And besides, the whole thing is a comedy about the division between fine art and crass commercialism. It sounded like I'd be beat over the head with a single point for just shy of two hours. And that point would rhyme.

But I sucked it up last night and attended for two main reasons: too many people had told me that Mark Rylance's nearly 40-minute monologue was a thing of sheer amazement for me not to have my curiosity piqued. And having already earned raves for this, he's going to be back on Broadway later this Spring with another role he played in London and earned raves for. The chance to see a master actor do one intensely comedic and one seriously dramatic role nearly back to back? That was intriguing. With the clock ticking to the January 9th closing, I headed to TKTS and snagged a ticket in the third row of the half-empty theater.

So...where to start? I mean, I'm not at all surprised that this was reviled when it first opened. Between the extraordinary monologue and the play within a play in the last half hour, there's a solid half hour where the air seemed to be completely let out of the show. It just tries SO hard. And it DOES beat you over the head with its point. But but but...goddamned if the performances weren't exquisite enough to save the whole thing.

That monologue! WTF, Mark Rylance? No one should be able to land that many laughs so consistently for so long. I checked the time twice, not because I wanted it to end, but because I was actually dazzled that it was still going. I started to think (and hope) it might never end. It's so funny, so grotesque, so perfectly done, that there's precious little chance anything after the fact can compare. In the words of the person directly behind me upon the end of the speech, "Holy. Shit."

As for the point of the show, suffice to say that even though it's filled with fart jokes and lots of other low humor, it goes on to explain that we really need artists with integrity who won't compromise. Which I think is true. I wish it were slightly less damning of the joys of popular entertainment (since, let's face it, any play that has a man shitting just offstage while two onlookers are aghast) isn't exactly the height of respectability and integrity. I like to think there's room for balance, partly because I make my living off popular entertainment. Partly because I went home from La Bete and watched Bridalplasty. But on the other hand, if it weren't for intellects and committed artists, both groups which are quietly denigrated at this particular moment in time, the world would be less rich.

Of course, now that I've seen La Bete, I'm super bummed that I missed Boeing-Boeing, and I now feel like I absolutely have to see him in Jerusalem when it begins in April. A perfect performance makes a decidedly imperfect play into a complete and total joy. I walked out grinning like a moron. And besides all that, Joanna Lumley's entrance--all regal music, wind machines, and gold confetti strewn across the stunning set of stories-high book cases--was such a beautiful moment to watch, even if it was just cheap pageantry.

Blood from a Stone

It's the first night of the new year, and I'm already bored. Everyone I know is laid up with a cold or (more likely) a hangover. What to do? Find a show to see, of course. Browsing through the lists of what was playing, I found that not much new had started previews over the holidays, and there wasn't anything I'd seen that I particularly wanted to see again. Why start the new year retreading the last, you know?

I ended up deciding on Blood from a Stone at The New Group. It seemed dicey to drop the cash on a debut play that I hadn't heard a single thing about, but I'd read this article in the Times and realized that the playwright had been a security guard at a dorm I was a summer RA in a little over a decade ago. I remembered him being friendly, if a bit reserved, so I thought, Why not?



I admit to having been a bit worried about the show. I knew at the start that it had about half an hour cut from it during previews and was now two instead of three acts. I prepared myself for a work in progress and tried to keep an open mind. I'm glad I did.

Ethan Hawke is the star of the show in every way. He’s onstage for maybe all but five minutes of the two hour and 45 minute running time. He plays an ex-Marine come home to small-town Connecticut to visit his troubled family before heading West on what seems to be some sort of soul-searching adventure. What I loved about what he did is that it was so deeply naturalistic--nothing about his performance is showy or attention grabbing. It's a lot more subtle and nuanced than that. Even though I loved Before Sunset and Sunrise and retain a deep affection for Reality Bites, I’ve always been a little put off by Ethan Hawke. There’s this kind of pretension about him that I’m quite possibly just making up. Suffice to say, I didn’t expect to be as impressed as I was.

Everything about Hawke's performance is perfectly mirrored by the show itself. It's a real slice of life--sometimes funny, sometimes violent, often ugly. I heard people comparing it to Sam Shepard's plays, but it's so much more grounded and real than that writer's work. It's more like Shepard cross-cut with Arthur Miller (whose name also came up on the way out of the theater--more on that in a moment).

We begin with Hawke and Ann Dowd as his mother, raging about the awfulness inflected by the father of the family. But when the patriarch arrives home, Gordon Clapp seems to be playing him as an emotionally stunted, yet oddly lovable man. And that's when the play started to feel special. This is about a family that lets their angers and disappointments live on the surface. They alternate between cursing at and ignoring each other, and their greatest strength is in picking sides. More than anything else, it's the entrenchment of familial alliances that keeps coming to the fore--that and the failure to actually communicate, no matter how much they say.

Clapp is stunning as father Bill. And though he does and says some terrible things, I found his to be the easiest character to feel for. I was excited to see Natasha Lyonne and Daphne Rubin-Vega, two actresses I've really loved in other shows. Both had very small roles which might have been disappointing but for the fact that the rest of the show is so good and that they both play their parts perfectly, Lyonne landing some loud laughs as sensible sister Sarah, and Rubin-Vega radiating sex appeal as neighbor Yvette.

The last moments of the show are incredibly uncomfortable. And the music choice for curtain call is appealingly ironic. On the way out, as mentioned, I heard someone comparing the playwright to Arthur Miller. "You just can't look at this and see the same structural integrity as Miller," random dude announced. Yeah, duh, that's true. But if you're walking out of the first play someone ever wrote, and the worst you can say is that he doesn't have the same structural brilliance as one of America's greatest playwrights living or dead--well, that ain't too shabby.

It's true: the pacing is a touch muddled, and the plotting doesn't always have the necessary momentum, but even so, this is a carefully observed show that never feels like a slog even with the long running time. There's more than enough talent on and behind the stage to heartily recommend it.

On a separate note, I also saw Natasha Lyonne in Tigers Be Still at the Roundabout a month or two back, and it's kind of thrilling in this tabloid-ready age to see an actress who has a history of addiction and has spent some time in jail come back to acting by doing great work in small off-Broadway shows. She may not be raking in the dough, but she's just getting better and better and (hopefully) laying the groundwork for a long-lived career based on real talent and ability. Exciting!

Looking back and looking forward

For the past few years, I've seen more than 100 performances, concerts, galas, readings, or theatrical events each year. I keep lists of everything I see, but I wanted a place where I could keep a better catalogue of my reactions to what I saw when I saw it, have a space to work out my thoughts about different shows, and who knows--maybe find one or two people who want to read what one dedicated theater nerd has to say about the too, too many shows he pays to see.

It's now January 2, and I've seen two shows already. I'll break my perfect streak tomorrow which should give me some time to catch up on the first two. In the meantime, I'll get this started with a cursory look about at 2010.

Overall, I thought it was an amazing year for plays, and an...okay one for musicals.

Favorite moments:
--The diner scene between Louis and Belize in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches was my favorite few minutes in a theater last year. Except for...
--A few hundred broadway performers singing "Sunday" at Sondheim's 80th birthday celebration at Lincoln Center.
--The extraordinarily strange/delightful experience of seeing Patti LuPone play a teenager in Annie Get Your Gun at the Ravinia Festival outside of Chicago.
--Bernadette Peters sending in the clowns in a Little Night Music.
--Colman Domingo celebrating John Cullum's 50th anniversary on Broadway during a curtail call at The Scottsboro Boys.
--Arachne's "Deeply Furious" in Spider-Man (for most deliciously awful-we all need some unintentional humor now and again).
--Molina and Redmayne painting a canvas in Red.
--Laura Benanti's "Model Behavior" in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. SI liked this show a lot more than most, but even people who hated it have to admit that number was inspired.

Favorite performances:
Lily Rabe in The Merchant of Venice
Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur
Zachary Quinto in Angels in America
Deidre O'Connell in In the Wake
Michael Chernus in The Aliens, In the Wake, and SPF's reading of Man Boobs
Andrew Garman in A Bright New Boise
Bobby Steigert in Yank!
Raul Esparza, Donna Murphy, and Sutton Foster in Anyone Can Whistle
Joshua Henry, Colman Domingo, Forest McClendon, and the ensemble of The Scottsboro Boys
Eddie Redmayne in Red
Douglas Hodge in La Cage aux Folles
Brian Bedford and Santino Fontana in The Importance of Being Earnest


Favorite plays:
The Aliens
Fences
Venus in Fur
Bachelorette
A Bright New Boise
The Merchant of Venice
Red
Angels in America
The Little Foxes
One new play and one revival that opinion was mixed on but I adored: In the Wake and The Glass Menagerie
Less a play than an experience: PS 122's Hotel Savoy


Favorite musicals:
La Cage
The Scottsboro Boys
Brief Encounter (however you may wish to categorize it)

And not to dwell, but a quick recap of the worst of the year:
The New York Musical Festival--I saw four shows, each worst than the last.
Spider-Man. Why pile on? Because it's actually as bad as everyone says.
A Free Man of Color, or What Was John Guare Smoking?
Million Dollar Quartet. Period.

There's no reason anyone would be reading this yet since no one knows about it, but should anyone stumble across it and be curious, the shows I've seen and will be commenting on in the next day or two are Blood from a Stone at The New Group and one of the final performances of La Bete on Broadway. Suffice to say, the year is off to a strong and encouraging start.