Angela Lansbury and Friends Salute Terrence McNally

The Acting Company puts on some solid benefits. Last year they did a staged reading of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart which is now coming to Broadway next month. Let's just say Glenn Close was the weakest link in the cast. And I LOVE Glenn Close. They also did a tribute to John Kander with Debra Monk, Raul Esparza, Chita Rivera, and a dozen of theater's best singers performing his and Fred Ebb's songs. I got to see Chita sing "All that Jazz." Magic.

So naturally I snagged tickets for their latest benefit, Angela Lansbury and Friends Salute Terrence McNally. Well, maybe not so naturally. If I'm being totally honest, he's not a favorite of mine. Love, Valour, Compassion is a wonderful play that veers into cheap sentiment here and there. The Lisbon Traviata is hysterical, but it depends on a lot of in jokes that make it feel rather small. And his work on musicals is uneven. He wrote the book for Ragtime, one of my all-time favorites. But it's worth mentioning that I always felt the book was the weakest link. And his work on this season's Catch Me If You Can? I'll summarize in one word: ugh. But spending an evening watching excerpts of his work performed by a stellar group of individuals, I couldn't help but think that while I do have problems with his works on the whole, there are moments throughout that are beautiful, heartbursting moments of joy and compassion. If one thing is more clear from his work than anything else, it's that he seems to be a man who loves people. Flawed or troubled or bitchy or cruel, he still affords them moments of great sincerity and love.

Let's start with my arrival at the theater. I nearly knocked over Angela Lansbury. Thinking I was late to meet my friend, I started to charge into the crowd at the doors, then changed my mind, grabbed my phone, and made an about face...into a national treasure. If I had knocked over Angela Lansbury in front of a Broadway theater, I would have been lynched. I would have lynched myself! What can you say about the woman? She's 85 and she's stunning. She's 85 and still working. She's 85 and she still showed up at a benefit despite the fact that she was sick. The woman practically sparkles. And I almost took her out. Sigh.

Rather than give you the full recap of the night (there were a lot of people), I'll focus on the highlights. Bobby Steggert read a piece very near the beginning that very promptly brought a tear to my eye. I haven't been able to track it down yet (Google, you let me down!), but if I do, I'll post a link to it here. Summarized: life is lovely. And if we live in a world that could create a Shakespeare or Florence, Italy...isn't that a place worth living? The beauty of art, beautifully captured. Okay, there wasn't a tear in my eye. There were about 20 tears, and they were all over my face. I cry easily. It happens.

Alexandra Silber (who once thanked me in the comments here after I said nice things about her in Hello Again--which I'm seeing again on Friday!) performed an aria that I believe she will also perform in the play Master Class this summer. I do not know opera. I cannot comment on technicality or general skill. I CAN say that it was lovely. And that as ever, I adore hearing an unmic'ed voice. There was also a story about her finding herself licked in a closet at the audition for Master Class. I can see myself in this position ALL too easily. I'm also seeing the show in July and looking forward to seeing this performer I didn't know a month ago yet another time!

Speaking of people performing without microphones, John Glover went balls out and performed two pieces without the benefit of amplification. The first was from The Lisbon Traviata, and it was hysterical and wonderful. The second was from Love! Valour! Compassion!, and it was a great thrill to see him recreate part of his Tony winning performance--even if it's one of those sugary scenes of McNally's that I don't quiiiiiite love. On a side note, when I first read about that play, I thought it was Love! Velour! Compassion! As I was deep in my thrift store phase and wearing LOTS of velour from the 70s, I thought it sounded wonderful. I digress.

And speak of opera and no microphones: again, I don't know enough to really dissect anything she did, but Denise DiDonato popped on to do an aria of Rossini's and tore that shit up (that's a technical opera term). It was a pretty showy piece. And she showed it. She also gave a wonderfully charming introduction about why she picked it, what was different about opera and musical theater, and blah blah blah. Point is: she was super cute.

Tyne Daly was ridiculously wonderful doing a comedic song about embracing being fat. It was, I think, a Sophie Tucker number. And she slaughtered it. What else would you expect from Cagney. OR...was it Lacey. Oh, let's be honest: I just think of her as one of the titans of the stage who played Mama Rose. Along with Angela Lansbury! Where are Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Linda Lavin, and the ghost of Ethel Merman when you need them? And why can I name all of Broadway's Mama Roses? Don't answer that. She also read a small piece from Master Class. Luhv. Huhr.

Holy shit, this is getting long. I'm cutting too many people out! I'm not talking about Raul Esparza, Edie Falco, Jason Danieley, Barbara Walsh, or even Emily fucking Skinner! Emily you've-adored-me-since-I-played-a-Siamese-twin-in-underrated-but-brilliant-musical-Side-Show Skinner! She was great! They were all great! But best in show goes to:

Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell. Ragtime's original Mother and Coalhouse performing incredible songs from the roles they created--"Back to Before" and "Wheels of a Dream." It felt bizarre to see recreations of performances that I had actually seen. It's only been 13 years. I was 17! Aren't I too young for this sort of theatrical nostalgia? Who the hell cares? They blew the songs away. If Audra McDonald had come out and sung "Your Daddy's Hands," I would have just died. Mazzie and Mitchell clearly were both reveling in the moment and went whole hog on the vocals going for power over subtlety. And you know that? It was the perfect night for it. They killed, gutted, and buried those songs. They were fabulous.

The whole thing was fabulous. It was a really lovely evening. Am I McNally's biggest fan? No. Was I more than happy and enthusiastic to take some small part in a night celebrating him? Absotutley. When he's on, he's amazing. And his Cliff's Notes version of his career made me want to learn more about the plays I don't know as well. That can only be a good sign.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

h, Harry Potter. I won’t lie. I had high hopes for Daniel Radcliffe starring in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. It’s a fizzy, effervescent show filled old-school charm and comedy (and sexism). Just how I like ‘em. Radcliffe is twee and adorable, and while I’ve only seen two of the Harry Potter movies and disliked each, I was fond of his performance on stage in Equus and thought he was hysterical in his episode of Extras.

Watching this production only made me remember how much I loved Matthew Broderick in the show in the 90s. The point of comparison did Radcliffe and Company no favors.

This is just a listless production. Everyone seems off the mark in a way that leads me to believe the real fault has to lie with the director. And at least to my ear, it sounded as though Radcliffe was losing his voice. The best performance tellingly came from the understudy who was on for Rosemary. It was a thoroughly charmless evening at the theater. The jokes mostly failed to land, the music sounded tinny, the sets were at best unattractive, and yet it still got a raucous ovation at the end. Either my take was wrong or people were just super excited to see Harry Potter.

It's worth noting that my friend who joined me enjoyed it considerably more, I think because she didn't know the show. Even so, her take was, "It was okay. Daniel Radcliffe is adorable." Most out to sea are Tammy Blanchard and Christopher Hanke who are giving downright strange performances. I've liked both in other things and was very surprised by what they were putting forth since I think each has more than enough talent to have nailed these roles.

I left the show, went home, and started watching YouTube clips of the Matthew Broderick production which also starred Megan Mulally and my favoritest singer in the whole wide world, Lillias White. Not only was it lovely to hear the songs sound energetic and fun. It was comforting to hear laugh lines land actual laughs.

Boo. Wah. Snooze. I was sad when I saw the understudy slip and thought I’d have to go back to catch the female lead. Now I know it doesn’t matter—she can’t be good enough to get me back there.

BUT! Let's talk about something happier. I went back to The Book of Mormon tonight--I know, I'm insane. It's too many shows. I should save some money. Blah, blah, blah. But it was opening night! I couldn't help myself. And you know what? I loved it even more the second time. And not just because I like celebrity spotting (Alan Cumming, Marcia Gay Harden, Tyne Daly, John Benjamin Hinkley, Jeff Bridges, Tovah Feldshuh, and my future husband Paul Rudd were all there). It's really just an amazing show. And the Times review is out, and it's a motherfucking RAVE. Go see the review then go see the show. I can't wait until the cast recording is out!

The Book of Mormon

Let's just get this out of the way at the start: BUY TICKETS NOW!

I am prone to exaggeration, but I promise that I mean it completely and genuinely when I say that The Book of Mormon is the best new musical I've seen in years. Years. Like the blasphemous love child of Avenue Q and Hairspray, this show from the two creators of South Park and one of the creators of Avenue Q is not only riotously funny; it also has a ton of heart. It would be easy to spend two and a half hours making fun of Mormons on stage, but the creators here are actually (I swear to Heavenly Father) after something more than that. I read an interview with the South Park guys today where they describe this is an atheist's love letter to religion, and there's no better description. They completely take the piss out of Mormonism while also celebrating the positive possibilities of faith. It's low humor with a higher calling, balancing juvenile humor with a surprisingly humane, thoughtful, and (dare I say) mature plot and structure.

Here's the incredibly short version of the story: an upstanding, celebrate Mormon youth is partnered with a socially maladjusted nerd as brothers on a mission to Uganda. Hijinks ensue. The other major characters are a young village girl who yearns for opportunity, her father who simply wants to avoid his daughter's ritual circumcision by a corrupt general, and a deeply closeted fellow missionary who can't stop having "spooky Mormon hell dreams." Every moment is played for laughs, but as the show goes on, you find yourself impressively invested in these characters and their potential happiness. Helpful tutorials to the bizarre history of Mormonism are provided throughout. Here's what it is: you're invited to laugh at the absurdities of this religion, the horrors of extreme poverty, and the clash of two disparate cultures, but you're not laughing at the characters. They're all simply too likeable.

And the songs! They're super-catchy. From one that translates to "Fuck you, God," to the eleven o'clock number "I Believe" which is a soaring power ballad that lands the one line of the night that actually made me say, "Oh my God" before devolving into hysterical laughter, there's great pizazz and enthusiasm and showmanship and catchy melodies.

What makes me happiest about this show, other than the fact that it's basically two and a half hours of theatrical Prozac, is that it's an honest to God ORIGINAL musical. It's not based on a movie. It doesn't use pre-existing music. It wasn't stunt cast with random stars. It actually feels fresh, which in the increasingly stale mix of original musicals on Broadway makes it feel like a revelation.

The cast is perfection. Andrew Rannells is adorable as the earnest (and slightly self-obsessed) Elder Price who longs for a world as beautiful and happy as Orlando, Florida. Josh Gad is hilarious as sci-fi geek and compulsive liar Elder Cunningham. Nikki James gets to show off great comic timing and a killer voice as Nabalungi. And Rory O'Malley is all charm and jazz hands as Elder McKinley. In a lesser musical or with a less talented cast, any of them could have walked off with the show. It's a testament to the material and the ensemble that the whole thing blends so seamlessly.

I can't wait to see this again. Heavenly Father be thanked.

The Motherfucker with the Hat

I'd only seen one of Stephen Adly Guirgis's plays before this one--a fact I had forgotten until I checked out the Playbill before the show and saw that he wrote The Little Flower of East Orange, a show I deeply disliked a few seasons ago at the Public. So, that wasn't encouraging. But I had an open mind. And for the first scene of The Motherfucker with the Hat, I was blissfully prepared to forget that show ever happened. Opening on Bobby Cannavale and Elizabeth Rodriguez as a recovering addict and his coked out girlfriend, the dialogue popped like nobody's business. It felt completely authentic in a way that most people can't pull off--especially when they write "poor."

When Cannavale notices a hat that is distinctly not his on a table in the apartment and starts sniffing the bed only to discover the scent of "Aqua velva and dick," I was delighted. It was a little slapsticky while also feeling honest and opening the door for some giant drama ahead. That the show doesn't sustain it's initial spark is not completely the playwright's fault, though it does seem he could have cut about 30 or 40 minutes and zipped this on by in a one act. The play itself doesn't quite have the depth or pathos to fully sustain two acts. Without cuts, though, it would be deadly without intermission. It's close, but no motherfucker with a cigar.

The real energy sap from the production, surprisingly, is Chris Rock in his Broadway debut. During intermission I tried to dance around the subject a bit conversationally. "I just don't know if he's really nailing it. Maybe there's something more coming in act two. His natural charisma hasn't quite taken over the stage yet, but..." To which my friend replied, "Wood. Den. Wooden." So much more succinct.

It's true, disappointingly. His performance is strictly amateur hour. His line readings are flat, and you can see him sensing marks and anticipating lines. Don't bother looking at him when he isn't talking: between gesture-filled moments, his arms drop to his sides and he just sort of...stares. If most of acting is reacting as the cliche goes, then Rock is giving maybe 10% of a performance. There's enough working really well around him that I still enjoyed myself, but it's a bad sign when you're watching a show already looking forward to a future production that might allow the scenes to play better. Ah, star casting!

Rock plays the sponsor to Cannavale's addict, and as the show goes on you're invited to question whether it's Rock who might be the titular motherfucker with the hat. It's not a giant role, but it's pivotal enough that you need a firecracker in the part. I can see why he got cast, but it just didn't work.

Filling out the cast are Annabella Sciorra as Rock's wife. I'd like to see her performance be a bit more animated or underscored with more hostility, but she manages to do hurt and quiet rage very well. And Yul Vazquez plays Cannavale's Cousin Julio. It's probably the smallest part, but he's called on for some of the heaviest lifting in a scene where he takes his cousin to task for all the shitty things he's done to him over the years. It's the most lived in, fully realized performance, and it's damned funny.

Cannavale and Rodriguez are also very good and might be phenomenal once the show has some more performances under its belt. Alternating between love and hate, they're both at their best with each other: funny, sad, and revealing.

In the end, for all its profanity, it's a very sweet, good natured show about the ways we love each other and hold onto that feeling even when we get fucked over or fuck other people over. Everyone's an asshole, sometimes, and that's okay. Just don't be a motherfucker.

Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony

It's no surprise that Kathy Griffin won me over in her Broadway show which, let's be honest, was just her doing a stand-up show in a Broadway theater. Mic center stage, curtains hanging on either end, and Kathy uncensored for two hours. I've probably watched all 700 of her Bravo stand-up specials, and I was a dedicated viewed of her realiy show until it became her hanging out with celebrities and doing special theme episodes. It got a little forced. I don't blame her, but I did lose interest.

Regardless, she killed at the Belasco in a set that was surprisingly (and oddly, excitingly) low on celebrity gossip. She thrashed Elisabeth Hasslebeck (thank God), shot back at Sarah Palin, and couldn't avoid some Charlie Sheen jokes, but she played fast and furious with politics, stories of the week she had spent in New York, and a distressing sex talk with Gloria Steinem.

In case one didn't believe her promise to make each show different every night, she more than once broke out a pen to take notes on what she had just said. "Thanks guys. That's totally going in tomorrow." Besides that, I read reports on the first show when she had half an hour of Real Housewives comedy. She brought those ladies up not a once on Tuesday, giving us less Nene Leakes and more Michelle Bachman who she apparently confronted at a White House correspondents event when Bachman's assistant started videotaping them. "Were you born a bigot, or is that something you learned to become?" she apparently asked the horrifying politician before suggesting we Google the incident if we didn't believe her. "Everything I'm saying is true!" Unlike most comedians, I believed everything she said. Except, perhaps, that she's not bright. One thing that irks me about Griffin is her insistence on playing dumb. "I don't read!" she said more than once. But it's quite obvious that no stupid person can be as acerbic and sharp as she is. You don't have top be just like us, Kathy. It's the fact that you're not that makes us go see you.

While her targets might be easy--really, Richard Hatch, Gwyneth Paltrow, Barbara Walters, they practically write jokes about themselves, her execution never is. It's not really possible, I'm finding, to write about comedy in a way that is itself funny. And that's fine. It just leaves me less to write. So in summary, Kathy Griffin: funny as fuck. Even when she's not talking about Sharon Stone.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Robin Williams is not my favorite actor by any stretch of the imagination. When I heard he was making his Broadway acting debut in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo…as the tiger, I thought, “Well, there’s one less show I’ll feel compelled to see.

Then I saw Gruesome Playground Injuries by the same playwright, Rajiv Joseph, and I loved it. Everyone else hated it, it seemed, but I thought it was a wonderful, frank, funny, disturbing, if a bit thin, romantic dramedy about self-destruction, flesh wounds, and love. You know how these things go.

So I bought and read Bengal Tiger in the hopes that I wouldn’t like it and would thus avoid “the Robin Williams play.” I didn’t hate it. Off to the play it was.

Long story short: tiger in a zoo during the war attacks soldiers caring for it, eats one of their hands, and is shot dead (that’s scene one, so no spoilers, really). The ghost of the tiger haunts his killer, a dim-witted American soldier who works with an Iraqi translator who used to be the gardener for Uday and Qusay Hussein. The soldier who lost his hand was actually the one who killed Uday whose ghost haunts the gardener/translator. Over the course of the play…well, pretty much everyone dies. And philosophizes.

There’s a lot about the writing here that’s brilliantly done. It’s blackly comic and manages to work through incredibly complicated ideas without ever seeming preachy. I did have problems with the production, though. This scores highest when it’s also at its bleakest. Uday Hussein is the most riveting character on stage which was fascinating since I feel like putting him into the play as a character is the ballsiest of choices. Hrach Titzian (besides having the best name) plays him with a scary intensity and an even scarier sense of humor. It’s a perfect performance. Musa, the translator, is wonderfully complex—a man who sees himself as an artist, having dedicated himself to a stunning topiary garden that makes up much of the set decoration, but who decides to work for the American military and sees the possibility of ending up bereft, having lost everything when the war is over due to his penchant for “always working for the wrong people.” Arian Moayed plays him with dignity even when he’s being slightly pathetic, and it just works so well.

I liked the dopey American soldier least, and that was entirely unexpected. On the page, he was charming and affable, dim-witted but sympathetic, trapped in a war that is much bigger and more confusing than he is prepared to process. Brad Fleischer plays him nicely and finds very sweet and very funny moments, but I just didn’t find the character as convincing as he was when I read him. Which really made me wonder how much of my response was based on expectations from having read the play.

And that brings us back to Robin Williams. Blissfully, he avoids going full Robin and playing the tiger as, y’know…him. It’s a much more subdued performance than I expected, which I was delighted by. Except it was almost too much of a good thing, and the character started to play a little flat. He was less melancholy than I hoped and more affectless. Pulling off “tiger ghost” can’t be easy, and I do appreciate that he almost got there. It just didn’t really register.

In the end, the play just felt a bit less than I expected it to. The pieces didn’t quite add up. And I noticed that just like Joseph’s other play that I saw, it just kind of ended. He doesn’t seem to have really identified the difference between an ending and a stopping. I’m fine with something open-ended, but it’s something else to just get a blackout and that feeling of, “Uh…is that it? Are we done?” If there were cheap seats, I’d tell people to go see this. I don’t know that it’s really worth full price. Which isn’t the worst thing, but it’s a disappointment considering how wonderful I think it could have been.

Sleep No More

100,000 square feet of New York City space. 101 rooms all designed decorated and fully realized. An audience in masks roaming about in white masks, groups forming and dissipating, people breaking off from crowds. The instruction that besides keeping your mask on and not speaking, there were no rules.

Sleep No More is a theatrical experience. I'm not prepared to call it a play or a dance piece or an installation or performance art. It's somehow more and less than all of those things. Groups are taken into the building, a massive space on the far West side that used to be megaclub Twilo once upon a time. An elevator lets people off on various floors, and you're told to just enter and...experience.

The show/piece/whatever is heavily informed by Macbeth and Rebecca. There is no dialogue, things are happening in several spaces at once, and try as you might (and I tried) you will not see everything in one go. I'm pretty sure that's impossible. And I'm even more sure that's intentional.

I spent the first hour wandering about in a mask reading letters found in cupboards, peeking under beds, debating whether or not to take staircases. And then suddenly there was action, and I hurried off to see a tableaux in the "ballroom" that seemed to be Macbeth and Lady Macbeth on either end of a dining table. Maybe Duncan was at the head of it. Maybe Banquo was there? Or maybe, um, well, shit, it's been a long time since I read or saw Macbeth.

Up and down stairs, around trees, across rooms, through a bunch of pushy people who used silence as an opportunity to slam into people without saying "excuse me," I chased people, lost threads, discovered new rooms, and watched really stunning individual dance performances: an acrobatic number in a luggage room, a dance of guilt in a crumbling statue garden, an erotic murder scene in some phone booths, and a deeply astonishing interrogation dance while closed into a teeny tiny room with about seven other people.

I wandered through beaded curtains, looked at crime scene photos, browsed the taxidermist, got my shirt ripped open in a smoky bar, watched someone nail cards to the walls of a room, and tried desperately hard to figure out what the fuck was going on.

I found pieces of this show/piece/experience/whatever to be breathtaking, and the opportunity to explore this enormous and incredibly designed space was incredible. That said, I felt real frustration not being able to follow any terribly well-defined thread. With so much going on, I left with the feeling that I had a very incomplete experience. Surely there were more letters hanging around that I should read, a ton of individual performances I didn't catch. They say there's no right or wrong way to experience it, but I had a hard time giving myself over to it. A fascinating experience and part of me does want to go back, but I'm still trying to find a larger meaning in all of it and worry that what it had to say was actually quite a bit smaller than the actual breadth of material and size of its execution. Am I alone in this? I might be. Buzz is tremendous. I was there and on the move for the full three hours and still felt like I just...missed something.

This piece in the Times confirms that I certainly missed some stuff. I never saw the hospital or the children's room. I suspect I might have missed an entire floor. I still suspect, based partly on the fact that I know more about what was happening based on a newspaper article than I did based on the entire experience itself, that it's simply too unstructured to really add up to anything. I just saw a lot of small pieces about sex and death, death and sex, that never really added up to anything bigger. But maybe I need to give it another chance? Or maybe the experience is enough and I need to give up this need for meaning and coherency.

Dear Reader,
Do I drop another $75 to go back in order to find out?
Best,
Jim

SWAN!!!

I find a lot of things funny, but I tend to me a chuckler or a silent laugher. I’m the last person anyone wants at their comedy show. But this weekend’s Black Swan parody SWAN!!! at P.S. 122 cracked my shit up.

The inimitable Jenn Harris played Nina delivering a brilliantly spot-on Natalie Portman with the world’s best facial expressions. I’ve seen Harris in a ton of the Our Hit Parade shows at Joe’s Pub. The girl can do a Barbie show like nobody’s business, but nothing has ever topped her devastating lip-synch to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” She could teach a drag queen a thing or two. She was also brilliant in Silence! The Musical, a musical spoof of Silence of the Lambs which gave the world the classic song “Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket.” I’m not kidding—it was hysterical. So really, between that and this, she should be the go-to gal for any film parody.

The rest of the cast was all male, making this the gayest show since…well, frankly, it was even gayer than Priscilla—the drag queen musical with disco tunes. Which was pretty de-gayed for what it was. But that’s not the point. The point is that THIS show was really, really gay. And awesome.

Christian Coulson (the original Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter movies, which I don’t watch because the books are much better) was hysterical as the choreographer. Randy Harrison (of Queer as Folk) was amazing as the mother. The whole thing was organized by pint-sized dynamo Jack Ferver who also played the Mila Kunis character Lily, and who was adorably unable to stop cracking up throughout the evening (annoying on SNL, but super-fun when it’s a three night run of a casual parody). And Matthew Wilkas played Winona Rider. Who was referred to throughout the evening only as “Winona Rider,” not the name of her character in the movie. It worked. Brilliantly. As when the choreographer announce, “Winona Ryder will be retiring after her last performance here this seasons,” and Lily replied, “Oh my Gooooooood. Heather!”

It was perfectly low-rent. Performed from scripts in their laps, almost entirely seated, in rather chintzy ballet-ish costumes, and with a bunch of really clever low-budget sight gags: spraying themselves down with water for the sweaty club scene, a squirt bottle of fake blood, and (most notably) a can of baked beans that served as fake vomit. Over and over and over. Harris purged like a real ballerina. Constantly.

There was one point about an hour in when I felt a lull in the laughter and thought things might be slowing down. After all, how funny can you consistently be for almost two hours? About two minutes later, I was busting a gut all over again. An exceedingly hysterical two hours mix of low humor and sharp parody it was, without exaggeration, the hardest I’ve laughed at the theater in ages. They only did four performances and sold them all out. If they did it again, I’d be back in a heartbeat.

Bright Eyes

Oh, Bright Eyes. So serious. So sad. I feel like Conor Oberst falls into that category of musicians that I always dislike most passionately: whiny white folky bullshit. So I fully cannot explain why I love him so much. I can say that I'll forgive the person responsible for creating the songs "Lover I Don't Have to Love," "Road to Joy," and most especially "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" has carte blanche from me to do pretty much whatever the hell he feels like. Even do a concert that's almost entirely backlit as though he's daring you to look directly at him. Or delivering a rant in the middle of said concert about how war is always bad (a sentiment I fully concur with) that made him sound unintelligent and juvenile. My reaction? His heart's in the right place, and I'm sure he's just shy. Note: you can argue me on these points, but I have made my decision that they're true!

Here's the thing: I have never had, nor will I ever again have tickets for a concert as good as the ones I had last night. Second row, dead center at Radio City with it's low, low stage, I was practically on stage. In fact, in the video I posted here, you can see me sporadically, most notably when Oberst steps off the stage onto the chair directly in front of me. Not to reveal how silly my thoughts are sometimes, but I did have a legitimate moment where I thought, "He's coming to sweep me off my feet." Besides the fact that I was a random person among literal thousands, I'm also fairly certain he's a straight man. Moral of the story? I watch too many movies. WAY too many movies. Also, apparently I still want to marry a rock star. How teenager of me!

The concert was fantastic. How much I appreciated it because of sheer proximity, I can't say, but Oberst has an incredibly charming charmlessness about him. It's like he just can't figure out how to interact with...life. And that somehow becomes endearing. His songs are insanely earnest, but they're also thoughtful, periodically incisive, periodically naive, anf very often clever. What I appreciate most about them is the severe openness and unfiltered quality. Take for instance the lyric from "Shell Games:" "My private life is an inside joke; No one will explain it to me." It's a hysterical line, but I don't even know if it's supposed to be funny! I actually don't think it is. He's the negative of a Lady Gaga--everything she does is artifice. I love that. Nothing he does seems to be. I love that too. It's the middle of the road people I find so tedious.

The setlist included my three favorite songs of his. "Take It Easy" came near the top of the show, and I can't quite explain how thrilling it was to be five feet away from someone singing one of my favorite songs of all time. It's rivaled on my 25 Most Played iTunes list only by Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black." It was stupid exciting. He also played songs from the fantastic new album, "The People's Key," including "Firewall," "Jejune Stars" (yes, that's really the title), and "Triple Spiral." The only downside was that he didn't play the new album's "Haile Selassie." Yes, that's also really the title.

In the end, I feel like I probably shouldn't like him. I can't help myself, though. I really love him in all his pretentious navel-gazing glory.

Hello Again

Hello Again is the second adaptation of Schnitzler's La Ronde that I've seen. The first was The Blue Room, the play that earned boatloads of press because Nicole Kidman was naked in it for about three seconds. The basic idea of all three pieces is that we see ten couples in ten scenes. Each features one of the lovers from the previous scene. So A & B sleep together, then B & C, and so on until the last character introduced sleeps with character A. We have come full circle. As Gwyneth Paltrow noted on Glee this week, "Remember, whenever you have sex with someone, you're having sex with everyone they've ever had sex with. And everybody's got a random!" Here we get to connect the dots.

La Ronde used the structure to show off the fact that sexual mores can and do transcend class distinction. What's the line? Everyone is equal when their pants come off...something like that.The Blue Room had all of the characters played by the same two people, highlighting the ways individuals might enact several different personae. Hello Again's change to the structure (besides being a musical) is the shift the time frame across the decades of the 20th century, this time pointing to the timelessness of sex and romance. Some things never change. It's like the dirty version of Three Sisters!

Adding interest is that the Transport Group's production is given an environmental staging. The audience is arranged around eight tables that surround a bed. We, the audience, are warned not to put anything on the tables because they may be "active space." Oh yeah...you pretty much get acted ON in this production. Saying it's intimate doesn't really do it justice. In the first scene I was focused on The Whore (that's the actual character, not a judgment call) who was four inches from my face, thus missing the fact that The Soldier had removed his pants. There's no nudity quite like surprise in your face nudity. Having said that, it will sound really stupid to say that the nudity was actually not overdone or exploitative. But it's true. There were fleeting moments. It just so happened that one fleeted in my face. I just barely kept my "Zoinks" inside my head.

The real thrill of the intimate staging isn't being face to bare ass with a performer (though who's complaining?). It's that because this is all performed in a loft in Soho with the orchestra set to the side, there is no need for amplification. All music and all voices are presented unadorned. And there is really nothing more thrilling than hearing something performed entirely acoustically. yes, there were times when someone was across the room and facing away from me when I couldn't make a word or two out, but it's a sacrifice I more than happily bore given the incredible beauty of the sound overall.

My one issue with the piece itself (though it may have been the production's fault-I'm not sure) is that the fact that time periods were changing wasn't completely clear to me until we went from the Titanic sinking straight to a disco club and one of the characters remained the same age. It forced me to readjust abruptly and realize that everyone was portraying a more general than specific character. Which explained why they were all billed with names like "The Senator" or "The Actress," and only acquired actual names in their second scene. It worked. Quite well. And going back and listening to the recording from the 1993 cast at Lincoln Center, I was able to pick up on things I missed in the first few exchanges.

Is every couple as revealing and exciting as the others? No. But taken as a whole, it's a really remarkably cohesive evening given the nature of the storytelling. And the music! Holy crap. The music is STUNNING. It is at turns playful, sad, sweet, funny, and biting. The score is less about stand alone songs than a sort of recitative that continues the story forward while also commenting on the...ahem...action.

And the cast assembled is top notch. Rachel Bay Jones is killer in her two scenes as The Actress, gleefully bitchy to the lover who is writing a play for her before turning harrowingly needy with The Sentator, who she loves. The best pairing is offered by Blake Daniel, The Young Thing, and Jonathan Hammond, The Writer whose section feels urgent and lovely, two people whose deeper desires to connect are openly on display while at the same time, we're shown how that connection will never occur. Daniel has a sort of smug cockiness that seems unshakeable, making his quieter moments that much more potent. And Hammond has great fun with the sleazier side of The Writer's self-promotion before carefully keying us in to his own underlying desire for sweetness and sympathy. There really isn't a weak link in the cast which also includes Alan Campbell, Elizabeth Stanley, Bob Stillman, and the thrilling voice of Alexandra Silber--the rest of her is there too, but it's really her voice that stuns.

Lastly, getting this material and this cast in this close a space for $40 is a steal. It's a sultry stunner, and the more I think about it, the more I appreciate it. It's adult and sexual without being silly or blandly dirty. I imagine response will be mixed--nothing made it as clear about how uncomfortable some people were with the intimate staging as the too, too long beat of silence between the play's end and the applause beginning. I hope it gets the attention it deserves. It's one of the best shows I've seen in the past few months. Oh, but how ugly is that poster?!

Priscilla Queen of the Desert

I've had too much time to think about this show. Granted, only two days, but it's been stuck in my mind, and I feel like this is going to turn into a marathon of tortured metaphors. Let's start with this one:

Imagine you're at a slot machine and the first four columns line up as cherries. You've won a thousand dollars, and you're super-excited. Then the fifth line drops and it's...right next to the cherries. You can't complain because you just won a thousand bucks. But knowing how close you came to the jackpot will aggravate you every time you think about it.

Which is, predictably, to say that Priscilla comes soooo close to being an outright bonanza. It's way to much of a good time to complain about, but it will also piss you off for not being even better than it is.

Anyone who has seen the movie knows it's about two drag queens and a trans woman on a bus trip across Australia so that Tick/Mitzi can meet his six-year-old son. Don't think too much about the fact that this means he spent six years avoiding it--you won't be able to hear your thoughts through the blaring music anyway. And that right there is the problem with this show--the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of the movie gets almost completely overwhelmed by the show's glitz and glamour. The complicated gender and sexual identity of a drag queen father? The surprising casual cruelty of you drag queen Adam/Felicia towards older trans woman Bernadette? The insecurity roiling under Adam's blazing projection of confidence? There's no time for that. We have too many disco songs to get through. And let me tell you something, when I (of all people) am complaining that there need to be more breaks between drag queen disco numbers...honey, there's a problem. As Felicia and Bernadette, Nick Adams are stepping into the pumps of Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp. It's an unenviable position, especially the latter as I consider Stamp's performance in the movie nothing shy of brilliant. But they handle the material with aplomb, especially when given moments to actually shine. Perversely, the higher my expectations were for each performer, the better they were fulfilled. Sheldon is the star of this show. As Mitzi, Will Swenson had to replace...whatshisface. The one I couldn't remember. And yet his is the most uneven of the three lead performances--tentative, a little uncomfortable, and just ever so slightly off. He has a wonderful vulnerability and rips into "Macarthur Park" with gleeful abandon, but it just isn't as wholly inhabited a performance as his compatriots'.

Contributing the the sound and fury of the show distracting you from its strange shallowness is an overbearing sound design. Out of about 28 songs, there are only four delivered by less than six people. More than half have the full company singing. Even the penultimate number with the three queens on a bare stage celebrating their friendship to the tune of Pat Benatar's classic "We Belong" is assisted by the entire company of offstage voices. Yes, we're very close friends who need each other, the number seems to say, so let's have two dozen people you can't see sing at you about how this is so. We just lose the personal to the point that when Tick sings to his son and when Bernadette sings (half of, before everyone else jumps in) "True Colors," it's almost a shocking reminder of what the sound of one voice singing is.

Now, this is all very complain-y of me, but I focus on the negatives because, again, so much is right that this should have been perfection. The opening has a Greek chorus of "Divas" literally descending from above to sing "It's Raining Men." I was clapping like a slap-happy 12-year-old and no one had even started singing. And I was not alone. The costumes are To. Die. For. And these bitches know how to work a quick change. A funeral scene early on (played for laughs, of course) featured a dozen or so costumes that in and of themselves should win the Tony for Best Costumes. All I can say is that I can't believe someone beat Lady Gaga to a hair crucifix. "Go West" is one of the most rousing production numbers I've seen in ages. And the famous bus-top windblown lipsych to La Traviata's "Sempre Libre" is a jaw-dropping stunner. Very simple and completely beautiful, it is a three minute course in the potential artistry of a lip-synch.

There are other quibbles. Some strange and useless audience participation opens the second act (despite the hands of two cast members on my shoulder, I remained steadfastly focused in the other direction and thus missed my chance to have a brief hoedown on a Broadway stage--I'll live, but I do actually regret not going up). And "True Colors" was actually substituted for "Both Sides Now" between the British version and now. And let me tell you, I may love me some Cyndi Lauper, but "Both Sides Now" would not only be more appropriate to the scene, it is flat out the better song of the two.

I admit, my experience didn't benefit from the two loud beasts behind me who even sang along at one point. In the THIRD row! If this was a real drag show, those bitches would have been stiletto-slapped. Instead, they only suffered my angry glares and mumbled epithets. That music may have been blaring, but I could still hear those cows chewing their gum with mouths wide open.

Long story somewhat shorter, I had a blast. And I will likely go back. But I will always be a little disappointed that Priscilla isn't the show that it could have been. It just came so damn close to perfection that missing seems a near-tragedy.

Side note: I had very low-stakes goals with this blog. My hope was for ten follower. I'm up to nine! So tell your...friend! :)

Three Sisters

So…how do you direct one of Chekhov’s great, complicated, tragic, comic plays with everyone in stage acting as though they’re in a different production and with a translation that is loudly anachronistic and still have it work? I may have sat through all three plus hours of Austin Pendleton’s production Three Sisters last week, but I still have no damned idea.

Being a very long, very Russian play, Three Sisters, as expected, features melancholy characters nattering on about peasants, snow, and sadness. The titular sisters all long to return to their family home in Moscow, but they’re stuck (to varying degrees and for varying reasons) in a tiny town populated mostly my military troops. The sisters are overeducated and well off enough that they don’t really need to do much of anything. Commence: ennui.

So obviously Chekhov was a fucking genius; his plays are among the richest, most humane, beautiful, thrilling, and sad that have ever been written. There’s also a delicacy there that requires a good production. The whole enterprise of a Chekhov play can go down like the Hindenburg if the performances aren’t properly shaded and the emotional rhythms well excavated. They can be the most exciting plays to watch, or they can be an exercise in tedium. This one, at the Classic Stage Company, was happily the former. But seriously, I don’t understand how it worked.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Masha, the most miserable sister, as a sort of manic bipolar. For much of the time, I couldn’t figure out if her emotional outbursts were laughter or crying until eventually I realized it didn’t much matter considering how close together the two were for her. Juliet Rylance played Irina, the youngest and ostensibly happiest sister with a look on her face that always made it appear she might start crying at any moment. Marin Ireland played the sister-in-law of the title characters as a shrieking harpy straight out of Married with Children. No one altered their accents. Emotional levels were wildly varied. And yet, in this crazy group of individual performances, there seemed to be some unholy harmony that was ultimately deeply affecting. It just…worked.

That’s not to say the play was without its jarring moments. Cast the slender Josh Hamilton as a character who apparently keeps gaining weight, and it starts to get awkward. Peter Sarsgaard was supposed to be in his mid-40s, and while he might not be far from that in real life, he hardly looks like the grizzled military man he’s playing. Meanwhile, the sisters appear to each be fifteen years apart. Visually, very few people looked as the text described them. And given how freely this was translated, I’m surprised they didn’t just alter those mentions. I mean really, when Andrei started being referred to as “Andy,” I just wanted to shout, “Oh, come ON!”

But all told, it was an exquisite evening. Much of the play focuses on the notion that as much as the world might change, the people in it will always have the same problems—people will love who they shouldn’t, want what they can’t have, and misunderstand what moves them to behave as they do. It’s discussions of what life a century beyond would look like feel nearly prophetic, and there is a degree of comfort (and a degree of sadness) in knowing that no matter what happens, it is destiny for people to go through times of happiness and sadness, love and loneliness, war and peace, and all you can do is hope for the best and go along for the ride.

Arcadia

I was really stuck in a rut for a week or two there, really disliking everything I saw, starting to wonder whether it was what I was seeing or whether it was just me, some bad mood I was in that I didn't actually realize I was in. Which doesn't make any sense, but the shows were starting to feel really bleak. And then came Arcadia.

I've read some of Tom Stoppard's plays before, but I'd never seen one until this week. I know his work is often criticized for being overly intellectual and under-developed emotionally. I also knew that there were those who felt Arcadia was particularly confusing as it travels back and forth between the early 19th Century and the present day featuring frequent tangents about English garden design, mathematical theories, and debates on the merits of classicism versus romanticism. But as crisply and cleanly and beautifully presented on Broadway right now, it was, to me, blissful.

In 1809, a wealthy family's daughter is tutored by a bit of a cad who can talk himself out of almost anything. Nearly two centuries later, two historians butt heads in the same estate, Sidley Park, trying to establish whether or not Lord Byron had ever been there and whether he might have fought a duel, killing a young poet.

There's really no satisfying way to summarize the play. On the one hand, we're presented with what happened at Sidley Park, and on the other we watch historians truly bungle the evidence. And along the way, we meet a dozen of the richest, most entertaining characters on stage right now--the teenage girl who might have been a mathematical genius ahead of her time, the poet whose wife can't stop sleeping with the tutor, the celebrated author, the critic who keeps trying to debunk her, and a man of science who refuses to believe that a 13-year-old might actually have been the first to establish a theory he is still trying to prove.

As I write this, I feel like I'm only doing it a disservice. The play is so tight and thoughtful and intelligent (and funny!) that it's pleasures almost defy simple explanation. I'll say this: Billy Crudup originated the role of the tutor in the first Broadway production and now gets to try on the present-day historian. He makes him such a delightful tool, all pomp and bragadoccio, that one delights in knowing how off the real story he really is. Bel Powley is the young genius,Thomasina, a role that seems like it would be a nightmare to cast--how many teenagers are there who could pull of being a young genius who is still charming and naive? She's wonderful in the part. And Tom Riley as the delightfully named Septimus Hodge is giving an incredibly funny performance that doesn't miss the deeper human notes. The whole cast is glorious, from large role to small, including really winning turns by Grace Gummer and David Turner who deliver the goods in almost bit parts.

My favorite moment was Thomasina's breakdown over the loss of the library at Alexandria: how could we go on, she wondered, knowing how much knowledge and beauty and literature was lost to fire. Septimus' attempt to comfort her, to make peace with what was lost and how it matters in the grand scheme of time, made me tear up just a little. And even that doesn't compare to a later speech comparing the concept of an afterlife to having the answers in the back of a book--where's the satisfaction of puzzling something out if you know for sure you'll even get the answer. It's the puzzling that counts. Which is also true of the play. Letting the mysteries of it wash over you and waiting for the pieces to come together is deeply satisfying and tremendously rewarding. I loved the whole thing. I'm only disappointed that I don't feel as if I can better capture it.

Oh, but I'll still make two complaints: first, the show has the ugliest artwork I've seen in a longtime. Seriously--that Playbill cover: what were they thinking?? And second, every time someone entered or exited through the central upstage doors, they had to cross the loudest and squeakiest section of stage I've ever heard. Other than that: all was perfect.

The Dream of the Burning Boy

The Roundabout Underground program has served me well in the past. They put on full productions of new plays by new artists in a tiny black box theater in the subbasement of their home base in midtown The Dream of the Burning Boy is the fifth production in the space. It follows the deliriously funny Speech and Debate, the messy but moving The Language of Trees, the half great/half appalling musical Ordinary Days, and the stellar comedy Tigers Be Still.

Burning Boy is, curiously, the third of the plays set in a high school (I know they focus on young writers, but how limited are the worldviews we’re talking about?). This time around, we have a possibly misanthropic English teacher who was the last person to see a student before the kid dropped dead of a brain aneurysm. Other characters are the overly friendly guidance counselor, the dead kid’s girlfriend who may have been cheating on him, the kid’s steely but depressed mom, the sister who always felt second best and is now the survivor, and a small handful of other stock characters plucked right out of every other play/movie/novel about grief ever, thrown onstage and forced to perform through 90 minutes of plot shenanigans that are more contrived than a Shakespearean play about lost twins and folks hiding out in drag. Unlike one of Shakespeare’s more absurd plays, the proceedings are less than lyrical, lack any keen insight on humanity, and seem to be filtered through the collected works of Oprah Winfrey.

It’s one thing to watch unknowns flounder in a play like this. It’s another to watch a great actor like Reed Birney adrift in a sea of clichés and coincidences. He delivers, unsurprisingly, a very strong performance. So does Matt Dellapina as the dopey and endearing (and crazy adorable, though this is unrelated to his actual performance) guidance counselor with a heart of gold. Sure, he’s playing a stereotype. But he’s doing it with panache! The other performers are less fantastic, but to be fair, they aren’t given a ton to work with.

You know things are bad when you check your watch more than once during a play that’s only 90 minutes long. You know they’re worse when you start noticing how low the ceiling of the theater is and wondering how you got through four other performances there without feeling claustrophobic.

I know I’ve been full negative Nancy for the past few shows I’ve seen, but I’m a show ahead of what I’ve written about, so know this: my next post is going to be super positive! After two weeks of not really liking anything, last night was a blast of fresh air. More on it coming soon…

Timon of Athens

About halfway into the first act of the Public Theater’s production of Timon of Athens, I found myself thinking, “Man, why don’t more people do this Shakespeare play?” At intermission, I was pretty delighted—having a great time and looking forward to more. Then Act 2 happened and things got a wee bit wonky.

Quick plot synopsis: Timon’s a super-charitable guy who loves throwing parties and giving people gifts. But ruh-roh, turns out he’s broke, and he needs his friends to help him as he has helped them. No one does. So far, so good. Then Timon leaves Athens broke and angry, hating his false friends and the evils of money. And a pissed of military official ends up fighting against Athens, Timon finds a buried treasure, people find out he has gold and try to befriend him again, Timon continues to bluster against the world and blah, blah, blah.

The second act (which I assume is actually Acts IV and V of the play) feels terribly forced. Filled with strange coincidences, an unending whining about the terrors of money and the tyranny of me, and a seriously ugly wig, it removes the edge AND the humor that the piece had going for it, and the air slowly leaks out.

Still, I’m glad I saw this. The first act was brilliantly performed with Richard (JohnBoy) Thomas as a delightful Timon and a seamless ensemble of supporting actors. Max (Vinnie from The Wonder Years) Casella has a small but winning role as the philosopher who never wanted Timon’s gifts. Mark Nelson gave a beautiful performance as Timon’s unyieldingly dedicated servant. And a dozen or so other actors each bit into their parts with relish.

It isn’t surprising that the play is being dredged up in the years after a bad financial crisis, and it felt quite timely. And it actually works its way to a powerful and hopeful ending tableau. I know it’s Shakespeare—well, it’s purportedly Shakespeare but maybe someone else—but I really wish that someone involved had taken out the knives and chopped out much for the second act. With a bit less ridiculousness and whining, this could have been a really powerful intermissionless evening. It’s probably blasphemy to even suggest it, but ah well! Everyone makes mistakes.