Chinglish

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taylor Mac

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

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

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

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

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

The Phantom of the Opera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lyons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Threepenny Opera

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandi Carlile

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

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

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

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

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

Sons of the Prophet

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cymbeline

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

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

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

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

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