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.