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.