The Tenant

I got more blog hits out of Sleep No More than almost any other show, War Horse and The Motherfucker with the Hat being the only exceptions. It makes sense too. Going into a performance where you have to wear a mask, no one really tells you what it's about, and you know you're going to more or less be aimlessly wandering a few thousand square feet...it's intimidating. Maybe you want to make sure that no one is going to jump out of dark corners at you. Maybe you don't trust yourself to make the right choices with so much space and so little time and want some more direction. Maybe you just want to know where the naked people are (try the tubs). On the one hand, there's something thrilling in diving into this sort of experiential theater. On the other, it can be overwhelming, and sometimes confrontational art just isn't the order of the day. Personally, I love unsettling shit, but when I headed uptown to catch this year's OTHER five-floor, openly wandered theatrical presentation, The Tenant, I was feeling tired, under the weather, and just generally not up for stumbling about in the dark not knowing what to expect. As I waited outside, I checked out a review or two, and while in the end I'd say it wasn't necessary as The Tenant is even less interactive than Sleep No More, I'm nevertheless glad that I did since the reviews grounded me a bit in the plot.

There's the crucial difference between Sleep No More and The Tenant. The former is an impressionistic piece with characters pulled from Shakespeare and Hitchcock, but your enjoyment doesn't at all feel related to an ability to follow the particulars, even if throughlines do occasionally present themselves. The Tenant, while significantly lower-rent, is in some ways the more ambitious piece as it not only has a plot, it has a fairly traditional structure.

Trelkovsky searches for an apartment and ends up locating the custodian of one building attending to a tenant who tried to kill herself by jumping out of her window. As long as that apartment's available... This piece is presented in the basement of the building the show is presented in. Everyone is gathered together to watch a single opening and then sent off into the "apartment building" Trelkovsky takes his room in. Then shit goes crazy. Here's the storyline in a nutshell: the other residents are frigging crazy and try to drive him mad. He begins to believe they want him to kill himself just as the former occupant of his apartment did. And he may be right. They all seem to have it out for him--some find him a nuisance, some seem to hate him because he's Polish, and others just don't trust anybody new.

What was so completely fascinating about this project was that you could follow Trelkovsky and his descent into madness, or you could roam through his neighbors' apartments where talk would occasionally drift to him, but where independent story lines also made headway. Somehow, and even though I experienced it, I can't quite explain it, the entire thing felt manageable and as though it was always leading towards one inevitable end. It WAS, of course, but that it didn't feel forced or erratic or random is an incredible testament to the team of writers who assembled the piece.

Side by side with Sleep No More, a lot of The Tenant doesn't fare well in comparison. SNM looks to have cost millions. The Tenant easily cost in the thousands. The low thousands. The sets are chintzy and the sound design leaves a lot to be desired. The cast is wildly uneven. One or two performers are brilliant. The rest range from average to...let's say below average. Of course, there's another key difference: The Tenant is free. The price isn't reflected simply in the cheaper look. It also feel apparent in the deeply earnest, gung ho approach of all involved. These are people who are giving everything to the show they're in, and you can feel that commitment, even when it's filtered through a few amateur-hour elements.

The Tenant as a production is a beautiful marriage of high and low--technical precision and spirited ambition, and that marries well with the material which is sort of a high-minded horror-farce. Once people start doing drag, it's really anything goes. Based on a Roman Polasnki movie (itself based on a novel) that was panned upon release but later developed a cult following, the whole enterprise is a really good bad time. I'd love to go back again if I have the chance.

If anyone stumbled upon this review looking for where the nudity in THIS production is, I can't help you. I saw a sign warning of nudity, gun shots, and strobe lights. I missed them all.

Man and Boy

I have three really exciting shows to share my feedback on. Before I get there, though, let's talk about the latest Roundabout show! Okay, so here's the deal: I often like the shows the Roundabout does more than just about anybody. I liked Matthew Broderick's widely panned performance in The Philanthropist. I really enjoyed Sienna Miller in the deeply loathed After Miss Julie. And damned if I didn't get a kick out of the sappy Holocaust musical (you read that right) The People in the Picture. But even with those shows, I suspect that my enjoyment is intrinsically related to the fact that I only spent $10 on each. And even then, my expectations may have been lowered by the fact that it's the Roundabout. Still, even for $10, I couldn't get behind The Ritz or The Understudy (even with Zack Morris!) or Old Acquaintance or any number of other shows. Still, I stay in the $10 game for the moments when they nail it out of the park--their Waiting for Godot, The Glass Menagerie, Assassins, and Cabaret were all stunning. Of course, the material in each of those cases was exceptional. Give Roundabout an amazing show and they may well do an incredible production. Give them middling material, and they aren't going to find a way to elevate it. At this point, that seems verging on undeniable.

So where does Terrence Rattigan's Man and Boy fall? Well...they didn't knock it out of the park.

The unimpeachable Frank Langella plays Gregor Antonescu, a sleazy financier caught in a terrible scandal that may take him down. The implications are far-reaching, and on a pivotal night, he goes to his estranged son Vasili's apartment in the West Village to try to save his entire career, reputation, and holdings. The deeply moral Vasili has been hiding out under the assumed name Basil Anthony. Not even his longtime girlfriend knows his real past. Five years earlier, Basil took a shot at his father when he learned the extent of the old man's financial misdeeds. Even still, Gregor believes the boy doesn't mean him any harm ("He missed"), and it's apparent to those around on this fateful night that Basil still holds his father in high esteem. Perhaps too high.

A treacherous family drama in the guise of a financial thriller, Man and Boy provides many moments of black comedy and appealing (or appalling, depending on your take) seediness. Most notable is Gregor's plan to use his son as a pawn in a game of sexual cat and mouse with another financier. And Langella seems to take great pleasure in playing this decidedly despicable yet oddly sentimental criminal. The production around him isn't up to the task in spite of a handful of wonderful supporting turns--Francesca Faridany as his countess wife, Michael Siberry as his longtime confidante, and Zach Grenier as his business friend/rival all strike high notes. The younger cast members--Driver, Brian Hutchison, and Virginia Kull--seem a bit stymied by the decidedly more earnest parts they've been given, and I don't believe that's a matter of age or experience. Instead, it seems the production can't seem to settle on a tone. Everything is played a little too black and white, where it seems the joys of the play lie in its middle grounds. I found myself wishing the whole thing was played a bit meaner. For me, the highlights came in Gregor's interactions with his wife and his confidant. The depths of the cruelty on stage were plumbed, but the humor was never sacrificed. The show is at its best when it's at its most unsettling, and Driver, Hutchison, and Kull all seem to be playing their parts to garner the good will of the audience, effectively letting the air out of the show.

I'm not sure if Man and Boy is a great play, but I feel like there's potential for it to be greater than the whole I saw. From my one experience with it, which I will say was slightly unsatisfying but not at all unpleasant, I just wanted to see it more vicious. Right now, it feels like Dracula without his fangs--sinister but harmless. Hopefully as it carries on performances, the whole ensemble will find a way to engage in a bit more bloodletting.

Completeness

Why, hello again. How incredibly erratic my theatergoing has gotten lately. I didn't see anything and then I saw everything. I went from nothing to write about to way behind, so let's dive in with the first of five shows I saw in the past six days: Itamar Moses' Completeness at Playwrights Horizons. You know how some things can be too clever for their own good? This is like that. But it works. Mostly. In spite of itself. Let's get more specific.

Boy are you lucky this blog isn't in real time because I just went on a crazy hunt for my Playbill. Never found it. So let's just say I might be guessing at some character names here. The show opens with Elliot and Molly (confirmed names!) meeting in a computer lab on an unnamed college campus. He's a computer programmer. She's a biology grad student studying the reactions of different proteins in yeast. Or different proteins ON yeast? It's something about proteins and yeast. How to summarize this as quickly as possible while also not revealing how much of the science-y discussions I didn't understand? So...to map the possible chemical reactions of proteins, you need to be able to isolate the independent reactions of properties and find a way to take into consideration every other stimuli that may be itself causing the reaction. Computers can help by processing algorithms that will limit the potential outcomes and produce incredibly specific answers. But to be able to process every single outcome of something, you need a big fat algorithm that technology as we know it wouldn't be able to solve within our lifetimes.

In other words, all things are at the cusp of being knowable, but the incredible number of variations that could potentially occur might as well be infinite as far as the human brain is able to comprehend them. Not everything is possible, but it might as well be. Surround this discussion with a love story that takes these principles into account and...voila: Completeness.

So yeah, it's an incredibly complicated metaphor for romantic interaction, and why we can't know whether or not things will ever work out. And that metaphor is perhaps too conveniently grafted onto a play about two nerd geniuses falling in love just as they're each falling out of love with two other people (the other two cast members, Meredith Forlenza and Brian Avers as characters I can't name from memory). The dialogue is too self-consciously clever, and the themes are passed along in a less than subtle way, but you know what? I really dug it.

Here's why: the play is nothing if not ambitious. From the author's willingness to tackle big, complicated concepts to his breaking of formal convention in the second act (in a hideous bit that should be cut except that it means so well), he may not always succeed, but that it is as accomplished as it is as often as it is...it's just really promising. It's also crazy funny at times, and it manages a pitch-perfect demonstration of the mating rituals of the privileged and over-educated. Also, the cast is fantastic. Karl Miller is adorable as Elliot, a self-involved yet oddly romantic doofus with charm to spare. Aubrey Dollar as bio grad student Molly is perfection. She's a self-loathing narcissist, drowning in guilt that she can't stop being fascinated by. She may hate her life, but she definitely doesn't find anything else more interesting. Dollar is also a natural comedian, provoking the hardest laughter without ever seeming to try.

This is one of those shows where you feel like in lesser hands, you'd be chewing your own hand off hoping the experience would just end. But somehow a cast was assembled that could be witty and believable and effortless even while spouting off about complicated algebraic and biological nonsense. While the show may be ham-handed in its delivery, it also shows a beautiful sense of balance between comedy and drama with the characters balanced precariously on the edge of being hideously irritating without ever going over.

Completely is a deeply imperfect, lovingly executed, totally enjoyable show.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

As summer wound down, I didn't take in as many shows as usual. Part of this is that I didn't have a ton of time. A bigger part is that there just hasn't been anything new to see. I actually wanted to head to the theater tonight but literally couldn't find a single thing I wanted to go to. I thought about seeing Follies a third time even though I already have tickets for next Monday. That's how dire the situation was. Instead I came home and engaged in the great mouse hunt of 2011. The mouse has still not been caught, but there are three different types of anti-rodent devices scattered about my single room apartment now.


Point is, I can't wait for the Fall season to kick off, but before it does so in earnest, I did manage to catch the Elevator Repair Service's production of The Select (The Sun Also Rises) at NYTW last weekend. ERS's Gatz, a six-plus hour show in which the script was the entirety of The Great Gatsby was a major event last season that I chose not to partake in. Here's the thing: I'm not the hugest Gatsby fan. Yes, it's beautifully written. Yes, it probably has the best last sentence of any novel ever. But that doesn't mean I LIKED it. And however brilliant the show was (and reports were that it was pretty damned brilliant), I just couldn't bring myself to drop $150 to spend several hours watching the performance of an entire novel that I feel iffy about.


Okay, fine. I waffled for the above reasons for a really long time and by the time I decided to see it, the whole run was sold out, and I've been kicking myself ever since. Point is, they're back, and this time they're doing a version of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (which I somehow never read). And it's not the whole novel. And it's a mere...three and a half hours. So I was in.


All of the text is Hemingway's. His narrator, Jake Barnes, becomes ours as well. Beautifully played by Mike Iveson with a detached amusement barely concealing a wealth of anxious, useless desire, he is an ex-pat in Paris rendered impotent by a war wound. He and the increasingly desperate ex-boxer Robert Cohn are in love with Brett Ashley, a promiscuous divorcee. Cohn has an affair with her that ends brutally for him but barely even registers for her. Barnes continues to be a center for her--she keeps spinning back, but his irresolvable impotence keeps them apart. It's also about war, the "Lost Generation," bullfights and all that, but if you want that summary, just check out the SparkNotes.


Long story short, it's a booze-soaked romantic tragedy. Tragic only in the most intimate (and thus unsettling) ways. It's too funny and self-aware (and real) to allow for a broad moment of catharsis. So let's call it...subtly devastating. In only the most entertaining of ways.


Performed on a single set designed to look like the Parisian bar The Select that the characters frequent, Barnes narrates in frequent monologues while the other characters are given only Hemingway's dialogue. It wasn't until I had a chance to step back and think about the mechanics long after the show was over that I really appreciated how deeply impressive that all was. There's no dramaturge listed in the program which is either a gross oversight or an incredible testament to the director and troupe's collaborative efforts.


For the most part, the largest, trickiest roles are also the best played which is certainly better than the opposite. I remember when Holly Hunter won the Oscar for her wordless performance in The Piano, my mother said, "I don't know that she deserved it. I mean...she didn't have to memorize any lines." If remembering the most text is the greatest achievement of an actor (which I obviously don't believe to be the case), Iveson deserves any award thrown at him. But the fact is, in addition to remembering a hideously overwhelming amount of text, he also manages an incredibly well-shaded performance as our broken, yet spirited protagonist. Matt Tierney does delicate work as the alternately infuriating and heartbreaking Robert Cohn. You want him to be rejected, but damned if you don't feel bad from him when he is. And Lucy Taylor is frigging ridiculous as Brett. It's easy to see why men would fall at her feet, but more importantly, why they'd stick around after she dismissed them. She's thoughtless without being cruel--a woman dancing as fast as she can to keep the party going, needing to find (or pretend) happiness, even if she leaves people lying in her wake. The tragedy is a result of her not realizing how much of an impact she has on those around her. She's Sally Bowles with even less direction but much more money.


This is not to say the cast is perfect. I don't know who thought Susie Sokol should be cast as 19-year-old bullfighter Pedro Romero, but it's hideous casting. It felt like they were going for Cathy Rigby as Peter Pan and got Patti LuPone playing Dennis the Menace. Absolutely nothing about it worked. And to stick with awkward casting comparisons Kate Scelsa as Frances, Cohn's wife, reads like Carol Channing playing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Literally EVERY time she opened her mouth, the elderly woman next to me started cursing. "Jesus Christ. Here she goes again. Fuck. She just...Jesus fuck." I could relate. Related: I can't wait to be old enough to be able to pull that shit off without getting in trouble.


Back to the production. The sound design is miraculous. Normally, I'd say that if you're paying attention to the sound design, it's a bad sign, but here it's actually mixed on stage and so thoroughly integrated into the show in an intentionally artificial way that it just reads brilliantly. And the two dances scenes are stunners--kicking us out of the action and into a more interprative space in a way that captures the joy and also the menace of the era's drunken decadence.


Interestingly (to me) this isn't a show that I left feeling elated. My immediate response was actually that they needed to hack 30 minutes and get the thing moving more quickly. But as I think about the performance more and more, I'm increasingly impressed with what I saw and how rich the experience was. It's hard to say how much of that was the show itself and how much was the source material, but in the end, I'm very, very glad I saw it.

Rent

Settle in kids, this is likely gonna be a long one.

If there's one show I can't judge with any sort of objectivity... If there's one show that I can legitimately say had a profound formative effect one me... If there's one show that I'm almost embarrassed to love as much as I do because it seems so easy and so obvious... That show is Rent.

Let's take a little trip down memory lane. What, you got something better to do? I'm 15 years old, living in the suburbs of New York and just starting to fall in love with the theater. I discover Playbill online and start to read about a musical where the creator died just before preview started. Then word of mouth gets really amazing. Then it transfers to Broadway. The day after it opens, I walk to the supermarket to grab a copy of the NY Times (oh, the old days) and read the rapturous review thinking all the time that I MUST see this show. So I borrow my mom's credit card, call Telecharge, and book tickets for months out because everything sooner, at least with regard to the cheap seats, is sold out. In the meantime, I buy the copy of Time with the cast on the cover. I get the cast recording and learn it beginning to end. Finally, I see the show, and I fall for it. Hard. Everything about it screams out to me--this group of artists living in squalor and searching for truth in love and art while battling AIDS seems so incredibly, intensely vital. Coming to terms with being gay in the era of AIDS, feeling uncomfortable in my suburban home, desperately wanting to know more about the world, and being a typical teenager with outsized feelings and curiosities, the entire thing felt so terribly, wonderfully romantic and real.

Yes, looking back, it's possible to question whether the piece was ever truly authentic, whether it romanticized disease and poverty from a position of privilege, and even whether it's that well-constructed dramatically. But when I saw the show in late '96, it was like a sucker punch. It said everything I wanted to hear about the transformative powers of art, love, community, and New York City. Without the heady thrill of the show shaping my notion of what New York was, I doubt I would have moved to New York when I was 18. I always figured I'd end up applying to Brown for college. In Rhode Island. RHODE ISLAND! Pardon me while I judge my 16-year-old self.

The bottom line is that my family, living all of 40 minutes from Manhattan, HATED New York City. They still do. Everyone fled the area but me who moved into the belly of the beast and fell more in love with this city than I've been with anything else in my life (even Rent). So I ended up Manhattan bound, dreaming of the day that I'd be living in an apartment with no heat and all of my friends would have AIDS. Hey, I never said it wasn't a deeply flawed dream.

It wasn't just about New York, though. When I really think about how earnestly I pursued the notion of an "authentic" life, even if I didn't truly understand what I meant by that, a lot of it falls right out of this show. We'll pause here to acknowledge the irony that I wanted to be deeply truthful to myself and based that vision on someone else's work. Irony accepted. Moving on.

I saw Rent ten or so times on Broadway, mostly in its earliest years. That original cast was stupidly perfect. I imagine a tremendous amount of their energy and devotion came out of the bonding experience of doing a show and losing its author right before it started. And, of course, from the rapturous response that followed. So, sure, over the years, the replacement casts got a little wonky, and then the film version happened, but we'll just try to pretend it didn't. But the show itself always held a sway over me and still does. So when it's announced less than three years after it ends its epic Broadway run that they're doing a new version off-Broadway with the original director, I am equal parts thrilled and horrified. And then I saw it. Thrilled and horrified was pretty much the right reaction.

Let's start with this. Acknowledging again my lack of objectivity, I though the show held up pretty damned well. It's a period piece now, especially in its long-gone vision of a Bohemian East Village and also in its treatment of AIDS, a disease that becomes ever more destructive but less localized and less unknowable. But the fact that this show manages three central relationships over the course of a year with all the attendant backstories, the encroaching threat of gentrification as personified by one of their own former friends, and the ways these couples get together, break apart, rejoin, and (in some cases) die, is really beautifully managed, especially when you consider that Act 1 takes place in one day and Act 2 is the entire following year. It may be a but confusing at times, and there are some moments where the dialogue just sort of clunks to the stage as the characters inform us of what happens, but all in all, it's a lot smoother and tighter than one could expect. There's a tremendous amount of information presented, but the pace never lags--all the more impressive since it's nearly sung-through.

Where the new production gets into trouble is occasionally in the direction and more often in the acting. First thing's first: this always bothered me about the original as well: does Michael Greif only direct from a seat in the center of the house? Is he not aware of how severely he limits sightlines? As before, solid chunks of action play behind beams or floating walls depending on where you sit. Apparently there are projections throughout this production, but I certainly didn't see them. And occasionally, I wanted people to just stop moving around the sort of iron jungle gym of a set. It's not that big of a space, so I'm not sure why everyone seemed to be walking for the entire show. Really, though, my complaints here are pretty minimal. So let's get to the part where they get bigger:

Oh, hell, let's start with the biggest. Arianda Fernandez plays the female lead, Mimi. Poorly. Mimi's the bad girl 19-year-old dancer at an S&M club struggling with heroin addiction, AIDS, and high notes. Well...at least in this version. Fernandez looks the part, but I have legitimately never heard a professional performer crack as many times in one show as I did on Friday. "Out Tonight" went from being a sexy number about living on the edge to an endurance test of Fernandez's larynx and the audience's ears. She fared mildly better elsewhere, coming closer to her musical notes but no closer to any sort of emotional truth for the character nor a sexual chemistry with Roger.

Roger and Mimi's meet-cute moment is "Light My Candle," and to be fair, it wasn't only Fernandez's problem that it didn't generate any heat. Heh. Candle. Heat. ANYway...Matt Shingledecker has an awesome last name, some truly amazing pants, and a haircut that looks straight out of Major League. Vocally, he was miles ahead of his love interest, but his performance just read really, really flat.

Working my way down the mediocrity ladder, it really pains me to say than Adam Chanler-Berat who I adored in Next to Normal and even in Peter and the Starcatcher (despite hating that show) also didn't really pop as Mark, our filmmaker narrator. He was adorable, but he played the part of the witness to the action a bit too literally, often fading into the background when I would have loved to see a little more snap from him.

Happily, while my opinions of the three leads ranged from Meh to OHMIGODMAKEITSTOP, the supporting cast was fucking fantastic. As Collins, Ephraim Sykes started off very quiet and subdued, and I wasn't sure where he was going until I saw that as he discovered love with the character Angel, he became fuller and fuller before ultimately bursting out with the deeply emotional, beautifully sung reprise to "I'll Cover You." As Angel herself, MJ Rodriguez may not have had the vocal power or dance technique that Wilson Jermaine Heredia brought to the role, but he acted the hell out of it. In a performance that was one of the most different from the original, Rodriguez was not only more believable as a drag queen than his predecessors, but he navigated the fine line between performative attitude and emotionality incredibly deftly. His choices were never obvious, but they were usually spectacular.

Now let's get to my two favorite performances of the night. And I'll start with one that essentially came from an ensemble member so good that she basically turned off the lights on the rest of the stage when she had her moments to shine. Tamika Sonja Lawrence could give a master class on making the most of a six line role. As the homeless woman near the end of the first act, she was chilling and heartbreaking and delivered line readings that were incredibly different from any I've heard before while making them seem like the only possible legitimate choices. And then as the soloist in "Seasons of Love," she avoided going the typical route of just trying to slam her verse out as loudly as possible, showing off an incredible voice and stunning technique before bringing it on home in that huge, endless final note. Apparently she understudies the much larger role of Joanne, and while I did really enjoy Corbin Read, I'd drop everything to go see her take it on.

Then with a bigger role that similarly read entirely differently than the original, Annaleigh Ashford was brilliant as Maureen. She makes a late entrance, showing up at the end of the first act to do the comedic performance art piece "Over the Moon," her version of which I could just watch on a loop for an hour or two without getting bored. Cranking the femme dial up to 10, she makes Maureen hyper-sassy, uber-funny, and deeply, beautifully recognizable. She is exquisite.

So what's the lesson? I guess that sometimes the very best thing to do is reject everything you're supposed to know about a character and find your own way in. And that Mimi is a pretty tough role to sing and should be re-cast. And that no matter what, I have always loved and will always love Rent, even when it's not at its best.

Catch Me If You Can

When I started this blog in January, one of my stated goals was to get free tickets to something, so imagine my delight when I got a pair of seats to Catch Me If You Can as part of Bloggers Night. Why they'd choose to do this now when the show is closing in a few weeks in kind of beyond me.

Two things:
a) I'd like to participate in more events like this (I like free things!), so it seems counterintuitive to give a bad review to the first show I got free tickets for.
b) Giving a bad review to a show shortly after it posted its closing notice really feels like kicking someone while they're down.

You sense where this is going, right?

Let's get some more things out of the way: I LOVED Hairspray. I'd put it in the top 5 musicals of the last decade. I know there are those who feel it was too sanitized for Broadway, but I disagree. I really felt like the show was tighter and stronger than the John Waters movie (which I also love). I realize this is basically blasphemy, but I don't care. I loved the songs, the staging, the cast, the set...everything came together perfectly. So when I heard the creators were doing Catch Me If You Can, I was damned excited. I even caught the out of town try-out because I happened to be in Seattle when it played. I was really let down, but I had hoped they'd do the work that needed to be done to make it really shine on Broadway.

What's playing now is, in fact, a tighter, stronger show than I saw in Seattle. But I still wouldn't say it's good. The quickest of plot run-downs: Frank Abagnale, Jr. becomes a con man, fleeces banks out of two million dollars, flies five million miles as a fake Pan Am pilot, lands a job as an ER supervisor after faking a medical license, and even manages to pass the bar. Along the way, he is pursued by FBI Agent Hanrahatty. Imagine what could have been done with this story if all of its hard edges and psychological depth weren't replaced by vaudeville numbers and odes to sexy nurses. Imagine what it could have been if Kander and Ebb had gotten a hold of it--now whitewash that.

As Abagnale, the adorable and clarion voiced Aaron Tveit is charming but shows none of the panache, joy, or neuroses that would make someone risk everything they had (repeatedly) in pursuit of the next big get. Norbert Leo Butz fares better as Hanrahatty (and won the Lead Actor Tony for what I would argue is a supporting role)--he's hammy and fun, but he's more cartoon than three dimensional character.

The show most suffers from a lack of focus. Presented as a television special (a conceit that makes virtually no sense), we are occasionally addressed directly, no chance for a big dance number is passed up, and we're almost forced to view the action at a further remove. This is Abagnale narrating his own story (except when he isn't because he isn't in the scene so we arbitrarily shift focus), but he's too much of a cipher to actually give us a vision singular enough to have weight.

For all the energy on stage, this is an astonishingly okay show. There's enough sheer effort that it should tip it towards great or terrible, but instead it just sits there, inert. It has also, inexplicably, been given what looks like the cheapest production on Broadway. The set is one of the ugliest I've ever seen (a tacky white bandshell and some awkward scrims), and the costumes range from bland to truly hideous. Money also seems to have been saved by not employing dialect coaches (there probably are some, but I didn't check), because present on stage are the worst French and the worst New Orleans accent I've ever heard.

This is the kind of production that I feel like I could pick away at for hours because there are so many elements that could and should have gone right but on level after level it simply misses the mark so there's no one person with whom the blame can be placed. Beyond the set design, nothing is truly awful, it just...is.

But I still appreciate the free tickets! Try me again??

2 Burn

I always get excited about the NY International Fringe Festival. That excitement usually lasts until I've seen my first Fringe show of the year. Case in point: 2 Burn.

2 Burn? Not 2 burn.

Here's the concept behind the show: someone has an academic interest in idioms about romance that are rooted in disease and how they crop up in pop culture (think "Fever" or Madonna's "Burning Up"). So a teenage student flunking poetry at nameless conservative university actively pursues an out gay professor writing a book about the whole love/disease thing. I would try to explain why he does this, but, well...I'm not sure there's any real reason other than the fact that without this relationship, there would be no play.

Meanwhile, the professor's lesbian best friend is trying to get him back together with his ex-boyfriend. She also happens to be the kid's poetry professor who happens to be flunking him because the kid has all these ideas that feelings are just a social construct. Ideas he got from the main character's book.

Blah, blah, blah...coincidence adds to coincidence adds to lengthy diatribes about BIG IDEAS leading to an ending that would probably be pretty great if it had been tacked onto a play that actually deserved it.

I think the most frustrating thing here is that the playwright seems to have some interesting thoughts. Just enough to really drive home how thin the play is and how didactically it's constructed. It's like watching someone sketch the rough idea for something that they can develop later. As a first draft, I'd say there might be enough there conceptually to take the time to overhaul. As it stands, though, it shouldn't be in front of an audience.

Suffice to say, the most dramatic thing I saw at the theater that night was someone who identified herself as a friend of the playwright freaking the fuck out on the hapless person running the door. Apparently they couldn't find a record of her tickets being purchased, so she opted to crank the dial to mega-bitch.

The two female cast members, Deena Jiles and Michelle Wood, delivered with full conviction and were deeply admirable, especially considering it was the first performance for an audience. But even the strongest performances couldn't fill the cavernous holes in the play.