After "Glory Days" was over, as I compared noted with my parents, all three of us seemed to have the same reaction: If I had been in an aisle seat, I would have walked out. Note that the show is ninety minutes long with NO INTERMISSION. Then came the, how long did it take before you started looking at your watch - for me it was forty-five minutes (followed by forty-six, forty seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, and fifty...), my mother was thirty, and I think my father slept through the whole thing. Really, I can't think of a nice thing to say about it. Well, okay - the four person cast does a decent job. None of them are spectacular, but consider the material they have to work with. It's strange - listening to the songs posted on the show's Myspace page made me sort of excited to see the musical - yes, they are a little Jonathon Larson-y sounding, but they seemed young and fun. But when sung in the context of the show, by characters that I found not remotely likable, they seemed to lose all of their charm. They also all started to sound the same. "Glory Days" is about four guys who were friends in high school, who then come together after their first year of college and find they don't like each other anymore. The thing is, they all come across as the jerky frat boy types - the sort of people I would avoid eye contact with in the hall and hope would ignore me - so I couldn't have been less interested in spending five, let alone ninety minutes with them. Four unlikeable guys who don't even like each other. What is supposed to be entertaining about this? Granted, sometimes people being mean to each other can be fun. But this doesn't come across as real mean - it's more like watching them stand facing each other, close their eyes and look away, and fake slap each other. I mean, the whole thing could have been told in about thirty seconds:
Guy A: Hi.
Guy B: Hi.
Guy C: Hi.
Guy D: Hi.
(pause)
Guy A: You suck.
Guy B: No you suck.
Guy C: No you suck.
Guy D: I'm gay.
(pause)
Guy A: Whatever - bye.
Guy B: Sh... bye.
Guy C: Bye.
Guy D: Bye.
The end.
As for the production values, well the set should be easy to replicate for community theatres. There's a wall of lights and bleachers. And that's it. Oh, and there are some exposed bulbs hanging down, so when they sing a song about "electric stars," they can turn on and the audience can literally see electric stars. The whole lighting design looks like some cheap Kevin Adams rip off. That anyone would have the nerve to charge $97.50 for a show with no set and no stars (not to mention no entertainment value) is mind boggling. And really, who is the target audience for this show? Being in my mid-20's, I would think I would be what would be considered the target age set for this show. But maybe it's not just 20-somethings, but frat boy 20-somethings. And doesn't that just put this musical in the same hole as "High Fidelity" - aka a musical whose target audience hates musicals? One of the main producers must have had his name removed from the Playbill - namely Max Bialystock. Because who else would have moved this to Broadway?
To end on a positive note, since the music was actually pretty good, at least outside of the context of the show, I look forward to see what composer/lyricist Nick Blaemire writes next. Hopefully something with a book that doesn't make "In My Life" look like "Gypsy."
On a happier note, I also went to see "In The Heights" this week. Compared to "Glory Days," it's "Gypsy," "Sunday in the Park..." and "Spring Awakening" (those being my three favorite currently running Broadway shows) all rolled into one, I actually found it more satisfying than I did off-Broadway. The book remains its weak point - it presents such a white-washed view of Washington Heights, with nothing of consequence really happening at all, it's more "Sesame Street" than "Avenue Q," and that should be the other way around. That said, the cast is so bursting with the energy that it's really impossible, I think, to dislike it. The music is for the most part extremely tuneful and entertaining (though I don't think it really warrants the 2-cd set that it's been given), even if there are some duds like that awful song they wrote for Priscilla Lopez (called "Enough" - coincidentally also what I wanted to yell out while she was singing it) only there because she was upset that she didn't have a song. The choreography is fun in small bursts, though when it steps center-stage, like in the overlong final song/scene in the first act, I found myself extremely bored. Then again, I'm usually not really a fan of long dance sequences. Flaws aside, the show is harmless fun - the best (and I guess only) good new Broadway musical of the season - and with the exception of the first act closer, the overlong Carnivale song in the second act, it was never really boring - even if nothing was really ever at stake plotwise. I had a surprisingly good time, and managed to enjoy the show - warts and all. I won't feel too bad about rooting for it come Tony time.
I also saw "Rafta, Rafta," the winner of this year's Olivier Award for Best Comedy, and which just started previews off-Broadway. I was pleasantly surprised by it. I found the first act a bit slow - it's starts out with the celebration after an Indian wedding (in Britain), and I felt sort of like an outsider watching other people have fun but not actually feeling a part of the action - but thing improved towards the end, and then the second act was much better. The show is about a young couple who get married, but they live with in the groom's parents' house, and so he has trouble keeping it up long enough to have sex with his wife, which obviously frustrates her. It's not all comedy - there are serious scenes too (call it a dramedy maybe). The best unintentional laugh (PLOT SPOILER here, if you care) was when after the couple does actually have successful intercourse near the end of the second act, the lights go out, and the guy behind me yells "Finally!" Then the lights come up again, and the parents are sitting in the kitchen, and the mother's line is something like "Did you hear something?" Biggest laugh of the night. It's my new favorite audience comment moment (the previous was at "New Century," when Mr. Charles is talking about how no one was surprised when Ian McKellen said he was gay, and the guy behind me yells out "Who's Ian McKellen?!") Anyway, I think this one's worthwhile. Oh, and the set is mighty impressive - especially for an off-Broadway production. At least twice the number of cast members as in "Glory Days," a better set, and all at a fraction of the price. Just saying.
And I suppose I need to throw in a mention for "Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland," the latest of Richard Foreman play. This was my sixth Foreman play. As usually, I was pretty much totally baffled, but at least it was only a little over an hour long, and it was actually sort of amusing - in that it looks like your typical totally bizarre and over-the-top, low budget, avant-garde production. One of these days I'll understand his work. One of these days....
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
On Comedies and Plotless Bores
The last four shows I've seen fit semi-neatly into two categories: the comedies and the plotless bores.
THE COMEDIES
I saw two "comedies" this week - one was "The New Century" and the other was "The Walworth Farce." The former is pretty much pure fun fluff, and the latter is Irish (needless to say it was one of the most bleak, disturbing and depressing things I've seen in a while). "The New Century" is a series of four short plays by Paul Rudnick, with the first three introducing the separate characters, and the fourth bringing them all together. I think this is one of those plays where you need to be a gay and/or Jewish New Yorker (or very much aware of those cultures) in order to get any of the humor. The four stories all have fairly thin, silly plots, but it's really those oh so hilarious one-liners that come fast and furious that make it so very entertaining worthwhile. At intermission and again after the play (and to be perfectly honest, even thinking about it now), we couldn't help going around and re-telling our favorite jokes like "In this house we use a toilet, not our friends from Tribeca" or "It's like if Patti LuPone was a store." Those are just paraphrases of the lines since I don't have a script in front of me, and honestly I they're probably not nearly as funny out of context and when just read on a screen as opposed to being recited by a master comic actress like, say, Linda Lavin, but trust me, when recited on stage those lines and ones like them had me falling out of my seat in laughter. I will say that all five of us in our group felt that the second play (about Mr. Charles - who was thrown out of NY for being "too gay" and then ended up having a cable access show in the middle of the night in Florida) was the weakest of the four. But even if that one seemed to be a bit stale, it had it's choice moments. Oh and I must say that I'm certain the cast, with my favorites being Linda Lavin and Jayne Houdyshell, had a good deal to do with making Rudnick's lines land as often as they did. Yes, the show is a silly piece of mindless entertainment, but what's so wrong with that? And not only did I love it, but my grandmother who usually sleeps through and hates most shows we take her too, both stayed awake the entire time and loved it. Now if that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.
In the category of the most certainly not a silly piece of fluff, is Enda Walsh's "The Walworth Farce" - which is your typical Irish comedy - meaning you may laugh a bit, but you completely totally and utterly depressed. It's the sort of thing that Martin McDonagh does so brillianty, and Walsh seems to be in very much the same league here, though I will say I was often very confused by the comic portions of the play. The basic premise is that there are these three men (an older father figure, and two grown "sons") who just stay in their apartment all day and perform the same farce. Every single day. For years and years. I suppose partly because there are so many characters in the play within the play, but only three actors to play all of them, I found it extremely difficult to follow the story that they were presenting. It was still fun and funny (for a time anyway) to watch their zany quick changes and bad acting (you can tell when a section is real vs part of the play-within, because the characters are all rotten actors, so when the dialogue sounds natural it's supposed to be real, versus the forced over-the-top stuff that's part of the "play"). I got the basic premise from the first act and was basically amused through, but it's the second act, where things just snowball and become increasingly disturbing and depressing, to the point where I was jaw-dropped in miserable shock for the last maybe ten minutes of the play, as I saw what I suppose was inevitable play out before me. The production, from the Druid Theatre Company (that also I think presented the premieres of Martin McDonagh's plays), plays for around a month or so (tonight was the first preview) at St. Ann's Warehouse, and I think is very much worth seeing. If you don't mind depressing Irish comedies. If it happens to pop up on tdf again, I think I may actually try to see it again - both because I really "enjoyed" it, and because I want to see if I can get a better handle on the stuff I missed the first time around.
And now on to the...
PLOTLESS BORES
Is it so much to ask for a show to tell a story? Maybe I'm lazy and I just like my theatre spoon-fed to me, but I don't see what's so wrong with shows telling stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The first example of that this week was "God's Ear." I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Supposedly it was about a parents dealing with the death of a child. But it all sounded like repetitive gibberish to me. I think the play must be more interesting on the page, when it can be looked at as a long piece of poetry. But as a piece of theatre, I really just didn't get it at all. It's by a young writer named Jenny Schwartz, and while I applaud her for being what I would certainly call an original new voic for the theatre, it was just totally over my head, and not at all to my taste. The only entertainment I was able to glean from the experience came from the older couple in my row (the first row, no less): after around twenty-five minutes, the wife whispered to her husband that she couldn't take anymore and she was going to sit in the lobby; the husband stayed and kept watching the play and about five minutes later she came back and asked him why he hadn't left yet; he said he wanted to see if it would get better, she grunted and sat down again, and then five or ten minutes after that they finally both left. At least it wasn't a total loss :O)
And then there's "Satyagraha," an opera that makes "Tristan und Isolde" look action packed. I will say that the Met's new production (or, well, it's co-production with the ENO) is really marvelous. Does that make it worth sitting through all three hours and forty-five grueling minutes of the opera? I think not. I'm sort of hit or miss with Philip Glass, but even the minimalist music didn't bother me all that much. What really bored me to tears was the story, or lack of one. The opera is made up of random scenes from the life of Gandhi. For some bizarre reason, the designers chose to not provide met-titles for this production, and instead to just project the translations on the back wall of the stage. We get about one line every fifteen minutes. There's also an insert in the Playbill that I think may be the libretto. It's two pages long. Two pages for three hours and forty-five minutes of opera. So basically, I sat there the whole time, watching the actors go through motions that seemed to only vaguely resemble the scenes listed in the synopsis, and listen to people sing words I couldn't understand (either because they were in Sanskrit, or English with bad diction). I just don't understand how anyone could find this remotely entertaining as a musical drama, considering there isn't actually any "drama." In the last scene, Gandhi walks slowly towards the stage, singing the same line what seemed like forty times. Maybe if I knew what he was singing, I would have found this interesting. But listening to someone slowly walk towards the front of the stage singing the same line of what sounds like gibberish over and over again, and sorry but my limited attention span can only stand so much. As for the most entertaining moment of that evening... On the subway platform, after I think every opera I've been to at the Met, there's a single musician playing music from that's evening's opera. I had sort of forgotten about this, but when I got down to the platform I heard music playing, and a woman walking next to me said to her friend, "Oh god, the flutist is playing Philip Glass." At which point I could barely contain my laughter. That comment definitely made my night, even as I was considering asking if I could pay the guy playing the flute to STOP playing the music.
Okay - that was long, it's now very late, and so good night.
THE COMEDIES
I saw two "comedies" this week - one was "The New Century" and the other was "The Walworth Farce." The former is pretty much pure fun fluff, and the latter is Irish (needless to say it was one of the most bleak, disturbing and depressing things I've seen in a while). "The New Century" is a series of four short plays by Paul Rudnick, with the first three introducing the separate characters, and the fourth bringing them all together. I think this is one of those plays where you need to be a gay and/or Jewish New Yorker (or very much aware of those cultures) in order to get any of the humor. The four stories all have fairly thin, silly plots, but it's really those oh so hilarious one-liners that come fast and furious that make it so very entertaining worthwhile. At intermission and again after the play (and to be perfectly honest, even thinking about it now), we couldn't help going around and re-telling our favorite jokes like "In this house we use a toilet, not our friends from Tribeca" or "It's like if Patti LuPone was a store." Those are just paraphrases of the lines since I don't have a script in front of me, and honestly I they're probably not nearly as funny out of context and when just read on a screen as opposed to being recited by a master comic actress like, say, Linda Lavin, but trust me, when recited on stage those lines and ones like them had me falling out of my seat in laughter. I will say that all five of us in our group felt that the second play (about Mr. Charles - who was thrown out of NY for being "too gay" and then ended up having a cable access show in the middle of the night in Florida) was the weakest of the four. But even if that one seemed to be a bit stale, it had it's choice moments. Oh and I must say that I'm certain the cast, with my favorites being Linda Lavin and Jayne Houdyshell, had a good deal to do with making Rudnick's lines land as often as they did. Yes, the show is a silly piece of mindless entertainment, but what's so wrong with that? And not only did I love it, but my grandmother who usually sleeps through and hates most shows we take her too, both stayed awake the entire time and loved it. Now if that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.
In the category of the most certainly not a silly piece of fluff, is Enda Walsh's "The Walworth Farce" - which is your typical Irish comedy - meaning you may laugh a bit, but you completely totally and utterly depressed. It's the sort of thing that Martin McDonagh does so brillianty, and Walsh seems to be in very much the same league here, though I will say I was often very confused by the comic portions of the play. The basic premise is that there are these three men (an older father figure, and two grown "sons") who just stay in their apartment all day and perform the same farce. Every single day. For years and years. I suppose partly because there are so many characters in the play within the play, but only three actors to play all of them, I found it extremely difficult to follow the story that they were presenting. It was still fun and funny (for a time anyway) to watch their zany quick changes and bad acting (you can tell when a section is real vs part of the play-within, because the characters are all rotten actors, so when the dialogue sounds natural it's supposed to be real, versus the forced over-the-top stuff that's part of the "play"). I got the basic premise from the first act and was basically amused through, but it's the second act, where things just snowball and become increasingly disturbing and depressing, to the point where I was jaw-dropped in miserable shock for the last maybe ten minutes of the play, as I saw what I suppose was inevitable play out before me. The production, from the Druid Theatre Company (that also I think presented the premieres of Martin McDonagh's plays), plays for around a month or so (tonight was the first preview) at St. Ann's Warehouse, and I think is very much worth seeing. If you don't mind depressing Irish comedies. If it happens to pop up on tdf again, I think I may actually try to see it again - both because I really "enjoyed" it, and because I want to see if I can get a better handle on the stuff I missed the first time around.
And now on to the...
PLOTLESS BORES
Is it so much to ask for a show to tell a story? Maybe I'm lazy and I just like my theatre spoon-fed to me, but I don't see what's so wrong with shows telling stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The first example of that this week was "God's Ear." I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Supposedly it was about a parents dealing with the death of a child. But it all sounded like repetitive gibberish to me. I think the play must be more interesting on the page, when it can be looked at as a long piece of poetry. But as a piece of theatre, I really just didn't get it at all. It's by a young writer named Jenny Schwartz, and while I applaud her for being what I would certainly call an original new voic for the theatre, it was just totally over my head, and not at all to my taste. The only entertainment I was able to glean from the experience came from the older couple in my row (the first row, no less): after around twenty-five minutes, the wife whispered to her husband that she couldn't take anymore and she was going to sit in the lobby; the husband stayed and kept watching the play and about five minutes later she came back and asked him why he hadn't left yet; he said he wanted to see if it would get better, she grunted and sat down again, and then five or ten minutes after that they finally both left. At least it wasn't a total loss :O)
And then there's "Satyagraha," an opera that makes "Tristan und Isolde" look action packed. I will say that the Met's new production (or, well, it's co-production with the ENO) is really marvelous. Does that make it worth sitting through all three hours and forty-five grueling minutes of the opera? I think not. I'm sort of hit or miss with Philip Glass, but even the minimalist music didn't bother me all that much. What really bored me to tears was the story, or lack of one. The opera is made up of random scenes from the life of Gandhi. For some bizarre reason, the designers chose to not provide met-titles for this production, and instead to just project the translations on the back wall of the stage. We get about one line every fifteen minutes. There's also an insert in the Playbill that I think may be the libretto. It's two pages long. Two pages for three hours and forty-five minutes of opera. So basically, I sat there the whole time, watching the actors go through motions that seemed to only vaguely resemble the scenes listed in the synopsis, and listen to people sing words I couldn't understand (either because they were in Sanskrit, or English with bad diction). I just don't understand how anyone could find this remotely entertaining as a musical drama, considering there isn't actually any "drama." In the last scene, Gandhi walks slowly towards the stage, singing the same line what seemed like forty times. Maybe if I knew what he was singing, I would have found this interesting. But listening to someone slowly walk towards the front of the stage singing the same line of what sounds like gibberish over and over again, and sorry but my limited attention span can only stand so much. As for the most entertaining moment of that evening... On the subway platform, after I think every opera I've been to at the Met, there's a single musician playing music from that's evening's opera. I had sort of forgotten about this, but when I got down to the platform I heard music playing, and a woman walking next to me said to her friend, "Oh god, the flutist is playing Philip Glass." At which point I could barely contain my laughter. That comment definitely made my night, even as I was considering asking if I could pay the guy playing the flute to STOP playing the music.
Okay - that was long, it's now very late, and so good night.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
The Tuesday Night Catch Up
Okay, here we go, starting with Friday...
Basically because I have no will power, when "The Country Girl" showed up on tdf, I was powerless to resist picking up a ticket. Especially since I just happened to have on plans for Friday night. This was, of course, before I read that at the first preview on Thursday night, the actors didn't know their lines yet. Cue plummeting expectations. I'm already had/have tickets to see the play again at the end of May, so it would probably be more fair to write about it in more detail then. At the second preview, there were only a few flubbed lines (nothing that seemed particularly out of the ordinary), but it was pretty obvious that the actors really hadn't found their parts yet - it seemed like they were basically just trying to get through the play without screwing up their lines. So they can really only improve as the run progresses since they've begun at basically rock bottom. That said, I can't say I'm really sure why anyone really felt the need to revive the play. It didn't really strike me as some long lost classic. Possibly due to the weak performances, the first act was pretty interminable, and the second act a little better. It was also really really warm in the theatre. The play's about an old alcoholic actor (played by Morgan Freeman) who's called in to take over a major role in a play. He can't remember lines very well, but thanks to support from his wife (Frances McDormand) and the director of the play (Peter Gallagher), he gets by. The play as a whole just struck me as kind of creaky. Maybe I'll think better of it next time. Oh, and the set (which I'm assuming will not change over the course of previews) was rather underwhelming. There seemed to be a turntable in the center of the stage that allowed everything to rotate for presumably quick set changes... except for some reason they felt the need to have this extremely long curtain move across the stage so the stagehands could set each scene unseen. I didn't really see the point, and I'm sure a less dreary solution could have been found. Also strange is that though the scene-change curtain looks exactly like the curtain that comes down at the beginning and end of each act, the regular curtain goes up and down, while the scene-change one goes side-to-side. Seemed like a strange waste of money to me.
Saturday afternoon was "A Catered Affair." This is basically the conversation that I had with my parents after the show:
--------
Mom: That was sad.
Me: Really sad.
Dad: Sad.
(pause)
Me: It was just so sad.
Mom: Wasn't it sad?
Dad: That was sad.
(pause)
Me: It was sad.
Mom: Is that all we can say? It was just really sad.
--------
This has got to be the most depressing musical of the season. I mean, yes there's a happy-ish ending, but it's sort of like putting on a little bandaid after being stabbed twelve times with a knife. It was too little too late. I don't necessarily mind a sad musical - there's something to be said for the catharsis from a real tear jerker. But I don't know... there was just something about the show that left me sort of empty inside. I enjoyed it (if that's the right word) while I was watching in, but when the lights came up at the end I couldn't really say I was satisfied by what I had seen. It's funny (well, not really) but when we were walking down to Penn Station after the show, we saw two people getting married on the marquee for the Hard Rock Cafe. And just seeing the bride and groom up there after having sat through the show just made me even more depressed. After sitting through a show that beats you over the head with how horrible these big catered affairs are, and then seeing one right after, it made me want to cry.
Part of the problem could be that the story is just very slight (a girl decides she's going to get married, the mother insists on a big catered affair, and that brings about nothing but disaster after disaster - and not happy goofy mishaps - very real, tearing family, friends and lives apart, disasters). It's just a really ordinary family in the 50s going from very ordinary situations. Maybe it was something how very ordinary and normal everything was that failed to truly grab me.
The performances are on a whole excellent. Faith Prince and Tom Wopart are fantastic as the parents of the bride. They give very quiet, but really devastating performances. For me, one of the big mistakes of the show, was Harvey Fierstein casting himself (or letting himself be cast - however that went, since he did write the book of the musical), because as we all know, he cannot sing. That's fine in a show like "Hairspray" because it's part of the fun. But in a serious, quiet chamber musical like this, it was honestly really painful to listen to him croak out his two songs (the first made me really want to cover my ears because he was pushing so hard, and it was obviously out of his two-not range; the second was a little quieter and since he didn't have to push as hard in that one, it was less unpleasant).
The music - this is a musical after all - is pretty and pleasant. The songs just sort of drift in and out over the course of the scenes. There aren't too many "songs" per se, there will just be scenes where one moment they're talking, and the next moment they're singing - and then back to speaking again. I can imagine people saying it's not really melodic, but maybe because I had listened to the music once or twice first (from a *cough*bootleg*cough*) I did leave humming one or two songs. I don't know that I would ever necessarily listen to a cast recording, but I think they work well in context, and it's a fine score from John Bucchino.
The set is very plain, which I think works because the show is so small. One odd thing though, was that at the end of the the show, after staring at basically just walls, fire escapes, a little bit of furniture, and lots of projections, suddenly they roll a car onto the stage. Maybe the set designer just had money left over in his budget, and felt the creative team felt this was an extremely important part of the show, but to me is seemed totally out of synch with the style of the rest of the staging. Like they needed something big and special to roll out at the finale to show the audiences why they paid so much for this little musical. But I really think it would have been less odd if they had found a simpler way to present it, with a projection on the wall or something.
In the end, I didn't enjoy the show as much as I would have liked to. I sat there the whole time really enjoying it, only being bored every now and then, but then when the lights came up at the end, I was just really depressed and unsatisfied. Maybe I need to go back and see the show again, to get a better handle on it.
And might I also point out that the ad campaign for the show is really terrible. Listening to people leaving, I think most audience members were expecting some kind of old fashioned musical comedy. I mean, it's four smiling happy people (including a bride and groom), and one guy off to the side just looking sort of gruff. Seemed like a happy romantic show, no? No.
So, then Saturday night I took the train out to Princeton to see "Arognautika," which is written and directed by Mary "Metamorphoses" Zimmerman. Well, you know what they say about lightning not striking twice. I had seen (and also disliked) that Da Vinci show that she did at Second Stage a season or two after hitting it big with "Metamorphoses," but I still had high hopes for this. It just really felt like childrens theatre for adults. Very very long (an excruciating two hours and forty minutes) children's theatre for adults. The acting, especially in the first act, was all the sort of over the top really showy irritating acting that you see in really bad kiddie theatre productions. You know what I mean - where they all talk slowly, and really loud and with too much expression? I found it really grated my nerves. They seemed to calm down in the second act, but it really didn't help. The whole thing was really pretentious, and just had none of that simple beauty of "Metamorphoses." If I hadn't shelpped all the way out to Princeton to see it, and I hadn't been with my sister (who loved it, but what does she know... she compared it to the Julie Taymor "Magic Flute" which she also loved and which I also detested), I would have seriously considered leaving at intermission. Just a really painful experience.
Tonight, I went to see a workshop production of "The Paris Commune" by the Civilians. I won't go into too much detail because it is a workshop, but I will say I really enjoyed most of it. It's about a minor revolution in France I think in 1871, in which Paris basically seceded, and for two months was it's own little communist state. It sounds really boring, I know, but the cast is very enthusiastic, and it includes a lot of peppy songs - there's even a history of the can-can thrown in to boot. Things went a little off-kilter and into that sort of overwrought over-the-top Les Miserables territory near the end when the French army finally got around to fighting back, but hopefully that's the sort of thing that the workshop is there to look at and fix. It runs through April 19 at the Public, and costs a whopping ten buck (I even paid full price for once), and I think it's really worth seeing - it's nice to see something that's both educational and entertaining (though it did sometimes feel like one of those educational shows that tours to different high schools, sponsored probably by the French Club). I definitely look forward to seeing this again in its next incarnation.
And now I'm all caught up. Gosh that was long.
Basically because I have no will power, when "The Country Girl" showed up on tdf, I was powerless to resist picking up a ticket. Especially since I just happened to have on plans for Friday night. This was, of course, before I read that at the first preview on Thursday night, the actors didn't know their lines yet. Cue plummeting expectations. I'm already had/have tickets to see the play again at the end of May, so it would probably be more fair to write about it in more detail then. At the second preview, there were only a few flubbed lines (nothing that seemed particularly out of the ordinary), but it was pretty obvious that the actors really hadn't found their parts yet - it seemed like they were basically just trying to get through the play without screwing up their lines. So they can really only improve as the run progresses since they've begun at basically rock bottom. That said, I can't say I'm really sure why anyone really felt the need to revive the play. It didn't really strike me as some long lost classic. Possibly due to the weak performances, the first act was pretty interminable, and the second act a little better. It was also really really warm in the theatre. The play's about an old alcoholic actor (played by Morgan Freeman) who's called in to take over a major role in a play. He can't remember lines very well, but thanks to support from his wife (Frances McDormand) and the director of the play (Peter Gallagher), he gets by. The play as a whole just struck me as kind of creaky. Maybe I'll think better of it next time. Oh, and the set (which I'm assuming will not change over the course of previews) was rather underwhelming. There seemed to be a turntable in the center of the stage that allowed everything to rotate for presumably quick set changes... except for some reason they felt the need to have this extremely long curtain move across the stage so the stagehands could set each scene unseen. I didn't really see the point, and I'm sure a less dreary solution could have been found. Also strange is that though the scene-change curtain looks exactly like the curtain that comes down at the beginning and end of each act, the regular curtain goes up and down, while the scene-change one goes side-to-side. Seemed like a strange waste of money to me.
Saturday afternoon was "A Catered Affair." This is basically the conversation that I had with my parents after the show:
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Mom: That was sad.
Me: Really sad.
Dad: Sad.
(pause)
Me: It was just so sad.
Mom: Wasn't it sad?
Dad: That was sad.
(pause)
Me: It was sad.
Mom: Is that all we can say? It was just really sad.
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This has got to be the most depressing musical of the season. I mean, yes there's a happy-ish ending, but it's sort of like putting on a little bandaid after being stabbed twelve times with a knife. It was too little too late. I don't necessarily mind a sad musical - there's something to be said for the catharsis from a real tear jerker. But I don't know... there was just something about the show that left me sort of empty inside. I enjoyed it (if that's the right word) while I was watching in, but when the lights came up at the end I couldn't really say I was satisfied by what I had seen. It's funny (well, not really) but when we were walking down to Penn Station after the show, we saw two people getting married on the marquee for the Hard Rock Cafe. And just seeing the bride and groom up there after having sat through the show just made me even more depressed. After sitting through a show that beats you over the head with how horrible these big catered affairs are, and then seeing one right after, it made me want to cry.
Part of the problem could be that the story is just very slight (a girl decides she's going to get married, the mother insists on a big catered affair, and that brings about nothing but disaster after disaster - and not happy goofy mishaps - very real, tearing family, friends and lives apart, disasters). It's just a really ordinary family in the 50s going from very ordinary situations. Maybe it was something how very ordinary and normal everything was that failed to truly grab me.
The performances are on a whole excellent. Faith Prince and Tom Wopart are fantastic as the parents of the bride. They give very quiet, but really devastating performances. For me, one of the big mistakes of the show, was Harvey Fierstein casting himself (or letting himself be cast - however that went, since he did write the book of the musical), because as we all know, he cannot sing. That's fine in a show like "Hairspray" because it's part of the fun. But in a serious, quiet chamber musical like this, it was honestly really painful to listen to him croak out his two songs (the first made me really want to cover my ears because he was pushing so hard, and it was obviously out of his two-not range; the second was a little quieter and since he didn't have to push as hard in that one, it was less unpleasant).
The music - this is a musical after all - is pretty and pleasant. The songs just sort of drift in and out over the course of the scenes. There aren't too many "songs" per se, there will just be scenes where one moment they're talking, and the next moment they're singing - and then back to speaking again. I can imagine people saying it's not really melodic, but maybe because I had listened to the music once or twice first (from a *cough*bootleg*cough*) I did leave humming one or two songs. I don't know that I would ever necessarily listen to a cast recording, but I think they work well in context, and it's a fine score from John Bucchino.
The set is very plain, which I think works because the show is so small. One odd thing though, was that at the end of the the show, after staring at basically just walls, fire escapes, a little bit of furniture, and lots of projections, suddenly they roll a car onto the stage. Maybe the set designer just had money left over in his budget, and felt the creative team felt this was an extremely important part of the show, but to me is seemed totally out of synch with the style of the rest of the staging. Like they needed something big and special to roll out at the finale to show the audiences why they paid so much for this little musical. But I really think it would have been less odd if they had found a simpler way to present it, with a projection on the wall or something.
In the end, I didn't enjoy the show as much as I would have liked to. I sat there the whole time really enjoying it, only being bored every now and then, but then when the lights came up at the end, I was just really depressed and unsatisfied. Maybe I need to go back and see the show again, to get a better handle on it.
And might I also point out that the ad campaign for the show is really terrible. Listening to people leaving, I think most audience members were expecting some kind of old fashioned musical comedy. I mean, it's four smiling happy people (including a bride and groom), and one guy off to the side just looking sort of gruff. Seemed like a happy romantic show, no? No.
So, then Saturday night I took the train out to Princeton to see "Arognautika," which is written and directed by Mary "Metamorphoses" Zimmerman. Well, you know what they say about lightning not striking twice. I had seen (and also disliked) that Da Vinci show that she did at Second Stage a season or two after hitting it big with "Metamorphoses," but I still had high hopes for this. It just really felt like childrens theatre for adults. Very very long (an excruciating two hours and forty minutes) children's theatre for adults. The acting, especially in the first act, was all the sort of over the top really showy irritating acting that you see in really bad kiddie theatre productions. You know what I mean - where they all talk slowly, and really loud and with too much expression? I found it really grated my nerves. They seemed to calm down in the second act, but it really didn't help. The whole thing was really pretentious, and just had none of that simple beauty of "Metamorphoses." If I hadn't shelpped all the way out to Princeton to see it, and I hadn't been with my sister (who loved it, but what does she know... she compared it to the Julie Taymor "Magic Flute" which she also loved and which I also detested), I would have seriously considered leaving at intermission. Just a really painful experience.
Tonight, I went to see a workshop production of "The Paris Commune" by the Civilians. I won't go into too much detail because it is a workshop, but I will say I really enjoyed most of it. It's about a minor revolution in France I think in 1871, in which Paris basically seceded, and for two months was it's own little communist state. It sounds really boring, I know, but the cast is very enthusiastic, and it includes a lot of peppy songs - there's even a history of the can-can thrown in to boot. Things went a little off-kilter and into that sort of overwrought over-the-top Les Miserables territory near the end when the French army finally got around to fighting back, but hopefully that's the sort of thing that the workshop is there to look at and fix. It runs through April 19 at the Public, and costs a whopping ten buck (I even paid full price for once), and I think it's really worth seeing - it's nice to see something that's both educational and entertaining (though it did sometimes feel like one of those educational shows that tours to different high schools, sponsored probably by the French Club). I definitely look forward to seeing this again in its next incarnation.
And now I'm all caught up. Gosh that was long.
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