I would strongly recommend taking full advantage of the newly renovated restrooms at the Longacre Theatre so as to avoid peeing in your pants from laughing at the onstage antics at "Boeing-Boeing." I'd seen (and loved) the Matthew Warchus-helmed revival when I was in London last year, and I was obviously nervous about how it would play over here with a mostly American cast (the wonderfully hilarious Mark Rylance was the only cast member to cross the pond with it to Broadway), having slept through so many imports that were supposedly great in London and ruined here. Well, I'm pleased to report that all is well, and it's just as deliriously silly and side-splittingly funny as it was over there. If I had one minor quibble, it's that Christine Baranski isn't quite as good as Frances de la Tour was, partly because she insists on using a French accent that takes some time to get used to, and partly because the idea of Frances de la Tour playing a maid was just so inherently ridiculous that it just added a whole other level of amusement. Still, I did eventually warm up to Baranski, and the rest of the new cast is all absolutely splendid. If you're in the mood for evening of turn you brain off, totally ridiculous and endlessly amusing farce, well you couldn't do better than "Boeing-Boeing."
Also rather high up there on the silly scale is the Met's current revival of "La Fille du Regiment." There are unfortunately only two performances of it left, both are sold out, and I just noticed the incomparable Juan Diego Florez isn't doing the one on Monday, which means there's only really one chance left, because you don't want to miss him. I honestly don't think I've ever heard a mid-opera ovation as long and impassioned as the one following Florez's big first act aria. Honestly, I think the audience would still be applauding now, a week later, if it wasn't so tiring to keep clapping for so long. Which is not to ignore the also brilliant comic performance of Natalie Dessay, who once again this season (the first time was in "Lucia"), has proved what a great singing actress she is. I usually find I don't much care for comic operas - if I'm going to the opera I want to see misery and death (expressed in glorious song) - but resistance was really futile here. At one point early on in the first act, while the soldiers were marching around singing some silly song or other, I couldn't help but think that if Monty Python were going to put on an opera, it would be very much like this. This production was recorded for those HD movie theatre broadcasts, so that probably means it'll end up on PBS sometime later this year. But there's really no substitute for live and in person opera, so if you can beg, borrow or steal a ticket (or grab a cancellation or standing room one), it's well worth heading over to the Met on Friday to see the final performance. And even on Monday, when Barry Banks (who?) takes of the Juan Diego Florez role, well you still have the likes of Natalie Dessay, Felicty Palmer, and Marian Seldes (yes, that Marian Seldes) to keep you in opera heaven, so that worth trying to score a ticket to too, I suppose.
On the unsilly front, I went to see "Substitution" on Wednesday mostly because there was really nothing else I wanted to see, and I hadn't seen anything on Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday and I was going through withdrawal. It stars Jan Maxwell, who as usual is the saving grace of a lousy show ("as usual," referring to "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "Coram Boy"). The play is pretty dreary and unconvincing, but watching Jan Maxwell act is always such a treat that it was somewhat bearable. The story is basically that a mother lost her high school age son in a boat accident, and the boy's substitute teacher (who was somehow obsessed with this boy, even though he was just a substitute teacher...), falls in love with the mother. Then spliced in, there are snippets of a conversation between two students who are on the bus with the boy, and who were also involved in the boat accident. The student conversations seemed pointless and rather boring. The whole relationship between the mother and the substitute teacher was also not in the least bit convincing (they had absolutely no chemistry at all, and honestly their personalities were so different, the inevitable ending just seemed totally ridiculous). And then there's the fact that this guy was only a substitute teacher, which made his obsession with the dead boy ever so much more implausible. It was just overall a terribly unsatisfying play, with Jan Maxwell's devastating performance really its only saving grace. What I found particularly interesting about her performance, was that she starts out totally drained and emotionally raw, and get slowly happier (well, kind of) through the course of the play, which I imagine must be really hard to act. I don't want to think about how she prepares each night to bring herself to the point she's at when she first steps out on the stage. I guess one of these days Jan Maxwell will appear in a play equal to her talents. But when?
