Was there some sort of 19 day Broadway stagehand strike that just ended? Funny, I hardly noticed. For the first two weekends of the strike, two shows I was scheduled to see (August: Osage County, and Is He Dead?) had cancelled performances, so I replaced them with two of my favorite new off-Broadway shows, The Piano Teacher and Make Me A Song. After that, all I had was Roundabout and Lincoln Center stuff, so I went right ahead with my Broadway-going, undeterred. There was a controversial article in the Times sometime during the strike, complaining about the mediocrity of the shows left to see on Broadway during that time. In a season that was supposed to celebrate the glorious return of the new drama, I was stuck with two mediocre revivals.
I had never seen "Pygmalion" before, though I've certainly seen the movie of "My Fair Lady" enough times. I think part of my dislike of "Pygmalion" may have come from the fact that I had been obsessed with "My Fair Lady" first. I know people always complain that adaptations are never as good as the original source material. But when you've seen the adaptation so many times, and then you read the original, it's possibly for the reverse to happen. I remember in fifth grade, I picked "The Phantom Tollbooth" to do for a book report, because I loved the movie. Well, I picked up the book and found that there were many thing in there that weren't in the movie. And there were also lines from the book that were taken verbatim and turned into song lyrics, so that I couldn't really read sections without singing. I think there may have been something to story about me skimming the night before the report was due, but that's not really relevant to my point. What I mean to say is that while George Bernard Shaw purists may have been blowing all sorts of gaskets when "My Fair Lady" premiered, well I can see why musical theater fans could be sort of blase towards the source material. We don't see Ascot, we don't see any of the training, we don't see the ball... basically all of the best parts are left out. And of course, there is the lack of music as well. I know it's blasphemy to not enjoy Shaw, but I don't know... it felt really choppy with those missing scenes, and I just found myself watching and replaying the musical in my head at the same time, and being irritated that Jefferson Mays is no Rex Harrison, and Claire Daines is no Audrey Hepburn (let alone Julie Andrews). I will say that I did thoroughly enjoy Boyd Gaines' Pickering, and Helen Carey's Mrs. Higgins. Whenever I was onstage, I think I was able to stop humming to myself. But otherwise I think I was kind of disappointed and bored. And the set was really very odd. I guess the designer wanted to keep the dimensions of the rooms the same as they would be in a London townhouse, but with the low ceilings, and walls not reaching the edge of the stage, it almost felt like the production had transferred from an off-Broadway theatre, because it didn't really make very good use of the size of the stage, except in the fancy-shmancy set changes. Overall, a disappointment.... I think I would have had more fun sitting at home and watching my dvd of "My Fair Lady." Or maybe even watching the old video of the play that my grandmother gave me a number of years ago and that I still haven't watched.
The next week was another case of previous experiences killing a production. A few months ago, I saw a production of "Cymbeline" at BAM... I think put on by Cheek by Jowl. Anyway, it was my first time seeing the play, and while it did seem like Shakespeare just took the highlights of each of his other plays and smushed them all together into a new one, I did really enjoy it, and didn't really see why it was so relegated to obscurity. Well, after seeing the Lincoln Center Production, now I see why. I found the whole endeavor mediocre in every way. I wasn't particularly thrilled about anyone in the cast, other than maybe Martha Plimpton. The usually excellent Phylicia Rashad gave probably the worst performance of the cast. Remember her Tony speech from "A Raisin in the Sun"? Well the way she acted in that, was how she acted as the Queen. Meaning basically, she wasn't acting... she was just playing herself. And absolutely dreadful performance, and especially disappoint after she was so good in "Raisin..." and "Gem of the Ocean." The set designer apparently spent his entire budget on the 'deus ex machina' in the second act. Most of the time we have to stare at an almost empty stage, with just a couple of unattractive door. Not that a bare stage is necessarily a bad thing - the BAM production was definitely sparse - but there's a way to do sparse that looks artsy and tasteful (the natural beauty of the Harvey, of course always helps), but this just looked cheap. And the aforementioned 'deus ex machina'? Well, the whole scene reeked of theme park entertainment. As soon as I heard the miking of the actors, I couldn't help but think it sounded exactly like the quality of the sounds from the haunted house in Disney World... or the talking gargoyles at the Jekyll and Hyde restaurant. If they ever build ShakespeareLand, that scene would fit in quite nicely. Even the costume were ugly. It was a traditional dress production, which is fine, but Michael Cerveris and Jonathan Cake were given costumes made with some of the ugliest black and gold floral fabric that I've ever seen. The costumes other costumes were fine, but just looking at those two outfits made me ill. Maybe I've been watching too much Project Runway. Anyway, maybe I was spoiled by that BAM production (which, to be perfectly honest, even though I loved, I don't remember getting great reviews), but really, there was just no comparison between the two.
Now don't think I'm only knocking Broadway. Off-Broadway hasn't been that much better (Piano Teacher, and Make Me A Song, excepted of course).
"Trumpery" is a new play at the Atlantic, about how Darwin and a man named Wallace both discovered natural selection at the same time. So I figured it be mostly from Wallace's point of few, since he's the one no one really knows about, and the play would be about how he had this theory, and then Darwin suddenly stole his thunder. Well, what's on stage isn't nearly as interesting as what I imagined. Basically, Darwin spent fifteen years working on "The Origin of Species." He gets a letter from his friend Wallace, that Wallace just came up with this great theory about natural selection and what not. So Darwin, feeling threatened, rushes his book to publication. But he feels really really guilty about doing that, because no one really cared about Wallace. Um... Darwin came up with the theory fifteen years before Wallace. What's the problem? It's not like Wallace had the theory, and Darwin stole it. Or they came up with it even at the same time. Clearly Darwin was first, and while yes, Wallace may have gotten to the press first if he hadn't corresponded with Darwin, I don't really see the problem. Apparently, the playwright seemed to think this was somehow interesting, though, and so we see Darwin wandering around with guilt for two hours. Darwin also gets two children: one is very sick and you can guess what happens to her; the other runs on stage at random times for no apparent reason. I groaned every time he walked on stage, though he least he broke up the non-action, I guess. Manoel Felciano (who plays Wallace) gets a nice long speech in the second act about his life as an explorer, and Michael Countryman does a nice job as Darwin, but really neither makes this very academic and dull production interesting. My aunt saw this and raved about it, but she's a retired science teacher, so I think that basically explains it.
Finally (yes, we're nearing the end of my ramblings), "The Receptionist," a performance notable only because sitting two rows ahead of me and across the aisle was Stephen Sondheim. I honestly, did not understand the play one bit. It started out as a rather amusing office comedy, but then it turned serious, and I honestly just didn't understand why anything happened or what the point of any of it was. I just made absolutely no sense. I'm sure Adam Bock, the playwright, had some very deeply buried and very pretentious hidden meaning in their somewhere, but I was just totally baffled. I just kept waiting for something in the way of explanation to come along, and it just never did. It was just all setup with no payoff. I will say that Jayne Houdyshell was wonderful in the title role, and I can't imagine how painful the show would have been without her. She's one of those "I would watch her read the phone book" type actresses. And since the script isn't really much deeper than a phone book, well this is pretty close. Oh, and here was a first for a play - someone actually boo-ed at the curtain call. I've heard boo-ing a-plenty at the opera, but never anything else. I'm not saying it deserved to be boo-ed, but I can't say I blamed him. If even 1% of the audience got anything out of the play, I'd be surprised. 70 minutes long, not boring, but not remotely satisfying, and totally baffling.
And I wonder why I keep wanting to revisit "Make Me A Song," "The Piano Teacher," and "Die Mommie Die" (actually, I've only seen "Die Mommie Die" once, but I think I may go again just to have a sure-fire escape from the mediocrity).
