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:
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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.
