Twas a rather strange day of theatergoing.
First up was "reasons to be pretty" - a sweet romantic drama that had me a bit misty eyed at the end, but that also left me feeling quite a few times with a nice warm and fuzzy feeling. It's one of those plays where the protagonist is just so nice and sweet that all of the women, and at least half the men just want to run up on stage during the curtain call and give him a hug... and perhaps propose marriage to him. That said the play did also leave me in something of a state of shock, because according to the Playbill, this play was by none other than Neil LaBute - he who only writes plays about how people are just all really crappy and then throws in some random twist ending just for the heck of it. This has got to me the most shocking turn around for a playwright since David Lindsay-Abaire went from whimsical plays like "Fuddy Meers" and "Wonder of the World" to the utterly devastating "Rabbit Hole." There's a line at the end of the final monologue of "reasons to be pretty" about how it's not that hard to be nice, but it really does a lot of good. And it was almost as if LaBute was apologizing for the nastiness of the rest of his plays - that we may be like the characters in "Shape of Things" and "Fat Pig" (the first two plays in his "trilogy"), but this is the salve for that evilness. I will say the play starts off in typical LaBute mode, with (the brilliant and intense as usual) Alison Pill screaming at her boyfriend (played by the oh so loveable Thomas Sadoski) and every other word out of her mouth is "fuck." And there is the typical LaBute character - an extremely obnoxious guy played by the irritating Pablo Schreiber. In the program note LaBute mentions that Greg (the nice guy) is the first "adult" he's written (as opposed to men who act like boys - like the Screiber character). The play is all about obsession with beauty (Greg's girlfriend freaks out when she finds out he told a friend that her face is plain and then breaks up with him - even though it was one mistaken line and they really did love each other; and then there's the guy who's in a relationship with a dumb blonde only because she's pretty, but he's a total loser) And I have to say the casting of Thomas Sadoski in the role of the nice guy was particularly good as far as the theme of the play goes because he's really not particularly attractive when he first walks on stage, but as the audience gets to know him and how nice and smart he is, and we really see what he's like inside, of course we grow to love him. And since one of the points of the play is that we really should look past surface beauty, well... this seemed to work very much in the play's favor. I have to say I'd never heard of Sadoski before (according to his bio I saw him in "Reckless" on Broadway, though the only thing I remember about that production was that it was weird and Mary-Louise Parker was in it), but his performance in this is really fantastic. I should mention this isn't a perfect play my any means - the scenes with Pablo Schreiber were more typical Neil LaBute stuff in that he was beyond irritating, and whenever he was onstage I couldn't wait for him to just go away so we could get back to the nice people. And also LaBute for some reason decided to give each character a confessional monologue, in which they just randomly step to the edge of the stage and talk to some offstage presence (the audience? an unseen character? Big Brother?), and though they were informative, and though the final one worked quite well (though it also served as an epilogue), I couldn't help think he could have come up with a more creative and dramatically interesting way to convey the information we get from those scenes. Still, considering I usually consider MCC's yearly Neil LaBute productions to be a low point of each season, to say I was pleasantly surprised by "reasons to be pretty" is quite the understatement.
My evening show was the Musicals in Mufti (aka off-Broadway Encores) production of "Minnie's Boys." The show is about the Marx Brothers, and is probably best known as the musical that gave the world the song "Mama a Rainbow." The show was fine and cute, though it's kind of obvious why it flopped (uneven score, choppy book). But the real highlight actually happened before the show even started. Apparently, a group of audience members were trapped in the elevator that goes down to the theatre (if you've ever been to the York, you know that's one unpleasant elevator - but it's better than taking the zillion flights of stairs down to the theatre... usually). So to keep the audience happy while we waited for the fire department to save our fellow audience members, cast member Jim Walton was sent over to the piano to entertain us. So he attempted a couple of Marx Bros tunes, and then sort of fumferred and asked for requests. And someone in the back yelled out "Anything from 'Merrily We Roll Along'." Yes, Jim Walton was Franklin Shepard in the original Broadway production of "Merrily." And so he graced us with his renditions of "Good Thing Going" and "Not A Day Goes By," and let me tell you, hearing him those songs live after hearing them so many times on the cd, was beyond thrilling. So thank you to those people who got stuck in elevator, for allowing the rest of us the chance to have the chance to have a most exciting evening.
