2012: A Look Ahead

How can it be 2012 already when I still haven't finished my reviews of shows I saw in 2011? Less than twelve hours into the new year, and I'm already disappointed with myself. And not just because of my behavior last night.

But now that I mention it:

1. Next year I shall try to not be the drunkest person at the party.

2. Even when I'm drunk at a NYE party, I still talk trash about theater.

(This time I was complaining about the gay lumberjack outfits for the supposedly straight-dressing gay older brother in Sons of the Prophet at Roundabout. If your flannel shirt is fitted, even in a small Pennsylvania town people will start to wonder if you are gay. Right? And both brothers were way less flaming when the show was at the Huntington. More on this later when I double-back to finally reviewing that show, which I really liked, by the way.)

In exciting news, I already have tickets to 27 theatrical performances for this year (in chronological order):

The Mountaintop
Chinglish
Billy Elliot (closing performance)
The Canterbury Tales Remixed (Soho Playhouse)
Stick Fly
Outside People (Vineyard)
Once (NYTW, closing performance)
Red (SpeakEasy, Boston)
American Idiot (tour, Boston)
Wit
CQ/CX (Atlantic)
Assistance (Playwrights Horizons)
Yosemite (Rattlestick)
Merrily We Roll Along (Encores!)
Once (Broadway transfer)
American Idiot (tour, Denver)
Death of a Salesman
Carrie (MCC)
Next to Normal (SpeakEasy, Boston)
Xanadu (SpeakEasy, Boston)

(No, I'm not terrible at math. I'm seeing the American Idiot tour multiple times in Boston. Yes, every performance. It's all Steven Hoggett's fault. Well, mostly.)

It seems unlikely that I'll match 2011's record of 102 theater performances ever again, but perhaps that means I'll read more than 10 books this year.

Weekend in review (11/11-11/12/2011): Suicide, Incorporated / Morgan Karr / Bonnie & Clyde / Wild Animals You Should Know

I felt like crap this weekend, but I like to think I can separate that from my opinions about the shows I saw. But, you know, full disclosure and all that.

So, yay for a three-day weekend. And OF COURSE Lisa and I used that to go to New York. Full reviews to come, but I'm tired of being so thoroughly behind, so I'm going to start doing these quick weekend reviews in addition to coming back for full reviews later. So these will be for general impressions and recommendations and then (I hope) I'll be able to go back and dig in for the reviews later.

Anyway, here's what I saw:

• Suicide, Incorporated at Roundabout Underground
  
• Morgan Karr's concert at Joe's Pub
• Bonnie & Clyde musical on Broadway
• Wild Animals You Should Know at MCC Theatre
  

First up was the latest offering from Roundabout Underground, a program I really love. This is the group's black box space and they use it to foster young artists. So far their biggest success seems to be Stephen Karam, so a big YAY for that. I really like Speech & Debate, and I love Sons of the Prophet (which started at the Huntington in Boston and is now in Roundabout's Pels theater, their larger off-Broadway space, upstairs from the Underground--so Karam is literally moving up in the world).

Right, so the new Underground show is Suicide, Incorporated. I was achy and exhausted, and the theater was overly warm, so I was not at my best as an audience member. Still, I think the show needs to pick up the pace. I was itching to leave toward the end, even though a couple of the performances are excellent. (HOLY CRAP, James McMenamin.) I think the idea of the play is intriguing: a company that helps people write their suicide notes. It's interesting to think about how companies prey on desperate people, how people can learn the wrong lessons from personal tragedy, and how little effort it might take to nudge someone onto or off of the right track. The play isn't as funny or insightful as it seems to thinks it is, and in addition to the production needing better pacing, the play could use some trimming. Still, not bad, and I'm glad I managed to fit it in (more in retrospect than while I was fidgeting in my overly tall seat).

Then I saw Spring Awakening alumnus Morgan Karr's concert at the newly renovated Joe's Pub. In general, I think I like the new space, though I did not like sitting near the new door to the kitchen, which was louder than it should be. The new bathrooms are plentiful. The whole Public Theater is a mess of construction right now, but I think it's moving in the right direction.

Karr is determined to be a pop star, and he certainly has the voice and the drive for it. He has surrounded himself with talented supporting artists, and he goes balls-to-the-wall out on stage. His songwriting isn't my favorite style, but DAYUM that boy can sing. And he put on a SHOW. So go see him when you get a chance. And his 11:11 wish thing is pretty charming, even though his 11/11/11 show started barely before midnight (not his fault).

Next up was the new musical Bonnie & Clyde. I will have very, very much to nitpick about it. For now, I'll just say that for a show filled with so much shooting, it really misses the mark. (Yeah, I'm sure I'm neither the first nor the last to make that super-lame observation.) It's not bad exactly, but it's not good. I was hoping it would be great or hilariously awful, but it is neither. And it isn't shockingly mediocre the way Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Catch Me if You Can are. It just fails to be good. The sound and projections and costuming and design are excellent. The fault lies with the material. The music is pretty forgettable other than about three good songs. And the entire focus of the show is wrong. There are such talented people up on stage, a famous real-life story, and so much potential relevance in this economic climate and culture of fame worshiping. So it's so disappointing for the musical to be so not right. Alas. Also, Laura Osnes has such a beautiful voice, but this is the third show I've seen her in and SHE CANNOT ACT. Just ... NO.

Rounding out the trip was the new off-Broadway play Wild Animals You Should Know, which I think had just started previews that week. I liked it. The performances are very good, as you would expect from Tony Winner Alice Ripley (Next to Normal) and Patrick Breen (the Normal Heart), but really there isn't a weak link in the cast (plus Jay Armstrong Johnson and John Behlmann are so very, very pretty). There are interesting ideas (alas not particularly well explored). Basically, it's fine off-Broadway fare, but nothing that is likely to stick with me for a long time. And the MCC needs new seats like whoa.

While I was at Suicide, Incorporated, Lisa saw Other Desert Cities and really liked it. I'm looking forward to seeing it next weekend.

Side Effects

http://www.mcctheater.org/shows/10-11_season/sideeffects/index.html






Side Effects is the follow-up to Michael Weller's excellent play Fifty Words. Both are two-person plays about the disintegration of passionate but often-explosive marriages, full of secrets and disappointments and affairs and anger. The two plays, and two couples, intersect at one crucial phone call.

My expectations for Side Effects were quite high because Fifty Words blew me out of my seat. In Words, Elizabeth Marvel and Norbert Leo Butz were both mesmerizing and painfully real--and they were so perfectly matched--so it would be difficult for another pair of actors to match their level of performance. (I think their fights on stage were so intense that both actors were injured at least once.)

So I guess I was bound to be a bit disappointed with this companion piece. I don't know how to judge whether any of this has to do with the direction (David Auburn directs Effects and Austin Pendleton directed Words), but I definitely think both the script and the casting fail to measure up. The earlier play takes place in real time, which heightened the fly-on-the-wall feeling of watching a marriage at the moment of implosion. It makes sense for this one to take place over a longer period, especially as it's hard to portray the dynamics of mental illness otherwise. But it makes this play more like a series of earthquakes: still devastating but less fiery.

Joely Richardson is absolutely captivating as an artistic, free-spirited, brilliant, sharp-tongued bipolar woman who can't (and doesn't feel she should have to) live up to the cookie-cutter perfect-wife role required of an aspiring politician's subordinate half. She has important things she wants to do on her own, and she resents that her husband's ambition means becoming a different woman than the one he married, even if her illness has changed her too.

It's hard for me to tell whether her character is supposed to be so much more sympathetic than the husband, but I suspect not. I think it just comes across that way because as her quiet, steely, ambitious but secretly vicious husband, Cotter Smith just isn't up to her level. His performance lacks nuance, so I find it hard to see (even after the play reveals his "softer side") why this couple were ever together. It's not only that his performance isn't as good as hers (she charmingly covered flubbed lines as part of her manic character and he just sort of stumbled), but I think the pairing is just off. I might like the show much better if Richardson had a different acting partner. I can only imagine how brilliant she would have been with someone better to react to. And a more dynamic pairing might have overcome some weaknesses in the script. Alas.

Anyway, the show is only about 90 minutes long. So if you have time, head over and be charmed by Richardson's excellent performance (if not her wandering accent).

The Other Place and the blessing of theatrical synergy

Two-show days/three-show weekends can be utterly exhausting. They're trying physically because I get fidgety and my knees start to protest after so much sitting still in a cramped space, mentally because it requires so much attention, and sometimes emotionally. That makes it hard to give each show the reflection it deserves. (I have become so grateful for the ninety-minute shows, which let me actually think between performances!) But I live outside New York, so there's just no way to see even half of the productions I want to unless I just cram them all in on the weekends. (A huge thank you to Chris, Seth, and Becca for letting me crash at their place--all the time.)

The flip side of this is that seeing shows back-to-back can create wonderful serendipitous experiences. Most recently, I saw Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney at the Irish Rep on a Saturday and Sharr White's The Other Place at the MCC the following day. Both are impressive performances in their own right, but the combined experience is far greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, if I had seen them months apart, I'm not sure my puny, forgetful brain would have made a connection. The plays tell the stories of women dealing with their own physical deterioration and its mental effects, how their husbands struggle to help them, and whether that help is more or less useful than how they struggle to help themselves.

Molly Sweeney has closed, but The Other Place is currently running through May 1 at the MCC and, although the script is flawed and devolves a bit into cliche, Laurie Metcalf's performance is mesmerizing throughout, even when she's just sitting on stage in character waiting for the show to begin. I don't want to give away her ailment, as it might be considered a spoiler, but for me the reveal was less interesting than the path to get there. Aya Cash is definitely better as the daughter than as the doctor, and John Schiappa is wasted in what amounts to a bit part. Dennis Boutsikaris is effective as the put-upon husband doing his best to deal with both the illness and his increasingly erratic and belligerent wife, who, to his dismay, keeps insisting that he's filed for divorce and is having an affair with her doctor. The technical jargon and its accompanying visuals are arresting, sometimes assaulting, but I'm a nerd so I enjoyed it. Tthe power of this piece, though is Metcalf's performance, one not to be missed.

Another recent pairing is immersive musicals Prometheus Bound and Hello Again, which I've already posted about. And although I don't think either production is great, I enjoyed being able to compare the big, loud Prometheus Bound (performed in the A.R.T.'s new club space) with the quiet, unamplified Hello Again (performed in a SoHo building the Transport Group temporarily converted for this show).

The most stunning example of theatrical synergy (surely there's a better term for this?) is seeing Adam Rapp's Metal Children at the Vineyard followed by John Logan's Red, the Donmar Warehouse production that transferred to Broadway. I was so surprised at how much the second show changed my feelings about the first.

Red, about painter Mark Rothko and his (fictional?) assistant Ken, is just a phenomenal play. Eddie Redmayne and Alfred Molina (I will not think of him as Doc Ock!) gave career performances infusing the talk-heavy script with irresistible energy. But the play itself is perfect, never feeling dull or preachy even during long monologues about, well, art. The whole production was flawless, especially the canvas priming--probably the most visually stunning scene I've ever seen on stage--though the opening to the National Theatre's current production of Frankenstein is right up there. (I'm so excited that the SpeakEasy Stage Company is doing Red in Boston next season!)

Metal Children, on the other hand, is good but not great, and I might have written it off as an interesting idea gone a bit wonky if I'd seen it in isolation. (I feel that way about a lot of Rapp's work, which is compellingly dark--and odd.) You can never go too wrong with Billy Crudup on stage, of course. Mostly, I loved how their meditations on the purpose of art and the dangers of being misunderstood but yet commercial artists play against each other and make me reconsider Metal Children, a play I enjoy more as I think about it afterward than I did while watching it.

These pairings are unintentional but delightful, and I would like to create more of these experiences but, as I said, I mostly just cram in as many shows as I can whenever I can. Tonight I'm in Cambridge to see Central Square Theater's production of Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (about famous mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked the Nazi's Enigma code--perhaps you've heard of the Turing Test in relation to artificial intelligence). I would love to follow it up with Samara Weiss's Lines in Code in New York at Columbia Stage's New Plays Now (about the imagined--perhaps kinky--relationship between Charles Babbage, father of the computer, and Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer), but it's playing only April 14 at 2, April 16 at 7, and April 17 at 2. Alas. I do hope I get to read it, though!

ETA: Yes, I get to read it! Thanks, Samara! Also, I just found out that one of the characters in Arcadia--which I'm seeing tomorrow--is loosely based on Lovelace. Isn't that awesome? Yay, serendipity! (Sorry for the sudden burst of exclamation marks.)