I started the weekend with three very funny shows about serious topics: The Mountaintop (closing Jan. 22), Chinglish (closing Jan. 29), and Billy Elliot (closed Jan. 8). What a way to start my year in theater!
First up was Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, a strange fictional account of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last night on earth. I'm not a religious person, but I do care about civil rights, so it's really a shame I don't know more about the man. And this play really didn't do much to correct that ignorance, I suspect. Was he really a philandering, chain-smoking, sometimes-foul-mouthed megalomaniac? Ok, that might be overstating the play's portrait of him a bit. A bit.
I went in excited to finally see Samuel L. Jackson in something that wouldn't be curse-strewn, to see him act in a role different from anything else I'd seen him in. (I'm pretending those terrible Star Wars prequels didn't happen.) While it's true that Jackson doesn't curse--much--Angela Bassett more than makes up for him in her role as a maid/newly minted angel. (Huh? Yeah, it makes about that much sense a lot of the time.)
Jackson is great, which doesn't surprise me at all. Bassett disappoints me, though, and I suspect it's because the writing for her character is pretty awful. I appreciate the effort to humanize MLK and inspire everyone to "pick up the baton" and make the most of the time we have on this earth. It isn't a very good effort, and it shouldn't have worked on me at all. But it did. And it rains on stage, which almost always wins me over. Mostly, though, the show sucker-punched me at the very end with a weird spoken-word bit that made me think of The Normal Heart, a play that rocked my worldview last season. (More on that soon!)
Up next was Chinglish, my first encounter with Henry David Hwang. I laughed a lot at this display of the communication troubles and culture clash that results when American businesses expand into the Chinese market. The enormous supertitles showing the correct translations for the words misspoken on stage are hilarious, as is its somewhat charming example of sad-sack American As Buffoon. The performances are excellent, and the set movements are fun. The show is basically great fun with a few serious points thrown in. I liked it well enough that I insisted that Arthur see it the following weekend. I'll talk more about this show in connection with another Chinese-English bilingual play, Zayd Dohrn's Outside People, which I saw the following weekend at the Vineyard Theatre.
Last up was the closing performance of Billy Elliot, the dancing/mining/Thatcher-hating musical that I have been lucky enough to see many times with various casts and will miss very, very much. There were so many Billys on stage over the course of the show. Brilliant! The scene of the dance class interwoven with the police brigade is still one of my favorite stage scenes ever.
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.)
The theater week started (normally) in Boston on Tuesday, when I went with Lisa and hubby (I suppose I should just start calling him Arthur, yeah?) to see Charles Busch's The Divine Sister at SpeakEasy Stage in Boston. I never saw the show when it was in New York, and I think that's really, really fine. It's just really not my kind of humor (though I had a blast at Silence! The Musical!, which has a similar feel, I guess). The performances were excellent, especially Varla Jean Merman (aka Jeffrey Roberson), and the cast certainly didn't hold anything back in this insane slapstick comedy with music. It was quite a brilliant performance for what it was, I suppose. Not my favorite, but not a waste of an evening, and I like trying new things.
Then Lisa and I decided we were tired of acting like adults, so we ran off to New York Thursday night after work. We got to Rockwood Music Hall in time to catch the midnight set from the as-yet-unnamed punk trio of (ex-Idiots) Michael Esper, Johnny Gallagher, and Gerard Canonico. We got a nice seat upstairs and I drank a lot a whiskey. Lovely.
Friday we saw Esper again, this time at the Vineyard Theatre for our second viewing of The Lyons. Linda Lavin as the mother was just as excellent the second time around. Kate Jennings Bryant as the alcoholic sister was just as terrible. Dick Latessa as the obscenity-spewing dying patriarch was good but greatly overshadowed by Lavin--well, everyone was. I can see why she chose to do this off-Broadway role instead of reprising her role in the Broadway transfer of either Follies or Other Desert Cities. A role like Mrs. Lyons is a hard one to find. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have seen her performance even once, much less twice. The play itself is ... hilarious, sad, and very problematic. There's a weird scene with Mr. Lyons in the second act that is just SO unnecessary. The same with the sister's scene at the top of that act. Just, terrible really. It was hard to tell whether Bryant was truly awful (overall, but in that scene in particular), or if the playwright (Nicky Silver) spent all his talent on writing the parents and just ran out of steam when faced with the dialogue for the other roles. Overall, the first act is really good (daughter excepted), and the second act is a mess. As always, Esper cries beautifully. (Isn't it time for this man to be in a comedy? Or, even better, a traditional musical comedy? Please?)
Saturday Lisa saw Venus in Fur, which she then RAVED about, before abandoning me to head back to Boston. (I'm seeing Venus this weekend--front row for Hugh Dancy, w00t!) While she was there, I headed to the New York Theatre Workshop for my first viewing of Once. (I'll be seeing it a total of four times before it closes off-Broadway and will then probably park myself at the Bernard Jacobs theater next year.) I bought tickets to three performances as soon as subscriber tickets were available and have since gotten tickets to the closing, which is conveniently on a Sunday evening during a long weekend. I am in love with pretty much everything about this show, as I knew I would be. A show that adds the creative team behind Black Watch to the music of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova was a pretty safe bet for me. Sure, it's cheesy at times, but in a way that I find charming overall. And the music and visuals are breathtaking. I love the entire cast (even with the accent wonkiness). Kudos to Steve Kazee for making me feel even a bit sorry for him--given how attractive and talented he is, it's not so easy to be convincing as a sad sack. Major props to Cristin Milioti for approaching Irglova's stunning vocals and being completely charming in a role that's a bit too twee.
(I don't know if there are any left, since the show is getting good reviews and has already announced its Broadway transfer, but they were offering $20 tickets for all Sunday evening performances. They were available to purchase in advance at the box office--cash only, max 4 per person.)
Then I saw Other Desert Cities, minus Stockard Channing, who was out with an injury. The audience was understandably upset to be missing the show's star. I like Channing and was a bit disappointed, but I didn't mind seeing an understudy. I feel like I certainly get a better sense for the strength of a play itself when left in the hands of a less overwhelming presence. (Indeed, would The Lyons be as enjoyable without Lavin's masterful delivery and the extra oomph she provided even--often especially--in silent moments?) The cast is excellent, including understudy Lauren Klein, but the rhythm of the show was definitely off. And it did sound as though Jon Robin Baitz had written specifically for Channing's voice. I liked the play well enough and would like to see Channing in that role (because Pal Joey should NOT be the only time I see her on stage), so maybe I'll go back when Justin Kirk takes over Thomas Sadoski's role. For me, though, Judith Light made the show.
To wrap up the weekend, I got to see Anais Mitchell's BRILLIANT folk opera, Hadestown, again, this time as a regular concert at Le Poisson Rouge. As most of the audience were diehard fans, Mitchell skipped the exposition and just plowed ahead with the songs, with guest musicians including Ani DiFranco as Persephone and Boston music god Tim Gearan as Hades. I am so in love with this show. If I were rich, I'd bankroll a production of it myself. And I'd convince the Once team to write the book/direct/choreograph/design it. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.
After Hadestown, the enormous band/cast came down off the stage and led the audience in some protest/pro-union songs. She then invited everyone to follow her out to Washington Square Park to support the OWS campers there. Here's a very up-tempo version of Hadestown from the park:
And here's the end of my favorite choreographed moment in Once:
The Illusion is a Tony Kushner adaptation of a play by Pierre Corneille, a seventeenth-century French playwright I know nothing about and now feel no need to investigate. The actors were excellent but I just didn't care about the play. It was certainly the most lighthearted of the shows I saw that weekend, but it's not my kind of farce, and the conclusion was fairly disheartening.
On the other hand, the look that lighting designer Kevin Adams and set designer Christine Jones, frequent collaborators, created is interesting and quite beautiful. I wanted to walk around and touch the various votives and other light-giving objects near the stage, and I wanted to take the overhead light sculpture home with me. Jones's off-stage set design here is reminiscent of Spring Awakening's chock-a-block, stuff-stuck-on-a-brick-wall design (which I loved), but Adams's is unlike any of his other work I've seen. Their efforts were by far my favorite aspect of this production.
I loooooooooove Kevin Adams's lighting design for the show. Unlike with Spring Awakening, Passing Strange, and Next to Normal, it is understated and beautiful (more Mirror Blue Night, less Feeling Electric). No neon lights in sight! I think the lighting designs of those three earlier shows were certainly appropriate to their material, but I was just bored by the concept by the time Passing Strange rolled around, and I don't have any idea how Adams could possibly one-up that wall of light. (To be fair, I also saw several off-Broadway shows at the Vineyard and at Second Stage that Adams lit, plus The 39 Steps on Broadway, and don't remember being overwhelmed by them at all. Hair was in the middle, for me--fine, but I definitely suspected it was him.)
I really don't have much to say about this show other than that. I love Lois Smith (from the movie Twister and the TV show True Blood among more serious fare), and she was charming here. Merritt Wever, whom I generally know only from Aaron Sorkin's short-lived TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was funny with the conniving and strangely anachronistic role she was given. Henry Stram, however, was so good in what was pretty much the only role in the show that I really liked. He's good at being weird and creepy. (I liked about half the characters he did as the Adult Men in the first national tour of Spring Awakening, and he was pretty good as a drunken lech in the Huntington Theatre's entirely unnecessary production of William Inge's Bus Stop last season.)
At least I finished out The Signature Theatre's Kushner-centric season. I loved iHomo (which I told Kushner when I ran into him at Starbucks one day), really liked Angels in America Part I, liked Angels Part II even though I didn't understand when it turned so weird, and have almost entirely forgotten The Illusion even though it's the one I saw most recently. Alas, I just wish iHomo were still running.
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.)
