Awkward turtle (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever opening)

http://onacleardaybroadway.com

I went to my first Broadway opening! Many thanks to the excellent folks at the Vineyard Theatre for hooking me up with a pair of tickets for opening night. It was fun spotting Tom Kitt and Len Cariou at Angus McIndoe before the show. Yes, Arthur and I gave up our bar stools to Sweeney Todd and his wife! And with minimal fangirling on my part.

Unfortunately, that was most of our celebrity spotting for the night. I couldn't find my nice wool coat because it had been way too balmy in previous weeks to ever break out the winter gear, and there was a total planning failure on my part leading up to packing for the weekend. I don't buy into the idea of theater being a dress-up event (it should be an affordable part of everyday life), but even I knew a hoodie would not do for this special occasion. So I went with a thin, 3/4-sleeve wrap over my cute, fancy short-sleeved shirt. That ensemble was wholly inadequate to the chilly task, and we both felt like awkward turtles just standing around, so we went inside shortly after the house opened.

Loitering outside before then, though, we did spot the fantastic Brian d'Arcy James being interviewed. (The Smash cast is showing up en masse to pretty much every arts-related event right now.) Mo Rocca was there, looking dapper. The self-important dude who does the overrated Battery's Down was wandering around, I think with Carly Jibson (who was sooooo good in the really bad Johnny Baseball musical at the A.R.T.--seriously, considering that amazing cast, the show should have been great, but the book was an unholy mess).

Our seats up in the mezz had a great view. (The balcony was closed--is that common for an opening?). But from up there we weren't able to oogle the stars in the orchestra once we were seated. Alas. The show started about half an hour after advertised, but that's probably normal. There wasn't any late seating, which was a wonderful perk. No cell phones went off. And people pretty much didn't talk or text, as far as I saw. That lack of distractions and the overall enthusiasm from cast and audience made the performance a special experience for us.

The show itself doesn't do it for me. In so many ways. The revisions are half-baked, the premise is beyond dumb, and there is nothing likable about most of the characters. The sets are violently awful, perhaps in an effort to distract from the rest of the mess on stage. And considering that the gay twist was one of Michael Mayer's main reasons for reviving the show, cutting to black before the big kiss is a ridiculous cop-out.

Some of the choreography for the trio is fairly brilliant, though. And Jesse Mueller's voice is perfection.

The Illusion and Signature's Kushner season

http://signaturetheatre.org/illusion





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.