Thank god for Broadway tours (American Idiot is back!)

http://americanidiotthemusical.com

Boston is an amazing city with tons of great local theater. Plus it's a doable bus distance from New York. It also launches shows that later transfer to New York, hosts Broadway tryouts, and always brings in big Broadway tours. And I am SO thankful for that, especially when dearly departed Broadway shows come around on national tour. (Billy Elliot just closed, and I'm already ready for the tour to get here. I can't believe I have to wait until July!)

This week, I finally get to see American Idiot again. (A lot.) Oh, how I have missed this musical since it closed on Broadway nine months ago! And I'm so excited to see familiar faces from the Broadway cast, especially Van Hughes reprising his role as Johnny and two excellent former understudies now in leading roles: Leslie McDonel as Heather and Joshua Kobak as St. Jimmy.

Mostly, I'm in love with Tom Kitt's gorgeous arrangements of Green Day's cathartic music and Steven Hoggett's powerful choreography. I really can't get enough of either. Sure, eight shows in one week is excessive. But surely that's not surprising to any of you who have read this blog before.

I'll write up a review at the end of the week, but I can tell you now that it will be mostly positive!

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A special hello to my new theater friend, Jorge. It was great talking with you before the show, and I look forward to seeing you at other performances in Boston and New York. Theater people are the best!

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ETA: There is a ticket lottery for $28 seats in the first 2 rows. Cash only. Submit your name 2.5 hours to submit your name. Winners will be chosen 30 minutes later.

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.

American Idiot

http://americanidiotonbroadway.com

When is a jukebox musical not a jukebox musical? No, I'm just kidding. American Idiot is definitely a jukebox musical--perhaps moreso than most in that it has practically no book. In a brilliant move, director Michael Mayer decided not to bloat it with cheesy dialogue to detract from the gorgeous people singing fantastic songs, dancing to cool choreography, and basically rocking our faces off. That also keeps the show at just over 90 minutes plus a fun curtain call, which makes it about perfect for adrenaline junkies with short attention spans (or people who are seeing a long-ass show like Jerusalem or The Intelligent Homosexual's ... the same day).

All together, there's less than five minutes of dialogue in American Idiot. Instead of a more traditional style of jukebox storytelling--which is often clumsily tacked onto a score of unrelated songs (Mamma Mia, All Shook Up)--Mayer and Green Day frontman and lyricist Billie Joe Armstrong give a sketch of character arcs for the leads (and a blank canvas for the large ensemble) and let them stand in for a whole generation of angry, aimless, impulsive youth desperate to break out of tiny towns and meaningless lives but unsure how. In the meantime, they settle for anything that gets their blood pumping: music, sex, drugs, fighting. It's a visceral show, aimed at the gut more than the head, and if the lyrics sometimes don't quite match up to the already thin plot (Extraordinary Girl???), no one cares much because the songs are damn catchy, and there are a million other details vying for attention.

I've seen this show an excessive number of times. Truly. And I'll see it again when the tour comes through Boston. The performers have been almost universally fantastic (late replacements for Will, Tunny, and St. Jimmy aside). And the set design, projections, and dances are so overwhelming that I could probably never see everything no matter how many times I might go. I love seeing what the understudies, who've had such different voices, bring to the songs gorgeously arranged by Tom Kitt. The added strings and the strength of so many great voices makes them so lush. I'll never get tired of the cast recording, even if it's overproduced and pop-sounding compared to the raw live show.

The show has been full of fantastic dancers, too (Leslie McDonnell, Declan Bennett, Andrew Call, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Gerard Canonico, and Mikey Winslow in particular), who performed the crap out of choreography that is perfectly matched to the style and energy of the show. I was sitting at Junior's splitting a slice of devil's food cheesecake with a friend after the show a few months ago and I mentioned how much I love the choreography. He said he didn't think there was much to it, which surprised me, but he admitted that West Side Story-style dancing would definitely have felt wrong. I love how Steven Hoggett exaggerates and smooths out the movements of kids who hang out in convenience store parking lots looking for trouble and turns it into (often-concussive) dance. The posturing in picking a fight with other kids killing time at the 7-11 and the struggle between new parents Will and Heather as she moves out are perfect. And the bombing dance, combined with actual night-vision footage from Iraq, is stunningly brutal. (I look forward to comparing it to the movement he created for the war scenes in Black Watch.) There's also a flying scene. (No, really.) My friend hadn't really considered any of that to be choreography, which I think speaks to how organic it feels to the music and the characters.

That bizarre flying scene is a duet between Extraordinary Girl (originally played by the golden-voiced Christina Sajous) and Tunny (originated by Stark Sands, the only one I've seen who's been up to the role). I get that it's a dream sequence, but even so it just doesn't belong in the show. EG glides down in a burka, which she then removes piece by piece, like a stripper, to reveal a midriff-baring I Dream of Jeannie outfit. Then they fly around (him in his hospital gown) singing the song Extraordinary Girl, which has lyrics that are probably the worst fit in the show (war is definitely not an ordinary world, the song mentions Whatsername, whom EG and Tunny have never met, etc.). It's a great song and flying is fun(!) but, like 3-D for movies, just because you can put something in your show doesn't mean you should.

The show itself is great, but the choices by director Mayer and casting director Jim Carnahan (who both also handled Spring Awakening) deserve much of the credit for Idiot's success. Individually he found the best people for each role (regarding the original cast), and their chemistry together was palpable. I really am in love with most of this cast (ensemble included) and can't wait to see what they do next. (Below the jump, I go on at length about the cast, especially Michael Esper and Tony Vincent, and talk about their other projects.)