Bucket list, part II

Earlier I gave you the list of performers I want to see at least once in my lifetime. Here is my list of shows I want to see, sooner rather than later. (I'm sure I'm overlooking many important works, of course, so this list is a work in progress. Feel free to make suggestions!)


Shows and playwrights I've never seen but really need to:
Amadeus

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (love Carson McCullers--no idea if this is any good as a play, but I want to see it)

Damn Yankees

The Rocky Horror Show

Thoroughly Modern Millie

Bertolt Brecht

Anton Chekhov done well [I have high hopes for the Lyric Theatre production in Belfast]

Eugene O'Neill (It doesn't count that I've spent a lot of time at his theater.)
August Wilson

NOT on my list:

Cats

Chicago

Les Misérables

The Phantom of the Opera

Andrew Lloyd Webber's entire oeuvre (but I AM going to see Ricky Martin in Evita--SHUT UP. I have a soft spot for Menudo and for that show.)

Shows I've already seen (NYC or regional) but want to see again:
Altar Boyz
American Idiot (but probably only with the original choreography--YAY FOR THE TOUR!)
Assassins
Black Watch (heartbreaking, but I could watch it over and over)
Billy Elliot (though preferably in London with decent accents)
A Chorus Line (my first Broadway show, and still one of my all-time favorites)
Company
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (with John Cameron Mitchell, if possible)

Inherit the Wind

Man of La Mancha

The Music Man

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Sweeney Todd

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

NOT on my list:

Gypsy

Hair

Act II of Sunday in the Park with George

(Click below for a list of people whose work I love and want to see more from.)

Powerhouse Theatre at Vassar: Whisper House / The Nightingale / Nero / F2M

http://powerhouse.vassar.edu




Over the past few summers, I've seen four Powerhouse Theatre shows at Vassar College as part of their annual collaboration with New York Stage and Film. Nero, Whisper House, and The Nightingale were concert readings of musicals by Duncan Sheik (famous for that incessantly played kind-of-twee song Barely Breathing and, of course, for Spring Awakening). F2M was a fully staged play by Patricia Wettig (famous as an actress in Thirtysomething and in Brothers & Sisters).

I think Wettig's play F2M has legs, but I wish the explanatory bits had been less cliched, handled better than as in an after-school special (both in the actual explanations and how they were clunkily folded into the surrounding dialogue). I know many theater audiences know nothing about transgender issues, but the play spends so much time saying what being transgender is and isn't that it shortchanges the really interesting questions the play raises about its impacts on a college-age transgender person and those who love the person. I've read and watched a lot about this (which is how I know how cliched the dialogue is), and the play still managed to raise at least one issue that I had never considered. Serious kudos for that, but it happened late in the play and was barely explored. Keira Keeley's portrayal was excellent, restrained, and very real, though.

For the concert readings, the audience is reminded that in the Internet Era, there are few safe spaces for artists to hone their craft without widely circulated criticism and to please honor that by not filming the show or talking about it with your invisible friends. [See my newer post for an update on this policy.]* So I won't do real reviews for these shows, but I do want to tell you a bit about my experience so far and encourage you to take the beautiful drive or MetroNorth train ride up to Poughkeepsie to check it out for yourself sometime. (Please click MORE at the bottom to read about Nero and The Nightingale.)


Whisper House
Score by Duncan Sheik, book and co-lyrics by Kyle Jarrow. Copied from the Old Globe Theatre's website (the show got a fully staged run there after the Powerhouse workshop):

It’s 1942--at the height of World War II--and Christopher, an imaginative young boy, is sent to live with an aunt he’s never met: Lilly, a reclusive woman who serves as the keeper of a remote lighthouse. Not yet comfortable in his surroundings, Christopher begins to hear strange music no one else can hear seeping through the walls. It doesn’t take long for him to suspect the lighthouse may be haunted, and these ghosts tell him that Yasujiro, a Japanese worker that Lilly has employed, should not be trusted. Is Christopher’s imagination getting the best of him? Or are these ghosts warning Christopher about the very real dangers that lie ahead?

I love this show and hope it comes to New York. It's a simple but touching story, and I think it's brilliant that--like in Spring Awakening--the songs take place outside the narrative, this time with the ghosts commenting on the action but not really taking part in it. Please go listen to the concept album Sheik recorded with the golden-voiced Holly Brook. I'm particularly fond of Better to Be Dead, And Now We Sing, and especially The Tale of Solomon Snell. I listened to the recording on repeat for weeks when I got it and am still completely in love with it.

Here's a video for the Whisper House song Earthbound Starlight:

Carson McCullers Talks about Love

http://www.rattlestick.org




Carson McCullers Talks About Love, a meditation with song about McCullers's relationships with writing, men, women, and illness, opens tonight at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Renowned for her decades of excellent storytelling through song, creator and star Suzanne Vega doesn't have much acting experience. But she has an affinity for McCullers and a similar gift with words, in addition to a strong physical resemblance. I thought she was great as both the writer in the past and as herself now commenting on her own history with McCullers's writing.

As a longtime fan of both women, I cannot be an objective observer here. I know this show isn't perfect, but it's so well crafted around its imperfections that I have absolutely no complaints about it except that I won't be able to see it again. Bringing in Duncan Sheik to help with some of the music was an excellent move. After all, he won two Tonys for Spring Awakening's music and orchestrations and has a few other musicals in the works. (The concept recording of Whisper House is stunning. The staged reading at Powerhouse a couple of summers ago was very promising, and a full production at the Old Globe in San Diego followed.) Sheik's style meshes well with Vega's, and he adds some layers to her usually sparse arrangements. I'd love to hear the show in its final form. If they released a cast recording I would wear. it. out.

Under Kay Matschullat's direction, the production does much to highlight Vega's strengths and shrug off her amateur status. Although the show was still in flux when I saw it, and Vega used a lyrics sheet for one of the two new songs and hummed through a few forgotten lines of another, it didn't affect my enjoyment a bit. She and Joe Iconis, a locally well-known musical theater writer, seem to have an easy, trusting rapport. As her piano man and witty sidekick, he's a great addition to what is essentially a one-woman show plus two onstage musicians. When Vega tripped up in a monologue, Iconis gracefully pulled the show back on track with such humor and natural timing that I wondered if it isn't even more enjoyable when things don't go exactly as planned.

Had I realized at the time how close the theater is to the Stonewall Inn, I would have swung by. I think the Carson McCullers of this time-shifting production would have approved. A comment from Iconis about the Stonewall riot as a flashpoint in the fight for gay rights--led by outcasts even within the gay community, the kind of misfits McCullers loved to study--would have fit right in stylistically and thematically, especially given her complex romantic history. (I wonder if Iconis will mention during the show that, like McCullers, Marie Osmond just remarried her first husband.)*

*At the performance I saw, he somewhat randomly brought up Martin McDonagh, modern playwright of the gruesomely hilarious. I was disappointed that my two companions and I were the only ones in the audience who seemed to find it hysterical. Still, it was a bit odd and didn't really belong in the show, and I didn't really want to encourage it, but I love McDonagh and the comment itself was apt, so I laughed. Really loudly.

Spring Awakening non-Equity national tour

http://www.springawakening.com




Many people assume, not unreasonably, that my favorite musical is Spring Awakening. I've certainly seen it a ridiculous number of times--way more than I've seen anything else--and I love it a ridiculous amount. I still listen to the cast recording often. I've followed some of the actors to their new projects. Yes, I'm a huge Spring Awakening fan, but it's not my favorite musical and I certainly don't think it's the best musical ever (hello, Sondheim!). I do love the show, but I'm not blind to its many faults. It's clear that I've seen it for the last time, and I'm ok letting it go.

About three and a half years after seeing Spring Awakening on Broadway for the first time (two and a quarter since it closed) and almost two years since seeing it in Boston during its first national (Equity) tour, I finally saw it again last weekend. It was the second national (non-Equity) tour, in New Haven. There were apparently no understudies on, which is good because I don't know anything about the current cast, including their names. After seeing the show, I don't think I'll be bothering to learn them, but you can find the cast list here.

Can we all just agree that Steven Sater's dialogue here must be the worst for any show that has won a Tony Award for best book? (Suffering through it all again really makes me love American Idiot's dearth of dialogue even more. Michael Mayer, who directed both musicals, obviously learned his lesson!)

On the astonishingly positive side, this performance was the only time the beating scene EVER worked in any cast I've seen, Broadway or tour. The way Wendla breathed/gasped through the pauses in the whole never-felt-anything bit made up for so much awkward writing. How did no one ever think to do this before? Major kudos, kids (and/or whoever took over for Mayer in directing the tour).

Overall, sitting on stage was a terrible idea for me. I'm very glad I didn't pay more to see it (stage seats are cheap because they're partial view and awesome because the cast sings while sitting next to you), but I was in danger of being terribly rude and laughing my face off at the most inappropriate times. I didn't, but it was supremely awkward. Unfortunately, holding that in meant I didn't laugh at all because everything else ceased being funny several viewings ago.

Below the jump are my Twitteresque responses to everything else. They will only make sense if you've seen the show. Sorry. The performance just filled me with inertia and I can't face writing a real review (which would end up being twice as long as my Idiot post was, and no one wants that).