Prometheus Bound at the A.R.T.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/148207-Tony-Nominee-Gavin-Creel-Is-Prometheus-Bound-Opening-at-ART-March-4

Gavin Creel as Prometheus. Photo by Marcus Stern.

This musical should be titled Prometheus's Abs. As with Hair and The Donkey Show, A.R.T.’s Diane Paulus once again uses naked flesh (in the form of Gavin Creel, again) to distract from a hot mess of a show. (Hair isn't a bad show, exactly--especially compared to the completely clothed Johnny Baseball--but it's not a particularly great one.)

For me, the most telling thing about this lackluster production is that while I continue to think of additional things I loved about The Dream of the Burning Boy that I left out of my review (the clever use of movable bookshelves, the preshow music, the awesome blackboard/backlight panel), I've already forgotten almost everything about Prometheus, which I saw only three days earlier.

Here are my general recollections of this collaboration between Paulus, Steven Sater (Tony winner for the very awkward book to Spring Awakening), and Serj Tankian (from band System of a Down, which I've never listened to):
Loud! abs! where'd they go? can't hear lyrics! on my table! plot??? hate this space! creepy chicks are awesome! LOUD!

As my husband complained to me, for as loud as the show is, and with all the jumping around, nothing really happens. And because of that, there are no character arcs. The lack of action makes the story about as engaging as reading a Wikipedia article about the myth. This is not helped by Sater's stiff and clunky writing in both dialog and lyrics (but his earlier work with Spring Awakening makes this unsurprising). Plus, the vocals are often drowned out by the music, so it's hard to follow what story there is.

 The show bleeds righteous indignation and aspires to be a political anthem for Amnesty International, to inspire the youth to rise up and take social action. But to me the script lacks heart and, worse, is mostly irrelevant to its cause. But at least there’s loud music and half-naked dancing, right?

 And the kids on the dance floor did have their hands in the air.

Eventually even the wonder of the abs wears off, and only boredom is left. As I mention in an earlier post, in the Oberon space I feel very detached from the show even when it is happening on top of my table. (I'm curious how that experience will compare to the also-immersive Hello Again, by New York's Transport Group, which I'm seeing on Sunday.)

 The most interactive the A.R.T.'s shows get is to require the audience to remove everything from their tables when the cast comes bounding up. Yes, everything, including the menu that the staff puts on the table and the drinks they sell.

Between straining to hear the lyrics, trying to follow the actors around the space, keeping my head and arms inside the vehicle at all times, and looking very hard for the point, my mind wandered. I wondered if Creel had that ripped body before or developed it over the course of this very physically demanding show, caught myself pondering his terrible dye job, then admired the tenacity of the body tape valiantly holding on the mic cord running down his back in the face of all that sweating and thrashing about. Bravo, tape!



For all its faults, though, this production has a lot going for it, which is why it's such a shame it's not better. The actors performed the hell out of the material given to them. (Unfortunately, Gabe Ebert as Hephaistos/Hermes was always breaking character--I assume an ill-chosen direction from Paulus.) A couple of the less musical-theatery songs sounded wonderful, enough overall that I'll definitely check out System of a Down, but except for the quiet ones sung by the Daughters of Aether the lyrics were so hard to hear that I don't remember which songs.

Other aspects I liked:


• Uzo Aduba as Io. The only emotional part of the show is her story, and her pain is palpable (even though it's written as way too overwrought, she sells it). Although I wish some of her songs were quieter, subtler, Aduba acted the crap out of it.

 Prometheus is the protagonist, but whatever heart and soul this production has is Io.
• Gavin Creel as Prometheus. Wow, the guy can sing. Imagine if he had better songs! Also, the spotlight just loves him, even when the script gives his almost nothing to do but belt out angsty songs while looking pretty.
  
• The trio of Daughters of the Aether. Their songs are spooky and interesting, and I loved how Ashley Flanagan, Jo Lampert, and Celina Carvajal's voices meld together. Their movement around the club space is the only immersive aspect that makes sense for the story and is compelling rather than distracting (they're fairly peripheral to the story, lending atmosphere most of the time). Basically, they bring the cool.

• Lea DeLaria as Force. Ok, mostly DeLaria being DeLaria, kicking ass and being generally awesome.
  
• The crazy hair in the show. Especially the shaved/bright red 'do on one of the Daughters, Lea DeLaria's fauxhawk, and what the various band members sport. (Not Gavin's hair though. The black makes him look washed out, and the hair gets strangely poofy after all that writhing around.
)
• Highlighting Amnesty International's work. After the curtain call, they tell the story of one suffering activist and invite the audience to sign postcards on her or his behalf. (Apparently a new activist is selected for each show.) Although I fail to see any strong connection between the show and this very important work for human rights--despite the note in the program asking "Are we in ancient Greece? Or is Prometheus a defiant dissident in modern-day North Africa? Or China? Perhaps Iran or Belarus?"--I'm glad to see the effort on behalf of Amnesty nonetheless.

All in all, it comes down to this: Once the show was over, instead of pondering Prometheus as a modern human rights hero, I was instead thinking of how much I loved the National Theatre's broadcast of Frankenstein (based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) and Anais Mitchell's brilliant Greek folk opera, Hadestown. Both put the A.R.T.'s Prometheus Bound to shame.

For the sake of all that’s right and good, would someone please mount a fully staged production of Hadestown in Boston or New York already?


(ETA: Anais's manager says they're working crafting the show right now, to be ready sometime next year. BEST NEWS EVER.)

Diane Paulus and the new A.R.T.

http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/

(Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)

Last night I sat through Prometheus Bound, Steven Sater's new musical written with System of a Down lead singer Serj Tankian, at the Boston-area A.R.T., directed by the inexplicably popular Diane Paulus. Her star is on the rise after directing Hair on Broadway, which happens to be on tour in Boston at the Colonial Theater at the moment.

I'm not surprised that I didn’t love Prometheus. I clearly just do not like her work, and I suspect I never will. I didn't love Hair, with its paper-thin story full of characters I didn't connect with played by a highly energetic cast throwing out an impressive wall of sound on songs I knew but never had loved. I half-hated the complete two-headed mess of a musical that was Johnny Baseball (the modern half was a light and hilarious spoof of Red Sox fans, while the flashback was a muddled, preachy, ineffectual, sappy, and trite treatise against racism). And I despised The Donkey Show.

Most of all, I hate what Paulus has done with Zero Arrow Street in Harvard Square. I don’t find her use of the space to be daring or exciting or even particularly creative. In fact, it’s annoyingly disingenuous. It's one thing for a scrappy theater company to turn a run-down club into a low-budget, makeshift theater space. It's another entirely for a high-profile, well-funded company to turn a perfectly good theater with decent sound and sightlines into a crappy club performance space so that dancing half-naked actors can sing loudly at you and invade your personal space to distract you from the deficiencies in yet another underdeveloped show.

This immersive-theater style Paulus is cramming down our throats just makes me weary. I thought Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More was brilliantly immersive, with the audience roaming around four floors of an abandoned school out in Brookline to check out the amazingly detailed spooky-cool set design and then running to catch up with gorgeous dancers as they zipped from room to room to wordlessly interpret scenes from Macbeth. (Bringing Punchdrunk to Boston is Paulus’s best contribution to Boston theater so far.) She’s riding high on Sleep No More’s critical raves and The Donkey Show’s success (undeserved, I think--aside from the fun of drag kings and very pretty, very scantily clad go-go boys, I don’t see the appeal of this hideous disco-music sketch of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Paulus now seems determined to force this in-your-face style onto pieces much less suited for it.

I neither want to stand for a 90-minute show on a crowded dance floor, getting pushed around to make room for actors and set pieces flying at me from different directions, nor do I appreciate having to crane my neck around this way and that to try to follow the action from the more expensive raised table seating. The lack of tiered seating upstairs and the action taking place mostly on the level below means someone else’s head is in your way even when the actors are directly in front of you. The floors on the upper level are creaky, and the actors are always stomping and jumping on and off tables and railings, so it's really loud. And with the mix of voices over music being woefully unbalanced, you just miss too much of the show visually and aurally.

I do wish I had seen Amanda Palmer as the Emcee in Cabaret there, since that seemed like a brilliant use of the space (and it wasn't directed by Paulus). And I must admit that the kids down on the dance floor at Prometheus Bound, and the gay men and bachelorette parties at The Donkey Show, seemed to be having a grand time and were likely to come back for repeat viewings. So it's clearly bringing in a new audience to the theater. So even if I don't like the style, and even if it will keep me from seeing future shows in that space, I must grudgingly admit that I’m grateful that Paulus is helping to make a new generation of theater-goers.