Once on Another Island

Once at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

            The new musical Once, based on the Academy Award-winning film about an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant who bond over music over one week together, is perhaps defined by what’s going on onstage as the audience files into the theater.  Sure, the house lights are on, and people wait patiently for the show to begin just as they would anywhere else, but before the audience’s eyes a full-on jamboree is underway up on the dais.  The actors jump and dance and pluck at stringed instruments in a tight cluster, surrounded by audience members, who are freely allowed to meander up among them.

            Yes, in this show the actors play the instruments, and even the lowliest supporting character lugs a bass as he delivers his lines.  This seems to be because the show’s calling card is bare-bones, less than fancy, simplistic delivery of the story.  Is this a good thing? Maybe not, but it’s given just as well as it can be given what it’s got going for it.

            Guy (Steve Kazee), a depressed Irish musician (although I guess that’s redundant), is considering giving up his music after his mother’s death and his abandonment by his girlfriend.  However, wouldn’t you know it, he’s brought out of his brooding, mysterious sulk by a (supposedly) beautiful Czech immigrant, Girl (Cristin Milioti), who convinces him to fix her broken vacuum cleaner and record what she’s sure will be a hit song in her burly friend Billy (Paul Whitty)’s music shop.  And so it begins.

            It seems like a recipe for an unlikely hit.  There’s one immobile set, which resembles a bar in the musical’s setting of Dublin, functioning as at least three other locations, and backed by the bare, uncovered brick walls of the theater.  It features the traditional Celtic melodies of yore accompanied by little old men playing mandolins, and long, sweeping dances punctuated by unorthodox lighting that leaves the viewer dazed and confused.  Sounds like what I like to call hipster bait.

            But it’s not enough.  There’s something about Once that is cold and uninviting, almost dead.  It’s not as warm or open as the film was, mainly because the film employed cinema verite and accessible actors (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who also wrote the music and lyrics for the musical adaptation) to bring the audience into the film, while the actors in the musical seem like a haughty clique, too good to let their fans into their world.

            If the cast members were smart they’d see it’s not enough to be great singers and great instrumentalists, which, undoubtedly, they are.  You must employ a dynamic, a pattern, to draw people in to the story and character development, a feat Once comes close to achieving, ironically, only once, when Girl brings Guy to visit her apartment to meet her fellow Czech mother, daughter, and roommates (Anne L. Nathan, Ripley Sobo/Mackayla Twiggs, Will Connolly, Elizabeth A. Davis, and Lucas Papaelias respectively).  They employ a method of portraying those who hail from the Czech Republic effectively—less humor is more.  (A recurring catchphrase of the six is “I’m always serious.  I’m Czech.") When it’s first expressed by Girl it’s a little disconcerting, but when seen as a form of camaraderie by a group of, frankly, quite funny actors, it’s almost hysterical.  However, when their traditional, vibrant Czech song ends it’s back to the grey boredom of Ireland. 

It’s a truly dull place, Dublin, or so the musical leads me to believe, and even when the characters try to counteract it by declaring their love for their “beautiful” city, I don’t buy it.  I’d remind the flat group of people around whom Once revolves in what city they’re performing, and then ask them to compare.  I’m sure they’d be disappointed with the results.

Hell is Other Players

Damn Yankees at the Paper Mill Playhouse

            Whose side is the Devil really on?

            An interesting question.  Certainly Applegate, the Devil’s suave, debonair alter ego (Howard McGillin, who played the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway for over ten years) in Adler and Ross’s Damn Yankees (running through April 1), is on the audience’s good side.  McGillin pours so much sickly-sweet core evil—not to mention incredible talent—into the performance that he becomes the demon in the pinstriped suit the American audience just loves to hate.  But he is on the bad side of the protagonist, Joe Boyd (Joseph Kolinski), whom he swindles into handing over the deed for his soul in exchange for his transformation into “Shoeless” Joe Hardy (Christopher Charles Wood), the slugger who can lead Joe’s team, the Washington Senators, to victory over those damn Yankees.  Applegate’s plan is to bring the hopes of the Senators’ fans unbearably high, only to crush them when he takes possession of Boyd’s soul and makes him throw the pennant-deciding game against New York in late September.  Yes, it’s pretty clear that no matter who may seek to please or displease the silver-haired Applegate, the only team he’s on is his own.

            Damn Yankees has earned its renown for an array of reasons over the course of its many productions, but perhaps most famously for the portrayal of the two Mephistophelean antagonists, Applegate and his personal home-wrecker, Lola, played in this production by Chryssie Whitehead.  Lola, of course, was played in the original 1955 production and 1958 film by Fosse wife #2 Gwen Verdon, then Bebe Neuwirth in 1994, and, most recently, Jane Krakowski of 30 Rock fame in the 2008 Encores! revival.  Perhaps boasting an even more star-studded list, however, is Satan himself, who’s been played by Ray Walston, Vincent Price, Jerry Lewis, and Sean Hayes, in that order.  It’s difficult to put the current Applegate and associate up against their colleagues—if they can even be called that—but McMillan does very well, maintaining a boastful bravado and simmering wickedness that Jack from Will and Grace couldn’t muster even if he tried.  Whitehead is less memorable, mainly due to pure star power—that is to say, lack of.  She tries, but she doesn’t match up to most of the main characters, especially her brimstone-soaked boss and Christopher Charles Wood, a brilliant dancer and singer who acts circles around his chubby counterpart Joseph Kolinski, who dulls “Six Months Out of Every Year” unbearably.

            Not only that, but the adaption of the Faust legend has been warped considerably from its original Broadway plot.  Song locations are shifted and lines like Applegate’s “Don’t you have another version of that thing?” when forced to take the oath in court are cut entirely.  It’s enjoyable; hugely so, but any audience member can tell from the start how much more the Playhouse could have done with it.  Richard Adler and Jerry Ross are also responsible for another epic of musical theater, The Pajama Game, and they deserve better than what the company and director have to offer.

            But don’t let me put you off.  If there’s one reason to go see Damn Yankees before April Fool’s Day—or perhaps it should be two reasons—it’s the leads on both sides of the Force, as it were: Wood and McMillan.  The two are shining stars in their respective roles, talented in all quadrants of the stage actor’s portfolio, and their duels not only represent the battles between good and evil, but are also vastly entertaining.  Look for Wood’s performance in his duet with Lola (although he originally shared it with Applegate), “Two Lost Souls,” and McMillan’s show-stealing, house-collapsing rendition of “Those Were the Good Old Days,” wherein Old Nick recounts the many abominations in human history he’s had a hand in.

            Damn Yankees is a more recent classic than most, written in the mid-fifties when theater had begun to approach its dropping-off point into the quagmires of adaptions from film and Andrew Lloyd Weber, and the history behind it is more than enough justification for becoming absorbed in its love-of-the-game magic.  Baseball is more than a plot point, however, it’s also a motif—an overriding theme that overtakes the audience as they settle into their seats.  The lights dim, the curtain rises… Play ball!

Rage and Profanity on the Upper West Side

Seminar at the John Golden Theater

            The new play Seminar, written by Theresa Rebeck, is the work of a creative angry with the process.  In the course of the production writers are called “feral cats” and “talented nobodies” and the process of writing a novel is generally scorned and bemoaned.  However, it’s also the work of a writer who truly admires her fellow writers and what they go through every day, and who looks at the process of writing as more than putting words on a page, but as the shaping of a language into something profound and beautiful, something even the feral cats can be proud of.

            Beyond the written word of the script, though, the play belongs to Alan Rickman, the internationally-renowned actor who is perhaps best known for portraying Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, and whose low, gravelly, and extremely British voice has him eternally typecast as the misunderstood villain.  In person Rickman is more powerful than imaginable on the screen.  The lines spill from his mouth with great fluidity of motion and spirit, and when in the midst of a rant (as his character, private writing teacher Leonard, usually is), he leans forward as if he must put extra strength behind the delivery for it to hit home.  We don’t need it, though, as we’re already in thrall of the ability we see on the stage.     

            Writing, as many such behind-the-scenes stories have told us, is depressing, and the four young adults who’ve signed up for Leonard’s class are no exception to the writers’ rule.  Kate (Lily Rabe), a bespectacled twenty-something who’s been working on the same Jane Austen homage for six years, is the patron of the ten weekly meetings in her massive apartment her parents rent to her for eight hundred dollars a month and can’t handle Leonard spewing abuse at her mediocre work.  Martin (Hamish Linklater) is a cowardly and poor deadbeat living in Queens who can’t bear for anyone to see his work, let alone his teachers.  Izzy (Hetienne Park) is the pathetic Martin’s love interest and a proponent of Asian eroticism in writing to get ahead.  She’s provocative enough to first sleep with Leonard and then Martin after he tells her she could do much better than Rickman’s character.  Finally, there’s the effeminately dressed Douglas (Jerry O’Connell, who played quarterback Frank Cushman in Jerry Maguire), whose father’s name is so familiar in literary circles he can get his work published in The New Yorker even if it is, in Leonard’s words, “whorish.” The individual whirlwind depressions of the four collide explosively under Leonard’s tutelage as they struggle not to insult each other’s work and to keep their own from Leonard’s critical eyes.

            Leonard has his own problems.  He’s gone through the novelist’s paces (he describes writing your second novel as “the ninth circle of Hell”) before his career trailed off and he ended up teaching university creative writing classes and then being accused of plagiarism by one of his students.  He was then forced to take on editing and private teaching jobs and found himself to be good at them.  Unfortunately for his private pupils, though, his style can be a little intense, and it’s not long in the six-room apartment before tensions arise and all present are forced to address them.

            Though a little pretentious and including nudity and expletives for their own sake in places, the script is perfectly acceptable, and anyway it’s not the words you’re thinking of but the thought behind them.  The actors deliver the lines like writers, walk like writers, and act like writers.  It’s a writers’ play that can only be called great because of the actors.  In this way it’s almost like a meeting in the middle, a compromise between the cast and creators to achieve something that is fully worth seeing.

Up in the Air

Boeing-Boeing at the Paper Mill Playhouse

 

            The classic 1960 French farce Boeing-Boeing, written by Marc Camoletti and the most performed French play in the world, is playing through February 12 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, where it is rightly well-received.  The play, which played on the West End for seven years and was revived twice on Broadway, follows an American-turned-Parisian architect whose blissful lifestyle depends on the timetables of the three major airlines.  He’s got it all figured out, as he explains to his houseguest, an old college friend—polygamy.  But polygamy on a schedule; that is to say, polygamy with three flight attendants, one of whom is always up, one of whom is always down, and one of whom is always pending.

            Said playboy, Bernard (Matt Walton in this production, but famously played in the 1965 film by Tony Curtis), is simultaneously engaged to independent American hostess Gloria (Heather Parcells), possessive Italian Gabriella (Brynn O’Malley) and forceful and fiercely patriotic German Gretchen (Anne Horak).  He juggles them constantly and throws their nationalities around like he’s referring to his car collection “My German/My Italian/My American.”  Each day the menu and decorations change with the help of his overworked housekeeper Berthe (Beth Leavel), whose heavily French-accented catchphrase is “It isn’t easy, you know.”  Things go perfectly smoothly, as Bernard is all too happy to show off to his Wisconsinite college buddy Robert (John Scherer).  But as the schedule is torn to pieces by the four Rolls-Royce engines of the Super Boeing, which goes fast enough to land all three fiancés in his Paris apartment at once, Bernard, Berthe, and a reluctant Robert are forced to drive themselves crazy arranging it so that the wives-to-be never meet.         

            Boeing-Boeing is fast-paced, exciting, and hysterically funny.  Robert is new to this world of immorality, as he constantly complains, comparing and contrasting his apparent new lifestyle to that of his Midwestern home, and the audience is drawn in, too, but in a different way—with interest.  We legitimately want to see what happens.  It’s not painful comedy like Curb Your Enthusiasm, where the spectator feels so uncomfortable with the main character’s problems that they’re tempted to cover their eyes and curl up in the fetal position.  It’s more similar to the easygoing but still entertaining comedy of the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera or, especially, Room Service.  We feel empathetic towards Robert and Bernard as their timetables fall to pieces, but not so much so that we wish it would end.  In fact, we wish it would go on much, much longer.

            The cast works so well together that they resemble a well-oiled machine.  When one attendant walks out, another walks in, and the imperative for Bernard’s operation is that none enter a room at the same time.  This makes for some odd strategies interpreted by the foreign air hostesses to be a symptom of Americanism, and for Gloria a symptom of the disease that is the unwelcome guest.  Robert must immediately claim rooms occupied by competing fiancés, such as the room where Bernard and his current female companion usually sleep, or must cut in line for the bathroom when the American is taking a bath and the Italian wants one herself. 

            The comedy in some ways resembles slapstick.  When Berthe first realizes that all three attendants are in the flat together, she screams and collapses, causing Bernard and Robert to collapse themselves into stress-induced tears.  In this campaign even Robert is overworked, and it shows.  While he’s trying to warn Bernard to leave for the country with the Italian before Bernard has realized their new problem, his face turns red and his hair flops wildly around as he jumps and makes what may seem to be ridiculous insistences.  But at the end of it all, faces return to normal color, Berthe is happy with her new 30% raise (long story), and the two men relax on the couch and open a bottle of champagne each.  They’re happy it’s over, but we’re happy we were there to enjoy the ride.

Make Me Over

The Natural History Museum of Utah

           Perhaps too little known for its scientific prowess is the western metropolis of Salt Lake City, Utah, known only to New Yorkers as a deserted wasteland by an unfishable lake, populated by cheery tie-wearing Mormons as depicted by the creators of South Park.  However, I find it out of order, and believe we’ve underestimated our mountain-dwelling brothers at least in terms of their ability to, in layman’s terms, clean up good.

            In the hills above Utah’s capital, at the copper-plated Rio Tinto Center at the University of Utah, lies the Natural History Museum of Utah, an architecturally and intellectually beautiful learning experience composed of consolidated exhibitions from around the University.  Focusing on Utah’s natural beauty specifically, as well as the place of humans within it, the museum has five levels, each going into a specific aspect of the west’s natural beauty.  The NHMU suggests you begin at the top floor, Sky, and make your way down to the main entry hall, where odd outcroppings and a plunging design are meant to make you feel like you’re at the bottom of a canyon, looking up at the curling bridges and open skylights above.  In the daylight I’m sure it would be just as beautiful as the night, looking out over the main floor terrace to the skyline of the city ahead and back to the gently sloping mountains behind.

            At NHMU, professionalism is key.  Practically every prehistoric bone is just as real as you or me and meticulously arranged by top archeologists who barely have to travel from their digs to the museum, and frankly it’s impressive the beasts the mesas of the Great Basin have to offer.  Triceratops with heads that fill forty-foot walls, alligators the size of semi trucks, giant sloths that rear in ready attack position, and even bones from the famous Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a paleontologist’s mystery where bones were scattered beneath the muck like utensils in a drawer.  Evidently no one knows quite how they got there or even how the monsters died, but that doesn’t stop the experts at the museum from putting one foot in front of the other to get the beasts built to their former glory and to let them sit silently and regally in their new, quiet homes.

            Modern animals, too, have their place here.  After the suffering and heritage of the Native Americans of the Ute region on the Sky floor comes the other natives of this land, among them antelope, cougars, and tarantulas, one of which makes its home beneath a glass dome on a table the observer can freely approach.  Masterful taxidermy lines the walls and display cases, giving the visitor a close-up view of the wildlife of the area as if in their natural habitat.  There’s even a massive working ant farm, glowing white and spotted with hardworking red ants scurrying to and fro, not unlike, it seems, the staff and administrators of the museum, which just received its new name and location in fall of 2011.  And there’s so much more to see, too much even to list.

            There’s not much to complain about at NHMU.  It’s interesting, it’s thorough, it’s detailed enough for a long day’s visit, and it’s a beautiful space.  It rivals the museums of New York just due to what’s available to see, and it’s considerably cheaper.  What’s more, it just underwent a pretty extensive makeover to get to where it is today.  I’d say the work has paid off.  I guarantee that if you’re already making the trip out to Utah, if you live there, or if you’re interested in some SLC culture, the Natural History Museum of Utah will not leave you disappointed.

A Comedy (of Sorts) Tonight

Lysistrata Jones at the Walter Kerr Theater

 

            Retellings of the old tales often work just because they aren’t yours.  With something that’s been proven to work—such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—you can mess around with the characters, storyline, and setting without worrying that you’re setting yourself up to fail (a fact of life Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim took advantage of with their hit West Side Story).  It’s almost a guarantee that you’ll attract viewers solely based on the following the old story has accrued.  That’s the same reason you can’t list many musicals on Broadway today that aren’t taken from a tale from long (or not so long) ago: think Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins, The Addams Family, War Horse, and especially Godspell.  This must be the reason why writing team Douglas Carter Beane (Sister Act) and Lewis Flinn (The Little Dog Laughed) thought they could succeed with their new musical Lysistrata Jones, based on Aristophanes’s age-old tale of women withholding sex as a means of controlling their disobedient men.  Sadly, they were mistaken.

            Lysistrata Jones is unspeakably average.  Every action performed on the stage screams maximum effort, minimum result.  While I do pity Beane and Flinn for coming close to what legitimately could have been a good show, I’m not inclined to accept something as mundane as this basketball farce.  It wasn’t that it was bad, but that it wasn’t the opposite either.  Jones is the kind of show where you leave the theater indecisive, because it hasn’t given you anything to be excited about.

            And there’s another fault.  Jones has no pull.  There’s no massive, noticeable feature like Daniel Radcliffe in How to Succeed or even a composer descending into a previously unvisited realm that has become newly interesting to the composer’s fans, as was the case with Stephen Schwartz and his passion project Wicked.  Even the concept of the show is wholly uninteresting.  Taking the pacifistic attitudes of the original Lysistrata’s women and reapplying their anger to a college basketball losing streak is forced and unrealistic.  If anything it makes the heroine seem utterly controlling, a puppeteer in the wings so desperate for glory she’ll instill a school-wide dry spell just to see some personal victory.  As if this wasn’t enough, “Lyssie J” installs herself immediately as cheerleading captain, a position that isn’t exactly home to many protagonists in fiction or non.  The result is that both Lyssie and the show are entirely unlikeable, and even song-ending high notes every now and again or an Aretha-like narrator with a toga and feather boa can bring the audience’s attention past the initial disinterest.

            A show’s greatest enemy is clichés, and Jones is chock-full of the kind of oversights that would make a playwright wince in his seat.  The dumb blonde who leads the pack away from conformation and into the light of self-acceptance (Legally Blonde, Clueless, House Bunny), the suave basketball captain whose belief in his solid relationship causes him all kinds of trouble (High School Musical, Pleasantville, Teen Wolf), and of course, the nerd-gets-the-girl theme that for some reason tends to hang out around feel-good comedies like a mosquito at your Fourth of July picnic (I hope I don’t have to name anything for this one).  There’s no shortage of original moments, either, but they’re far out-weighed by painful and grossly self-referential mentions of Siri, the iPhone, SparkNotes, and enough other odd little “techie” outbursts to make one wonder if Beane and Flinn wrote the show as a response to “those darn kids with their machines!”

            I won’t lie, there were one or two places where I laughed.  During a scene in the basketball locker room when the team, the vast majority of which is white, address each other as if at a meeting of the Crips, the team’s only African-American member complains, “Guys, I am the only black man here! Why are you talking this way?” But I didn’t love.  I didn’t feel the Broadway in the air (not surprising, since the show was produced originally in a gym and does its best to make the stage look like one too).  People pay hundreds of dollars to see a Broadway show, and if it’s not good enough, I’m going to tell you it’s not good enough.  And Lyssie and her team are not good enough for me.  Sorry, Lysistrata, but hopefully your writers will live to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” another day.

The Ego and the Id

Freud's Last Session at New World Stages

         Do I expect too much of New World Stages?

            To any experienced in the theater, the preceding sentence may seem odd and misinformed.  New World Stages has no standing on Broadway.  In fact, the seven-theater establishment is housed in what was once an underground movie theater.  But the Stages have good judgment, after picking up revivals of Rent and Avenue Q, or so it would seem.  But when I went to see the longest running show Off-Broadway this season, New World Stages disappointed me.  They put on a play that was long, inane, and monotonous.  The show was wildly rambling and had little point, describing a fictional meeting between C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold), the deeply theist author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner), the atheist psychologist who managed to link sex to innumerable everyday activities.  To call the play well-developed would be similar in nature to calling Elton John a real man’s man.  It makes no sense to me, and lacks any semblance of a plot.  Sure, the play was complicated, and there were moments where I could detect some things that were meant to be humor, but all in all I was nothing if not a man whose time had been wasted. 

Now, to be fair, there are only two people in the play, and one, Martin Rayner, who usually plays the part of Freud, was absent, leaving dual understudy Tuck Milligan in his place.  Milligan was a boring and unpracticed actor, and the performance seemed to mostly consist of Mark H. Dold attempting to coax Milligan into entering the fun and games of the play’s intensiveness, such as it was.  The actors themselves didn’t seem like they actually liked the work they were performing.  I agree.  The play had all the drama of a fifth grade report on Freud plagiarized from a few of his better books.  Perhaps if I had seen the play with Rayner in the title role, I would have felt differently.  For some reason, though, I don’t think so.

One can’t fault the playwright, Mark St. Germain, for running with an intriguing idea.  In 1939, Freud met with a young professor in his new home of England.  St. Germain was interested in the possibility that this professor could have been C.S. Lewis.  He imagined that “the meeting between these two men [would be] timeless.” The problem with Mr. St. Germain is that he gets so into the idea of religion that he makes the play seem like an amateur debate over the legitimacy of the Catholic Church.  Forgive me for expecting more of two of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, but I believe that if Lewis and Freud did meet (unlikely, since Freud was, at the time, in the midst of spiraling into a deep, solitary depression that would cause his purposeful morphine overdose) their conversation would be much more engaging and much more entertaining.  St. Germain wasn’t up for a premise this bold.  Perhaps in the future he should remain in the realm of bedroom farces or, better yet, one-man shows.  St. Germain’s droning rhetoric would be perfect for a graying man reclining in a director’s chair as the audience succumbs to slumber.

In another place, during a different, less enjoyable season, Session would have impressed me further.  It was just that in one of my more respected Off-Broadway theaters, I wanted more than what I was given.  I craved a show that gave Freud all he deserved, and Lewis all the literary self-references he could possibly spout.  If I could sum up the faults of this show in one sentence, it would be this—It wasn’t enough.  Good enough? Maybe.  Not substantive enough? That could be it.  But the key word is enough.  Theater should exceed expectations, astound you in a part of your sub-conscious where before you had only stored dreary reflection.  Freud’s Last Session did not give me that.  It stayed firmly in reality, something the arts are meant to transcend.  Sorry, New World Stages, but one dud ain’t bad.  Maybe next time.