Jerusalem

Jerusalem

Aug 20, 2011

with Kara

Orch P 8

Note: This review was written after postshow discussion with Kara and incorporates some of her thoughts, too.

I was so pleased to see Jerusalem before it closed as it had been on my must-see list for months.

The problem in reviewing Jerusalem is knowing how, or even where to start. Do I focus on the acting? On the script? On the story as it appears on surface level or as it appears when one delves deeper?

Alright. Let’s start with the surface. There’s a man named Rooster who lives in the woods in the vicinity of an English town. He’s been there for about twenty years, drinking, rabble-rousing, and welcoming whoever wants to join him. These have mostly been young teenagers, some of whom have stuck with him into their adulthood and others who are now trying to drive him out of the woods and keep their own children from him as they’ve decided he is unsavory and driving the property values down. As the play begins, city officials nail an eviction notice to his trailer and the rest of play carries on with his friends in turns facing and denying what is about to happen as Rooster remains in denial, too. Even his ex-wife and child visiting fail to bring him around. To further complicate matters, a teenaged girl is missing and her father, formerly one of Rooster’s teenaged party-goers is convinced Rooster has her. This is all juxtaposed against an annual festival taking place in the town that day and

memories of how Rooster, a former stuntman until one near-death-experience too many, made the town council end his days as the highlight of the festival. The play ends with the girl found in Rooster’s trailer, where she’s been sleeping off the previous night’s party and hiding from her father, Rooster beaten by the father and his friends, and him alone to stand off the roar of the bulldozers in the distance.

Scratch a bit beneath this hilarious and at times disturbing surface and one finds a play overwhelming with meaning, metaphor, fairytale. The story now: There’s a troll in the woods who makes noise, or is he a Pied Piper who lures children away and never gives some of them back, or is he indescribable, magic and powerful, wonderful and terrifying? He lives in his own paradise (Jerusalem of the title is based on the William Blake poem, made into a popular English hymn, which envisions mythic England where Jesus walked.) He knows all of your secrets, but there’s no threat about him, only happiness and fun, but careful! Because if you threaten him, he’ll bring out his arsenal, and what he has is stronger than what you’ve got because he knows everything about you. He’ll freeze you to the spot with what he knows. It amazed you when you were a child, but now that you’re an adult, he’s your greatest fear. You try to keep your children away, using the excuse that kids shouldn’t be drinking at their age, not like you were, but that’s a surface lie. Beneath it is the fear that your children will grow up to be like you, to be as terrified as you are of brazen honesty and things that should never be said about who you used to be and the things that frightened you then. The missing girl appears dressed as a battered angel, her costume in tatters that wars with her innocence as Rooster gives her a place to retain it and the rest of the world strives to strip it away. She’s nearing the age where she’ll have to decide if she’ll be loyal to Rooster or go against him.

Rooster tells stories of gaining promises of protection from giants, of being born with a cape, a dagger, and teeth, tells them with such vigor that even as adults his remaining friends are hesitant, frightened even, to disbelieve. When one dares call him on his bluff, Rooster hangs back knowing the bravado won’t last long, and indeed it doesn’t. The young man falls back under Rooster’s spell immediately. For now, the girl hides in the woods, needing the innocence and shelter he offers. But Rooster has to fear the ones who don’t feel his magic anymore, those who see something threatening in it. As the play ends, he calls upon the giants sworn to protect him. The curtain falls to the sounds of their lumbering feet drawing near to smite his enemies.

Mark Rylance won his second Tony Award for playing Rooster and a slew of UK awards that I am too lazy to look up. I think a good many people were there because of that and didn’t like the play. I’m not sure why, but it seems to be one that people either love or hate. I loved it and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Baby It's You

Baby It's You
Broadhurst Theater
Mezz E 113
April 26, 2011 with Brian

Baby It's You is the story of Florence Greenberg (Tony Winner for "The Drowsy Chaperone" Beth Leavel, who is very good with what she gets), a New Jersey Jewish housewife who starts a record label, pulls four girls off her daughter's school playground, and dubs them the Shirelles. They go on to become one of the greatest girl groups of all time. Ms. Greenberg has an extramarital affair with her business partner and producer Luther Dixon (Allan Louis), a black man. Early on the show establishes Mr. Greenberg as a "women belong in the kitchen, let me crush your dreams" husband, and steamrolled over any possible plot tension by making the whole audience hate him right off. Well of course Ms. Greenberg should have an affair! Her husband's a jerk! And of course she should remain married despite not loving him, it's the 1950's! People would talk if they divorced! Plus Mr. Dixon's black!

This two hour twenty minute jukebox musical is jammed so tight with hits from 1958-1965, including songs by The Shirelles, Dionne Warwick, Chuck Jackson, and others, that there is almost no space for anything else, by which I mean plot development. A DJ named Jocko (Geno Henderson, also playing Chuck Jackson and other roles) acts as 'narrator' (that's really the wrong word) who pops in during act one to tell us via multimedia the top songs, film, and theater of the year, and then largely disappears in act two until the very end when his reappearance emphasizes how unnecessary these interludes are. Wait, I know what he reminded me of. Remember how in old old old productions a pretty girl would walk across the front of the stage with a sign that said "Chicago, 1814" or "Ten years later" or "Back at the ranch"? Yeah. That's it.

The story develops under the impetus of the songs in lieu of more than a few lines of dialogue, but when "Soldier Boy", a song inspired by the idea of a girl being true to her boyfriend who is heading to Vietnam becomes a vow of fidelity between (the still married) Ms. Greenberg and Mr. Dixon, my tackiness meter exploded. I can (by combating my boredom) get over that we're supposed to be on board with the cheating because Mr. Greenberg is a jerk (read: man of his time), but this? Really? No.

Today, news came down that various real-life figures, including members of the Shirelles, Ms. Warwick, and Mr. Jackson are suing the producers for using their personas without permission. This could explain my complaint that the Shirelles characters had no development. Granted, with forty (!!!) songs squeezed into the show, there's no time to develop anyone, but the Shirelles remain from start to finish the same bubbly nineteen-year-olds.

Part of me feels like a grouch for not enjoying this show. The songs are amazing! We know and love them! Everyone around us loved it. People were standing up and dancing, some actually in the aisles. Me, I enjoyed act one. I settled in, loved the music and waved away the absence of development. But at the start of act two, I realized that I was done with it because it was the same thing. Completely. The second act of anything should buckle the audience in and be different from Act one. Grab, squeeze, amaze, release. The singing is great, particularly The Shirelles and Luther Dixon. I'd get the album for that. But I'm not a fan of jukebox musicals that exist solely to shove songs down our throats. Jersey Boys avoids that. Boy From Oz avoided that. This doesn't. It may as well be a revue, but instead someone decided to stick an underdeveloped story in there.

Who knows what the fate of the show will be with the lawsuit underway, but I have a feeling that after the reviews come out tomorrow, it won't be great.

I'm going to go ahead and single out the ladies who played the Shirelles, who looked like they were having a lot of fun, and they, along with Mr. Louis, at least were able to make me not completely despise the show. So thanks to Christina Sajous, Kyra de Costa, Erica Ash, and Crystal Starr. (I had to look up the names of the real Shirelles on Wikipedia to make sure I got the right actresses because aside from Shirley and Beverly, the show skims right over them.)

I believe Brian summed it up best: "Well, that happened."

Yes, yes it did.

Equus

Equus
September 5, 2008
8:00 PM
Orch F 112

I've wanted to see Equus since I read it in college, and I will admit that when I found out Daniel Radcliffe was going to be in it, I was kind of pissed off. I didn't have anything against him, but I knew that some people would be going to see Harry Potter nekkid and the production ran the risk of turning into a meat market. Or, worse, fans shrieking at inappropriate moments would ruin the play. None of that happened at this first preview. In a packed house, there wasn't a peep of entrance applause.*

Richard Griffiths** and Mr. Radcliffe reprise their roles as the psychotherapist and troubled boy he is treating for brutally blinding six horses. After playing together in Harry Potter (Mr. Griffiths is the vituperative Uncle Vernon) and in this production in London, our two leads have an easy vibe with each other. God knows they need it. Equus is a difficult play and I imagine it's been butchered more often than it's succeeded. This production is a success. It's creepy, sometimes scary, and intense, but more than all that, it sweeps you up in the slow pulling of facts from the traumatized, nightmare-ridden boy to piece together what happened and why. The result is uncomfortable; the performances from the leads are understated and without inhibition—qualities that seem to contradict but are key to the play working, especially in Mr. Radcliffe's role.

The boy isn't the interesting thing in Equus. It's the people around him: his parents whose conflicting views—the mother ultra-religious, the father an atheist—have conflated to instill in their son a desire to worship horses instead of the conventional God; it's the therapist who is so good at treating children's neuroses that he dreams of tearing out their insides because he knows that this is what he is essentially doing and envies their fantasies as compared to his dull life; it's the magistrate who sees hope for the boy in the soulless treatment he'll be given; this is what intrigues far more than a boy with a fantasy.

The final scene in which Mr. Radcliffe recreates the violent act that got him put into care is explosive and harrowing; he runs up walls, throws himself against them, screaming as the horses surround him, stamping and closing in, smoke billowing, until Mr. Griffiths captures him with a blanket and holds him as he shakes until finally he can be lowered to his bed. Then the final monologue—the psychotherapist irrevocably changed by this boy, feeling the trap of his profession, and the masks of the horses hovering above him, knowing that his life will go on and on and on unchanged, without risk, following the mores of society, training his patients to do the same, and turning them all into horses—brilliant, strong creatures who do as they are told despite having the ability to trample the humans who control them, and becoming one himself.



*Interestingly, this article from 2007 mentions the London incarnation of this production as an example of how entrance applause is harder to come by in London.

**Mr. Griffiths is notorious for stopping shows to lecture audience members who let their phones go off (leaving much of the History Boys audience quaking), so before the show and at intermission in addition to the recorded announcement, ushers went up the aisle row by row and made the announcement again and again. I've been to this theater many times and never had this happen before, so I can only guess that Mr. Griffiths' reputation precedes him.

Kicking a Dead Horse

Kicking a Dead Horse
By Sam Shepard
July 20, 2008 3:00 PM
Orch E6

And so, we round out this year's membership at The Public Theater. Before I get onto the play, which I didn't care for, I want to say that Stephen Rea was very good. His American accent was right on, and you could even pick him for a former Westerner. There was only one place where he dropped it a little, but considering how well he'd done the rest of the time, I think that was purposeful. Any problems I have with the play, are due to the writing, not to him, and not to the direction.

So…

The dead horse and the grave it lies beside are metaphors for something to do with America. I'm not sure what, as I don't have much of a head for metaphors, despite, yes, being a writer. However, as I watched "Kicking a Dead Horse", I wished that I did. Because it would make the play boring on a whole other level, aside from the dull-in-its-own-right-no-special-interpretation-needed level I was watching. Stephen Rea plays an American art dealer who decides to leave New York on a whim and return to the West, where he grew up. He and his favorite mare will have a jaunt across the Badlands, and return home to his wife.

Except the horse dies on the first day, leaving him stranded with no idea where he is.

So he talks. A lot. About his life. About things that matter to him, and don't matter much to us. He starts talking to himself, in another voice. At first I thought he was playing good conscience/bad conscience, then that he was channeling Quentin Crisp and had some kind of personality disorder (this one won out when Quentin forced him to throw the horse-related accoutrement into the grave). Then a girl came out of the grave and gave him his hat back. He was looking through his binoculars and singing a song about Crazy Horse rambling around until the "butchers cut him down", and didn't see her slinking around in her decidedly non-weatherproof nightie. Pretty sure the girl was his wife.

He probably killed her. She heads back underground once she puts the hat on him.

(Nothing in the play really says that, I'm just doing open interpretation for my own entertainment.)

He throws the hat back. I think he thought he got it himself (again w/ the split personality).

His big quest is to get the horse in the grave. He thinks it's not going on out of some kind of post-dead willpower. He gets all depressed about something…maybe his trip going wrong, and the horse being dead, and him having Quentin Crisp (who I now think is his wife) in his head, so he tells the horse he'll go in the grave with him, for company, and they can both be dead together.

Then he puts his tent up and prays for the first time, ever. He doesn't pray for rescue, but for the sun to be up. It works.

Things seem on the up and up. Then he decides he wants the hat back.

So he jumps in the grave to get it.

And horse falls on top of him.

Figures, doesn't it?

The End

The Tragedy of Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth
July 7, 2008, 7PM
In Battery Park, with Brian

New York Classical Theatre stages productions that make use of the site. Audiences follow the actors around the location—in this case, Battery Park—and stop from time to time to watch a scene. This was the 2nd of their productions that I’ve seen. The running around actually helps a good deal in keeping focus.

As would be expected from ‘classical theatre’, the show was done in period dress (or as close as they could get to it.) And there were swords! Witnessing all that clanging and grunting had all the children in the audience enrapt.

I wasn’t overly enamoured with Bryant Mason’s Macbeth (though he did have a healthy beard) or with Joshua Decker’s McDuff, whose great emotional scene was rendered all but moot by his having to SHOUT OVER THE FERRIES, but I loved Duncan and his son (Stephen and Cooper D’Ambrose), one with the easy manner of a kindly king, the other tottering towards righteousness. The witches were fun. They weaved in and out of the action as soldiers, swordfighting against the men, and acted as guides telling the audience where to go next.

In addition to being, all told, an engaging production, it offered numerous photo ops. The Statue of Liberty was in the background during many of the scenes, and an extended scene took place inside Castle Clinton with the buildings of lower Manhattan looming overhead. What a pity that pictures weren’t allowed.

ETA: As the commenter below rightly pointed out, I haven't mentioned the women. I agree with everything s/he said, except for the 'not done before' part, because it has been done before. In fact, the last two times I've seen Macbeth, the witches have been blended into the story in other parts, so they are always around. Now, what was interesting about this production is that the witches actually did battle. They were the ones who killed the soldiers in battle, or, in the case of Banquo's son Fleance, helped him to safety. I found that very interesting. Plus, girls with swords=awesome. And yeah, it was rather creepy/ghosty. Lady Macbeth was good, but I thought she was difficult to hear, so that stopped me from laying praise down.

The Bacchae and Legally Blonde

The Bacchae
National Theatre of Scotland at Lincoln Center
July 6, 2008, 3 PM
Orch T 110

The last time the National Theatre of Scotland landed in New York, it was with a production that held everyone spellbound (Black Watch, returning to Brooklyn in October, get your tickets now!), so The Bacchae had some pretty large shoes to fill. Sadly, they don’t manage it, and one problem is exactly that, the size. Namely, of the theater. The huge stage in the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, adorned with no set whatsoever, is far too cavernous for this tragedy.

The Bacchae has a petulant god, dancing women in the throes of madness, mob violence, cross-dressing, and infanticide. Such a show needs to be done in a way that is totally over the top. We need freaky lighting, spooky sounds, carnivale masks, puppets… Instead, we get a blank stage that bursts into flames once and some very stiff acting by the ‘humans’. The god Dionysus is played by Alan Cumming, who, acting-wise, is never less than totally relaxed. Dressed in gold llame skirt and vest, he is lowered upside down from the ceiling for his entrance, giving you the hope that something exciting is about to happen. (This could also be due to my memory of a Robbie Williams concert in which he entered the same way, albeit with pants on.) Alas, we are instead treated to a very long opening monologue about the History of Dionysus. In summation: Dad, Zeus. Mum, human. Dionysus, bitter and out for vengeance on people who deny he is a proper god. All his wrath is focused on one family, and the story is all about how he stays in disguise and arranges the son’s death.

He’s surrounded by a chorus of women in red dresses (the Bacchae) who break into song from time to time. Occasionally, he joins them. I’d forgotten what a good voice for rock he has. Stronger than I remembered, too. The songs are upbeat; the lyrics are decidedly not. (Given the plot, how could they be?)

However, comparisons of this production to Cabaret are wishful thinking. Apart from Alan, there’s not much here to recommend it. Aside from the songs, which the ladies hold up quite capably with or without him, any scene he’s not in falls flat. At one point, the audience held in a collective sigh of dismay upon realizing we were about to be subjected to a long conversation between mother and son near the end of the intermission-less 2 hours.

The production was so sapped of emotional depth that even the scenes in which characters are humiliated were met with a lack of response by the audience. So Dionysus got his wig ripped off? And he’s going to be beaten? He’s a god—he’ll bounce back. So Dionysus is tricking a guy into wearing a dress? And he’s going to get set upon by wild women? Hey, he looks good in blue. You just don’t care.

Basically, we learn 2 things from The Bacchae. 1. Don’t make your gods mad. 2. Alan Cumming has great legs. In fact, watching him during a long scene in which he sits near the edge of the stage and drops one over the side and does nothing else was more interesting than the scene itself.

Legally Blonde
July 6, 2008 7:00 PM
Rear Mezz H13

I unwittingly had a theme day, theatrically, as what does Legally Blonde feature? A Greek chorus! The 3 girls who shadow Elle made for a more interesting story and a more convincing chorus than the Bacchae, and, as we know since many people are familiar with the plot of this show, that is saying a lot.

Legally Blonde…if you took the songs out, you would have 19 lines of dialogue, and still know the entire story. The bulk of the show is icing, and in act 1 I was getting tired of it. It’s not often I go to a musical and wish they would stop singing.

However, I thought the entire cast was great. Laura Bell Bundy is nearing her end-date, which is why I finally got myself in gear to see this show. She’s brilliant. So. Darn. Perky. Christian Borle was quite enjoyable as Emmett, and I was surprised and pleased to see Michael Rupert from Falsettos as the teacher. Orfeh was fantastic. I don’t think I knew who she was, but what a voice!

Act 2 was much better than act 1, both song and dialogue-wise. Also, it was shorter.

But that song, my God, that incessant song!

Oh my God, oh my God you guys…

EEEEK!!!

Elling

Elling
September 29, 2007
Trafalgar Studios, London
Play by Simon Bent, adapted from the Norwegian film and play

I wanted to see Elling for two reasons. First, it originated at The Bush Theatre, where I did an internship in 1998. (Coincidentally, Simon Bent wrote Sugar, Sugar, the play they were doing at the time.) Second, it had John Simm as one of the leads and was getting good reviews. At the time, I was only familiar with Mr. Simm from the last few episodes of Doctor Who, season 3 of the new run of that show. Since then, I've seen him in a number of things, but Elling was the first one to wake me up to what a versatile actor he could be as he played someone the complete opposite of his Doctor Who character. What follows is the review I wrote in my notebook shortly after seeing the show, fixed up for clarity. Apparently I was thinking too fast for my writing to handle, and some of the sentences take some brainwork to interpret.

John Simm gives a precise, exacting (say the same thing twice, why don't you?) performance as a sheltered mama's boy rooming with a fellow former psychward inmate in a government-subsidized apartment as part of an experiment to reintroduce the non-violent insane into society, rather like a program for releasing animals into the wild. All Elling (Simm) and Jbarne (Adrian Bower) have to do to keep their freedom is prove to their social worker Frank (Keir Charles) that they know how to act like normal people.

'Elling' is a buddy-play about men who are a little off but understand friendship more than most other men. They take it seriously, too. When Frank suggests that Elling's attachment to his mother in lieu of going out with a woman is due to a preference for males, he responds: "Don't be ridiculous. True, I have done my fair share of 'male bonding' as we were taught to say in the hospital. For which I am grateful, I don't mind who hears me say it.... What is there to be ashamed of, unless you fear something. We have re-entered the community as citizens. But I will never betray mother for another woman."

Jbarne comes off as the more immediately sympathetic of the two. He is a child in a man's body, oafish and innocent. His one goal is to find out what sex is like. It is all he talks about, with the same wonder as a five year old hoping to see Santa. Elling is a harder nut to crack. He is OCD, and debilitatingly uncomfortable around people. "That's not my forte" is his response whenever someone asks him to do something. Mr. Simm handles Elling's stiffness well, but just as you get fed up with him, he allows in glimpses of how immensely difficult it is to be this man. In one such moment, Elling attempts to go out alone. A skipping little girl with a doll terrifies him and he winds up catatonic on the ground.

As sex is the key to Jbarne's reintroduction into society, a secret passion for writing poetry is Elling's. He meets a poet who is just reclusive enough to understand him without threatening him, and just friendly enough to engage him.

Friendship is the most important thing, especially to Elling, who has no friends aside from Jbarne. When Jbarne chooses to spend the night with a girl, leaving Elling alone, Elling smashes the match-stick house Jbarne painstakingly made for him as a Christmas gift. Mr. Simm gave all of Elling's dialogue in staccato, and this delivery resulted in one of the funniest moments following Jbarne's 'betrayal'. The two had kept their beds in the same room, but now Elling pushed Jbarne's out. "At first I was..." he says as he goes. "And then I was..." As the audience realized that he was, in rhythm, saying the opening lines of "I will survive", Jbarne returned, just in time for Elling to snap, in perfect time, "so you're back."

In the end, after being convinced that they are hopeless cases, Elling and Jbarne discover they aren't so far from normal after all. The birth of a neighbor's baby leads them both into a celebratory hangover. Elling tells Frank to take them away. They give up--they're drunk and Jbarne has been sick on the stoop. Society isn't for them. He is astonished when Frank refuses and reports his discovery to Jbarne: "It's normal to vomit when you have children!"

Their path to normal adulthood is well and truly begun.