Satellites

This was a pretty buzzed about show, what with Sandra Oh and all. Unfortunately, it was also a very annoying, frustrating, not particularly entertaining or enlightening show. And I like Sandra Oh. And Asians on stage in general.

This show was about race and discrimination. It didn't subtly make any surprising or enlightening statements about race, it just kind of shoved things that weren't really surprises in your face. And it was annoying. Just like every single character in the play. So here's the deal. An interracial upper middle class couple have a child. The mother (Sandra Oh) is Korean, the father is black. The black father is from an adopted family, and thus has a ne'er-do-well white brother. The Korean mother also didn't really know her parents. They want to raise their child so she knows her background, so they pick a mostly black neighborhood in Brooklyn and hire a grandmotherly Korean nanny. As the play ensues, we see the black father having prejudices against other blacks, and the Korean mother against another Korean. It becomes a class and age discrimination. And the villain, or the most villainous or the most looked down upon, is the white male. I've had some great discussions on the power play based on gender, class, and race, but this show just didn't play it right.

However, as I said before, the show just kind of shoves it in your face, and not in a way that makes you think or enjoy it, moreso in a way that just kind of annoys you. Every character is annoying and unreasonable. They seem to be smart characters but just seem so clueless that's it's unbelievable. Each one is basically trying to throw themselves the biggest pity party ever, and instead of pitying any of them, I really just wanted to throw rocks at them. It was that annoying.

I think the cast did a fine job for the wholly unlikable characters they had to work with. I think the sets were pretty darn spiffy, and they flowed well - kind of like cameras panning through rooms in a house. The show, however, just didn't seem to bring me anywhere or tell me anything or make me leave the theater feeling fulfilled or satisfied in anyway whatsoever. I think the show was trying to say something, or make some sort of statement, I just think there was a better way to present it and a better one to make.

Arabian Night

So now I'm the one that's behind in posting. But Spring Awakening just inspired me to post, even though I don't get to post for any shows that were nearly as good as it. But here goes anyway. We saw Arabian Night a few weeks ago at the Classic Stage Company. I'm going to give it a pretty neutral rating. Partly because we weren't totally sure what it was about, but it had a really cool set, and it was staged pretty neatly.

So basically the show is set in this apartment building, in which the water is turned off, and everyone is really hot (temperature-wise). One girl is like really loopy, and one guy becomes a genie, and one guy has a lot of sex with women who aren't there, and one guy is the narrator/building manager. It kind of shows these people intermingling, and somehow it melds into these people walking into like Arabian tents, and genies in bottles, all while being in this apartment building. It was a little weird. But it wasn't bad.

All the dialogue was kind of in third person style, where they don't actually speak to each other, but rather narrate what they are doing. This annoyed the hell out of me in "Apparition" (that might be my most-mentioned show in this blog, and I saw that before we started posting. Let me remind you if you've forgotten: WORST SHOW EVER). But in this production, I think it worked. Maybe because there was action.

As I mentioned previously, the set was pretty neat; it was kind of this big apartment building built of pipes and lights and stuff. It was very sparse, but the way the rooms/balconies/elevator etc were laid out worked well, and it was pretty neat.

The cast wasn't bad, the show wasn't bad. So basically what I'm trying to say is that it wasn't a bad night at the theater, but it wasn't anything to write home about. Or write on a blog about. Sorry this posting kind of sucked.

Spring Awakening

I adored this show - simply adored it. This is the first show in quite some time that I've wished had never ended - during the last song, I literally was sad that this two hour event was coming to a close.

Spring Awakening is a new musical playing at the Atlantic Theatre (their first ever musical!) with music composed by Duncan Sheik (yes, the Duncan Sheik you may remember back in the day for the song, "Barely Breathing") and book and lyrics by Steven Sater. Apparently, the two met while meditating at a Buddhist temple.The musical is an adaptation of the play by Frank Wedekind from the late 1800s and is directed by Michael Mayer (known for Thoroughly Modern Millie). Back in the day, this story of young love and exploration into sex, masturbation, and themes of rape was quite scandalous, and it didn't get produced until the early 1900s - several years after it was written. Today, the themes are a bit less shocking but just as powerful.

A cast of very young actors play the German schoolchildren in the musical. They sing of their oppression by their parents, school teachers, and society in general. This is just about the age where kids start to discover their hormones and each other - what a feeling! The leads, Melchior and Wendla fall in love and have several beautiful scenes together. Moritz, Melchior's good friend at school goes through an especially hard time and his life ends in disaster. All of the other young boys and girls complement these relationships wonderfully. As they sing, they pull microphones out of well-stashed places in their costumes - they begin to sing and the music is completely contemporary - whereas the text they've been delivering is straight from Wedekind's original play from the 1800s. It's a nice combination that in theory wouldn't seem to work so well - but Michael Mayer + Sheik and Sater have turned this into a fantastic piece. There are several very energetically choreographed numbers that are particularly fun.

Here's something important - I chose to take Atlantic up on their "theatre for the price of a movie" special $10 tickets, and get this - you get to sit on stage. When you enter the Atlantic, you see that it's a pretty intimate theatre (a renovated church) with a small stage. We sat on the side of the stage and I noticed that there were certain chairs in all of the rows without numbers. Of course, as you can imagine, the actors use these chairs during almost all of the scenes. Sitting here, I felt like I was really a part of the show, without feeling awkward. It was one of the best theatre-going experiences I've had in a long time. There's talk of this show transferring to Broadway - but I say get the $10 tickets while you still can and enjoy it in this lovely space.

Faith Healer

Kevin and I finally got around to seeing Faith Healer last night at the Booth Theatre. We went the affordable way and bought standing room tickets - my first experience doing so. I have to say that at the Booth, standing room isn't bad at all, it's actually quite good. We made the mistake of grabbing two orchestra seats after intermission, and both being extremely tired, drifted a bit through the last two monologues of the show - so here's the best I can recount.

Faith Healer, if you don't know, is a play performed entirely in monologue form - four monologues delivered by three actors. Ralph Fiennes (one of the best actors of our time) plays Francis Hardy, the illusive title character of the show, the Faith Healer. He opens the show with the first monologue - starting by speaking what I thought was a foreign language or some sort of jibberish - but what turned out to be the names of towns in Scotland and Wales, over and over. He began to recount the times he spent travelling between these towns "performing" his gift of healing on the less fortunate in each place. Frank tells of his manager, Teddy, and wife, Grace and the experiences they've had while travelling and faith healing. Frank has a commanding presence on stage - not commanding in the sense of powerful, but mysterious and most definitely narcissitic. His confidence in himself and his gift, although recounted as shaky at times, comes forth very strong here.

As the next monologue begins, we see Cherry Jones playing Grace, Frank's wife. She appears sitting in a chair, cigarette in hand and whisky in her glass not too far off. She's crying, and appears completely lost in her own world of sorrow and confusion at what her life has become. Grace goes on to tell the audience of her travels with Frank and Teddy and how it must have felt to be the wife (usually referred to as mistress) of such a man. She explains that the couple had several failed attempts at a child, and lastly a stillborn baby as their final attempt (or did they? This remains one of the play's several unanswered questions). Grace seems tormented, but as much as she tries to share it with the audience, things seem completely bottled up inside of her own head. I, like many of the other reviews I've read, have to say that Cherry was miscast in this role. Coming from seeing her most recently in Doubt, she's much too strong of a woman to play what I see as the weak, beaten-down role of Grace. Also, please send this woman a decent dialect coach - her accent was quite terrible. However, I do love Cherry and can't wait to see what she's in next.

The third monologue belongs to Ian McDiarmid - and this man is marvelous, having recently earned a much-deserved Tony award for this role as Teddy, Frank's manager. He charms us by recounting his days as manager of several other quirky acts - his dog that plays the bagpipes, and a woman who can charm over 120 pigeons into doing whatever she asks. Teddy's stories make us laugh at the utter ridiculous of his life - seeing how happily he recounts these memories....until, he begins to talk of his days with the Faith Healer - whom he describes as "of mediocre talent at best." Teddy describes his time with Frank and Grace, and begins to lose his humor when talking of Grace's incident with losing her child. These three certainly did go through some terrible times together. Seems as if Teddy had taken quite a liking to Grace, who knows if he once was in love with her or not? Ian left the stage with thunderous applause - what a welcome monologue he had just delivered.

Ralph appears one last time as the Faith Healer and we see that this moment he is recounting is simply for the stage - he is living in the moment he is talking to us on stage. He recounts the difficulty in going back to Ireland and the events of one certain night with four Irish men and his attempt to try and perform his talents on them.

The show raises lots of questions that ultimately remained unanswered. As I left the theatre last night, I thought I had missed some of these answers, but I've come to realize that this is how the playwright, Brian Friel, has structured this piece of work. So that we ask ourselves the sort of tough life questions that can't always be answered - always searching for those answers. I think Faith Healer is a respectable piece of theatre, possibly not the most enthralling work, but certainly worth seeing three talented actors deliver monologues. Especially because we don't see this type of show performed very often at all. As I read in another review, don't be put off by not seeing these three actors on stage together - until the curtain call that is. This plays nicely on one of the major themes of the show - "that no matter how closely connected our lives are, our memories of and feelings about that shared reality are forever separate and apart."

The Water's Edge

This play was all right. We saw it on opening night, which was pretty fun. There were a few cool people there, but not too many. Among them, we had Cynthia Nixon, Lynn Redgrave, Eric Bogosian, and a bunch of Second Stage actors. No Meryl Streep.

The play itself I thought was pretty good. Nothing stunning, but definitely not bad. I kind of liked it. It helps that we were told it was based on a Greek play, as the show really unfolds into a very Greek tragedy. The show basically tells about this guy who left his wife and kids seventeen years ago and comes back with his girlfriend to try and get his house.

So the show was pretty good, it had some funny moments, and I enjoyed its darker ending. The cast was decent. Kate Burton was pretty good, but the girl who played the girlfriend needs to learn how to use inflection and talk naturally (i.e. "I..I..I..." should not sound like "aye aye aye!"). But she was whoa bosomy.

So I would say the show is recommendable, but not on the top of the list. Like go see it if you feel like it, but there's no need to run to it.

Pig Farm

Okay, so Lydia and I are both slacking on postings. I think it's the heat. In any case, we saw Pig Farm a couple weeks ago, and it was great. It's by the writer and director of Urinetown, which is an incredibly wonderful and hilarious show. And this show was hilarious in the same ridiculous style.

Basically the show tells the story of a man and a wife on a pig farm with a kid who is working for them. The pig farm gets audited by the government and chaos ensues. It's basically great.

The show starts out a little slow, but it's still funny, and by the end we were both like laughing so much it hurt. It helped that there were these two little old ladies next to us that were basically falling off their chairs laughing. It was great. The ending is phenomenal. It was a little tough, because the main actress on stage was pretty much laughing the whole last scene as well, when she was supposed to be crying.

I thought the cast was great, a little less impressed by the main guy, but very impressed by Logan Marshall-Green (trey in the OC). And of course Dennis O'Hare can do no wrong.

So if you're looking for a good laughing night at the theater, go see this show.

I'm really behind - summary of several shows..

So time has been getting away from me lately and I've been so behind on posting - I think Kevin will stop letting me be his blog partner if I don't post soon, so here goes.

First, we saw Some Girl(s) at Lucille Lortel a few weeks back before it opened. I read the reviews and agreed with them - the show is pretty mediocre. Basic premise - "Guy" - Eric McCormack, is a man about to get married who goes back to four of his ex-girlfriends to try and make amends before the wedding. Eric doesn't have to stretch himself too far here in this role. His portrayal of Will in Will and Grace comes across the same here, except he's playing a straight, not gay man. The women of the cast are a pretty nice ensemble. Brooke Smith was the weakest, so it's a good thing she came on stage first. I remember hoping that her scene would end soon. Fran Drescher is actually a stand-out (if you can stand the toned-down Queens accent) in which she plays a professor with whom Eric had a fling. Maura Tierney is the most believable ex-girlfriend. For a moment I was hoping for a picture-perfect ending but "Guy" really screws things up in the end for everyone. As a woman, I really left this play a bit angry at men in general. I guess it can be said that both men and women really know how to screw up relationships, but here the emphasis is completely on men. For getting so much hype, this show was really only okay for me. I'm still not sure how I'm feeling about the playwright, Neil Labute. I've seen Fat Pig and This Is How It Goes, from last season. Seems like all of his plays have big name stars for really mediocre writing. It'll be interesting to see some more of his work in the future.

Second show is Stuff Happens at the Public. Wow. What a show. Absolutely. Fantastic. It's a poignant look at the Bush Administration from the start of Bush's first administration through current events happening up to today. David Hare, a brit (known also for his screenplay, The Hours), has written the play. His voice seems so accurate and so angry in many instances that you forget he's not American, at least I did. So the play is set behind-the-scenes showing us the intimate conversations of the Bush Cabinet - especially Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell. It rehashes all of the events that have happened over the past 6 years or so. I should say that it's a very powerful to hear all of these happenings rehashed in a 2 hour play. For myself, there was a lot of anger at the events of the Bush administration and the situation our country is in to this day. A very smart powerful piece of theatre - whatever your political viewpoint, I say go see it...now...before it closes.

The third show that I saw is titled In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Connelly Theatre. It was presented eloquently by the Keen Company. The play is set during Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing with the Atomic Energy Commission. It's set in 1954, the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism. As you can imagine, this clearance hearing seems rather ridiculous. Questions are thrown back and forth from the attorneys and witnesses are brought in for accounts of the past. The play centers around its dialogue. There is very little action except for the coming and going of witnesses. But I must say that for three hours, I was enthralled with the words going around the stage. The end result shows us that Oppenheimer was denied his security clearance, but has become one of the most respected figures of his day. It just goes to show how heavily certain political viewpoints can bias our country. I'd say check this show out as well!

Burleigh Grime$

So here's a first. I may actually be posting this before the show I was at actually ends. Yup, that's right folks. We left at intermission. This is the first time I've ever done this. But we decided we'd rather be walking home in the rain than sitting in a comfortable theater watching this show. In fact, I'd rather be cutting my arm off with a rusty spoon than watching this show. Let's put this in context. I stayed through the entirety of "Good Vibrations." I turned to Lydia about 15 minutes in and said, "I think I liked 'I Love You Because' better..." About 30 minutes in a cell phone rang, and I turned to Lydia and said, "Oh, that helps." Yeah, it was bad. No, it was worse than bad. It was awful. Wait, wait - MIND-NUMBINGLY AWFUL. Good.

I don't even know where to begin. The writing was awful. And the staging. And the acting. Okay, so it was about this bad man on Wall Street who was in cahoots with a TV reporter. This heart-of-gold assistant wants to get to the bottom of the fraud. I don't know what happens next. I should have stayed. Ouch. My brain just hit me for thinking that.

So the jokes were really bad, they were just put in randomly, and they weren't funny. And lines that were supposed to be funny were delivered really badly, with really, awk, ward pause, s. Oh, and there was music! Music written by David Yazbek, who is a respectable Broadway composer. So in the middle of a scene, music would start, like they were supposed to sing, but they really didn't. Instead, they like spoke in rhythm, or spoke during breaks, or just seemed really awkward presenting bad dialogue with music in the background. It was like watching a puppy drown and not being able to help it. Of course, instead of singing, they would dance. And not like, oh cool, good theater dancing. No, like junior high dancing where the kid with really bad BO is trying to dance with the girl who's four inches taller than him, but they're trying to impress everyone by doing a spin, no, a turn. While they're talking about trading stocks or something.

There was this line in the description online that said, "partial nudity." Not even that could redeem it. It was this really awkward scene where this 40 year old stripper is dancing on a table in a bikini while three guys are talking about something which I don't recall but probably did not advance the plot or provide entertainment of any sort. It was awkward. By the way, the stripper also plays an assistant who dances with a coffee pot. That's one of those roles that don't gender profile and aren't demeaning at all. I think she had a line. Oh yeah, because she also played the bitchy, spoiled (unfunny) wife.

So if you don't know, the show is playing at New World Stages, formerly Dodger Stages, which is like a 5 theater complex of off-Broadway shows. One of them there is really good ("Altar Boyz"). Unfortunately, that show does not have an intermission so we couldn't hop into it. And Lydia says you can't hop into theater anyway. Psh.

It's times like this where I wish this blog had more than our three readers, all of whom are not based in New York City, because then I would feel like I am contributing to society by saying DO NOT WASTE YOUR LIFE OR MONEY BY SEEING THIS SHOW. Unless you overdosed on Prozac and you need something to bring you down.

The Busy World Is Hushed

So this was an interesting play. We saw the first preview of this one, which Lydia doesn't enjoy, but I really do. I think it's a pretty special thing to be the first audience to ever see a play shown to the public, and while some of it might still be a little rough, I think if you enjoy it at that point, it's much more telling about the play. And I really rather enjoyed this play.

Again, it was first preview, and Jill Clayburgh stumbled about her lines a bit, but I thought it was still pretty solid. There were some stretches that were a bit cheesy and awkward that could have been cut, but there was also an audience post-show discussion with the playwright, the director, and the artistic director that really put some of the more jarring or interesting lines into perspective.

The play basically featured Jill Clayburgh as a widowed minister who has turned to God after the death of her husband and raises a son who is a free spirit. The son has hit the age of his father when he died, and is trying to learn more about him. Hamish Linklater comes in to work for Jill Clayburgh in writing a new book about a newly discovered Gospel. The play progresses and shows the impact that each character has on the relationship between the other two, and it is really quite interesting.

I really enjoyed the play. Again it had some points that were cheesy and sappy and a little excessive, some dialogue that was a little preachy and forced that could be cut, but I'm sure it will work itself out. But I think it did say some interesting things about religion, homosexuality, and family relationships. There was an interesting interplay between the characters, and the power they had over each other despite the weaknesses of each individual character.

The acting was good, the characters were all likable in a way. As the director described them, they were all completely right and completely wrong. I thought the characters were pretty endearing, and the writing definitely had many moments that made me laugh out loud. It was both funny and moving, I thought, and I was pretty captivated throughout the show.

So I liked it, but I think Lydia has some other opinions, so I'll let her share those if she'd like...

Shining City

Imagine this. A phenomenally reviewed play, nominated for multiple Tonys, described to be like your ideal play - dark, edgy, funny, scary. It boasts stars like Oliver Platt and Brian F. O'Byrne, who can basically do no wrong on Broadway. This play could basically get away with anything, I was so excited for it. There was nothing that could turn me against it...And then I saw it. I'd like to think I had just built up so much expectation for it, that it was just disappointing. But no. It sucked. Sucked is such a harsh word. But I guess it's appropriate. Yeah, pretty much. Like after some shows, I want to run and post about it because it was so good. This one took me like four days. And I have no job. And absolutely no responsbility or anything to do during the day. Like I had to choose between posting about Shining City while watching "Password Plus" reruns on Game Show Network or just focusing 100% on "Password Plus" reruns on Game Show Network. I chose the latter. And I have TiVo. So I could have rewound if I missed anything. But no. I wouldn't even do that. It was that bad.

Okay. The basics. Plot summary: N/A. like literally. It consists of Brian F. O'Byrne talking to three different characters that really have nothing to do with each other, and bring no point to the entire play. It leads to this "shocking, horrifying twist of an ending" or something that reviewers say that apparently translates to "predictable, not scary, and basically a culmination of pointlessness." I'm sorry. I mean I only dozed off for a little bit a couple of times in one or two of the gigantically long (and pointless) monologues, but I think I pretty much caught everything. I mean if it wasn't Oliver Platt doing a wonderful job delivering the pointless monologues, I probably would have been out like a light the entire show. And that's hard to do when you're sitting in the dead center 5 rows back. I mean you can't sleep in seats like that unless the shows THAT bad.

Now people have said to me, "Really? but Brian O'Byrne was soo good." This I am not denying. Neither am I denying that Oliver Platt was good. I thought they were both excellent. I blame what they were saying. I don't know how Irish people talk for realy, but apparently everyone, no matter who they are and how different they are from each other, they say "You know" about four times a sentence, which I believe is MORE than my humanities professor freshman year, who only said it twice a sentence, or about 133 times a lecture (I tried to contain myself and did not count them during the show). And anyway, in the case of the younger boy, it wasn't really "You know," it was more "Yoo Gnaoooww," which made it hard to count or pay attention or not cover your ears and cringe in annoyance. Apparently Irish accent = Nasal accent in some acting schools.

Am I being mean? Maybe. But whatever, every other reviewer gave it rave reviews, so it can deal. I mean, it did build me up for nothing. And it did suck. So I guess I don't feel too bad. So yeah, not such a Shining City. Switch the starts of those words around. Much better. Now, you may like it, just like all those reviewers. But if not, don't say I didn't warn you.