Curious on Broadway

I am a bit jealous of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. It is a novel that is indirectly about autism and which was published around the same time as Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark, which is very directly about autism.  Of the hundreds of novels I have represented as a literary agent, Moon's is unabashedly the one I am proudest of.  It won the Nebula Award and has become a small part of the canon, used in a number of campus and community reading events.  But it hasn't been Curious Incident, which won many prizes and has been sold in twice as many languages and become much more of a thing.

My mild envy extends to the fact that the Mark Haddon novel has been adopted for the stage, with the play by Simon Stephens getting rave reviews in London and winning the Olivier Award for best play.  And now it's on Broadway.  And jealous or not, I am somewhat curious about the Curious Incident.  If I'm still not interested in the novel (ennui, disinterest, scared, who knows…) the play is an opportunity to experience it once removed.  So when I saw it on the TKTS half-price list last week, I decided "what the hey," and soon found myself in the front row for the second night of previews.

And I've got to say, the play is better than solid, and boasts and excellent performance in the lead role by Alex Sharp, a young British actor fresh out of Julliard, who has a two page profile in the September Playbill.

Sharp plays Christopher Boone, a 15-year old who is likely on the autism spectrum.  According to the Playbill article the book never states this clearly, but if you follow the duck test, a kid with poor social skills who hates to be touched, fares poorly in crowds, doesn't do well outside of his home environment, etc. etc. -- yes, tis a lot like autism.  He sets out to do detective work to find out who killed a neighbors' dog, which leads to revelations about his family, which leads to a road trip.

Among the many strengths of Sharp's performance is that he plays an annoying character without ever being annoying, which is not at all an easy thing to do, and this in turn enables the play to hit its notes without ever seeming manipulative or cloying.  It might have been an early preview, but Sharp received a stirring standing ovation from the near to capacity crowd, and the play seems quite likely to duplicate on Broadway the success that it has had in the West End.  And it deserves to.  Hard to believe I walked out of Harper Regan, the last play I saw from this playwright!

The production is directed by Marianne Elliott, and physically the play takes place in what is essentially a big modernistic hi-tech box with few actual sets.  Boxes, mostly.  Trap doors for a dead dog to emerge from at the start, or which open to present a trench for the Underground tracks when Christopher is journeying on the Bakerloo line. It works well enough; it enhances the words, doesn't get in the way of them, and connoisseurs of model train sets will enjoy some of what happens within the box of little boxes.  And people who remember the old Automat days may enjoy the way Christopher Boone is able to get things from the little boxes as well; it's almost like there's a little old lady putting new mac & cheese in, only in this case it's the ingredients for the model train.

This was a second preview performance.  As I exited, I could see a lot of people clearly not getting ready to leave, as there are notes to be given and changes and fine-tuning to be made.  Likely more notes for the supporting cast than for Alex Sharp.  He's about as perfect as I'd think he can get, but no one character in the supporting cast had quite that same effect.  And it's kind of hard, because almost all the supporting cast are playing multiple roles, and "just right" for one may not be exactly that for another of the roles.

There ought to be some notes on the play!  Good as it is the first act could be delicately trimmed, 30 seconds from this scene and two lines in another.  The second act can definitely be taken in a notch.  In particular, Christopher's road trip is done up quite a bit, choreographed cast-wide urgency up and down and across the stage, all staged beautifully, very energetic and thoroughly enjoyed by the crowd.  And it would still be all of that were it two or four minutes tighter.  My guess is people aren't looking too much at changes to an award-winning play that's getting standing ovations, but if it's four or eight minutes shorter (and almost certainly not ten minutes shorter; it's needs a bit of a trim but only that) it will be better.

Did the play make me want to read the book?  No.  But the people sitting next to me were thinking they should.  And while there hasn't been much sign I can see that people who read the Haddon novel go looking for more and fine their way to Elizabeth Moon's as a next stop, I can hope a successful play might say something to the people who have circled around doing a film or play from The Speed of Dark.

Dinner With Puppets

Somehow or other I never posted these two play reviews from several months ago...

Dinner With Friends, which first played in New York in the late 1990s into 2001, is one of the major plays by Daniel Margulies.  For a literary type such as myself, Collected Stories is perhaps the keynote. It's an All About Eve story of an aging writer and a young admirer/protege.  More recently, Time Stands Still, a play about a wartorn journalist recovering from wounds physical and spiritual at home got a lot of attention.

But it's Dinner With Friends that I saw today in a revival at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, and I can't say it impressed.

It's a yuppie marital drama.  A couple, probably in their thirties, are having a friend over for dinner.  She reveals that her husband is leaving her.  A few scenes that night of the aftershocks, one at her house, where he stops by when a flight cancellation keeps him from heading off to his new home.  They have sex.  Another as the couple that received the news discusses.

Act Two has a flashback to when everyone first met, when the one couple hooked her up with him.  Then his-and-her scenes as the two men and two women talk separately a while after the event, and then a final wrap-up scene in the bedroom of the couple that are still together.

And who cares?

These are the kinds of people who fly up to Martha's Vineyard to open their house for the summer, but who have no external lives that can be detected.  They each have kids.  The "happy" couple likes to talk about food, to decide that the shiraz is too astringent or maybe too much vanilla in the polenta cake.  They all spout platitudes about marriage and family life.

"Having kids is something I just have to do."

"I had to survive Tom in order to realize that my second husband is the man I was meant to be with."

"Why can you talk for hours and hours about the problems of everyone else we know, but the moment I want to talk about us you fall silent?"

And that's pretty much it.   The play never delves much deeper than those platitudes.  I "rested my eyes" purposely.  When there was a scene with brighter lighting, a read a little bit of a comic book, turning the pages quietly.  The best I can say is that I've seen plays that are plenty duller than this, but still, I just wasn't interested in a word of it.  I can't quite comprehend that this play was ever a "thing" in the drama world, that it won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

I saw Margulies' Collected Stories at the Lucille Lortel theatre, so many years back I think I was still working at the Scott Meredith agency.

Coincidentally, just a few hours after seeing Dinner With Friends, I found myself back at the Lucille Lortell, for Hand to God, which is certain to contend for my personal Best Play honors for 2014.

Written by Robert Askins and directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel, Hand to God is a play with puppets.

It starts with a marionette alone on screen delivering a monologue on theology.  Quite a funny one.  So whatever happens after this, at least there's one thing different.

Thereafter the play proper begins in the basement classroom of a small Texas church, where a recently widowed woman is seeking solace by teaching a puppet class for teens in the church, including her sullen son and a smoldering hot teen who has eyes on his teacher.  So, in fact, does the play's pastor.  We see two different types of seduction, one driven by the passion of youth and the other by the power of authority, within a few minutes.  For some plays, that might be enough.  For this play, the real fun begins when her son becomes possessed by his puppet.  Hard to tell what the puppet wants, exactly, but whatever it is the teacher's son will do what he can to gain satisfaction for his puppet.

This sounds serious, The Exorcist melded with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or something.  But it's a very witty play that surpasses any expectations for any of the individual genres you might want to tag it with because the underlying emotions of the characters feel true, and are realized on the stage by an excellent cast. The rave reviews are going especially to Steven Boyer as the son and evil puppet Tyrone.  Both are good.  But my eyes were drawn more to Geneva Carr as the mother and Michael Oberholtzer as the young man who desires her. She can pivot in a sentence or two, radiating vulnerability, confusion, strength, responsibility, passion, and he has "it," a lot of charisma and you see in his performance that way the young have of radiating what it is they don't know about life and don't realize they don't know.

I can often write the second act of a play having seen the first, because there are conventions that are followed in writing theatre, as in writing books or movies or pretty much anything else.  To its credit, Hand to God doesn't succumb to predicatability.  Ultimately, the end of the play doesn't go anywhere unexpected, but scene-by-scene it plays out with enough uncertainty that I could enjoy the second act rather than diagramming it,

I would expect a lot of local theatre companies in the US will be producing Hand to God in coming seasons, and you should keep an eye out for it.

Between Riverside and Crazy

I saw the last preview before tonight's opening of Between Riverside and Crazy, a new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, a highly regarded playwright whose The Motherf**ker with the Hat was nominated for six Tony Awards.  I'd seen that play, somewhat flawed by tremendously well acted, at the Studio Theater in DC last year.

What should I say about Between Riverside and Crazy?

Bedecked with references to Game of Thrones and Whole Foods, it's a play very much of its time and moment.  It has some tremendous scenes in it.  It has lots and lots of laugh lines, and the audience was clearly having a very good time. I expect it will be popular and get some good reviews.

But honestly, it's not a very good play.

It takes around 40 minutes of a play that's around 2:10 with intermission to get to its point, to the extent that it has one.

The lead character, name of Walter "Pops" Washington, is a former NYPD officer, who was shot six times by a white rookie officer eight years ago, and has a lawsuit going against the city.  There's pressure coming down on behalf of the powers that be from his one-time partner and her fiancee for him to agree to a settlement, because it's not looking good for his case after eight years.  The public has turned its attention elsewhere.  He's suffering since his wife died, having trouble paying the rent on his apartment, his son is off-and-on, more on, with criminal troubles with the police.  So after around 40 minutes of engagingly written, lively, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, but ultimately going nowhere scenes, we finally get to this confrontation.  Which is great.

Then the curtain comes down on Act One with a cliffhanger.  Which resolves like most cliffhangers.  And Act Two has four or five scenes that just don't go anywhere, like most of the first act.

Part of the problem is that we don't care about the characters.  "Pops" is an alcoholic.  If he isn't soaking in his drink, he's stewing in his bitterness.  Stephen McKinley Henderson does a great job playing the part, but the part goes nowhere.  We see a man who's less pleasant to be around than he thinks, with less going on upstairs than he thinks.  His "adversaries," Elizabeth Canavan as his one-time partner and Michael Rispoli as Lieutenant Caro, get as much as they can out of their roles, which are probably more fully realized in the script than anyone else's and then boosted a little beyond by the performances, but I didn't want to hang around with any of the people hanging around in Pops' apartment, and even accounting for the fact that some of them are family, they're the family I don't think I'd want to see other than at Thanksgiving.

I hate to come down hard on a play that has some lively writing and lots of good laugh lines, but I generally prefer plays that don't have me wishing for more brightly lit scenes to provide more reflected light in the auditorium to allow me to do more of my crossword from my seat in Row C.

Cultural Affairs, February 2014

Even by the standards of early year movies, the start of 2014 has been full of a stunning array of must skip movies.

I will include in that list the surprise sensation of February, the Lego Movie,  Surprisingly good reviews, robust box office indicative of strong word of mouth, and if I hadn't been attending with a friend I would have walked out after ten minutes, or retreated to a quiet corner to read on my iPad while the film played,  Thus was just another boring superhero movie with overlong fight scenes, only with Legos. Even at the end, the movie didn't have any charm for me.  Everything is not awesome.

Non-Stop on the other hand was a nice action movie.  Liam Neeson lends gravitas and depth to the role of an air marshall being framed for a remarkably clever feat of airplane crime.  The movie is never terribly believable but is always just plausible enough that I was willing to buy in.  I have no idea how the bad guys got at the pilot, or now they fond out secrets about the people the bad guys were framing, or how the rhetoric of the bad guys matched up with their plot, or why everyone got to lounge around the crash landing site at the end, or any one if a thousand other things.  But the movie moves briskly, has a jaunty score, generated real suspense, and works.  It will do OK at the box office but deserves to do better than that, since it does more in its limited way to entertain than a handful of overlong over CGId over pretentious superhero movies that collect in a day the box office receipts that this will collect over a weekend,

A book just came out called Mad As Hell, which chronicles the making of the movie Network, which I saw in Montclair, NJ in 1976.  In conjunction with the book's release the movie was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, followed by a discussion between Keith Olbermann and the book's author, NY Times reporter and culture writer David Itzkoff.  The movie holds up well, as good or bad as it was when it first came out almost 40 years ago.  It's very relevant for the science fiction fan, since it's a movie that seemed like science fiction at the time but has essentially come true.  A newscaster goes a little crazy, becomes the initiator of the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" catch phrase, and is rewarded by going from fired to being the host of a nightly news loud with segments from a psychic produced live to high ratings in front of a cheering live audience. Until he decides to take on his corporate overlords when they are going to be taken over by the Saudis, which has consequences.

So it holds up, but that means that the first half or two-thirds of the movie are still pretty much brilliant, while the latter sections never quite work as well as the rest of it.  When Robert Duvall leads a meeting where the TV execs discuss killing the now-wayward newscaster kind of like they might discuss changing the producer or the set, it doesn't quite work the way the rest of the movie does.  This is about as near to happening today as the rest of the things the movie depicts were near to happening 35 years ago.  The conglomeritization of the TV business, the resultant pressure on the news departments to make money instead of being loss leader public services, the move toward reality TV, TV becoming a platform for the shrillest voices over the voices of reason.  All of these things seemed unlikely in 1976, especially perhaps to those closest to the events, but were in fact just days away from, one-by-one, coming to pass.  And the movie anticipates these events with scabrous dialogue and brilliant performances and keen vision in just about every way.  But the next step still seems tacked on.  It's so close to being real that it kind of almost seems like a piece with the rest of the movie, but honestly, deep down, my instinct tells me that this is where Paddy Chayefsksy, the screenwriter, went from being a visionary to being as desperate to find an ending for his movie as his characters were to find a way out of the Howard Beale dilemma, so he came up with this.

In any event, it's a film worth seeing if you haven't.

The book was short, so I decided I had hours enough in the day to read the entirety of it, so I did.  I would have enjoyed it more if the gym hadn't been incredibly uncomfortable.  I wasn't working out all that hard, but it was so hot and humid even by gym standards that it wasn't a fun few hours of reading and exercising.  The book Mad as Hell is kind of like the movie it depicts.  Solid for the first two thirds.  Gives good background on the auteur of Network, Paddy Chayefsky, as context for his development of the movie itself.  It serves some nice dish on the casting and production and artistic decisions in the film.  I even got a little teary-eyed at the climax of the movie's story, when Chayefsky invites Peter Finch's wife to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept his posthumously awarded Oscar.  But the aftermath of the movie,the part that takes us from the vision of Network to today's reality, falls flat.  It's full of too many quotes from the usual suspects to say "yes, work of genius, look what happened" when I feel like a slightly longer second act that talked about the actual of what happened would have been more meaningful.  Don't just have Keith Olbermann tell us how real it all is, but talk about how Keith Olbermann has worked for a variety of conglomerates that have undergone the come-to-Jesus moments about the importance of profit to the business of television for the suits that run the business.  Actuallly write, even briefly, about the real life suits that are like the suits played by Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty.  Actually show how Brian Roberts at Comcast is the third cousin twice removed of the Ned Beatty character, or compare and contrast Fred Silverman,, the person who was closest at the time the movie was released to being the real-life Faye Dunaway.

That book would have diverged a little bit more from being a book about the making of Network to being a book about something a little bigger than just that, but it would have been a more important book that way, more enduring in the manner of Network itself.

My other recent cultural activities include a documentary about the Broadway performer Elaine Stritch, which was worth seeing for a Broadway/Sondheim admirer like I kind of am but not so much for a wider audience than that, and the actual Broadway play Outside Mullingar, from the pen of John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Doubt).  The play has a great cast.  Readers of my blog are most likely to know Debra Messing from Will and Grace, but a NYC theatregoer will know Brian F. O'Byrne or Peter Maloney every bit as well.  They act up an entertaining storm that kept me well enough amused.  But I've seen better from Shanley, including Doubt and his recent Storefront Church, and for a play about true love I felt the characters did a better job of talking about their true love than actually showing it in a way that made the outcome personal to me.  So, enh.

What Rhymes w/the Aliens' Great God Harper

In my last post I dumped a little on the critical herd for film reviewers.  They ain't the only ones.

I've seen a lot of theatre, this year I added a second off-Broadway subscription because it looked like a very good season at Playwrights Horizon.  I'm glad I did, not so much because all those plays have been wonderful but because the Broadway season -- there isn't a show on Broadway which I really want to see and haven't yet, so if not for the off-Broadway stuff I'd be going without.

Recently, I've seen a lot of plays that have had varying degrees of critical fawning but to my eyes are falling a little bit or a lot short, though unlike things like Harper Regan, which I walked out of, or Detroit, which collapses into inanity if it doesn't start there, are interesting failures.

The Whale by Samuel Hunter.  So you've got this really really fat guy brilliantly played by Shuler Hensley.   We're talking 600 lbs fat.  At first, it's hard to appreciate the performance because you're focusing on the fat suit, but once you get accustomed to the suit you focus on the face.  Why is The Whale so whalish?  It's some kind of reaction to something that happened several years ago when he and his boyfriend went to church and heard something that caused his boyfriend to shrink away into nothingness and death.  Getting super fat is a reaction.  So the Whale waddles around his home, teaching English over the internet.  Into this mix comes a Mormon Elder, the guy's estranged daughter who's teenaged into being a real fire-cracker, then his ex-wife, and a friend who also happens to be a nurse and might be the one person who cares about the Whale as a person instead of an embodiment.  There's a lot of stuff being stuffed in here, if you haven't noticed, and it's all very very very well acted.  Cory Michael Smith as the Elder, he's good.  Reyna de Courcy as the daughter, she makes an overwrought role seem very real.  There's a lot of really good writing.  But there's a but, or a few of them.  For one, if you know anything about Mormon missions, you know you don't have "an elder" visiting someone.  It's always two of them.  So the fact that there's a lone Elder constantly popping in is like a huge flashing klieg light that there's something up here.  Too far into the play, he's asked why he's alone and he gives and answer that doesn't entirely satisfy, and then, of course, like the gun in the first act that needs to be fired before the end of the play you soon enough find out there's something more going on with this character.  The teenage daughter isn't just a firecracker but is bordering on if not actually mentally ill, and she'll be doing things that take the play up to 11.  There are revelations about the finances, about the relationship between the man and his ex-wife.  It might be possible to write a play about the main thing, this 600-lb guy who's intent on wasting away, Samuel Hunter decides to write a play about a great many things.  Too many, really, and to connect them all together he drowns the play in endless metaphors.  There's this essay about Moby Dick which the guy had graded years and years ago, and he keeps on reading from it.  And it's not enough that the essay is about Moby Dick, so there's this whale, see, and the name of the play is The Whale.  No, there's something else about the essay as well to tie it together in the double secret probation of plot knots.   And there's so much going on that the most important thing, whatever it is that happened long ago at that church service, ends up hidden amidst everything else.  This is a good play, but it should have been a better one, if nothing else, just find some way to have "an Elder" showing up that tackles the "an" part in a convincing enough way that you can be a Mormon or know something about their missions and not spend the entire play wondering if either the playwright doesn't know about these things or if that klieg light is shining on something.

What Rhymes With America stars Chris Bauer, who plays Sheriff Bellefleur on True Blood.  You wouldn't know that he's a Yale Drama School grad with extensive theatre credits, but just for The Atlantic Theater he has a handful.  He was good a few years ago in Parlour Song, a bad Jez Butterworth play.  He's very very good in What Rhymes With America.  He's recently divorced from his wife, quite bitterly, and still clinging to visions of reconciliation even though things are so bitter that his daughter won't let him into their old house.  The opening scene, brilliantly written, is him and his daughter talking, the door is imaginary so it takes a bit to realize that he's standing outside and she's inside.  He does ham acting and there are several scenes of him talking to another of the actors in the play, comic relief but often revelatory about the character.  The comic highlight of the play is an overdone sex scene which is coitus interrupted when his ex-wife calls, and practically with his thing still in hers he starts telling the ex-wife how much she loves her.  From the perspective of the other woman, the one he's screwing when the phone rings, this isn't the best way to end the encounter, and the fact that the man starts saying this over the phone in the same room as if he's completely forgotten what he was doing is indicative of his overall common sense and self-awareness.  But as good as the play was, I was also dozing a bit in the middle of it, because it's ultimately just another play about a failed marriage, and in this one, the more you know about Chris Bauer's character the less you're inclined to want to spend too much time watching a play about him.  He's hopeless.  In the opening scene you're sympathetic, by the time we get to the sex scene you want to walk out of the room with the lady he was screwing because he's hopeless.  And while the writing is often well-observed there's only so much you can say, big picture, about this topic.  When playwright Melissa James Gibson mines the depths of the topic, she uncovers things that make us less interested in the proceedings, instead of things that might make us more interesting.

I loved Annie Baker's Body Awareness, which was part of the same Atlantic Theater season as the awful Parlour Song.  I was quite pleased that I had an excuse to be in DC while the Studio Theatre was performing another play of hers, The Aliens, Washington Post review here.  Which, sadly, was nowhere near as good as Body Awareness had been.  Like most of these plays, it has some good dialogue and nice observation and you can see why everyone considers all of these playwrights to be hot and new.  The outstanding performance in this production was Brian Miskell's as Even Shelmerdine.  He's a teenager working at a coffee shop in Vermont who finds a couple of driftless perpetual teenager characters hanging out in back where the aren't supposed to.  Under their tutelage, he grows from being so very, very, very teenager to being a more confident adult, you see it in his bearing and his tone of voice, it's almost like the transition the lead character undergoes in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things, or at least requiring that same set of skills from the actor.  But, with all of these plays there's a but, a note in the playbill says that the instructions in the script are for one-third or even one-half of the play to be silence.  It's not the pretentious and artificial silence of Pinter, it's that natural silence of people just hanging around and being silent.  But you can get that point across when you start the play with two minutes of characters on the stage being silent, believe me when you're waiting for a play to start and the lights have come up, having an extended silence makes its point pretty quickly.  Does your character need to have a last name like Shelmerdine that can hammer home the fact that this is a young teenager with nothing much going for him in life, and if he's going to start out with that name shouldn't he change it by the end of the play, or do we see him blaring out his last name with pride and excitement before the end of the play to complete the arc?  We'll be hearing more from Annie Baker early in 2013, a new play The Flick is part of my Playwrights Horizons subscription.

Flashback:  I never reviewed 4000 Miles, a highly regarded play by Amy Herzog from two years ago.  Young adult moves in with his grandmother after a trauma, both of those performances are excellent.  The scenes between the two of them are spot-on, full of people saying and doing just the right thing.  And they take place on a brilliantly designed set of a New York apartment that could probably have been done from pictures of the one my great aunt had on Ocean Ave. in Brooklyn.  Neither my sister nor I liked it quite as much as the general consensus.  It was a little on the slow side, the kind of thing where every scene seemed to drag on just a beat or two too long, which over the course of a long play starts to add up.  There are JABberwocky clients like Brandon Sanderson who do that, but the thing is, Brandon's last step in writing a book is to go in and take out all of those extra beats in the final revise before sending the book to myself and his editor.  4000 Miles needed that.  Didn't get it.  I also felt that the ultimate revelation about the trauma that had the grandson moving in with his grandmother was a little underbaked for having an entire play lead up to it, but I might not have minded that as much if the length of the entire play had been ten or fifteen minutes less.

This season, Amy Herzog is back on the NY stage with The Great God Pan at Playwrights Horizon.  Perhaps more than any of these other promising new playwrights, she is showing incredible promise.  This new play starts off with a 30-something journalist meeting a childhood friend, the two had a babysitter together in their elementary school days, for the first time in many years.  After the obligatory small talk, the two get down to business:  the friend is suing his father for child molestation which he's discovered took place when he was very young, the journalist is the first person he's reaching out to because things said by the father suggest that the journalist, might have been victimized as well.  From the opening minutes of the play, you know you're in the hands of someone who can write a scene, and the entire first scene is as vivid and real and spot on as if I was having the conversation myself.  And unlike in 4000 Miles, the scene doesn't go on for an extra beat or two, it's taut and lean.  The problem with this play is that, once the initial scene is held, you can guess for yourself what many of the scenes that follow will be like.  The journalist doesn't remember anything happening, but with the suggestion that something did he will begin to grasp at things that may or may not lead to a recollection being unearthed.  His parents will have to come into the picture to shed some light on the scenario.  And of course, it's a play, the thing that may or may not have happened 25 or 30 years ago will have some parallel to something that's happening today.  And all of those scenes that you might expect to see if you were writing the play, well, they happen in the play Amy Herzog has written.  When he was 5, something happened at home which led to the journalist's sleeping over at his friend's.  The journalist is in a relationship and is about to find out that she's pregnant, quite unexpectedly, and she is dealing with her own issues as a therapist treating a teenager with an eating disorder.  Now, if you were writing the play, would you end it with a resolution, or would you leave the whole question of what did or didn't happen up in the air?  The play is worth seeing to find out how Amy Herzog answers that question.  It's worth seeing for each perfectly realized scene with spot on dialogue.  It's certainly worth seeing for this cast.  I was distracted a bit from Jeremy Strong's performance as the journalist; couldn't the writer or director or costume designer have had him changing his shirt at some point during the play (in The Aliens, it's like Annie Baker wrote the play with extra scenes just so Evan could change shirts more often, talk about opposite ends of the spectrum...).  But it's a very good performance.  The way the journalist's father halts when revealing the past to his son, spot on in both writing and performance.  I've had a thing for Keith Nobbs, who plays the childhood friend, from when I first saw him off Broadway some ten years ago, and he holds the stage, holds the theatre, every moment of the two scenes he has on stage, absolutely fabulous.  And yet, for all that's good about the play, the fact that it can't overcome the logical consequence of its opening resolution, that you can diagram the scenes before they're played out, keeps the play from being truly great.

The frustration to me in all of these things:  My goal as a literary agent, one of them, is to take good books from my clients and help them shape them into great books.  It's very difficult to do that when the world is willing to settle for good where it might be possible to achieve great.  When that happens, when too many critics elide problems in their criticism, it makes it too easy for the recipients to fall short of what they can achieve.  I'm not sure that The Great God Pan could be a better play than it is, any attempt to shake up the expected consequences of the opening scene would create more problems than it would solve.  The fact that Amy Herzog is writing so much tighter in this play than in 4000 Miles does say something good about her internal drive or of someone else involved in the process of Great God Pan.  But The Aliens, The Whale, 4000 Miles, all of those could have and should have been better plays.

The final piece of theatre on my plate in recent months was Hearts Like Fists, which played at the Secret Theatre.  This little space is tucked on a dark street beneath the el between my home and my office.  Written by Adam Szymkowicz.  Superhero play.  Got some good press when it opened in LA.  And got some decent press in New York, too.  It's hard to describe the plot, but basically you've got this bad guy, you know he's bad because he's called Doctor X and he skulks across the stage in classic super villain fashion delightfully played by August Schulenburg.  He likes to take people's hearts out, especially when they are locked in one another's arms in romantic sleepful bliss after making love.  Some kick-as superheroines are out to stop him.  I'm not 100% sure I fully understood the plot, but I knew the play was a lot of fun, that the cast was fun, that everyone involved seemed to be having a lot of fun.  The NY Times reviewed this play and liked it, but it's a little tiny review by some stringer who does off-Broadway.  A pretentious bore like Harper Regan gets an even more fawning review and articles before and after and many many column inches.  I would love it if the genre fun, the pleasurable hour-and-a-half, of this play, would get the respect and attention that the pretentious bore does.

Justin Long and the Two Jay(mie)s

Talk about weird, two movies today that both have Justin Long in them, and both directed by a Jamie. Not the same Jamie, but still, it's weird. Jamie Travis was the director of For a Good Time, Call... which opened quietly on a national but limited basis before Labor Day, and 10 Years, which opened on Friday, and is written directed by Jamie Linden.

Of the two, 10 Years is clearly the better. It's an ensemble movie with a lot of talent playing nice together in small roles, along with Justin Long you've got Channing Tatum and Max Minghella and Rosario Dawson and Anthony Mackie and Scott Porter and Nia Vardalos and Mimi Rogers and Ari Gaynor (more coincidence, also in For a Good Time, Call..., ) more. It's about a high school's 10th reunion, picking up as the characters start to fly and drive their ways in that morning and then have the wee hours breakfast after.

You can fill in a lot of the characters from that basic description. There's the drunk guy with a supportive wife, the successful guy, the successful guy who isn't so much, the old flame now married, the guy with a secret. And oftentimes, movies like this where you think you can write the script yourself when you know the premise tend not to be very good ones for that exact reason.

Not that way here. Linden's script (Linden also wrote the script for Dear John, a very good Channing Tatum vehicle, and We Are Marshall which is one of those movies I didn't get to and in retrospect wish I had) is very well-observed and very sharply written, it's the first script since Woody Allen's for Vicki Christina Barcelona where I felt so strongly that things were so sharp on a line-by-line basis. It's not a perfect script. The guys are more memorable characters than the gals, at least I thought so, in fact I spent most of the movie wondering why the guys seemed very white and so many of the girls a little more exotic in appearance, like they hadn't all gone to the same school. But it's a good one. The lines and gestures seemed right, the way people greeted one another at the reunion, the wee hours apology for doing something you realize in retrospect you really shouldn't have. Even the characters types that I don't like seemed reasonable enough, in particular the drunk guy. Though getting back to the guy v gal thing, I understood the drunk guy a lot more than I did his loyal and unshakeable wife. I couldn't get, and the movie really needed, a line or a scene to explain better what she was getting out of the bargain. I wasn't 100% absorbed in the move all the way long, my mind wandered a bit, but the cumulative effect of it was quite strong, and I was getting a little teary-eyed at the end.

For a Good Time, Call..., here Justin Long is the gay guy between two girls with bad bodily fluid between them dating back to college. They need to room together, soon they have a phone sex line they're running together. But the movie has no place to go. It's not a romantic comedy. It's not Boogie Nights. As we got to the final reel of the film, I decided to rest my eyes for a bit.

I haven't said much about Justin Long. You know, what is there to say? He's a really pleasant and likable actor in pretty much everything, he fit in perfectly with the strong ensemble work and strong cast of 10 Years, and if there were problems with For a Good Time, Call..., he isn't one of them.

After a lazy Saturday where I was very happy not do do anything after a few very busy weeks of tennis and WorldCon and Ann Arbor (see previous posts) and some family business in between, Sunday was a much more productive day, for I saw not only these two movies but another movie and play besides.

The third movie was Arbitrage, which is nifty. This really is the kind of perfect role for today's Richard Gere, as a rich businessman with some Chappaquiddick stuff going on in his life just as he's trying to close a business deal that will give him the cash to fill in a big hole in his books that could bankrupt a lot of people. Gere is nicely supported by Susan Sarandon as his wife, Brit Marling as his daughter, Tim Roth as a cop, Stuart Margolin (Angel in the Rockford Files) as a trusted attorney/consiglieri to Gere. Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, the script doesn't go entirely as you might predict, it goes very very smoothly. It and 10 Years, I'd recommend both.

I wish I could say the same for the play, Detroit, which has David Schwimmer from Friends and is in previews at the Playwrights Horizon. It's quite clear that there are going to be some good reviews for the play, there were laughs to be had. But what you noticed was that the "comedy" didn't have any laughs where everyone was laughing, there were people who were laughing and people who were not. I didn't find the characters to be very likable, it's possible they're believable white trash but certainly not likable white trash. Since I didn't like them, I couldn't laugh with them. It's very contrived. Contrivance is fine when the author can set up an initial contrivance then let the characters roam free within it. But this is a play where a character gets injured from a table umbrella, then another character reveals she has a planter's wart, then a third character gets injured falling through a porch. Doesn't this seem a bit much? David Schwimmer doesn't seem to have a handle on his role until halfway or two thirds thru the play, he seemed downright awkward to me in the opening scenes. Just about everyone seemed awkward in the opening scenes. Are they rehearsing from the end back, and they haven't fully integrated the notes from the director on the opening scene yet? Sometimes you can get a play where a character comes on at the end of an act or play to fill in some gaps and it seems right and proper, a coup de theatre, but here there's a final scene that casts a new light on everything that's come before, but not in that good "Sixth Sense" kind of way. This fills in all kinds of gaps that aren't hinted at enough along the way. And then it still doesn't make much sense of the ending.

Threes

First, let it be said that the episode of Glee after the Super Bowl was simply dreadful. I've watched some Glee, and it can achieve real heights. This contrived boring uninteresting filled-with-bad-musical-numbers of songs-nobody-would-care-about episode was nowhere near anything good. A shame.

I saw three theatrical pieces in DC this past weekend.

Black Watch is a play I've been wanting to see very badly. It played in New York a year-and-a-half or so ago to rave incredible reviews and multiple extensions. It's two week tour stop in DC at the Shakespeare Theatre was the main impetus for heading down. It wasn't quite like the Shakespeare-shaped cookie cutter in the gift shop wasn't more interesting than the play, but closer than I'd have expected considering the reviews, that's for sure. The Black Watch is a Scottish military regiment which dates back to the 1880s and which served in Afghanistan. This play is too many things and not enough of any of them. It's framed as a journalist interviewing members of the regiment after their experiences in Afghanistan, but it doesn't have any characters. It has mouthpieces to tell the history of the regiment, or a little about the war in Afghanistan. Because it doesn't have characters, it can't get across a "war is hell" message near as good as a Full Metal Jacket. Because the history of the regiment isn't intrinsically interesting to a non-Scottish audience but is very important to the National Theatre of Scotland, whose production this is, it isn't sure whether to tell lots of history or little pieces of it. The staging is kind of all over the place. There's a lively but pointless scene where one member of the regiment is lifted off his feet multiple times so different kilts or hats can be put on him to symbolize different parts of the regiment's history. It's different, at least. The setting makes decent use of the steel box shelter unit which I'm told is used in the military theatre. At the end, everyone marches around the stage in something that seems to be the "war is hell" moment where members of the regiment falter and get back up, but it's a gesture. And it goes on way too long since the production is done with seating on both sides, so it's like every piece of the action has to be done twice with the company facing both ways. It's better than I'm making it sound, lively and passionately done, it kept me awake. Still, I left thinking as much on the pointlessness of my two hours in the theatre as I did on the pointlessness of war -- the majesty of the fighting arts either, for that matter.

The historic Ford's Theatre in DC has been nicely renovated, with a new lobby area that makes it much more suitable for use as an ongoing theatre and living museum instead of just a museum of the Lincoln assassination, which is still marked in his box. I went there to see Horton Foote's The Carpetbagger's Children, which I might have skipped if I'd known it was a monologue play. I don't like monologue plays. A good play play, you can feel like you're observing some version of reality. If the actors break the third wall at some point, it's an acceptable device. But to have people just talk and talk and talk like the audience isn't there but who then are they talking to is just an artificial device that in real life would be associated with mentally ill people regaling on a crowded subway train. But as monologue plays goes, this one was actually pretty good. The three actresses are telling different pieces of the same story, about a northerner and his kin living in a small Southern town after the Civil War. The actresses are very good, all veterans of the DC stage and frequent nominees or winners in DC's Helen Hayes Awards for theatre. It's a real story, and not quite just people droning on as bad monologue plays can be. I once read that acting is about listening, and I don't know if it's because the scripts are better or the actresses really really good, but there's more interaction even when silent between the actress who's telling her story at any given point and the two others that are on stage. Usually, the staging of a monologe play has no idea what to do with the other characters in the pieces, and here they actually have a purpose. Count this as a pleasant surprise, at least in this production.

I liked Tynan some, would have liked it more if I wasn't so so tired the night I saw it that I was having trouble staying awake for no particular fault of the play's. This is a one-man show which is playing at the Studio Theatre about the British critic and later writer for The New Yorker Kenneth Tynan, who long kept a diary from which this pleasantly acerb play is drawn. It's a one man show, quite nicely acted by Philip Goodwin, and I felt pleasantly educated by the experience of seeing. I do wish, as I'd said, that I'd been a little more awake, but my long day beforehand of shopping by and at the Potomac Mills, including a visit to Borders #262 in Woodbridge, my 234th visited, left me beat.

In The Heights

The next stop on my quest to catch up with the January closings on Broadway that I'd really miss seeing was In The Heights, which opened almost three years ago after a successful run off Broadway, and won some Tony Awards in 2008.

Alas, the things it's best at are things I don't appreciate in a musical as much as some other people, and the things I do appreciate, this one isn't so good at.

It's one of the very few musicals to make it to Broadway at least so far that's heavily influence by latino culture, with a bit of african-american mixed in. The eponymous heights are the latino areas of Washington Heights, the part of Manhattan near to the George Washington Bridge which looms over the street scene, which centers on a bodega and a car service. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, just that if you took away the latino rhythms and characters you'd be left with a story that could as easily have been done and probably was for that matter with a Jewish tailor shop or an Irish pub subbing for the car service or bodega, in fact one character comments on the Irish that were still in the neighborhood way back when, and when the sign on the car service is taken down we see one for O'Hallaran's Car Service beneath with a clover logo.

There are bigger or smaller stories you can do even within this kind of background, and the story here is small. Too small for a 2.5 hour show, you ask me. Young girl is coming back home from Stanford for the summer, we find out she has taken a leave of absence without telling her parents, in part because she was too busy working for her tuition to have time to study so her grades suffered. Dad decides to sell car service and use money to fund her through college, dad also doesn't want her having a romantic relationship with the young black man who works at the car service. Parts of this go back to Romeo and Juliet if not before, other parts have been the meat of 659 other immigrant dramas. Honestly, there's so little plot and it's all so perfunctory we can safely say there's really no plot at all. And I'm a plot person.

This wispy plot is filled out with an assortment of character types. The wonderful grandmother, the bodega owner, the young dreamer, a shaved ice vendor. Of all the characters big and small the only one I found at all interesting was the young man at the car service who was in love with the owner's daughter. Either the writing or the actor or something had a little bit extra for me there.

Absent much of a plot or much in the way of interesting characters, the musical is mostly about having big production numbers, the kind that are spoofed by the opening number of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and then interspersed with those you get the daughter with her "I want/I wish" song, and grandmother has her big number. People dance a lot, they sing a lot, they do it for 2.5 hours less the 15-minute intermission with the briefest of interludes to allow for the most perfunctory developments of the plot.

And it's just not for me. It wasn't for me in Hairspray, which kept coming to a halt in order to give every character his or her big number. It wasn't for me in the production I saw of La Cage many many years ago where they just kept dancing and dancing to no purpose, it isn't for me in the big dance numbers that pop up in The King and I or Oklahoma. I like the music to tell a real story about real characters that I really care for. I found that in Next to Normal, didn't find it here.

I can understand why this has had a good three year run. I can understand why I waited on seeing it.

Send in the Clowns. Really.

So Saturday night I decided to try and catch one more of the January closings on Broadway. In The Heights sold out as I was heading in to the TKTS line, so I opted for A Little Night Music.

A Little Night Music is a Sondheim show from 1973, with book by Hugh Wheeler and directed originally by Hal Prince. The same group would collaborate on the masterpiece Sweeney Todd a half dozen years after, and had done Company three years previous. It's probably best known as the show which includes Send In The Clowns. I'd seen once before, in a NY City Opera production at least 15 maybe even 20 years ago.

I do not consider it his best show or score. Send In The Clowns is a classic kind of because it became a classic. After that you've got the occasional line or two that's hummable and memorable, but Company or Sweeney Todd or Assassins all have more.

It's three hours inspired by Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, which is longer than that movie, way longer than Woody Allen's similarly inspired Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

And this production, directed by Trevor Nunn (Cats), is a bad one. In fact, the more I think about it in the hours after seeing, the more I'm realizing how bad a production it is.

It's a period piece, about a rondelet of lovers in Sweden in 1900. So that means everyone has to get into period dress, but does it mean that everyone in the production has to be wearing gowns of the exact same off white color, or that two of the male characters seem to be wearing the same outfit, being played by people that look so much like younger and older versions of themselves that you'd think they'd wandered in from some strange production of Follies (a show that actually is about older and younger versions of the same characters)? It's awfully hard to get involved with the love lives of the characters when you can't actually tell the characters apart from one another!

Once upon a time any Broadway production had to have many many musicians. Over the years in contract negotiations, the minimum number required to be paid at any particular theatre has been reduced, and since this production is at an intimate theatre, the Walter Kerr, more traditionally known for hosting plays (the original Broadway production of Angels in America, for one) it has a smaller minimum musician count than a huge theatre like the Gershwin that often hosts big musicals. I think this is the first time that I truly felt deprived sitting in the theatre. A period score like this, which Sondheim wrote mostly in waltz time, should have a certain silkiness to it, a period lustre, it should sound like you're listening to a waltz in some grand estate ballroom in the 1900 Swedish countryside. God knows this doesn't. I don't know exactly how many or few musicians there were, but there just weren't enough.

The set, the costumes, the orchestrations, all of it was just so monochrome, and if you're thinking of the smiles of a summer night, that's not the right color scheme.

This production had originally opened as a vehicle for Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won a Tony Award, and the beloved Angela Lansbury. When the two of them left, the show was re-cast with two grande dames of the Broadway stage.

Elaine Stritch has a long association with Sondheim dating back 40 years to the original production of Company. She's just shy of her 85th birthday, and the role here doesn't require a lot of singing or movement, in fact the character is in a wheelchair for most of it. I wish I'd seen Angela Lansbury, to be honest. The effort shows in Stritch's performance, and even though the character being played is an aging wheelchair bound matriarch, I think we should see the effort more in the physical aspect of the performance while here the giving of life lessons seems a challenge as well.

Bernadette Peters isn't on Broadway near enough these days as one would wish. She's originated roles for the Broadway productions of Sondheim's Into The Woods and Sunday in the Park with George and also played in a dreary production of Gypsy. She's one of the few characters in this production who manages to show love at its lightest, breaking through the monochromatics. Her performance of Send In The Clowns is radiant and revelatory. It's no longer a song, it's a hearbreaking conversation with musical accompaniment. Every syllable of every word of every line drips with a life of longing and feeling and wishing. In fact, she so completely takes the song away from the very idea of "song" in the Broadway musical sense that I wished the should could have taken a break afterward to allow her to sing it as she might if she were actually doing it as song in a cabaret act or something. I don't mean that in a bad way, either. It's just that she's so powerful doing the song one way that the only way to top would be to have her do it in another.

Right after Peters does her stunning rendition of Send In The Clowns, we come to the one pleasant surprise of the evening (with Peters, you never consider greatness a surprise), which is Leigh Ann Larkin's performance of the song The Miller's Son. Which honesty isn't much of a song musically. It's got the one signature "I Will Marry The Miller's Son" and the rest of it isn't worth getting wedded to. But it's got some classic Sondheim lyrics with some heart, and some nice variety between the signature line and the other sections of the song, and Larkin just puts her voice around every subtlety of the lyric and finds every bit of feeling and passion in the song. I was almost as transfixed listening to this as I was to Send In The Clowns just minutes before.

There are enough intrinsically good things about A Little Night Music that it was by and large tolerable even in this bad production. I didn't fall asleep, I mostly thought of what was on stage and only occasionally about how Borders could get run into the ground and other such things. We're not talking Follies which requires absolute perfection to be tolerable. That being said, even a great production of A Little Night Music would be only so great. And we're not talking here about a great production.

Time Stands Still

Yesterday I spoke about my Next to Normal trip on Sunday. Now to talk about the 2nd part of my theatre day.

With the blizzard on hand, the offerings at the TKTS discount booth were more robust for the Sunday evening shows than might be expected, but I stuck to my game plan and got a seat for the play Time Stands Still, in part because I didn't think it fair to ask another musical to compete with my fresh memories of Next to Normal. 

Time Stands Still is a drama with a strong pedigree. Playwright Donald Margulies has a half dozen Tony and Drama Desk nominations, I recollect him best for Collected Stories, an All About Eve protege drama set in the publishing world. Director Daniel Sullivan has been directing high gloss dramas for a long time, my first of his I'm Not Rappaport with Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, Tony for Pippin) and Taxi's Judd Hirsch some 25 years ago. It had opened in a limited engagement on Broadway earlier in the year, closed, they decided it was so good and Laura Linney so amazing in her performance that they should give people a second chance to see, and it will end up with around four months playing at the Cort when it closes at the end of January.

So of course this show reflects high quality gloss. The lead is played by Laura Linney, who is a three-time Academy Award nominee, a three-time Emmy winner, a Tony nominee. She plays a war photographer badly injured by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan who is coming home and starting her recovery, her face and limbs shrapnelled, her leg in a major cast, her arm in a sling. She's assisted by her partner and fellow photographer played by Brian D'Arcy James, who coincidentally enough moved into this from having previously played the role of the father in Next to Normal. He's been nominated multiple times for every award Broadway can provide. The photo editor at the magazine they work for most often is played by Eric Bogosian, a winner of multiple Obie Awards and a Drama Desk. And his new gf/fiancee is played by Christina Ricci, whom most of us will know and love from the Addams Family movies. High quality gloss, in great abundance.

And more gloss still, a typically gorgeous set by John Lee Beatty, thirteen times a Tony nominee and twice winning. He tends to be very realistic, and here he's created a dream of a Manhattan loft space.

Now, this glossy go-to director of great plays with a set from the go-to guy for these kinds of sets, all of this acting talent, it isn't being wasted on empty words. No, Daniel Margulies is an impeccable craftsman, and especially in the first act the script is note-perfect, just that mix of helplessness and determination as you'd expect from someone with her job who doesn't like her current circumstances. Christina Ricci's role is wonderfully written. She isn't aware that there was a movie named Brazil and is momentarily confused when the conversation turns to the topic of Brazil. So she gets out a notebook and jots down the movie, and you just know she's probably going to actually rent it or at least read up on it in the way of the person we all know who diligently studies the word of the day on the word a day calendar in the belief this constitutes self-improvement. It skirts perilously close to caricature but never becomes, and Ricci fills the part quite well. Even when the obligations of the script require people to leave the stage at convenient times, it's done without strain. The "who's going to go and get ice cream" ritual is enacted exactly like it would happen if it were happening in real life, as opposed to dramatic purposes. The bathroom visits are perfectly timed. The script is dealing with extreme circumstances but real ones, and doing so in a way that seems utterly real.

I wish the whole play could be as good as the first half hour, but eventually it has to become a play, with complications, where the script is still comfortably better than your run-of-the-mill but starts to show the creakiness. The first creak comes when we find out that Linney and James hadn't both been in Afghanistan when she was injured, he had things he needed to deal with. You know then that if you just wait a bit there's going to be some kind of emotional explosion on stage when we find out what those issues are, though this being a good play I will confess there was a second part of that revelation that I didn't see coming, but which once arrived does play out in the exact ways we would expect. When there's a wedding, you know quite correctly that we won't be seeing a later scene set on the couple's fifth anniversary.

Perfect script, no, but let's be clear that a Jez Butterworth from Mojo could learn some things by studying a consummate professional like Donald Margulies.

Laura Linney deserves her Tony nomination. She hits every line, gets every note, is always emotionally true to what she's saying both when the script is pitch perfect and when it's starting to creak under the mechanics of the play. It's the kind of performance that carries you over and beyond the rough spots in the script. Ricci as I said is perfect in her role. When the second act requires her character to start showing a little more edge, she manages to put that over as well, and you believe the character really has grown or has actually been hiding something beyond that slightly goofball veneer. Eric Bogosian, if you've seen the play or the film of Talk Radio, you'll know he can be a very very strong personality, and I was kind of worried going in that he might overpower. Not at all. In fact, during the quieter moments of the script it's almost like he's set to become the second coming of Tony Roberts, who's always been very successful in Woody Allen movies and in several plays as the guy who's kind of quietly there. But when it's time for Bogosian's character to explode a bit, suffice to say Bogosian explodes, quite convincingly. Brian D'Arcy James was to me the weak link of the foursome. When the writing was at its best, he was, but when the writing requires him to do functional things, he doesn't show the same ability as the other cast members to cover up.

Sadly, it's very difficult for plays like this to succeed without stars in today's Broadway. It's even hard with a good musical like Next to Normal or for a budding young talent like Kyle Dean Massey to have a kind of development system, where you'll write a role for the young star or look forward to a new Tom Kitt the way you once anticipated the new Sondheim. But every once in a while, they manage to come along.

Next to Normal

I ventured into Manhattan on a blizzardy day to see some Broadway shows that are closing in the coming weeks. January is always full of closings as shows attempt to cash in on the big Christmas week crowds and then get out of Dodge before the winter doldrums. 

I quite liked the number from Next to Normal on the June 2009 Tony Awards show and decided I needed to see, it took only 18 months and a closing notice to get around to do it. In the end, instructive to see in the same week a show that won a Pulitzer Prize and lasted 700 performances with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which lasted maybe 17 weeks. There are reasons. 

For one, an emotional component. Next to Normal is about a family trying to deal with a mother's mental illness. She can't let go of the memories of a son who died young, to the extent that she has a hard time dealing with her daughter. The daughter is struggling to have a relationship with a boy she met at school within the context of a crazy mother who isn't there for her in the ways mothers of teen-age girls are supposed to be, and the father is struggling to keep things in the house on an even keel. Lots of emotional meat.

And more even than that. The mother's vision of the son is himself a character, and a very likable character at that. If the mother becomes "normal," she'll lose this presence in her life. The son is a temptress, a hunky male version of Lola from Damned Yankees, trying to cling to its/his existence by getting the mom to give him what he wants.

Better songs.  Not hummable, but I feel like some Sondheim that I could start to find some that last with another go or two at the score via the cast album or repeat visit. Is it good or bad that I could sometimes see the rhyme coming? On the one hand, suggest this isn't quite as clever as the very best lyrics could be, on the other hand in mass entertainment there is something comforting about the familiar. 

Given this good material, the cast knocks it out of the park.  This isn't even the original cast, which won the Tony for the female lead. An actual husband and wife team of Marin Mazzie (maybe first saw her in Sondheim's Passion) and Jason Danieley have genuine chemistry on stage, not always a given (see Tom and Nicole in Far and Away). 

But the revelation is Kyle Dean Massey as the son. I haven't seen as magnetic a stage performance as this in a few years, since watching Matthew Morrison command the Atlantic Theatre stage in 10 Million Miles. Morrison went on to take the lead role in Glee, I wonder what is in store for Massey...  He's what every mother would want their son to be. Great looking, plays jazz band before school and football after. His performance is a work of art. A high wire act of the vulnerability in knowing that he disappears whenever the mother decides to let go of him, but also a cockiness that he'll never go anywhere. Just watch the way he pulls at his jacket, almost Travolta like, in one scene. But all the layers are there. He sings with passion and brio, in wonderful duets and triplets. I wanted him to go so badly because it wasn't good for mom to have this guy around, I wanted him on stage every minute. 

One of the great things about the musical is that it satisfies all of this in the end, manages to send everyone home happy, but without being trite or saccharine in the process.

Benjamin Walker is good in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, but the star in the making should be Kyle Dean Massey. 

Next to Normal closes on the 16th January. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey are the main creatives, and the production is directed by Michael Greif, whose many other credits include Rent. 

2010 Theatre, Pt 2

The most recent shows I saw were Mojo, a play from the late 1990s finally getting a full DC production at the Studio's 2nd Stage, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, an unsuccessful transfer from LA's Center Stage/Kirk Douglas and NYC's Public, which closes this weekend.

Mojo was an energetic and well-acted production of a play that isn't so hot, you ask me. Some seedy club, some two-bit singer who might be signing with another club, a dead body of one of the club owners. Important unanswered questions hang over the stage. Lime, how will staying in the club overnight and not reporting the body help the current manager to keep the club Why is this two-bit singer important? All ending on a very strange note of drift. Well, it's worlds better than the inert Parlour Song, also written by Jez Butterworth, but still not good. Butterworth also co-wrote with his brother the rather more successful script for the movie Fair Game, and a newer play of his Jerusalem opens on Broadway in 2011 after an acclaimed run in London. By and large, I don't yet see why Butterworth is considered quite the big thing,but maybe Jerusalem will surprise by being good as it is supposed to be instead of being Enron, which I shall talk on below...

But first Andrew Jackson, which got lots of good reviews during it's run at the Public and which I certainly enjoyed, but at the same time very easy to see why it couldn't cut it on Broadway. Essentially, it's a 100 minutes Schoolouse Rock on President Jackson, only the songs aren't as catchy as Conjunction Junction. We learn lots of good things to know about Jackson, with lots of spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down. As an example, a lot of information about Jackson is relayed by a narrator who rolls on stage in one of those scooters used by disabled people. She gets annoying, so Jackson shoots here, but she isn't actually dead and comes back a bit later, then Jackson goes after her again and she returns, and she may actually be dead the final time she comes on stage, and in the midst of summarizing historians' reactions to Jackson, not as favorable as Jackson might have wished, tells him "you can't shoot history in the neck.". If you have to dump info this is the way to do it! Broadway, so the action is good, Benjamin Walker especially so in the lead role. The set design stretches into and engulfs the audience, though I could have done without the concert style lights directed into the audience that go off way too often and only serve to temporarily blind the audience and keep us from looking at the stage which we have paid even at discount a decent Broadway price to see. Propulsive and energetic rocking songs.

So why didn't this have the decent run of an earlier youth-oriented transfer, the Tony winning Spring Awakening? I think Spring Awakening had heart, while Andrew Jackson is more about history. And Andrew Jackson has rock style music, while Spring Awakening has music that just totally rocks. Kind of like Sondheim, in that you maybe can't sing entire songs, but at least rich songs that stand repeat viewing and I can hum a few bars. Te songs in Andrew Jackson, they're lively and good and fun, the update of Ten Little Indians is a nice one. But I can only hum the concept of the song, and not the song itself, which exits the mind about as quick as it enters. Not totally successful, but I am intrigued by the idea that Alex Timbers (writer) and Michael Friedman (music & lyrics) might do 40 of these to cover all the Presidents. Because I did learn a lot, and was entertained doing it. Doesn't replace a full biography, but as a good entry level survey that raises questions for further study...

A quick word on Enron. What were the British thinking? This was quite the rage in the UK. It had some clever concepts like giant on-stage raptors in honor of Enron's special purpose entities of the same name, and a good visualization of how they were able to nest little ownership stakes inside of little ownership stakes to mask things, but it just wasn't very good. Closed almost immediately upon opening on Broadway.

The other show I saw in London this year was Jersey Boys. That is fantastic. The first act is full of music with enough background along the way to make the slightly more plot heavy second act succeed. The music is great, of course, one classic song after another. I liked the show so much that I was kind of ready to go out, buy tickets, and come back for the next performance. What I need is for some client to come to New York with a desperate urge to see, so I can have an excuse to go again.

But not Wicked, which I saw in Sydney. It was by no means as bad as I feared it could be, I could even admire it professionally as it does a good job of filling in the background of the fantasy world, which is something real fantasy writers need to do when they write their prequels. But it wasn't my cup of tea. At least with this I could kind of figure why some do find it their cup of tea. But Enron? What were the British thinking.

2010 theatre Pt 1

Haven't spoken about theatre much on the blog, other than discussing Pinter a week or so ago. 

And have to say, a good play seems much harder to fund than a good book, a good movie, a good comic book. 

There was A Life in the Theatre, an old David Mamet play revived as a vehicle for the wonderful Patrick Stewart (sf community knows him best as Captain Picard of STTNG) and TR Knight of Grey's Anatomy who is not familiar to me. Yikes!  What was this doing on Broadway?  The two play an old actor and a younger doing rep theatre in a small way in a backwards place, no surprise that the younger actor will end up overtaking the older. It is very small. The bad theatre jokes -- think props that don't work or flash back to Miss Piggy in Veterinarian's Hospital -- are wan. It's beneath great acting. Its limited Broadway run ended early as audiences steered clear. No surprise there, that some critics gave mixed or even favorable reviews does. 

Mamet's newer and better play Race also had a star-studded cast, with Richard Thomas of the Waltons and Denmis Haysbert of 24 and Allstate commercials in the cast when I saw. This was better. Law office takes on a possible sexual assault case with racial overtones, which intertwines with the possibility that a young attorney in the office was hired on because of her race. There are some interesting questions about race in society, but it doesn't cohere as completely as Mamet's best work sometimes can. 

Sondheim on Sondheim is a tribute show to one of the great talents of Amerian musical theater mixing biographical pics and info on Sondheim with some of his songs. If you like Sondheim, and I do, this was the cat's meow.  At the same time, it reminds of Sondheim's weakness, which is the vast quantity of great music that Sondheim has put in the service of shows that just aren't as good. Bad concepts, difficult concepts, bad "books," as the speaking parts of a musical are known. And then blessed with brilliant songs that aren't hummable. In The Sound of Music or Annie, you can go away humming almost the entire score, and sometimes sing entire songs from heart. Sondheim, you can hum a few bars from the best songs and cherish listening to them on the cast album for years and decades afterward. While equally virtuous in different ways, only one of those two options provides compensatory pleasures while actually sitting in the theatre. Anything less than a brilliant production and Follies is torture to sit through. Sweeney Todd and Assassins are among the best Sondheim shows and work brilliantly on many levels but one is about people who kill cats for meat pies and the other people who kill US Presidents.  Company has one of Sondheim's most intricate and delightful scores for the long haul in a show about a very cerebral exploration of marriage in a certain upper class kind of milieu. Sondheim wasn't entirely delighted with his experience providing lyrics only for West Side Story, but it's a more thoroughly successful experience than most of what Sondheim did when more fully in control. Called Sondheim on Sondheim because the musical numbers are interspersed with videotaped recollections and reminiscences by Sondheim and archival photos and the like. Its a fascinating glimpse into the man, full of great songs. But it does have this bittersweet aspect. As I said at the top, great theatre is hard work, maybe because it does require so much collaboration unlike the more solitary act of composing a great book or great song..

Dusk Rings a Bell at the Atlantic Stage 2 by Stephen Belber is a play I can hardly remember a few months out. During the parts of it I was awake for, I was more interested in wondering what was on the t-shirt the female lead was wearing undeneath her top than anything else. You know it has to be something because there is a costume designer so the shirt isn't being thrown on, but why then have a top over it? This mystery was solved by the end of the play, and for all my wondering during the solution has faded like most of the rest ot the play.

Acquired Tastes

I don't get Harold Pinter. And I don't get Mike Leigh.

With Pinter, I'm not sure there's anything to get. Long long ago I remember sitting through every miserable minute of the film version of Betrayal, and I've never come across anything to make me think I'm missing anything. My most recent experience was with a twin-bill at the Atlantic Theater (playing at Classic Stage Company) of his The Collection & A Kind of Alaska. The Collection is a play about a tryst that may or may not have taken place. The costume design was wonderful. The characters were non-entities, so who really cares if there was an affair, or if that one was cuckolded or if this one was cheating. The only drama comes from the fact that it's Pinter, so that the characters are all speaking in a most stentorian way full of portent and meaning. But there is no meaning. A Kind of Alaska is inspired by the work of Oliver Sachs. Someone wakes up after being out of it for 29 years with sleeping sickness. There's a wonderful performance here by Lisa Emery, as the bed-ridden lady. You watch her get out of bed, trying to use those leg muscles she hasn't used in 29 years, and it's a work of art. Can't say enough nice things about it. But I couldn't help but think that it would have been much easier for her to deal with this sudden emergence into a changed world if the people telling her about what had happened had been talking to her like real people, instead of like Harold Pinter people. This isn't a new theme, science fiction novels about time travel or people emerging from cryogenics deal with stuff like this all the time. Somehow or other the manage to get the point across instead of hiding it behind dramatic pauses. If I ever wake up from sleeping sickness or after being in a coma for 18 months and have a Harold Pinter acolyte telling me what happened, I'm going back to sleep.

Mike Leigh is a little different. His new film Another Year which opens soon was a free Variety Screening Series event, and I was willing to see for free what I knew I'd never pay for because at least with Leigh, I can see that there are qualities in what he does that are worth appreciating. Maybe not for me, but if someone really appreciates the stuff that's there kind of like I can really appreciate the fired-agent stuff in Jerry Maguire a lot more than most other people, who am I to complain. This is one of those four seasons plays, spring summer autumn winter sections that range from 20 to 40 minutes, a little over two hours in total. It's about a married couple on in years who like to garden (they have a plot in a community garden), one we meet doing some geology stuff for a pipeline type thingie, the other in her job in a doctor's office dealing with a woman who can't sleep and would prefer just to have a good pill than to route out the underlying cause. She's friends at work with a somewhat flighty and occasionally tipsy receptionist, Mary, who has a thing for their son and is not at all happy when he finds true love elsewhere. In the autumn segment, his very quiet brother dies.

Leigh's style is to work closely with his casts during an improvisational rehearsal period and to write his script based on what the characters find. The leads here, the reliable Jim Broadbent (I loved him on stage in The Pillowman, he plays Horace Slughorn in recent Harry Potter films) and Ruth Sheen, have worked with Leigh's process a lot, and they are fantastic. In fact, the acting is pretty stunning throughout the entire film. And the script is danged good as well. Even though I don't really like Leigh much, I'd have to say this is a good film. You look at the long set piece segments that there are here, the outdoor barbecue during the summer sequence where Mary finds out that Joe has her eyes on someone else and that her crush will go unrequited, or the dinner party when Mary's shown up unexpectedly and is trying to find an equilibrium or the spring scene where we meet the Ruth Sheen character at the office with the character who can't sleep, and they're all really good. Good enough that the film is really quiet but I didn't doze during it at all. Good enough that this opening scene, you'd think it came straight from a Wiseman documentary being filmed at the workplace. It's good true-to-life writing, good true-to-life acting, well-crafted with good camerawork, music, editing. But at the same time you get to the end of it and I couldn't really figure out what the point of it all was. Do I really need to spend two hours watching these characters just to see how or if Mary can deal with her heartbreak in the context of her drinking, or if she can do with it? In spite of all its virtues, you have to admire the craft above all to admire Leigh, not as much as with a Pinter where the craft is truly the be-all and end-all of the discussion, but there really isn't a plot to speak of. The risk in this to my eyes is when you have a script that isn't this good or actors that aren't quite as in tune with it, because when this kind of thing doesn't work on the levels it needs to work on -- well, it really really doesn't work.

Thinking on it, I might be liking Christian Bale's performance in The Fighter more than some of the reviews I've read because he's finding from his Master Thespian Acting approach to his cracked-out character a lot of the same notes that Lesley Manville finds playing the tipsy or worse Mary via the very naturalistic writing style that is found in the Mike Leigh movie. There's this scene at the end of the barbecue when Mary's going to try and drive people back to King's Cross to catch the trains home, and I'm not sure it would be much different if you had Bale's Dicky Eklund character showing up at the barbecue to offer the ride to King's Cross. It's interesting to see how two people can act their way to such similar places from such utterly different directions.

And while I get to the final shot and find myself deflated by the pointlessness of watching for two hours, it is an awfully good final shot. The studio is waging a major campaign to get an Oscar nomination for Lesley Manville, and just as I wouldn't complain to see Christian Bale garnering one for The Fighter, my general lack of excitement for Mike Leigh movies in general shouldn't keep me from saying Manville's performance is worthy of an Oscar nod, as well.

cultural capital

I ended up going on a bit about Animal Kingdom, let's so some quick takes.

Sunday August 22 I saw Eat Pray Love at Clearview's Ziegfeld and then The Other Guys at the AMC Lincoln Square, Aud #4/Olympia. Other Guys had higher highs and lower lows and Eat Pray Love was more consistently mediocre, so I'd give a slight nod to seeing The Other Guys. The best parts of Other Guys are in the first half hour and are often genuinely good and genuinely funny. There's good chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. But as many of the reviews I read quite accurately point out, in the last half hour the movie becomes too much that which it is supposed to be spoofing, and I tuned out totally and completely. It was good to see Michael Keaton with a decent role in a mainstream movie. Where did he go? Eat Pray Love isn't without its pleasures. Julia Roberts, exotic settings, lush feel, eye candy in some ways. But it's flat. The script is kind of flat. I don't know what depths are to be found in the book the movie is based on, but this script doesn't show any. But as or more important the quality of the casting seemed to end with getting Julia Roberts. For all its flaws at least in Duplicity you had good chemistry between Roberts and Clive Owen, who has some of the same "it" that Roberts does. Billy Crudup isn't bad in this movie, but he doesn't have that it. James Franco, same thing; if Franco had that "it" he'd be much bigger a star than he's become, because he's had his chances. The role Richard Jenkins has is annoyingly scripted, and I'm not sure any actor could have made it work. With Javier Bardem, it might just be that I'm not a fan. In order for the movie to have worked as well as it could have, they needed to aim higher and get higher for the men in Julia Roberts' life.

Last week Peter V. Brett and I saw Scott Pilgrim at the AMC Empire, Aud. #20. Better than either of the two movies above, but not as successful as I would have liked. To the good, the filmmaking by director Edgar Wright, who's previously done Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, is lively and energetic. Comic book sound titles go sweeping along the screen kind of like the subtitles in Slumdog Millionaire. Michael Cera fits the lead role like a glove, most of his entourage are well cast and likable. There are some good choices for the smaller roles of the seven evil exes. On the opposite side, it's creative and energetic in a way that can wear out its welcome after a bit, and here I think that point is reached rather before the end of the movie. At its essence, the movie is a romantic action comedy. The whole premise is that Scott is fighting for the love of a girl. And the director, the script, the filmmaking ... a lot of that "little" stuff shows no interest in the romantic side of the romantic action comedy. The movie's so busy at the start introducing all of us to its bag of tricks that the arrival of the romantic lead kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Where did she come from? Why? Why does the Michael Cera character go with one girl over another? This film had an even more disappointing opening at the box office than Kick Ass, which has found some justified redemption with excellent early sales for the video. Will the same happen here? I had some issues with the unnecessary violence in Kick Ass, but overall I do think it was the more successful of the two movies.

Salt, which I saw at the Regal Gallery Place Aud #10 in DC on July 31, was a thoroughgoing delight, very similar in my mind to the Angelina Jolie movie Wanted. It's totally and preposterously silly, and it knows it is. The actors toe a fine line nicely, most of them knowing that they're in on the joke but taking themselves just seriously enough for the preposterousness of the film to be solidly grounded in some semblance of Hollywood reality. Angelina Jolie is a delight. I had a lot of fun with the movie. I'm not going to defend it as art, and Myke Cole did not like it, couldn't look past the silliness of it all enough to find the enjoyment in it. But me, I loved the over the top pleasures this movie had to offer, and I'd recommend it.

Not so for Dinner With Schmucks, which I saw the next day at the same location, Aud. #13. Schmucks. Yuck. I don't even want to talk about this movie very much. It's not well-scripted, or well-made, and it just kind of lies there. It's not totally without laughs, but nowhere near enough of them.

And while in DC, I also saw two plays.

One Man Lord of the Rings is by the same guy who did One Man Star Wars. If you think you'll like it from the name, you probably will. Check here, maybe one of the shows is coming soon to a theatre near you. It was my first time seeing something at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. And then the Studio Theatre had Passing Strange. My classic DC theatre visit, that show had played on Broadway, gotten nice notices, wished I'd seen it, so this was my last chance I really must go and partake sort of thing. This is an autobiographical show of the artist's road to musical theatre. The Studio production was lively and energetic, I had a wonderful time, I'd recommend anyone go. It's also kind of entirely forgettable, almost while you're watching it. But while you're there, you're having fun, and that's not a bad way to go.

Triptych

I mentioned here that I had gone to DC to see some theatre, and I'm overdue to talk about what I saw.

Why do I go to DC to see theatre when there's so much in New York? Well, it's hard for me to make time for it when I'm home because there's so much else calling on my time, and then when some show I really regret not seeing makes its way to DC, I see it as my little last chance theatre and try and see if I can force myself to take advantage of the opportunity Before It's Too Late.

So this trip was a BITL for The Four Of Us, a show about writers and writing that had played off Broadway and of course has some professional relevance. And then I decided to add in a well-reviewed show called In the Red and Brown Water at the Studio Theatre, which is my favorite DC venue, and then added in a second show at the Studio that was just opening called That Face, about which I knew very little, but in for a dime in for a dollar.

In the natural way of things I liked most the show I knew nothing about.

That Face is written by the Christopher Paolini of British playwrights, someone named Polly Stenham who was 19 years old when she wrote it and ended up on the West End. It's very oedipal, thank you to the Washington Post review for giving me the word which was eluding me on my own after I saw the show. You've got a drug/alcohol addled mother of two, the father having escaped to a rich banker job in Hong Kong, a daughter in prep school, and a son who's essentially abandoned his life entirely in order to "care for" his mother. When the daughter's schooling is endangered by her involvement in a hazing incident, daddy is called back from Hong Kong to help resolve the situation. There's very little I'd disagree with in that Post review, except to say that on balance I tipped toward rather enjoying myself while the tenor of the review is mixed. The writing is sharp. The acting is good. The dynamic between the son and the mother is totally weirded out. My main objections are to that weirded out relationship, which I bought into near to totally while watching the play but kept resisting in the discussion with self afterwards. Ultimately, if I can buy into the Harper/Tolliver relationship in the Harper Connelly books by Charlaine Harris, then I should let myself buy into this weird relationship, and if I let myself do that I can let myself recommend the play. That being said, the cast really does have to be on top of their game, and if you stumbled across another production of this where the actors weren't walking the tight rope as adroitly as the Studio cast does...

In the Red and Brown Water was quite nicely reviewed by the Post and has been a popular show at the Studio with a multi-week extension, but the best I can say is that I kind of admired it but in no way liked it. It's like the Fish Tank of plays. Another young girl, this one a track star with the potential to get a scholarship, but tied up in all sorts of family drama and boyfriend drama and other drama. As with that movie, the character's thrust upon us without a lot of motivation or explanation for the choices she's making. The writing style is rather arch. The characters constantly break the third wall to announce things like "Oya cries" or "I walk in like a cat in the jungle ready to pounce." Not my cup of tea.

And then there's The Four of Us, NY Times review here. From what I've seen of the critical response, it's been up and down. Even just in Variety, the original review and the NY review aren't entirely in agreement. But it does have that professional resonance. You've got two young writers, one a playwright and the other a novelist, who are friends. The novelist sells his novel -- doesn't just sell it but sells it for $2 million when all of the global and foreign sales are accounted for. This causes some tension in the relationship, though the play isn't just about that. It moves back in time to show some of the pre-success relationship. It moves forward in time to show how the playwright ultimately resolves his own feelings toward his friend.

One of the risks you have when you're watching this sort of thing and know something about the subject is the easy ability you have to find every little flaw in what's being presented. Think the Pelham 123 remake from last summer. The good news on this play is that I can assure you all of the little details are dead-on. Maybe not a surprise; the playwright Itamar Moses is known to have known the author Jonathan Safran Foer. Examples: One scene is set in a music camp the two writers attended as teens and one of them talks about how he likes to go into record stores and go to where his CDs would be and envision them sitting there on the shelves in their proper alphabetical order. I've gone to bookstores with writer Andrew Gudgel and seen him put his hand in that space between Simon Green and Peter Hamilton, thinking this exact same thing. We get little snippets of the questions asked of the writer while he is on book tour, and they are very much the kinds of questions and answers that you get on book tour. He talks about moving from an agent who submitted the book to one publisher at a time to one who sends it out to many people at once, thus getting the auction fever going. Not once did I find myself shaking my head at some really silly piece of something in the play.

But I wasn't totally a big fan of the play, either. All the little details were right, but when they were added up together I wasn't sure if the play's big picture reveals about life were anything special. The play uses a very specific milieu to come to a much more general and perhaps more generic view of friends and friendship and the writing process. I wish the play had been insightful on something big as it was on all things small. Since I didn't think the play was going anywhere special on the macro side of things, I found the writing to be a little too leisurely. If I know where you're going, why not get there? Most of the scenes went on a beat or two too long than I thought they needed to. It was a 1:40 play which probably could have come in ten or twenty minutes shorter. I was seeing with a Sunday matinee crowd that skewed old, your 40-something blogger one of the younger attendees. I was getting a little bleary-eyed during the play, it looked like the man next to me was getting a little bleary-eyed, and somebody a row back and a seat or two over. Maybe I was tired, maybe that's what happens when you're 60% older than I am, or maybe it's what happens when every scene could be just a little bit tighter.

Not a bad play. It's a two-person play that travels well and could easily enough show up somewhere where you are. It will give the real goods on some parts of the creative trade. But I do wish it had been just a little bit better.

District Affairs

I go down to Washington DC fairly often, often doing the same things over and over again though trying at some level to always experience something new on each trip, even if it's walking down a different block.

On my latest visit I decided I wanted to try very very hard to do some things recommended to me by the Washington Post.

So I went to get cupcakes at Georgetown Cupcake.  Now, this whole cupcake craze has me a little befuddled.  Illogically, because I think it's crazy to pay in the neighborhood of $3 for a little cupcake.  Why do I say that's illogical?  Because we all have things we're willing to indulge in.  I pay $6.50 every so often for a slice of Juniors Cheesecake, so why not pay $3 for a cupcake.  But logically, because Juniors is really good stuff (I think so, most people I've introduced it to think so, or have sent as a gift).   But most of these cupcakes are pretty dreary, and paying so much money for a bad cupcake?  Like this little place in Sunnyside that opened up near me recently, and I tried one of their expensive cupcakes and it was so godawful dry and bad and ugh ugh ugh.  

But I was willing to give this Georgetown Cupcake a try because when the Washington Post did a whole series of cupcake reviews in the fall they actually admitted time and again over the course of the reviews that the emperor had no clothes, that most of the cupcakes they were trying weren't very good.  Neither place very good in week #1.  Week #2, one of the places "no better than grade school cafeteria."   Hence, when they concluded the series by rating Georgetown Cupcake as the best, I was willing to give them some credence, and so I happily waited on line to try some of them.  I ended up getting six cupcakes, which with tax cost $16.50.  Each a different flavor.  As things turned out I ended up carrying them with me to dinner, then to the train station, then home, and some of them toppled over a bit even though they give a very good box which does hold the cupcakes well in more normal transport, but they were more than good enough even so for me to concur that if you want to indulge in a cupcake this is a very good place to do it.  I liked the chocolate mint quite a bit, banana pudding not bad at all, red velvet much better than average.  Chocolate #3 was a little bit disappointing but wasn't one of the fresher by the time I got around to it.  Bottom line, the cakes were moist and yummy, and the icings were flavorful without being icky sweet.  

For the record, here in NYC the cupcakes at Magnolia, Billys and Buttercup are among those that leave me feeling cold.  Sage has a decent ersatz Hostess cupcake, the Little Pie Co. has a nice cream filled chocolate if eaten at room temperature (I also like Juniors best at room temp), and some Crumbs like the grasshopper are OK, but I think from now on I'll save myself for when I can do Georgetown Cupcake.

Dinner that night, cupcakes in tow, was at Ray's Hellburger, which the Washington Post liked quite a bit and put in their fall magazine listing as one of the best restaurants in DC.  Well, thank you Tom Sietsema!  This is one yummy hamburger.  I got a pepper encrusted burger cooked medium with some swiss cheese atop.  It was big and juicy, moderately but not overly messy.  Like the review says the bun was a little overmatched, but it was a good bun with some real texture and substance to it.  The surroundings are not luxurious.  You order at the counter then sit down and wait a few minutes for the burger to be delivered.  You might be sitting in close surroundings to somebody else.  I had my bags and cupcakes because my next stop was Union Station, and I had to kind of fight my way through the ordering crowd to get to the bathroom.  But if you want a good, no frills, eating experience when you're in DC. Rays Hellburger is well worthwhile.

If you want a bit of a walking tour, Rays is at the downhill side of the very walkable very pleasant Clarendon corridor.  Now that the B. Dalton won't be there any more I'm not sure if it makes sense to start a walk at the far end by Ballston Commons.  But certainly you can get off at Clarendon, enjoy the little park and admire historic theatres in the CVS window and think on the very good Delhi Club for some other meal someday, walk downhill to the upscale shopping mall, browse at the Barnes & Noble, check e-mail at the Apple Store, pick up some vino at Whole Foods, down a little further past the Arlington County courthouse and the AMC, then eventually go down Wilson a little bit further to Rays.  Have good burger, having built up nice appetite.  Then continue down Wilson to Rosslyn, walk over the scenic and glorious Key Bridge into Georgetown, with wonderful views in abundance, and then just a few short blocks to Georgetown Cupcake.  It's only 1.3 miles according to Mapquest from Hellburger to Georgetown Cupcake, downhill, (burn more calories by having cupcake first then going to burger), and my that would be good.  The problem with the Clarendon corridor is that it gives too many good choices.  If you eat at Ray's you can't eat at Whole Foods, if you go to Georgetown Cupcake who'll have an appetite for a slice of Linda's Fudge Cake at Cheesecake Factory, if you go to Delhi Club there's no chili at Hard Times.  

My other DC item to review quickly was the production of Grey Gardens at the Studio Theatre.  This was the classic Studio production for me to see, something I'd kind of wanted to see when it was on Broadway but never quite got around to, so the DC production becomes a last chance at a theatre that I know will generally do a good job of things.  The production was solid enough with the lead played by someone with lots of Broadway experience and another role filled by one of the cast members from the Studio's superb stunningly good wish-it-were-still-running production of Jerry Springer the Opera, but it's not a very good musical alas.  It's based on a documentary about some Onassis relatives living in squalor at the eponymous estate on Long Island.  The first act is set earlier in the 20th century when Grey Gardens is still a place to be seen.  Joe Kennedy is courting the ladies.  All very frilly but not very thrilling.  I don't care about these people at all.  The second act gets a little more interesting with some nicely staged numbers with the entire company and one particularly interesting song called Jerry Likes My Corn that is an ode to the handyman who's willing to help out the crazy ladies in Grey Gardens, but one bad act followed by one mildly interesting one doesn't make for a good night at the theatre to me.  So One Slithy Toad for this production, seen at the evening performance on Sunday January 1, 2009.  Interestingly enough, Peter Marks, the critic for the Washington Post seems to feel the same way that the production is much better in the second act than the first, and I guess overall liked much more than I since his capsule review gave it the "recommended" star.  But shouldn't he have genuinely liked both acts before he recommends it, instead of giving that little star to something that even he seems to say has some first act issues?