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.
Showing posts with label broadway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label broadway. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
So the first 2014 movie I saw in 2014 was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.
Took me a while. Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start. Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things.
I enjoyed it.
For one, I like Chris Pine very much. He has "it," that special movie star quality. He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies. He is very Chris Pine here!
I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh. Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he did the good Thor movie. He knows how to direct actors with charisma, he doesn't get in their way, he let Chris Hemsworth shine outside of the Thor suit in Thor, and he lets Chris Pine by Chris Pine. And he's a solid enough actor himself.
So all in all, it works. It's a little bit similar to the last Mission Impossible movie, but not as big a budget so things happen on a smaller scale, and the movie's short and moves briskly, which isn't a bad thing. There's one major action set-piece in the middle which the film builds to nicely, and one major action piece at the end which impressed me for doing a good enough job of faking NYC without being in NYC that I was willing to buy into it even though I knew the geography was unfamiliar.
Branagh isn't as good, always, at directing women. Not much for them to do in Thor, Keira Knightley has a pretty thankless role to play.
Nothing great, but as January releases go this was a pleasant way to pass the time.
Saw two Broadway shows on the same day.
Machinal at the Roundabout's 42nd Street Theatre was good for a nap. When I was up, I was quite impressed with the set design and the costume design and the creativity and beauty of the physical production. And the play, some decades old and based on a real life murder case, is a decent enough choice for revival because the play and the case it comes from anticipate quite nicely a lot of today's celebrity culture, enough so that we have to reconsider if today's celebrity culture is really just today's. We'd like to think so, but the 24 hour news cycle may just be an accelerant and not the flame and fire itself. I can't exactly recommend the play, because it's clear I got enough out of it from staying awake for a third or a half, which suggests half of it just kind of sits there. But I've also stayed awake for many a play that's given far less back to me.
Little Me is a 1962 musical with a book by Neil Simon and a Cy Coleman score that was originally intended as a star vehicle for Sid Caesar. It's an old woman narrating her life story, which consists of a series of short-lived marriages, with the husbands all played by one actor. It's got a juicy role for the old woman, another for the young woman, and a very juicy role indeed for the man. Here, Sid Caesar's shoes are filled by Christian Borle, a Tony Award winner for Peter and the Starcatcher and a star of the TV show Smash (male half of the composing team). I was glad I saw this. The first act goes on too long, but the play starts off with charm and humor enough to almost allow it to coast over the dull hills later in the act. Christian Borle was perfect in his role, Broadway veteran Judy Kaye was excellent in her role as the old woman who narrates, and the supporting roles well cast as well. Part of the Encores series, the show had one week, seven performances, and is gone.
Took me a while. Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start. Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things.
I enjoyed it.
For one, I like Chris Pine very much. He has "it," that special movie star quality. He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies. He is very Chris Pine here!
I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh. Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he did the good Thor movie. He knows how to direct actors with charisma, he doesn't get in their way, he let Chris Hemsworth shine outside of the Thor suit in Thor, and he lets Chris Pine by Chris Pine. And he's a solid enough actor himself.
So all in all, it works. It's a little bit similar to the last Mission Impossible movie, but not as big a budget so things happen on a smaller scale, and the movie's short and moves briskly, which isn't a bad thing. There's one major action set-piece in the middle which the film builds to nicely, and one major action piece at the end which impressed me for doing a good enough job of faking NYC without being in NYC that I was willing to buy into it even though I knew the geography was unfamiliar.
Branagh isn't as good, always, at directing women. Not much for them to do in Thor, Keira Knightley has a pretty thankless role to play.
Nothing great, but as January releases go this was a pleasant way to pass the time.
Saw two Broadway shows on the same day.
Machinal at the Roundabout's 42nd Street Theatre was good for a nap. When I was up, I was quite impressed with the set design and the costume design and the creativity and beauty of the physical production. And the play, some decades old and based on a real life murder case, is a decent enough choice for revival because the play and the case it comes from anticipate quite nicely a lot of today's celebrity culture, enough so that we have to reconsider if today's celebrity culture is really just today's. We'd like to think so, but the 24 hour news cycle may just be an accelerant and not the flame and fire itself. I can't exactly recommend the play, because it's clear I got enough out of it from staying awake for a third or a half, which suggests half of it just kind of sits there. But I've also stayed awake for many a play that's given far less back to me.
Little Me is a 1962 musical with a book by Neil Simon and a Cy Coleman score that was originally intended as a star vehicle for Sid Caesar. It's an old woman narrating her life story, which consists of a series of short-lived marriages, with the husbands all played by one actor. It's got a juicy role for the old woman, another for the young woman, and a very juicy role indeed for the man. Here, Sid Caesar's shoes are filled by Christian Borle, a Tony Award winner for Peter and the Starcatcher and a star of the TV show Smash (male half of the composing team). I was glad I saw this. The first act goes on too long, but the play starts off with charm and humor enough to almost allow it to coast over the dull hills later in the act. Christian Borle was perfect in his role, Broadway veteran Judy Kaye was excellent in her role as the old woman who narrates, and the supporting roles well cast as well. Part of the Encores series, the show had one week, seven performances, and is gone.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The Book of Mormon
Typically, when there's some hot new Broadway show where you need to buy tickets way far in advance and there are no discounts and etc., I wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. I live in New York City. Eventually in five years of fifteen years demand will drop. Tickets will be on TKTS. If I die before that happens -- well, if I'm dead, the fact that I missed a Broadway show will be the least of my worries. And it's New York, it's Broadway, you see the 12th replacement cast in the 9th year of the run, and odds are you're still going to see some pretty good stuff, The Phantom of the Opera is still chugging along well after Michael Crawford, you know.
Charlaine Harris was in town this week to do a special pre-signing of books for select bookstore accounts. She wanted to see Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon. A good agent would happily choose to take the client to Jersey Boys, cheaper tickets, and let the publisher take to The Book of Mormon, expensive tickets. I guess I'm not a good agent. I'd already seen Jersey Boys, which is fantastic and I'd recommend it to anyone, but I'd seen it. I've been dying to see The Book of Mormon. And the availability update on the website suggested there might still be premium seats for the week in question. So I was forced -- forced, I say, forced !! -- to go get very nice seats to see this show I'd been dying to see. Sometimes, it's a hard life being a literary agent.
It was worth every penny.
The Book of Mormon is one of the best musicals I've ever seen, likely one of the best I will ever see.
Even with Elder Price being played by the understudy.
There is one flaw, if you will. The songs are excellent, lively, melodic, tuneful, all of that, but not anything like Tomorrow from Annie or Sunrise Sunset from Fiddler that will linger in the mind for 62.92 years after you've seen the show. You can bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow I will be able to hum "I Believe" to myself, to the extent of humming those two words, I will not be able to go deep into the verses through to the cobwebs and the sorrow.
No, two flaws. One number takes place in the departure lounge of the airport with the Elders on their way to their mission in Uganda, the set has the departure board at the gate listing the flight as bound for Uganda. I kept looking at that and thinking in any real airport I've ever been to the plane would be going to a particular city in Uganda, not to the country. It is hard for me to believe that the creators of the show are worried that nobody from Gulu or Jinja will want to come see the show if that sign had properly read "Kampala, Uganda" instead of just saying Uganda. I think we should start a petition to get that distraction changed.
I can't address the show from a Mormon perspective. If you want to read up on that, you can find a thorough and interesting annotation on "I Believe" from our client Bryce Moore by clicking here.
I can say that the interesting thing about this irreverent if not downright blasphemous or sacrilegious show is that it is ultimately reaffirming of the idea of faith. The co-leads are two Elders off on their Mormon mission in Uganda, one trim and good-looking and fervent and personable and all those things you want your Elder to be, the other rather less in regard to everything except his weight. The good Elder loses his faith, and this is a bad thing. The bad Elder gets the locals to enter the church by teaching them an "interpretive" version of the Book of Mormon, which version the locals proceed to act out before the mission's supervisors to their great dismay. But in our happy ending, we are told that even this version has offered something, a ray of hope or a path to a different life. And to me, the corollary to this is that if there is good to be found even in the bastardized teaching then surely there is more than that to be found in the real teaching. Furthermore, while the musical is clearly skeptical about Joseph Smith's discovery of the Book of Mormon, the musical as a whole and the "I Believe" song in particular must present some of the basics of Mormon teaching in order to have some fun with said teachings. It is well within the realm of possibility that there are people who will find it intriguing, their curiosity heightened, and then decide to explore further. There are worse things. The church is wise to have taken a measured response to the show.
The musical is sometimes considered to be one of the great distinct American contributions to world culture. I am struck in watching The Book of Mormon to see how closely it follows in that great American tradition, only so much better in so many ways than so many of its antecedents. The Book of Mormon has a great love song. It happens to be a long double entendre set against a baptism, it's absolutely hilarious and a thoroughgoing delight to watch. But in its essence, in its form and place and function within the show, it is every bit as much the classic American musical love song as Maria in West Side Story. Similarly, the lengthy musical number in which the Ugandans present their version of Mormon history and belief is a clear and direct descendant of the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" presentation in The King and I. With significant differences. That number in The King and I has limited relevance to the basic plot, it's long and dull and boring, we should all go and see it to appreciate the place of the musical in the history of the musical and blah blah blah. But honestly, I have no particular interest in spending my life going to see a lot of these classic shows with long dance sequences stuck in just because you need to have a long dance sequence, and since I will never be able to get that Whistle a Happy Tune thing out of my head I don't need to keep going to see The King and I for a refresher course in whistling happy tunes whenever I feel afraid. But I would happily go see The Book of Mormon again.
The Book of Mormon marches along from high point to high point. It doesn't have much of a plot, but it has imagination and wit and humor and good cheer. All of which are present in virtually every musical number. So the show just flies by. You can tell that the creators have seen every great Broadway musical at least 9 times, which is easy. What's way less easy but which these people have done, is to identify what makes the shows work instead of borrowing the bad elements. Hairspray it's not, Hairspray has a much stronger plot line but is ultimately kind of dull because it takes too much to heart the idea that every character should have a big number and not enough to heart that all those big numbers should really do something to move the story along instead of just being there and being big to attract ovations from tourists.
Charlaine Harris was in town this week to do a special pre-signing of books for select bookstore accounts. She wanted to see Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon. A good agent would happily choose to take the client to Jersey Boys, cheaper tickets, and let the publisher take to The Book of Mormon, expensive tickets. I guess I'm not a good agent. I'd already seen Jersey Boys, which is fantastic and I'd recommend it to anyone, but I'd seen it. I've been dying to see The Book of Mormon. And the availability update on the website suggested there might still be premium seats for the week in question. So I was forced -- forced, I say, forced !! -- to go get very nice seats to see this show I'd been dying to see. Sometimes, it's a hard life being a literary agent.
It was worth every penny.
The Book of Mormon is one of the best musicals I've ever seen, likely one of the best I will ever see.
Even with Elder Price being played by the understudy.
There is one flaw, if you will. The songs are excellent, lively, melodic, tuneful, all of that, but not anything like Tomorrow from Annie or Sunrise Sunset from Fiddler that will linger in the mind for 62.92 years after you've seen the show. You can bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow I will be able to hum "I Believe" to myself, to the extent of humming those two words, I will not be able to go deep into the verses through to the cobwebs and the sorrow.
No, two flaws. One number takes place in the departure lounge of the airport with the Elders on their way to their mission in Uganda, the set has the departure board at the gate listing the flight as bound for Uganda. I kept looking at that and thinking in any real airport I've ever been to the plane would be going to a particular city in Uganda, not to the country. It is hard for me to believe that the creators of the show are worried that nobody from Gulu or Jinja will want to come see the show if that sign had properly read "Kampala, Uganda" instead of just saying Uganda. I think we should start a petition to get that distraction changed.
I can't address the show from a Mormon perspective. If you want to read up on that, you can find a thorough and interesting annotation on "I Believe" from our client Bryce Moore by clicking here.
I can say that the interesting thing about this irreverent if not downright blasphemous or sacrilegious show is that it is ultimately reaffirming of the idea of faith. The co-leads are two Elders off on their Mormon mission in Uganda, one trim and good-looking and fervent and personable and all those things you want your Elder to be, the other rather less in regard to everything except his weight. The good Elder loses his faith, and this is a bad thing. The bad Elder gets the locals to enter the church by teaching them an "interpretive" version of the Book of Mormon, which version the locals proceed to act out before the mission's supervisors to their great dismay. But in our happy ending, we are told that even this version has offered something, a ray of hope or a path to a different life. And to me, the corollary to this is that if there is good to be found even in the bastardized teaching then surely there is more than that to be found in the real teaching. Furthermore, while the musical is clearly skeptical about Joseph Smith's discovery of the Book of Mormon, the musical as a whole and the "I Believe" song in particular must present some of the basics of Mormon teaching in order to have some fun with said teachings. It is well within the realm of possibility that there are people who will find it intriguing, their curiosity heightened, and then decide to explore further. There are worse things. The church is wise to have taken a measured response to the show.
The musical is sometimes considered to be one of the great distinct American contributions to world culture. I am struck in watching The Book of Mormon to see how closely it follows in that great American tradition, only so much better in so many ways than so many of its antecedents. The Book of Mormon has a great love song. It happens to be a long double entendre set against a baptism, it's absolutely hilarious and a thoroughgoing delight to watch. But in its essence, in its form and place and function within the show, it is every bit as much the classic American musical love song as Maria in West Side Story. Similarly, the lengthy musical number in which the Ugandans present their version of Mormon history and belief is a clear and direct descendant of the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" presentation in The King and I. With significant differences. That number in The King and I has limited relevance to the basic plot, it's long and dull and boring, we should all go and see it to appreciate the place of the musical in the history of the musical and blah blah blah. But honestly, I have no particular interest in spending my life going to see a lot of these classic shows with long dance sequences stuck in just because you need to have a long dance sequence, and since I will never be able to get that Whistle a Happy Tune thing out of my head I don't need to keep going to see The King and I for a refresher course in whistling happy tunes whenever I feel afraid. But I would happily go see The Book of Mormon again.
The Book of Mormon marches along from high point to high point. It doesn't have much of a plot, but it has imagination and wit and humor and good cheer. All of which are present in virtually every musical number. So the show just flies by. You can tell that the creators have seen every great Broadway musical at least 9 times, which is easy. What's way less easy but which these people have done, is to identify what makes the shows work instead of borrowing the bad elements. Hairspray it's not, Hairspray has a much stronger plot line but is ultimately kind of dull because it takes too much to heart the idea that every character should have a big number and not enough to heart that all those big numbers should really do something to move the story along instead of just being there and being big to attract ovations from tourists.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
The Candidates on TV
With both 24 and Friday Night Lights going off the air the past couple of years, two shows that were appointment viewing for me, I've been willing to cautiously explore finding replacements.
Glee never quite cut it, too inconsistent.
I've been trying Smash. The first three episodes were enh. The 4th episode the show seemed to have found its footing. The next two were OK, the 7th episode that aired this past Sunday was the best so far. I'm willing to keep going with it a bit, I'm a NYer and a theatregoer.
But the show I've taken to wholeheartedly after watching a few episodes tonight is The Good Wife.
I've heard a lot over the years about how good this is, and they are frequently filming at the courthouse across the street from my apartment (yes, New York City doubles for Chicago in The Good Wife).
And a few minutes in to an episode I still had on the DVR from the end of January, I was totally hooked.
What's not to like?
The writing is excellent. Sharp characters, sharp conflicts, ongoing character arcs but each episode also provides some resolution to a case. In essence, it's all the things that TV people like to say they're doing but which they rarely execute on or often say they want but don't actually do.
The cast is excellent. Smash might be about the New York theatre, but The Good Wife brings the best of NY theatre into your living room every week. One episode, there's David Pittu who was just playing in CQ/CX, the next week there's Josh Hamilton whom you've seen multiple times in the judge's robes, and then another week it's Bebe Neuwirth. If it's a delight, at least for someone like me who goes to the theatre and can appreciate the guest stars, the rest of the world gets to enjoy the regulars. They all seem just right. Christina Baranski and Josh Charles and Juliette Margulies and everyone else, and they all just work.
The best film and TV manage to tow the line of the exaggeratedly real, a little over the top and a little Hollywood and a little manipulative and a little of everything but without ever going completely over the top. Shows like Glee today or Ally McBeal a decade ago can cast a brief bright flame by actually going over the top in some different or fresh way, but they flame out. The gimmick can't be fresh forever, or they fall in love with the gimmick and go over the top, and over time you lose the connection with the audience. It seems horribly unlikely in one episode that the prosecutor would start to ask our lead character in a grand jury investigation about whether she was sleeping with the guy they're trying to indict, but then you can think about how Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex. It seems even less likely that the person being questioned would then walk out of the courtroom in the middle of the questioning and dear the prosecutor to have her arrested, and even less likely that the grand jury would start asking questions and rebel against the prosecutor. But the characters are strong enough that you suspend disbelief, you enter the world of the exaggeratedly real where you can recognize the implausibility but believe. No dancing babies, no teaching the world to sing.
The show keeps things fresh with some tonal variety. One episode was pretty serious, the main case is about the father of a college student who committed suicide suing a filmmaker who documented it. This is serious stuff, and it's handled reasonably seriously within the realm of the exaggeratedly real. The next episode is a laugh riot. Dylan Baker is hilarious as a corporate executive specializing in peccadilloes, caught up in a paternity and harassment case in the middle of a proxy fight. It's laugh out loud stuff.
So this show is as good as everyone's been saying it is. I doubt I have the hours in the day to catch up on previous seasons, but it is so tempting to go and buy season passes on iTunes.
I don't want to rush to judgment on Smash when the show is giving signs of finding its footing as it goes along, but it's also the case that you don't get a second chance at a first impression and Smash's has been inconsistent.
Writing: If you are doing a show that's about a Broadway musical, is it a great idea to have a major subplot about the co-composer's attempts to adopt a Chinese baby? Not in my book, it's too off-center, it's a subplot that could be thrown into pretty much any hourlong drama if you wanted to, it's not why I'd decide to sample this particular show. And then there's the live-in boyfriend of the Marilyn who works in the Mayor's office as the Press Secretary, and that's another character that just seems like something you could have everyplace. The Good Wife is gloriously incestuous, within minutes I'm picking up on all of these connections between the district attorney's office and the law firm and the good wife and her husband, and they're not afraid to just make everything about the lawyers and the politicians. Smash is a TV show about a Broadway show that constantly seems to look over its shoulder, fearing that the outside world is gaining on it because who really wants to watch a show that's just about Broadway. It's commercially logical and entirely mistaken. The show is about what it's about, if you don't think people want to watch what your shows about, then make a different show, don't bring in lots of extraneous elements in order to appeal to people who don't care about what you care about.
Casting: It's not bad, but it's just the slightest bit off. If you've just come off seeing Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, it's harder to buy into Megan Hilty's performance here. Katharine McPhee is good but generic, when she's put into the ensemble instead of being given the lead role, you don't automatically think it's a bad decision. There's nothing wrong with having personality, the faces of the people in The Good Wife radiate all kinds of personality, all of it the right kind for the role. Smash is just that little bit off, that fine line between that person in high school with some weird ambition that everyone respects because it's so true and real for that person, and the person with some weird ambition that everyone thinks is just weird.
As always, these things run into one another. The role of an assistant to the composers is underwritten. This character could be the audience's surrogate, by seeing what makes him tick we could find ourselves with an interest in the Broadway stage that we didn't know we had until this character started voicing it for us. The way Lloyd's desire to be Ari Gold on Entourage makes us envy Ari at the same time we despise him. In Smash, we get a lot about the adaptation, a little less about this potentially pivotal character, who ends up being defined by his weirdrobe.
I'm being a little too hard on Smash, there are a lot of smart people involved with it. There's this sense that they've slowly gotten more confident over seven episodes to be about the musical instead of the adoption. The original musical numbers are solid. But comparing and contrasting, it's hard to see this grow to be The Good Wife, to be better definitely, but not to be one of the best dramas on TV.
Glee never quite cut it, too inconsistent.
I've been trying Smash. The first three episodes were enh. The 4th episode the show seemed to have found its footing. The next two were OK, the 7th episode that aired this past Sunday was the best so far. I'm willing to keep going with it a bit, I'm a NYer and a theatregoer.
But the show I've taken to wholeheartedly after watching a few episodes tonight is The Good Wife.
I've heard a lot over the years about how good this is, and they are frequently filming at the courthouse across the street from my apartment (yes, New York City doubles for Chicago in The Good Wife).
And a few minutes in to an episode I still had on the DVR from the end of January, I was totally hooked.
What's not to like?
The writing is excellent. Sharp characters, sharp conflicts, ongoing character arcs but each episode also provides some resolution to a case. In essence, it's all the things that TV people like to say they're doing but which they rarely execute on or often say they want but don't actually do.
The cast is excellent. Smash might be about the New York theatre, but The Good Wife brings the best of NY theatre into your living room every week. One episode, there's David Pittu who was just playing in CQ/CX, the next week there's Josh Hamilton whom you've seen multiple times in the judge's robes, and then another week it's Bebe Neuwirth. If it's a delight, at least for someone like me who goes to the theatre and can appreciate the guest stars, the rest of the world gets to enjoy the regulars. They all seem just right. Christina Baranski and Josh Charles and Juliette Margulies and everyone else, and they all just work.
The best film and TV manage to tow the line of the exaggeratedly real, a little over the top and a little Hollywood and a little manipulative and a little of everything but without ever going completely over the top. Shows like Glee today or Ally McBeal a decade ago can cast a brief bright flame by actually going over the top in some different or fresh way, but they flame out. The gimmick can't be fresh forever, or they fall in love with the gimmick and go over the top, and over time you lose the connection with the audience. It seems horribly unlikely in one episode that the prosecutor would start to ask our lead character in a grand jury investigation about whether she was sleeping with the guy they're trying to indict, but then you can think about how Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex. It seems even less likely that the person being questioned would then walk out of the courtroom in the middle of the questioning and dear the prosecutor to have her arrested, and even less likely that the grand jury would start asking questions and rebel against the prosecutor. But the characters are strong enough that you suspend disbelief, you enter the world of the exaggeratedly real where you can recognize the implausibility but believe. No dancing babies, no teaching the world to sing.
The show keeps things fresh with some tonal variety. One episode was pretty serious, the main case is about the father of a college student who committed suicide suing a filmmaker who documented it. This is serious stuff, and it's handled reasonably seriously within the realm of the exaggeratedly real. The next episode is a laugh riot. Dylan Baker is hilarious as a corporate executive specializing in peccadilloes, caught up in a paternity and harassment case in the middle of a proxy fight. It's laugh out loud stuff.
So this show is as good as everyone's been saying it is. I doubt I have the hours in the day to catch up on previous seasons, but it is so tempting to go and buy season passes on iTunes.
I don't want to rush to judgment on Smash when the show is giving signs of finding its footing as it goes along, but it's also the case that you don't get a second chance at a first impression and Smash's has been inconsistent.
Writing: If you are doing a show that's about a Broadway musical, is it a great idea to have a major subplot about the co-composer's attempts to adopt a Chinese baby? Not in my book, it's too off-center, it's a subplot that could be thrown into pretty much any hourlong drama if you wanted to, it's not why I'd decide to sample this particular show. And then there's the live-in boyfriend of the Marilyn who works in the Mayor's office as the Press Secretary, and that's another character that just seems like something you could have everyplace. The Good Wife is gloriously incestuous, within minutes I'm picking up on all of these connections between the district attorney's office and the law firm and the good wife and her husband, and they're not afraid to just make everything about the lawyers and the politicians. Smash is a TV show about a Broadway show that constantly seems to look over its shoulder, fearing that the outside world is gaining on it because who really wants to watch a show that's just about Broadway. It's commercially logical and entirely mistaken. The show is about what it's about, if you don't think people want to watch what your shows about, then make a different show, don't bring in lots of extraneous elements in order to appeal to people who don't care about what you care about.
Casting: It's not bad, but it's just the slightest bit off. If you've just come off seeing Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, it's harder to buy into Megan Hilty's performance here. Katharine McPhee is good but generic, when she's put into the ensemble instead of being given the lead role, you don't automatically think it's a bad decision. There's nothing wrong with having personality, the faces of the people in The Good Wife radiate all kinds of personality, all of it the right kind for the role. Smash is just that little bit off, that fine line between that person in high school with some weird ambition that everyone respects because it's so true and real for that person, and the person with some weird ambition that everyone thinks is just weird.
As always, these things run into one another. The role of an assistant to the composers is underwritten. This character could be the audience's surrogate, by seeing what makes him tick we could find ourselves with an interest in the Broadway stage that we didn't know we had until this character started voicing it for us. The way Lloyd's desire to be Ari Gold on Entourage makes us envy Ari at the same time we despise him. In Smash, we get a lot about the adaptation, a little less about this potentially pivotal character, who ends up being defined by his weirdrobe.
I'm being a little too hard on Smash, there are a lot of smart people involved with it. There's this sense that they've slowly gotten more confident over seven episodes to be about the musical instead of the adoption. The original musical numbers are solid. But comparing and contrasting, it's hard to see this grow to be The Good Wife, to be better definitely, but not to be one of the best dramas on TV.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Drama
The Cripple of Inishman, seen Sunday afternoon January 11, 2009 at the Atlantic Theater (NY) Mainstage, 2 slithy toads.
Reasons To Be Pretty, seen Saturday afternoon April 11, 2009 at the Lyceum Theatre, 3 slithy toads.
Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has written one of the best plays I've ever seen, The Pillowman, which I like enough to have seen once in London, twice in NY, and once in DC, and will happily go to again if given the opportunity. Let me know if it's playing on a stage near you, and we can do an outing. This year he received he an Acadamey Award nomination for his very pleasant comedy In Bruges. At the dawn of his career, he wrote The Cripple of Inishman, which was first presented in NYC ten years ago in a production that was not admired, and which now returns in a production first presented at Ireland's Druid Theatre, and which was received quite rapturously. Enh. Meh.
McDonagh's plays specialize often in cruelties of a sort, and the Cripple is indeed about a Cripple whose parents were lost as sea several years ago, and whose hopes of making it in Hollywood are kindled by the arrival of a film crew in town. The town is full of gossips, and by the time it's over we'll have heard multiple versions of the night his parents were lost and maybe by the end have the final one. I'll hold on to my memories of The Pillowman or of the gleeful bloodletting of the Lt. of Inishmore, or even on the negative side of the creaky dramatic device that allows The Beauty Queen of Leenane to creak into existence. I saw this one three months ago, and it fades so into the cobwebs of my mind that my general sense of its mediocrity is only confirmed.
A good Neil LaBute play is quite unlikely to creep into the cobwebs of anything. In recent years his plays have mostly been performed way downtown at the Lucille Lortel, which is a very long walk to get to and just an all-around pain in the neck, and I've ended up skipping there and then catching at the Studio Theatre in DC. This play, however, moved uptown to become the first Broadway play for LaBute, and with a theatermania offer in hand the price was very right for an 8th row seat.
LaBute first came to my attention with the gleefully misogynist film In the Company of Man, where two office workers bet on dating a deaf co-worker. In his play The Shape of Things, we're left to ponder how cruel we can be in the service of a good deed when a guy/girl makeover comes with an unexpected twist of the knife. (I saw the play, not the movie, but would recommend the film as it is supposed to be faithful.) Fat Pig, I saw with my Myke Cole, and we had some nice heated debates afterwards. That's about an office worker who dates a very very fat woman and then has to decide whether to keep the relationship going in the face of the reaction from his co-workers.
Those two plays form a trilogy that now concludes with Reasons To Be Pretty. Some interesting connections in all of these, in that Paul Rudd was in the film version of The Shape of Things and now in a movie I saw the same weekend as Reasons. I saw Reasons To Be Pretty with an understudy Anne Bowles playing the female lead, and I see in my Playbill that she was in the DC production I saw of Fat Pig.
Reasons To Be Pretty starts with a heated argument between a couple that are living together over something he said about her. Some of the reviews have given the details of what he said, which we don't get to find out until the argument's been going for a while, and I think it's better that way; no spoilers here on that at least. The two end up splitting up. The balance of the play alternates between: (a) scenes at his workplace, what the set but not the script tells us is a Costco because the pallets include some of various Kirkland Signature products, where the male lead Greg works with Kent on the night receiving team. Kent in turn is putting Carly, a security guard at the same job, into a family way. Greg and Carly do not get along so well. (b) the typical post-breakup awkward scenes Greg and Steph meet at a food court for some follow-on metaphorical eating of one another, when Greg and Steph run into one another at a restaurant, and later when Steph stops by work to tell Greg about the new guy she'll be marrying.
The scenes between Steph and Greg are exceptionally potent. Oh but it's quite a row they have at the beginning! The restaurant scene is filled with every little bit of what you'd dread about living it yourself. The unspoken desire to get back together, the spoken conflict between wanting to re-connect and wanting to unload. The fact that I saw Steph played by an understudy is a reminder that there are lots of good actors in the world and rarely a role or performance so indelible it can't be equalled by someone else, and Bowles acts like she was born to play the role.
I liked less the scenes between Greg and Kent at the warehouse store break-room. I was always rapt when Steph and Greg were on stage, and then bleary-eyed when it was Greg and Kent. And there was something about the relationship betwee Carly and Greg that seemed a little off or perhaps underdefined to me.
But at its best, the writing and the acting here are exceptional, and the best scenes are so brilliantly done that they are likely to linger long long after. Thomas Sadoski is wonderful as Greg, and the chemisty between he and Bowles exceptionally good. There isn't a line-reading that's off as he journeys slowly from the dead-on macho refusal to see wrong of the opening argument to slowly seeing so much that's wrong in his life to an ultimate regret and melancholy.
I'm giving this "only" 3 toads. First, what sticks in this is something that sticks in a lot of drama while the sharper knife twists of Fat Pig and The Shape of Things ask us to dig just a little deeper into ourselves. This is definitely gentler LaBute, but a sharper prod with the stick is sometimes what we need. Second, I do think the play was just so much better when Steph was on the stage, and I don't know if it's the writing or the casting or both or neither that I just wasn't as caught up in the guy-on-guy repartee between Greg and Kent. I'm more certain it's the writing that undercuts the play in the Greg/Carly part of it, though that aspect of it does ultimately go someplace interesting as part of Greg's growing self-awareness.
I would recommend this highly if you're in NYC, and because the Lyceum is a cozy old playhouse with a second balcony it doesn't have to cost you a mint. If I send you the Theatremania offer, you could choose to go upstairs for under $40.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
August, Osage County
Seen Tuesday evening August 26, 2008, 7:30 PM at the Music Box Theatre. 1.5 slithy toads.
This play won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Variety loved it
The NY Times loved it with the current cast. And with the old cast.
Why?
How?
Do they have a category for Best Dysfunctional Family Drama?
I think the best thing about the play might be the set. It's a three-story house, living room and dining room and den at the front of the bottom floor, marked off by pieces of furniture, with a kitchen lurking in the background and the driveway and front door and porch hinted at off to one side. A flight of stairs leads up to a 2nd floor with a couple of bedrooms, and then another staircase to a third floor with another bedroom tucked under the gables. It's a very very big house, and a very very tall house. Most of the time a play might have a really big living room and not much else going on, and maybe there's a turntable or some other scenery trick to give other rooms, but it's not often the case that you see a house with such immense verticality to it.
My admiration for the set does not extend to the lighting design. There were times when I couldn't figure out how the light we were seeing beyond the third floor windows was matching with what time of day it was supposed to be and the variety of light playing on the exterior of this very big very tall house. Was the house so tall that the third floor was in a different time zone than the bottom floor?
In a good play, maybe I wouldn't have time to ponder so much on the lighting design, but this is not a good play.
The play, which is named for the county in Oklahoma in which it is set, starts out with the patriarch interviewing a 20-something Cherokee college-age type for some kind of job with the family. I'm not entirely sure what her job was. If it was clearly defined during the interview, I didn't catch it between the patriarch's meditations on Tennessee Williams, or it got lost because the lady had her back turned to me making it harder to hear her soft-spoken dialogue. Nor could you really tell what her job was by watching the rest of the play. She isn't seen much. She hangs out in her room on the third floor reading.
Right after this, the patriarch disappears and goes missing, and his wife calls the police. The wife is one of those pill-popping dysfunctional matriarchs, and of course the sheriff has history with the family, in this case a prom date with one of the daughters. When patriarch is found dead the whole family returns, and we meet more daughters, their husbands, an attractive male cousin who is having a thing with one of the daughters that shouldn't trouble us (doesn't trouble the characters) because she had a hysterectomy so they can't do the kinds of things that lead to taboos against first cousins being too close with one another. The primary daughter has an estranged husband who shows up. There's a granddaughter around. There are plenty of dark secrets hanging around, darker even than that first cousin thing. The first act sets the stage. The second act has people preparing for a big dinner followed by the dinner itself at which some secrets will start to reveal. And then the final act will have more secrets come tumbling out followed by the ramifications thereof.
But there's one major problem with the play, which is that none of these characters are very likeable. I'm giving the play only a moderately low rating because it's well enough written that I wasn't looking at my watch all that often, other than in the first half of the third act, and it's got a bit of humor and some actual zing, but when I don't care about anyone on stage I'm not sure why I want to spend three hours with them. And the dysfunction seems forced. When I'm evaluating a novel by one of my clients, I'm often willing to give my most generous suspension of disbelief with regard to the starting points of the characters, and then those points being accepted will go where the characters themselves feel the need to go. But in August, I kept seeing the playwright Tracy Letts reaching down from on high (from very high on high, considering how tall the house is) to add a new revelation or a new twist or a new bit of nastiness. Hence, I liked the lead-up to the big dinner at the end of Act 2, because it was set against the background of doing what characters would do in these circumstances. But the dinner scene itself left me flat, because it becomes a canvas on which to paint people doing things that people won't do. The third act wore out its welcome at the start because it builds on that dinner scene, which means it put more odd-looking bricks on top of a foundation of odd-looking bricks. There's some real drama in the final stretch of the third act as the characters confront look at these bricks and react to them, but I still think of the bricks and not the people looking at them.
At the very end, the denoument of August Osage County is not dissimilar to the ending of the film Hud, a classic directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman which I finally caught up with al fresco in Bryant Park. That had an ending which was tragic on many levels for several of the characters, but the only tragedy at the end of this was that I felt "goodbye and good riddance" to all of the characters as they made their sorry way off the stage. I've had far drearier evenings at the theatre than this; I can't emphasize enough how nice it was to have a 3-hour-plus play that entailed only minimum looking at watch. But I can't recommend this.
This play won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Variety loved it
The NY Times loved it with the current cast. And with the old cast.
Why?
How?
Do they have a category for Best Dysfunctional Family Drama?
I think the best thing about the play might be the set. It's a three-story house, living room and dining room and den at the front of the bottom floor, marked off by pieces of furniture, with a kitchen lurking in the background and the driveway and front door and porch hinted at off to one side. A flight of stairs leads up to a 2nd floor with a couple of bedrooms, and then another staircase to a third floor with another bedroom tucked under the gables. It's a very very big house, and a very very tall house. Most of the time a play might have a really big living room and not much else going on, and maybe there's a turntable or some other scenery trick to give other rooms, but it's not often the case that you see a house with such immense verticality to it.
My admiration for the set does not extend to the lighting design. There were times when I couldn't figure out how the light we were seeing beyond the third floor windows was matching with what time of day it was supposed to be and the variety of light playing on the exterior of this very big very tall house. Was the house so tall that the third floor was in a different time zone than the bottom floor?
In a good play, maybe I wouldn't have time to ponder so much on the lighting design, but this is not a good play.
The play, which is named for the county in Oklahoma in which it is set, starts out with the patriarch interviewing a 20-something Cherokee college-age type for some kind of job with the family. I'm not entirely sure what her job was. If it was clearly defined during the interview, I didn't catch it between the patriarch's meditations on Tennessee Williams, or it got lost because the lady had her back turned to me making it harder to hear her soft-spoken dialogue. Nor could you really tell what her job was by watching the rest of the play. She isn't seen much. She hangs out in her room on the third floor reading.
Right after this, the patriarch disappears and goes missing, and his wife calls the police. The wife is one of those pill-popping dysfunctional matriarchs, and of course the sheriff has history with the family, in this case a prom date with one of the daughters. When patriarch is found dead the whole family returns, and we meet more daughters, their husbands, an attractive male cousin who is having a thing with one of the daughters that shouldn't trouble us (doesn't trouble the characters) because she had a hysterectomy so they can't do the kinds of things that lead to taboos against first cousins being too close with one another. The primary daughter has an estranged husband who shows up. There's a granddaughter around. There are plenty of dark secrets hanging around, darker even than that first cousin thing. The first act sets the stage. The second act has people preparing for a big dinner followed by the dinner itself at which some secrets will start to reveal. And then the final act will have more secrets come tumbling out followed by the ramifications thereof.
But there's one major problem with the play, which is that none of these characters are very likeable. I'm giving the play only a moderately low rating because it's well enough written that I wasn't looking at my watch all that often, other than in the first half of the third act, and it's got a bit of humor and some actual zing, but when I don't care about anyone on stage I'm not sure why I want to spend three hours with them. And the dysfunction seems forced. When I'm evaluating a novel by one of my clients, I'm often willing to give my most generous suspension of disbelief with regard to the starting points of the characters, and then those points being accepted will go where the characters themselves feel the need to go. But in August, I kept seeing the playwright Tracy Letts reaching down from on high (from very high on high, considering how tall the house is) to add a new revelation or a new twist or a new bit of nastiness. Hence, I liked the lead-up to the big dinner at the end of Act 2, because it was set against the background of doing what characters would do in these circumstances. But the dinner scene itself left me flat, because it becomes a canvas on which to paint people doing things that people won't do. The third act wore out its welcome at the start because it builds on that dinner scene, which means it put more odd-looking bricks on top of a foundation of odd-looking bricks. There's some real drama in the final stretch of the third act as the characters confront look at these bricks and react to them, but I still think of the bricks and not the people looking at them.
At the very end, the denoument of August Osage County is not dissimilar to the ending of the film Hud, a classic directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman which I finally caught up with al fresco in Bryant Park. That had an ending which was tragic on many levels for several of the characters, but the only tragedy at the end of this was that I felt "goodbye and good riddance" to all of the characters as they made their sorry way off the stage. I've had far drearier evenings at the theatre than this; I can't emphasize enough how nice it was to have a 3-hour-plus play that entailed only minimum looking at watch. But I can't recommend this.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Sunday in the Park with George
Seen at the 3 PM matinee, Sunday March 30, 2008, at Studio 54. 1 slithy toad
Seen at the 8 PM performance, August 23, 1984, at the Booth Theatre. My maximum 4 slithy toads
I can't help but see this as an object lesson in both the ephemerality of creation and the subjectivity of its reception.
When this opened in 1984 in New York City, it was generally hailed as a stunning achievement in the American musical. I'm surprised to see looking back at it that Frank Rich's review in The New York Times was a tad more calibrated in its praise than in my memory of it.
Itself a musical about the act of creation, Sunday in the Park with George depicts the artist Georges Seurat "putting it together" (one of the song titles) for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There on the stage he pokes and prods various characters revising slowly into the positions they have in the painting itself, while in his personal life his obsession with getting the right "color and light" ends up driving away his romantic interest, Dot. In a masterful coup d'theatre the first act builds toward a recreation on stage of the painting itself. The second act jumped the action forward many years, with Dot now an elderly lady with a son (a relationship of George's, we are led to believe) himself engaged in act of modern creation. It was commonly felt to be a huge letdown from the all-encompassing genius of act #1.
So on the morning of August 23, 1984, the notes on my Playbill told me I went in to visit Baen Books in the morning, the last of my summer freelance days before heading off to my junior year at college. I dropped off 3 manuscripts, I stuck Baen Books labels on five boxes of file folders, and then I went to the TKTS line and got half-price tickets with huge expectations. Huge expectations are sometimes a curse, of course. But in this case they were met. I wrote the word "brilliant" on my Playbill, though more with the first act in mind than the second. "One of the best. Fine score. [Mandy] Patinkin excellent."
Twenty years later a new production arrives at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Today, the painting can be recreated not just with actors but with modern video projections. The production is hailed as a work of genius every bit the equal and maybe surpassing the original. The video projections make it better, it manages to raise the level of the second act. You can read the Variety review of the West End transfer. The Roundabout Theatre Company, which has done several Sondheim productions on Broadway in recent years including an excellent one of Assasins and a less successful one of Pacific Overtures, grabs the rights. The New York Times is fulsome in its praise.
This time I go off with Hugo nominee Barry Malzberg and his wife. They have subscription seats in the front of the mezzanine, I have a single ticket in the back, we chat a bit before the show, split up for the show, and I can't believe what I am seeing. A show that seemed brilliant in 1984 is inert, flat, dull, lifeless. I don't care about the act of creation. I feel nothing when Dot leaves George. The only saving grace if you can call it that is that the second act is indeed better, but perhaps because the only way to go after the dismal first act is up. Where is the show that has received all of these encomia? When I meet up with the Malzbergs afterward, they ask what thought and I say that I could not find the heart in the show, and that it was to me flat, flat, flat, and they are in agreement. But how can the three of us be so negative toward something that's supposed to be wonderful? As I said, a case study in subjectivity.
It being said that opinions are subjective, let me offer a few thoughts on why this supposedly great production is not so very good at all. For one, technology can be used in creative endeavors for good or for ill. Special effects in film are a case in point. They can be too good. The Imperial Walkers in the Empire Strikes Back are done impeccably well, as are the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but somehow or other they both give a sense of people struggling to do something great at the very limits of technology that makes them seem real. When you get to Peter Jackson's King Kong or to some of the chase scenes in the newer Star Wars movies, technology exists to do anything, so they do anything, but it's so slick and fake that it no longer seems real. It's like I'm watching a video game, and the technology distances me from the story instead of bringing me into it. Same thing here. There's something exhilarating about watching the struggle to recreate a painting with humans in 1984, but it's nothing to me to watch them playing at it with video projection because I know they could project away and do anything or everything. It's an exercise in cleverness to take the technology, then tie one hand behind your back, and ask to be admired for it.
Casting is important. Mandy Patinkin was brilliant. I loved the original production even seeing without Bernadette Peters. The cast here wasn't near the equal. Casting is crucial in live stage. Another recent and supposedly brilliant Sondheim production, of Company, was seriously hamstrung because the show's gimmick of having the actors perform the music meant having actors who couldn't act so well but could do the tuba. This worked with the same director's Sweeney Todd, perhaps because the two central roles dominate the show and were cast with real talent with a minor in music, while Company requires strong support around a single central character, thus making the secondary roles much more important.
Small decisions can make a difference. In my professional life, I've come across manuscripts where the key to a great page 416 is something you do on page 258 to properly pave the way. Have the right thing in the right place and it works, have the wrong thing 200 pages before and it's turning pages instead of reading.
Is everyone else right about this production while I am wrong? Am I wrong and the rest of the world right? Those discussions get to be interesting.
Seen at the 8 PM performance, August 23, 1984, at the Booth Theatre. My maximum 4 slithy toads
I can't help but see this as an object lesson in both the ephemerality of creation and the subjectivity of its reception.
When this opened in 1984 in New York City, it was generally hailed as a stunning achievement in the American musical. I'm surprised to see looking back at it that Frank Rich's review in The New York Times was a tad more calibrated in its praise than in my memory of it.
Itself a musical about the act of creation, Sunday in the Park with George depicts the artist Georges Seurat "putting it together" (one of the song titles) for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There on the stage he pokes and prods various characters revising slowly into the positions they have in the painting itself, while in his personal life his obsession with getting the right "color and light" ends up driving away his romantic interest, Dot. In a masterful coup d'theatre the first act builds toward a recreation on stage of the painting itself. The second act jumped the action forward many years, with Dot now an elderly lady with a son (a relationship of George's, we are led to believe) himself engaged in act of modern creation. It was commonly felt to be a huge letdown from the all-encompassing genius of act #1.
So on the morning of August 23, 1984, the notes on my Playbill told me I went in to visit Baen Books in the morning, the last of my summer freelance days before heading off to my junior year at college. I dropped off 3 manuscripts, I stuck Baen Books labels on five boxes of file folders, and then I went to the TKTS line and got half-price tickets with huge expectations. Huge expectations are sometimes a curse, of course. But in this case they were met. I wrote the word "brilliant" on my Playbill, though more with the first act in mind than the second. "One of the best. Fine score. [Mandy] Patinkin excellent."
Twenty years later a new production arrives at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Today, the painting can be recreated not just with actors but with modern video projections. The production is hailed as a work of genius every bit the equal and maybe surpassing the original. The video projections make it better, it manages to raise the level of the second act. You can read the Variety review of the West End transfer. The Roundabout Theatre Company, which has done several Sondheim productions on Broadway in recent years including an excellent one of Assasins and a less successful one of Pacific Overtures, grabs the rights. The New York Times is fulsome in its praise.
This time I go off with Hugo nominee Barry Malzberg and his wife. They have subscription seats in the front of the mezzanine, I have a single ticket in the back, we chat a bit before the show, split up for the show, and I can't believe what I am seeing. A show that seemed brilliant in 1984 is inert, flat, dull, lifeless. I don't care about the act of creation. I feel nothing when Dot leaves George. The only saving grace if you can call it that is that the second act is indeed better, but perhaps because the only way to go after the dismal first act is up. Where is the show that has received all of these encomia? When I meet up with the Malzbergs afterward, they ask what thought and I say that I could not find the heart in the show, and that it was to me flat, flat, flat, and they are in agreement. But how can the three of us be so negative toward something that's supposed to be wonderful? As I said, a case study in subjectivity.
It being said that opinions are subjective, let me offer a few thoughts on why this supposedly great production is not so very good at all. For one, technology can be used in creative endeavors for good or for ill. Special effects in film are a case in point. They can be too good. The Imperial Walkers in the Empire Strikes Back are done impeccably well, as are the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but somehow or other they both give a sense of people struggling to do something great at the very limits of technology that makes them seem real. When you get to Peter Jackson's King Kong or to some of the chase scenes in the newer Star Wars movies, technology exists to do anything, so they do anything, but it's so slick and fake that it no longer seems real. It's like I'm watching a video game, and the technology distances me from the story instead of bringing me into it. Same thing here. There's something exhilarating about watching the struggle to recreate a painting with humans in 1984, but it's nothing to me to watch them playing at it with video projection because I know they could project away and do anything or everything. It's an exercise in cleverness to take the technology, then tie one hand behind your back, and ask to be admired for it.
Casting is important. Mandy Patinkin was brilliant. I loved the original production even seeing without Bernadette Peters. The cast here wasn't near the equal. Casting is crucial in live stage. Another recent and supposedly brilliant Sondheim production, of Company, was seriously hamstrung because the show's gimmick of having the actors perform the music meant having actors who couldn't act so well but could do the tuba. This worked with the same director's Sweeney Todd, perhaps because the two central roles dominate the show and were cast with real talent with a minor in music, while Company requires strong support around a single central character, thus making the secondary roles much more important.
Small decisions can make a difference. In my professional life, I've come across manuscripts where the key to a great page 416 is something you do on page 258 to properly pave the way. Have the right thing in the right place and it works, have the wrong thing 200 pages before and it's turning pages instead of reading.
Is everyone else right about this production while I am wrong? Am I wrong and the rest of the world right? Those discussions get to be interesting.
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