Film @ 11

We did it!  Eddie played around with a Sony Reader as well and said he liked it, so we got one this afternoon at the Borders at Park Ave., and I'm going to be curious to find out what he thinks of it.  I'll play around a bit with it myself, I'm sure.  Stay tuned for further updates, sometime or other.

A Game of Leapfrog

I think that my Kindle was/is better, certainly for me, than the first generation of the Sony Reader.  But I was playing around some with the new and improved Sony Reader at the Borders in Manchester, CT on Saturday night, and I think Sony has leapfrogged over the Kindle in many significant ways with their 2nd generation reader.

Instead of using buttons to move the pages back and forth, you can do that kind of iPhone touchy thing and drag across the screen to move forward or back a page.  Sweet!  The touch screen also can become a keyboard for searching for text.  Theoretically you can also bring that keyboard up to annotate text, but the fact that I wasn't intuitively able to figure out how to do that with the demo model suggests they might be able to improve upon that a tad (unless I was pressing the right buttons but the demo models don't let you do that so some 12-year-old won't look at the notes and find a pornographic treatise, which I'm thinking is a possibility?).  I worry some about the use of touchscreens, as I'm sure anyone would who's tried to use one at an ATM and found the corner with the button you need won't let itself be touched no matter what, but then again the little keyboard on my Kindle isn't exactly like new after eight months of vigorous annotating.  

The Kindle still has kind of a killer app with the whole wireless thing, while the Sony Reader requires hooking up to a computer as well as 3rd party intervention for use with Mac OSX.  And the subscription feature of the Kindle was a major plus for me as well.  I love having a Wall St. Journal and a Washington Post sent to my Kindle every morning; the Post is cheaper for a month on the Kindle than the NYC newsstand price of 3 Sundays.  And when I'm on the road I like being able to buy a full single issue of the NY Times instead of having to walk around with the National Edition in newsprint without the full NYC and Sports sections.  

So I'm not saying the Sony is a hands-down winner, because at least for me the overall functionality of the first generation Kindle still rates ahead of the Reader.  But if all you want to do is get books and read them, Amazon isn't the only player in this game right now, and we at JABberwocky may think on buying a Reader for my #2 for his manuscript reading using the 3rd party software that Charles Stross suggested in comment on my first Kindle post.  If Amazon gets too complacent about rolling out a new and improved 2nd generation Kindle, this is definitely NOT going to be a one-player game.

(All that being said with the caveat that playing around with the Sony Reader in its display at Borders may not be the same as the experience of actually using it, but even added display cuddliness is not a minor thing.)

Cinema under the tree

New York City is an island of little movie ecosystems on Christmas.  Walk down W. 13th St. and there's nobody around, until you get to the Quad Cinema.  Enough people milling around the lobbies of the Kips Bay or the Angelika you'd think they were giving something away.

One of the movies that opened in NYC on the 25th is Last Chance Harvey, which I'd seen Tuesday evening Nov. 18, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Auditorium #2, "The Kings," Part of the Variety Screening Series,  2 slithy toads.  It's a star vehicle romance with Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman who had so much fun working together on Stranger Than Fiction (clearly more fun than I had watching the movie) that they yearned to work together so much that they chose this mediocre romantic comedy.  It's the very definition of a 2 toad movie.  It's not very good, but it does have star power and enough pleasant things going on that it's hard to regret spending 92 minutes with it.  I liked the first third of it the most, bcause it does an excellent job of establishing Dustin Hoffman's character.  He's a pianist who works on jingles and is close to being squeezed out for a younger generation.  So much so that it's kind of risky for him to leave work behind to go to the wedding of a long-estranged daughter he's clearly seen rarely since his divorce.  He's at a nice Marriott in downtown London, but that's only so nice when you consider that his ex and pretty much everyone else are at a country house rented for the wedding party for the occasion.  His daughter would much rather her stepfather give her away.  It's a series of small indignaties, one after the other, and Hoffman doesn't drown them in star power.  No, he shrinks just a little further into his not so tall self, his face droops just a little bit more with each passing moment.  Emma Thompson plays a lovelorn spinster who does polling of arriving passengers at Heathrow.  The two meet cute when Hoffman misses his plane home and loses his job as a result, and Hoffman's so desperate for something good to come of it that he breathes life into a relationship that shouldn't exist like somebody managing to regain fire from one drowning ember in a small pile of brush.  It's what comes after that  just doesn't work.  There's no impediment to the two of them having a relationship, and it's so preordained that it makes you yearn for the artificial complication of a bad romantic comedy.  The extent of the complications here is that Hoffman misses a date because of the most contrived circumstances imaginable, and there isn't all that much to the regaining of trust thereafter.  So don't let me keep you from this, there are way worse chick flicks out there, just don't expect much more than a short and pleasant exercise in star chemisty.  Q&A after, Emma Thompson was losing (more had lost) her voice, but that didn't stop Dustin and Emma from turning it into a love fest comedy routine tribute to their joy in one another's company.  It was certainly different than the usual Q&A, and not unpleasant, but when there were those few moments when Hoffman would begin to give a serious answer to a question by reflecting on his Method training or on The Graduate, it was hard for me not to wish there'd been a little more of the master classs from somebody who has a lot of stories to tell and a little less second rate George and Gracie.

On Christmas day, I commenced my movie-going with Let the Right One In, seen Thursday afternoon Dec. 25, 2008 at the City Cinemas Angelika, Aud. #6.  2 slithy toads.  This is an offbeat Norwegian vampire movie that opened 2 weeks ago and which had gotten some interesting reviews in NYC and in DC.  It's the kind of movie that six or ten years ago probably would have been gone from theatres by now, but since the Landmark Sunshine opened up a few blocks from the Angelika and added more screens to the dowtown NYC art house circuit, there's a little bit more room for a film like this with some decent reviews and some decent word of mouth to hang around.  And in this case to hang around long enough I decided finally to see.  The vampire is a 12-year-old who travels around with an elderly man who helps her out some.  Kills the occasional person and taps their blood, or cleans up after her own feedings, that sort of thing.  She moves in next door to a boy who's being badly bullied at school.  The two become attracted.  He offers her human companionship her own age which she's clearly had little of, she offers him encouragement and life coaching, like a little 12-year-old vampire version of Anthony Robbins for young people.  The first half is a little sluggish and could stand some tighter editing.  The second half is a little bit stronger as her presence in town begins to attract attention and his situation at school and with his new girlfriend both start to develop.  There are some nice visuals.  Certainly worth seeing for the die-hard vampire afficianado, and certainly interesting, but also a little too Euro-slow for me to give any kind of strong recommendation.

Then Doubt, seen Thursday evening Dec. 25, 2008 at the AMC Loews Kips Bay, Aud. #8, 3 Slithy Toads.  I had planned on only one movie for Christmas, but I stopped by the Kips Bay to see what was playing on their big screens.  This theatre has 5 passable small theaters downstairs, then the north side of the upstairs has six awful small theatres which I've kind of vowed never to pay to enter ever again. But auditorums #7-10 are all really big and spacious and comfy with nice big screens that I enjoy quite a bit.  It was a pleasant surprise to see that Doubt was on one of those big screens while (as an example) Marley was on one of the smaller downstairs.  Now, Marley was the #1 movie Christmas day and had sold out, while the showing of Doubt had 100 tops in the 350 seat theatre, so you never quite know but that management will flip-flop, so really if I didn't see Doubt on the big screen then no assurance I'd get to later.  Doubt is an adaptation of a play by Moonstruck's John Patrick Shanley about the principal of a catholic school 40 years ago who thinks one of the priests might be getting too affectionate with one of the students, the first black kid to be admitted to the school.  The idea is that there should be some uncertainty about weather the principal, played here by Meryl Streep, is right in her suspicions.  When I saw this on Broadway there was a lot of ambivalency.  Here, there's a little less so, and that throws off the balance of the closing scene.  In that way, it's not as perfect as the play may have been.  But, it's wonderfully acted not only by Streep but by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest and Amy Adams as a teacher in the school and Viola Davis as the student's mother.  It's wonderfully photographed.  I'm not sure I agreed with the decision to shoot with a lot of dutch angles (if you don't know the term please do follow the link; I think of these most of all from the old Batman TV show, but there's a lot more to them than that; impress your friends by studying up), but I did like the way that the movie was opened up from the more limited settings available to the stage version.  There's some added context to the whole ritual of the catholic school and the church itself which I liked, and I can assure you that the housing project near to the school where Meryl Streep and Viola Davis go for a walk in one of the pivotal scenes of both play and film is a quintessential examplar of NYC life.  So I would recommend, and I think people who are new to the material may actually enjoy even a little bit than I did, with the experience of the play having spoiled some of the surprises.

I attempted to see Valkyrie on the 26th, but the lines at the AMC Empire were so torturously long that I decided to come home and blog instead before heading out for the evening.  Also allowed me to do my weights.

Another shoe...

With Van Johnson, aka The Minstrel, and Earth Kitt, aka Catwoman, having sadly passed in this season, is there a third to come...  The old saying is that things like this will happen in threes.

Follow-on

So Lisa, what do you think of Gypsy from your personal experience with it?  Did your 12-year old self like the musical?  Do you think back on it otherwise?

Jeri Westerson's Veil of Lies continues to chug away in Boston, another 19 copies the week ending the 21st according to Nielsen Bookscan.  That Globe review is really a gift that keeps on giving. 

Oliver Twisted, Bollywood Style

Slumdog Millionaire, seen Thursday October 23 at the  Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1,  Part of the Variety Screening Series, 3.5 slithy toads.

This was already a highly touted movie off of its screenings at the Toronto Film Festival and elsewhere even before I saw it, a few weeks before its opening.  And as you can see from the generous # of toads I am giving it, I think it's one of those movies that lives up to the acclaim.  My sister also liked it a lot, though a friend I was talking with on Monday night did not.  Well, the more people who read your book or see your movie the more people you can find who won't like it, but it's clear it is striking a chord.  The movie's been doing very well at the box office with signs of very good word of mouth, slowly broadening from being on very few screens to being on several hundred, and making the top 10 at the box office against films, up there with films that are playing at five times as many theatres.  Well, good!

If you're not yet familiar with the movie, it's set in Mumbai (nee Bombay) India.  It's like Oliver Twist meets Strictly Ballroom, game show meets Bollywood, East meets west.  A contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is doing surprisingly well and on the verge of winning a million dollars worth of rupees, and nobody can quite understand why or how, so the contestant ends up spending his overnight leading up to the final question in police custody, trying to explain how he knows the correct answers.  The answer to that question is revealed in a series of flashbacks beginning in earliest childhood, and it's that part of the movie that's extremely Dickensian.  Dickens himself might find the poor man's upbringing to be a little bit harsh.  The answer to one of the earliest question emerges from a great outhouse adventure, homelessness leads him first to the ultimate girl of his dreams but soon thereafter to a Fagin character whom Fagin himself would find cruel.  Alas not unbelievably so; I live in a city where deaf Mexicans were enslaved into begging on the subway line that runs thru Sunnyside.  His escape from that fate comes with a large price tag, as he's separated from the woman he loves and estranged from his brother. 

So you're saying this doesn't sound like the feel good uplifting movie of the season?  Well, it is.  As grim as the story can be at times, it's far from unrelenting.  The outhouse adventure is full of brio, enthusiasm, and joy.  The escapades include a delightful interlude at the Taj Majal.  We're never too far from flashing forward to the game show, where that million dollars creeps ever closer.  The love story is a classic, one which I was far more involved with (and almost in spite of myself) than the one between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Benjamin Button.

The filmmaking is full of life and energy and passion throughout.  I'd say director Danny Boyle has around a 75% success rate, and that's pretty darned good.  Shallow Grave was pretty much the progenitor of the British caper film that's ended up being way overdone in the ten years since, and I recall it having an integral zest and panache which a lot of the subsequent films in the genre have imitated without ever matching.  Trainspotting is the rare film about drug users that I quite cottoned to, and I even purchased the soundtrack album.  28 Days Later is one of the best zombie movies ever.  Millions is an underrated kind-hearted family movie which is well worth renting.  Sunshine, a sci-fi epic, falls apart in the final act and isn't as good as the other movies, but before it falls apart it's an interesting amalgam of a lot of other sf movies, kind of a more upscale seriously intentioned Stargate, with some stunning visual imagery.  There are a couple complete misses like A Life Less Ordinary which I've not seen, and which very few people have, and then there's The Beach, which I did see but don't remember much about either good or bad.  But by and large any film I've seen from Boyle has been crafted with verve and passion, and at least been interesting and often much much more than that.  I wouldn't rank him as high as Kubrick. I don't know if he's crafted a great movie for the ages like Scorcese's Goodfellas, but he's certainly been much more consistent in the overall quality of his movies than Scorcese or Altman.

He's come up with a real find in Dev Patel, a young British actor supposedly auditioned at his daughter's insistence, who displays even more It than David Kross in The Reader.  I was so thrilled Patel was present at the Q&A with Boyle and am very happy he has been nominated for Supporting Actor from his peers in the Screen Actors Guild.  He's very charismatic, has a nice combination of vulnerability and strength, and I expect to see him in more movies.  I hope he won't too quickly go the action star pay check route.

For all my enthusiasm for the movie, I've deducted a half toad because it did take me a while to warm up to the movie.  The characters were slow to gel.  I don't mind subtitles but found myself distracted by these.  I'm not sure I even got the whole romance thing, except that ultimately it was depicted with so much verve by the director and his team and acted with such fervency that I did eventually find myself falling entirely under the movie's spell.  The friend I was talking with earlier in the week was just the opposite.  He liked the movie at first but then felt it drowned in contrivance.   You all can let me know what you think if you see this movie, which I highly recommend doing.  When it came time for the big Bollywood dance number at the end, I wanted to dance in the aisles and I wanted to see the number go on for a long long long time, kind of like how I hated to see the last dance at Kellerman's eventually end in Dirty Dancing.  

I may see the movie again myself.  As sometimes happens at these Q&A screenings, when they're running  late or on a tight schedule they'll instruct the projectionist to cut out of the end credits so they can get an extra two or three minutes into the evening.  That happened here, and I feel as if I didn't get to properly enjoy the entire movie, beginning to end.

& in the interests of time, a quick post which I maybe should have included in Movies that Begin with the Letter W:

The Wrestler.  Seen Thursday December 4 at the Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1.  Part of the Variety Screening Series.  1.5 slithy toads.

This is another movie that's been highly touted, especially for Mickey Rourke's performance.  It's just opened in limited release and hopes to follow in the footsteps of Slumdog Millionaire by slowly going wider.  It didn't work for me.  It's an archetypal story about a professional wrestler, once a star and now hanging out at the fringes of the sport 20 years later, playing in smaller arenas.  Can he reconcile with his daughter?  Find love with a stripper?  Find a life outside of the wrestling ring when health issues arise?  This kind of story has been done a million times before, though I have a hard time naming all the many movies I should be able to say this is exactly alike.  I think it's because there are so many of them that end up being at the Rocky III level that those I've seen drift into a kind of haze.  And would anyone want to say that Rourke's performance is up there with Paul Newman's in The Color of Money, which is a particularly good example of the faded-star movie?  I can actually hold a pool stick with the cue facing the right way, and though I'm no fan of pool and have no talent for it maybe the fact that I might at least consider playing a round to be fun to do every five years while going down for a 3-count on a wrestling mat is way too high-school-gym I never want to think of every ever again biases me against The Wrestler.  Still, I think I could put aside my dislike of the sport for a movie that were a little more interesting than this.  Personally, I think there were a lot of people who were ready to anoint Mickey Rourke as a great American actor 20 years ago even though he was never really close to it.  I saw Angel Heart.  I saw Barfly.  I saw The Pope of Greenwich Village.  I don't think these were good movies even then and yet somehow Rourke was perceived as being a great new actor.  And sometimes when the critical establishment decides something it never wants to admit its wrong.  So even though Rourke has been acting steadily in supporting roles in movies for the past 20 years without etching an indelible portrait in any of them (The Rainmaker, Point Break, Get Carter, there's a good long list), it's become the perceived wisdom that he's disappeared for 20 years and has suddenly emerged in this classic performance.  It's like Rourke is living for real the kind of existence that Fast Eddie Felson was living fictionally in The Color of Money, and just like Paul Newman doing the "I'm back" line as he hits his break at the end of that, Mickey Rourke can do it as he carts home his statues for The Wrestler.  Sometimes these stories feed on their own momentum, and maybe Rourke will end up taking in a Golden Globe and a Saggy and an Oscar and a this and a that.  We'll all find out soon enough.  But as far as the Brillig Blogger is concerned, The Wrestler ain't worth your time.  I'm tempted to say to see it nonetheless if you're a big wrestling fan, but if you are do you really want to look at the sordid underside of it?

Theatricality

January tends to be a bad time for live theatre in New York City.  The tourist trade dries up after the holiday season, and with maybe some action around President's Day doesn't seriously revive until the warmer weather and the Easter holidays and spring vacations.  Even the locals get out and about a little less during the coldest days of the year.  This year the economy is adding an extra burden.  A full-price seat to a Broadway musical is $120 now, a play a few dollars less.  Even a half-price ticket will run $65 when the TKTS booth surcharge and the "theater restoration fee" are added, and "cheap" seats in the back of the mezzanine $45 or more.  This isn't the best time to hunt down people with $100 or $250 to spend for a couple of seats.  Hence, the usual slate of shows planning to close after New Year's rather than try and wait out the winter for the more profitable spring and summer months is particularly robust.  I decided to spend some of my time this weekend getting in some of the soon to be dearly departed.

My first priority:  Spring Awakening, seen at the matinee on Saturday afternoon Dec. 20, 2008, at the Eugene O'Neill.  4 Slithy Toads.

I had first seen Spring Awakening in 30 months ago just ahead of its off-Broadway opening at the Atlantic Theater.  Sentimentalist pack rat that I am, I save my Playbills and jot down on the cover some notes on when I saw the show, what I thought of it, maybe other interesting notes.  This was what I wrote on my Playbill in 2006:  "The best new musical I've seen since, if not quite as good as, Parade.  It grabs me instantly, doesn't let go.  Establishes a fresh idiom in its staging and its musical style.  It does what a musical should without being cloying or predictable.  Many of the young cast are making off B'way debuts, and they're working so hard and so enthusiastically to sell this.  So SO SO good."  Most reviewers were equally taken with the show.  Behind the good reviews and good audience reaction, the show did a very quick transfer to Broadway, where it was by no means a sure thing because younger audiences are not the core theatregoing crowd.  The show built on good word of mouth, became a contender for the Tony Awards in spring 2007, and won several of them.  I was rooting for it, and I yearned to see the show on Broadway, but what's the rush when it's there every night?  Well, now, the show is going after January 18, so I suddenly had reason to do it instead of thinking about it, and I am still head over heels in love with this wonderful musical.  If you live in NYC, go see it.  Visit Broadway Box for your discount offer, and go.  See the show on tour.  Go, go, go.  The only change I'd make on my second viewing is to say that this may be better than Parade, which was the last musical to excite me as much.  I saw Parade twice and loved it, but I don't know if I'd have happily seen it five or ten times.  Having seen Spring Awakening on Broadway, I want to see it again before January 18, and again and again and again.

Spring Awakening is based on a German play by Frank Wedekind, and is about young people experiencing their sexual awakenings in an era in 19th century Germany when these sorts of things were not supposed to be discussed.  It doesn't sound like a cheerful topic, and I don't suppose that is is, but it's a beautiful story beautifully told by young men in the starchiest and stuffiest school uniforms who whip out handheld microphones to sing their innermost thoughts, and the young women in long dresses who find something stirring but know not what.  The musical score rocks, especially in major group #s like The B***h of Living and Totally F*****, but it's also got songs of remarkable delicacy like "The Word of Your Body," the closing number "The Song of Purple Summer," and the opening song "Mama Who Bore Me."  Some shows take pride in having a variety of musical styles that get to showcase the broad talents of the composers.  Parade is one of them, as is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  Spring Awakening takes a different approach.  The music by Duncan Sheik is variations on a theme, in which the whole achieves something larger than any one song, while the lyrics by Steven Sater are gently poetic without going for easy rhymes.  In the aforementioned "Word of Your Body," there's a resonance between the long "o" sound in the words wound and bruise.  And I doubt you'd believe me if I said that a song driven by the long "o" in "wound" and "bruise" was a love song, you'd probably be dubious, but yet that's what it is.  It's a gorgeous and tender love song in multiple ways.  Furthermore, moderns musicals tend not to have scores as memorable as those of old classic shows like The Sound of Music, but Spring Awakening manages to achieve some level of resonance.  Not perhaps in a Carol Channing belting show tunes sort of way, but murmuring beneath the surface like blood pulsing just beneath the skin.  I haven't spent the past 30 months singing the songs of Spring Awakening, but when the band struck its music cues the tunes burbled up like water from a spring freshly uncovered.

The production is essentially the same as that which opened at the Atlantic.  The cast I saw at the Atlantic moved pretty much intact to Broadway, though as  I mentioned in an earlier post it was a plus that the role of the adult women in the show was recast.  That replacement Christine Estabrook continues in her role, and she hams up some of her parts a little bit more than I remembered but still nails it emotionally in the darker moments for her role.  Over the past year that original cast has drifted away, part out of necessity since the show requires that the actors not be too old for their parts.  Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher, Jr. have turned their roles into springboards for what should be promising careers.  Groff's lead role as one of the male students is now being played by Hunter Parrish.  I'm not familiar with Parrish, but he's a star of the Showtime series Weeds, and he's made a great career move by showing his chops on stage in Spring Awakening.  I had a very good view of his perch on stage when he wasn't singing (the cast intermixes with some audience members who have seats on stage to either side), and he seemed so happy to be in and part of the show, and he's really quite good when he's on.  But the current cast is good throughout.  Now, many of them are making Broadway debuts instead of off-B'way, but they're all still selling it with joy and verve and enthusiasm and talent to burn.

I'm glad the show had its two-plus years on Broadway, but sorry it isn't going to be more.  

In the evening, the half-price TKTS booth managed to cough up a great 6th row center seat for me at Gypsy, seen Saturday evening Dec. 20, 2008 at the St. James.  2 slithy toads.

Gypsy is considered by some to be one of the great American musicals, and I'd seen an earlier revival just four and some years ago with Bernadette Peters in the lead role, that of a stage mother, Rose, who won't take "no" for an answer as she oversees the vaudeville careers of her two daughters.  The older and more talented, June, eventually leaves her, and with her some of the more talented members of the small act she's formed around them.  The younger and supposedly less talented Louise then becomes the center of her mother's attention, and when she succeeds beyond her mother's imagining as a burlesque show stripper (the show is based on the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee), it becomes a hard cross for mama to bear.  Rose is a very brassy character, and unfortunately Bernadette Peters for all her considerable talents (and I've seen her perform masterfully in shows like the original Sunday in the Park with George) does not have a lot of brass.  The production I saw four years ago simply wasn't very good.  One example:  this is considered to be a great American musical and does have some great songs that you may know, without knowing they're from Gypsy.  "May We Entertain You" is a good one that can get trotted out on an award's show at a moment's notice.  Then there's Together Wherever We Go.  "Wherever we go, whatever we do, we're gonna go through it together."  You might know the tune without realizing it, and have it come to mind just by reading the words.  In the Gypsy with Bernadette Peters, this famous number was tossed off with no joy as if an afterthought, when you want to at least have some sense in watching in an "ooooh, a famous song" kind of way.

That production was directed by the young and hip Sam Mendes, who directed the film American Beauty.  This new production is directed by the 90+ year old Arthur Laurents, who wrote the "book" (for those of you not in the know, the script for a musical is called the book, and consists of the spoken parts that aren't part of the music which would be supplied by a lyricist.  In some shows like Spring Awakening, the book and lyrics are by the same person, and in others like Gypsy not) for the production and is still at it now working on a new revival of West Side Story.  He brings more life by far to the material than does Mendes, who is less than half his age.  I'm still not totally satisfied with their approach to "Together Wherever We Go."  Both productions still rely on the choreography of the original by Jerome Robbins, who might not have known at the time which songs would be the keepers, but there's nonetheless more spring in the step of the actors and the orchestra in this song, and really in all of them.  More important, the star of this revival is Patti Lupone who is very much a diva and full of brass and who takes charge of the role and the stage and the audience.  

I don't think personally that Gypsy is a great American musical.  It has a lot of talent behind it, including Laurents and Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom are icons of the American musical theatre.  But to me, the first act drags on without much happening after a point.  I'm not sure there's enough fondness for either vaudeville or burlesque to make a memorial to them of much interest to my generation, and certainly not for any younger.  I can remember HBO doing some burlesque shows in its earliest years in the late '70s or early '80s and not many people any younger than me will remember.  It's got a lot of plot problems because it's hard to find a rooting interest in the domineering Rose or the mousy young Louise.  I'm happy to have at least seen a production that brings out the strengths of the show, but that the show will close even before Lupone's year long contract is up does say something about the show's ability to move an audience moving forward.  It's the kind of thing where you really probably should see a good production of Gypsy if you consider yourself a serious fan or devotee or acolyte or whatever of the American musical theatre, but we're kind of getting close to the edge of the "great books" debate here, where you're supposed to do it because it's good for you.

And then, Boeing Boeing, another revival, seen at the Longacre at the Sunday matinee, Dec. 21, 2008.  1 slithy toad.

This is a farce.  Comedy is hard, and good farce is very hard.  It's a kind of comedy of the extreme in which an outlandish situation develops and then builds and builds toward a hopefully very fast and very funny finale, often helped by an abundance of doors to make for well-timed entrances and exits to great humorous effect.  The best farce I've ever seen and perhaps the best farce ever is something called Noises Off, in which a British play is seen falling apart during performance from both sides of the stage to ever-increasing heights of hilarity.  I first saw it in my youth and enjoyed the first act immensely and then the second act not so much; when I found myself throwing up a bad meal into a trash can at the Port Authority Bus Terminal while making my way to the Shortline bus home, I had to come to the reluctant but firm conclusion that I may not have been in the best shape for judging the second act.  When the play was revived in late 2001, it was the perfect tonic to the 9/11 blues and I can confirm that the play is in fact quite delightful in all its acts.  An example of good farce is Lend Me a Tenor, in which the star of a Cleveland opera is tranquilized and a replacement must be found on short notice.  An example of the farce that dare not say its name is any episode of Scooby Doo in which Shaggy, Scooby and the villain are going in and out of the rooms in the old mansion.

Boeing Boeing is not a good farce.  It ran very briefly in an original Broadway run a long time ago, and this revival will have lasted less than a year, and that probably several months too long.  There are some laughts in it, so I don't want to be too harsh, but it's not well constructed and it takes way too long to go nowhere.  The premise is far more promising than that of Lend me a Tenor.  It's France, and a man is engaged to be married to a Lufthansa flight attendant.  And a TWA flight attendant.  And an Alitalia flight attendant.  This is set in the heyday of luxurious air travel when it was a glamor job to be an air hostess with a glamor uniform and a glamor tote, and he juggles the three of them by carefully tracking the flight times so that each will be in town for two days of the week.  When bad weather and faster planes arrive, all three of the flight attendants will be in town at the same time, along with an old college friend just visiting.  Alas, it's very slow to get going.  A good farce should establish its premise as quickly as possible and then build upon it.  In this play it takes something like 40 minutes for the third flight attendant to appear.  Why the wait?  We can figure out the idea within ten minutes, so get a move on...  The first two attendants having appeared together, you would expect to have the third coming back to the apartment, and the form dictates this would be a good way to close the first act.  As indeed it does.  But you've got all of those doors.  Have the stewardess walk in a door and surprise the three-timer and then bring the curtain down.  Here, we find out via phone call that the third is on her way.  I'd been wondering how the mechanics of having all three in one room would be handled to  humorous effect because it's a situation that isn't entirely funny and needs to be handled delicately.  Here, the solution is that you never actuall have all three in the apartment at once but just deal with them in different combinations of two, so the play never builds situationally beyond what we've already gotten in the first act.  And then instead of the bad guy having to rise to the occasion of digging himself out of a hole, the stewardesses resolve it for him.  One goes for the best friend, and another turns out to be playing a triple game of her own and finds true love with her boy in another city.  Good farce develops quickly and ascends the heights.  This builds slowly and then goes very flatly.  You have an abundance of doors to the foyer, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, the guest bedroom, and more, but the most action you get is at the most basic person A out door 1 right as person B is coming in door 2, never 3 doors at once.  The cast tries very hard and wrings I'm sure as much laughter as there is to be wrung, but it's not a very good play.

Neither is Speed-the-Plow, seen Sun matinee October 14, 2008, at the Barrymore.  .5 slithy toads.  David Mamet has done some great things, but this isn't one of them.  A Hollywood parable of something, act one shows us a smaller big-time Hollywood producer and his acolyte who have the chance to move up a notch with a big action movie.  In act 2, the big guy is seduced by a temp and agrees to spike the action movie for some artsy-fartsy thing.  In act 3, the younger producer can't believe this and restores order to the universe by throwing a hissy fit.  Mamet has explored the male bonding better in Glengarry Glen Ross, the battle of the sexes better in Oleanna, and it's not a very good play.  The role of the secretary is an awful one but nonetheless is a favorite for stunt casting.  Madonna played it in the original Broadway production, here Elisabeth Moss from AMC's "Mad Men."  It's still a bad role, and having actresses unfamiliar with the stage doing it doesn't make it any easier.  I recall Madonna being better.  Jeremy Priven (Entourage) plays the top dog producer.  OK.  Raul Esparza is the highlight.  He's a young Broadway actor who is capable of wonderful things, probably the best Bobby in the history of Sondheim's Company, and he makes the third act his own with a wonderful indelible hissy fit that should live in the annals.  But it's just not a good play.  I knew that from having seen the first time, only went again because it's included in my Atlantic membership, kind of wish I hadn't because of the opportunity cost.

Farragut North, seen Sun. matinee November 16, 2008 at the Atlantic's main stage, 2 slithy toads, was  worthier part of my membership.  Names for the Metro stop in downtown DC where all the K St. types go.  John Gallagher, Jr. from the original Spring Awakening cast now plays a 20-something high up in the press heirarchy of a presidential campaign during the primary season, but he finds out that immorality is still best done morally.  When he is outwitted, outlasted and outplayed in this game of political survivor, the only decision he has left is whether to take a high road or a low road to his next stop.  Gallagher is pleasant to watch and handles his role well, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. is exceptionally good as the wizened old hand at the helm of another campaign's press operations, and the rest of the cast all do what they're supposed to.  A perfectly pleasant way to pass the time.

That, at least, is off Broadway with off B'way pricing.  The problem with the now-deceased Title of Show, seen Thu. evening Sept. 25, 2008 at the Lyceum, 2 slithy toads, is that it's no more pleasant or unpleasant but costs twice as much.  Young creatives create a musical and then see it all the way to Broadway in a very pleasant very amiable more than enjoyable musical within a musical, but there's nowhere near enough meat on the bones to think anyone would pay $100+ for it.  And in fact, I'm not sure if anyone did. I paid half price, and that was more than what Variety reported as the average ticket price for the show most weeks.  But it's hard to make a profit on Broadway when you can only charge an off-Broadway price and still struggle to fill your seats.