Are You Ready For Some: a) Dull Old Stability or b) Sex, Drugs, n’ Rock and Roll…?

                       May 22, 2013

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy….Scott Alexander

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder…. Octave Mirbeau

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid….Mark Twain

My favorite moment in MURDER BALLAD comes late in the 80-minute, straight-through show, when young hunk Tom (Will Swenson, HAIR) has a fight with older chubby Michael (John Ellison Conlee, THE FULL MONTY), and older chubby Michael nearly kills him. 

The fight is engaging and believable.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the show. 

But the question is whether that matters, or if MURDER BALLAD is meant to be a happening rather than a story. 

As a story, it’s ultimately an unfulfilling experience because the setting dissipates the play's impact, and the book is weak to the point of absurdity. 

As a happening, though, MURDER BALLAD is vibrant and diverting, sometimes too diverting for my taste, but maybe that’s just me.

Mark Wendland’s semi-environmental set – bleachers on three sides, a five-player band on the fourth, a long bar serving drinks to patrons who sit at tables on the floor, a pool table that gets a lot of action of various sorts – is at best a mixed blessing that gives the audience much to look at, yet painfully underlines the plot’s weaknesses.

Environmental theater can be fun – SLEEP NO MORE, an audience-participation version of  THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC we saw at UCLA, TONY N’TINA’S WEDDING – but the fun comes at the expense of story, which may be why the three shows just cited had familiar or predictable stories (Macbeth, the Titanic sinks, Tony and Tina do get married). 

MURDER BALLAD is an unfamiliar story.  Having the actors disappear into the audience “clutter” so that you have to search for them, wondering if the two customers sitting at one of the tables will speak to the actress who takes a third chair, then if she’ll slip and fall onto them when she stands on their table – while fun on their own – are unwanted distractions from the story.

Especially distracting, because it’s so fascinating to watch, is the hungry eyeing of Mr. Swenson (most of the women, some of the men) and Sara, played by Caissie Levy (most of the men, and for good reason).

Through-sung, the rock score by Juliana Nash really does rock, in all the best ways; some of the lyrics, co-written by Nash and bookwriter Julia Jordon are clever and memorable; but Jordon’s emotionally non-involving libretto robs the evening of anything even vaguely resembling substance.

An oft-cited theory of musical theater: Great music will make a show succeed, if a weak book doesn’t get in the way.  Proving that theory are shows such as MACK AND MABEL and CHESS, each with a beloved score and a book that dooms it. 

MURDER BALLAD, a four-actor musical opening tonight at the Union Square Theater, though smaller by far than either of those classic non-hits, works and doesn’t in the same manner.   

The story pits a passionate, electric romance against a stabile, conventional marriage. 

Tom is a young hunky bartender who’s been having a flaming, Sex, Drugs n’Rock-and-Roll romance with Sara (Caissie Levy, GHOST), until he asks her

One wonders why Tom would ask this question, he not seeming to be of the introspective or self-sacrificing school.  Then one is astounded that –hearing his question - Sara immediately dumps him.

So much for the flaming, Sex, Drugs n’Rock-and-Roll romance, at least for the moment.

Sara rushes out of the bar to the street, where she collides with the older not-a-hunk Michael, a student of poetry (Get it: the refined mind over cheap physical stuff?), and picks him up to ease her pain.

Michael hardly seems Sara’s type. 

Nevertheless, they get married and have a daughter. 

But Sara isn’t satisfied – actually, Sara never seems satisfied with anything – so she starts to cheat with Tom, Michael finds out, hence the fight, etc., etc., and so forth.

They’re living in a French Film The roles are all assigned…

Rebecca Naomi Jones (AMERICAN IDIOT) rounds out the cast as the Narrator, and is at the center of the deus ex machina that makes the end of the show the ultimate absurdity. (Deus ex machina –“god from the machine”–was a device first used in Ancient Greek drama, where a god was lowered onto the stage using a crane, and the god resolved the story in an unbelievable way.)

You don’t know what you would do

Until someone erases you!

John Ellison Conlee seems the best actor in the cast, but is also given the biggest opportunity – aside from Caissie Levy – to show his acting chops.  Karen Olivo played Ms. Levy’s role at MTC, and I suspect the show was the stronger for it. 

Will Swenson and Rebecca Naomi Jones look good and sing great, which is all they’re asked to do.

When you add MURDER BALLAD up - the terrific music, some of the lyrics, the performers, Trip Cullman’s direction, the weak book, the distractions of a happening - you end up with a fairly good time I wish could have been more.

As a happening, it works, as a play it doesn’t.

HEDWIG with a weak story line.

Rating (5 stars possible):  As a happening ****; as a play **

The bottom line:  Good, not great

Who should go?  Rock-music lovers, those who enjoy looking at sexy actors and being part of the action

Do I recommend it?  Not really

Good Play, Terrific Production, Hard To Watch…!

                April 28, 2013

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same….Pearl S Buck

A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets….Gloria Stuart

I’d be willing to bet no one over the age of fifty has failed to worry about the possibility of his or her getting Alzheimer’s. 

I know I do. 

This has caused me to avoid plays, movies, or most anything else based on the subject.  When the director, Joe Calarco, invited me to THE MEMORY PLAY, a contemporary musical, he forgot to mention the subject matter, so I went with Terri.

(Joe is scheduled to direct our new version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL this December, so obviously I went in liking his work.)

I found the play well done, but gloomy because of what I brought to the theater with me.  Terri – whose mother had a mild case of Alzheimer’s – wouldn’t have gone had she known, but ended up strongly taken by the play.  Judging from the sounds of other strongly-taken women crying all around us, and the applause at the end, I reckon a lot of others did as well.

THE MEMORY PLAY opens with the Mother (Catherine Cox) sitting on a stool on the audience side of the still-drawn curtain, none too happy about things.

She’s in the middle of a visit to her doctor, and was made to don a paper gown – and how we all love those – which is mystifying to her, since she’s only come in so the doctor can examine her hand.  As the monologue goes on, Mother has a good deal of trouble remembering certain things.  Since I now have a similar problem in real life, this didn’t spell Alzheimer’s for me, yet.

Then the curtain rises and we see the living room of Mother’s home.  Designed by Brian Prather, the single set features two parallel rows of family photos, hung on wires, to form a hallway.  Clever, that.  Otherwise, a quite ordinary room, without a trace of the opulence you’d find in the living room of Sue Mengers in I’LL EAT YOU LAST.

With Mother is Daughter (Leslie Kritzer), who says she’s 31, but looks younger.  Daughter (Don’t you hate it when the characters have generic “names”?) is moving in with Mother (/sigh), because, as we now learn for certain, Mother is in the early grip of the dreaded disease. 

Mother and daughter never leave the living room, though judging from the declining state of Mother’s mind, some days, weeks, or months elapse during the course of the play.

Daughter deals with Mother’s antics with a forced cheerfulness, giving her an “Isn’t she cute” smile, rather too often, and telling us she’s made the sacrifice of giving up her apartment to come take care of mom. 

Mom responds by repeatedly insisting her daughter gave up the apartment because she couldn’t afford the rent, and that she’s really moving home, no sacrifice involved.  In fact, Mother says she’s the one who’s made the sacrifice, but doesn’t say why until the end of the play.

Because Mother is keeping it secret.  Daughter won’t take teasing references to the secret seriously; they continually fight.  Both are angry; neither is willing to admit her anger.  The play builds on their increasing hostility to one another, mom letting it rip, daughter trying to have it all roll off her back, and finding it increasingly difficult to do so. 

Husband/Daddy Ira is dead, Mother remembering him with hatred, Daughter with reverence.

Eventually we learn the secret, which certainly wipes the smile off Daughter’s face, and with her new understanding, the two women find a quieter, more tender way of interacting with the other.

Both actresses, who played the parts at Barrington Stage a few years back, are top notch.  Catherine Cox employs a grin that combines her own version of “Isn’t she cute” with an undertone of savagery.  We don’t like her from the get-go, and aren’t intended to.  Cox’s one fault, for me, is that she too often goes to loud anger, which numbs after a time.

Leslie Kritzer’s Daughter at first seems a sympathetic figure, but we come to see she’s really been serving herself all this time.

The book is by Sara Cooper, who also wrote the lyrics.  It moves smoothly, with the interactions building to the show’s climax – the “unintended”  divulging of the secret – and helps keep the show from becoming static, which can have easily happen in a two-actor, one-set show.

Zach Redler is the composer.  In writing this, I read Ben Brantley’s review of the Barrington Stage Company version, and learned that at that point, the show had no songs, only

…seemingly random notes from a lone piano drift teasingly through the air, hinting at half-forgotten songs but never arranging themselves into a tune you can follow. There are unresolvable struggles taking place within this quiet, gentle music: between recollection and the past….Ben Brantley

I suspect I would have found the show more compelling with the earlier musical approach, since the songs in the current version land on the side of the ordinary, and sometimes seem unnecessary (I’m thinking of the one about Daughter cleaning up Mother’s “poop”, which was definitely TMI).  The songs may have made the play easier to follow, but from Ben’s description, the earlier approach better played to the characters’ inner struggles, an intriguing thought.

Holding it all together in fine fashion is Lucille Lortel Award winner Joe Calarco (SHAKESPEARE'S R&J), whose direction makes an imperfect show always interesting and at times riveting, and never lets it become static.

THE MEMORY PLAY is running at the Duke on 42^nd Street through May 18.

Rating (5 stars possible):  ***½

The bottom line:  Strong show about how Alzheimer’s Disease may expose family secrets

Who should go?  Based on the audience when we attended, it seems a woman’s show to which men might or might not connect.

Do I recommend it?  Yes

Close But Only Half A Cigar….

June 20, 2012

But I’m not complaining….

And in the evening at my window

As I watch Jersey growing dim

I feel this troubling emotion

Summed up in this notion

I wished I’d stayed with him

Lord knows each day with him was madness

As I have spent my life maintaining

But more and more I recall the joy

My golden dreamer 

My lost boy

Our life was life in the twightlight zone

But no worse then a life alone

But oh,

Well I chose my way...

And I’m not complaining….

Determination.  Doubt.  Certainty.  Regret.

Next to my desk I have a short list of “rules to live by”, the first of which is from Satchel Paige – How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?– that I try to keep in mind whenever (daily) I find myself considering the question of my aging.

But also on the list is a reminder…

Work as deeply as Richard Maltby

…reflecting my enjoyment (and respect) for the lyrics Maltby wrote over the years for songs composed by long-time partner David Shire, especially those in CLOSER THAN EVER, the themed-review currently being revived in a hit-and-miss production at the York Theater. 

CLOSER THAN EVER contains 24 songs, each of which looks deeply into the emotions of those who used to be termed “middle-aged”, meaning in their 40s and 50s, who face situations universal to those of their age, and sing about them in ways that delight or touch us.

In a Maltby-Shire show, you don’t get over-produced special effects (GHOST), or lines of muscular young guys dancing ever-more vigorously (NEWSIES), or oft-repeated ballads of Gaelic/Czech heartbreak (ONCE).  

Nor do you get a musical book as such.

What you do get are intimate songs that provide a window into the events and feelings that make up our lives. 

All of our lives, in one way or another. 

Love requited or not, love breaking down, being a parent, being a child suddenly faced with having to be a parent to your parents, emotions hidden, emotions shouted from the rooftops.

Each song tells a story that – properly performed – connects us to the singer/story-teller with a closeness we hope to feel once or twice in a typical musical, but which appears in nearly every one of CLOSER THAN EVER’s 24 song-stories.

Which adds up to a different kind of musical book.

This intimacy and universality are both the strengths and weaknesses of the show.  The challenge for director and cast is to pull the audience into a new story 24 times.  Not unlike seeing 24 short one-acts.  If a song fails to draw in the audience, they may never come back, so near-perfection is called for.

Some of the cast and numbers in the current revival, which is the first for CLOSER THAN EVER in New York, approach this lofty objective, but not all. 

I found myself wondering if the show would have been better served with a director other than Maltby, someone who could see each song with new eyes, and could be more successful in getting some of the cast to act the songs in the way they need to be acted for the show to completely work.

Christiane Noll is easily the standout in the four-actor cast, simply because she’s an outstanding actor.  All the voices are strong, but Noll has learned the power of stillness, and of “feeling” the story she’s telling us. 

The quote at the top of this review is from a song called “Life Story”.  Noll sings it while sitting quietly in a chair, with a minimum of gestures, telling us of her unhappy marriage, that she ended it to pursue the liberated life, and that – many years later – she still isn’t sure she made the right decision.

Ring any bells?

George Dvorsky – who, like Noll, looks age-appropriate – can also act, and knows the power of stillness.  His telling of how his father passed down his love of music, in a song called “If I Sing” (with lyrics credited to both Maltby and Shire), is beautifully told, concluding with:

My dad grew old.

His hands were numb.

And now he cannot play.

 

I came to visit.

He sat and asked me

"How can it be this way?"

 

I couldn't find an answer.

I played this tune for him instead.

My father sat there smiling

for he knew what it said.

 

If I sing you are the music.

If I love you taught me how.

Every day your heart is beating

in the man that I am now.

The other half of the cast, Jenn Colella and Sal Viviano, are less successful, the stories in their songs often lost in too much presentation, and confused by too many gestures and too much movement.  Since Kurt Stamm is credited as choreographer, I’ll give him the rap on the knuckles. 

In the theater, less is often more.

Colella and Viviano also appear to be too young, though pinpointing age based on a person’s appearance these days is admittedly tough to do.  When Viviano sings of “now” being 44 in “One of the Good Guys”, I couldn’t begin to buy into it.

The sets (James Morgan) and costumes (Nicole Wee) served the piece well, and the lighting (Kirk Bookman) often did more than that.

I enjoyed the York production, but made the mistake of listening to the original cast album afterwards.  Some of the songs shoulda, coulda, woulda been better if all the current cast members had told their stories as well as the originals did. 

Still, I was glad I went, as was Terri.

Rating (5 stars possible):  ***½

The bottom line:  Wonderful show; good not great revival of it

Who should go?  Anyone who’s 40 or above

Do I recommend it?  Yes

Just Possibly The Funniest Show In Town…!

                                                                                                            May 20, 2012

Sheldon goes to a psychiatrist: “Doc, I gotta talk to someone!  I work in a pickle factory and for three months I’ve had an overpowering desire to put my schlong in the pickle slicer.”  The psychiatrist’s a little shocked but just nods, and says to come see him five times a week and they’ll get right to work solving the problem. A few weeks later, Sheldon comes in for a session, says that he couldn’t take it anymore and that morning he finally did it - put his schlong right in the pickle slicer. The psychiatrist says, “Oh my god, man! What happened? Are you all right?” Sheldon says, “I got fired.” The shrink says, “No, no, I mean what happened with the pickle slicer?”  “She got fired, too.”

This has been a good Broadway season for laughter – I’m thinking of ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS and NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT – but nothing in town is funnier than OLD JEWS TELLING JOKES at the Westside Theater/Downstairs.

Side-splittingly, laughing-out-loud, gasping-to-get-your-breath-back funny.

A guy goes to a doctor.   The doctor says, ‘I’m afraid you have Alzheimer’s and cancer,’ and the guy says, ‘Well, at least I don’t have cancer.’

The show runs 80 minutes, the jokes are non-stop, and there isn’t a clunker in the bunch.  My attention never for a moment strayed, because the show movs so well, and the stories are consistently strong throughout.

This isn’t easy to do, and much credit goes to Peter Gethers and Daniel Okrent, who conceived OLD JEWS, and to director Marc Bruni.  This is as tight and smooth a production as you’re likely to see,.  Using projections that enrich the stories, and scattering a few songs in to vary the show’s texture, OLD JEWS always feels like a real stage show, taking the humor far beyond standup.

I’ll admit that when we walked into the theater with our hosts, producer Steve Baruch and his lovely wife, Eda, I wondered whether I’d feel excluded in my WASP-ness.  Of course, having grown up in L.A., lived for 22 years in New York, and worked all that time in the theater, I’d heard a lot of Jewish humor, but the title made the show feel exclusionary, which it emphatically is not.

(ROGER, JOHN, AND IRVING, ALL ARE WEARING COWBOY HATS.)

ROGER (To JOHN): How ya doin’? My name is Roger, I own 250,000 acres. I have 1,000 head of cattle and they call my place the Jolly Roger.          

JOHN:  Well, hey there! My name is John. I own 350,000 acres.  I have 5,000 head of cattle and they call my place Big John’s.           

(They both look at IRVING.)           

IRVING:  My name is Irving and I own only two acres.      

ROGER:  Two acres? What do you raise?

IRVING: I don’t raise nothing.           

JOHN:  Well then, what do you call it?           

IRVING:  Times Square.        

The five actors include three old Jews – Marilyn Sokol, Todd Susman, and Lenny Wolpe – and two younger Jews: Audrey Lynn Weston and Bill Army. (PC note: Terri says I can’t assume the actors are all Jewish, and she’s right, but I’m going to, anyway.)  All five are terrific, but – perhaps inevitably – it’s the older trio who really shine.  Sokol can roll her tongue in ways I hadn’t thought possible, Susman looks like a bemused, stereotypical CPA who’d wandered onto the stage by mistake, and Wolpe personifies everybody’s harmless Uncle Morty.  They effortlessly switch parts, with the kids often playing older “characters”.

Goldstein goes into an old New York restaurant and says to the Maitre d’, “Pardon me, how do you prepare your chicken?”. The maitre d’ says “We tell ‘em right up front they ain’t gonna make it.”

The jokes I’m including in this review aren’t the best in the show, because I hope you’ll follow my advice and go to OLD JEWS TELLING JOKES, yourself, and don’t want to tip off too much.  Just as a tease, here are the punch lines from the three funniest (to me) jokes in the show:

Who fucks the stork?

Granite countertops

The bad news is the Rabbi is a goner

I was touched by a speech near the end of the show about the importance of humor in the Jewish culture:

[My father would] tell the old jokes and I’d laugh. He thought he was doing it for me.  But I know he was doing it to hold onto a little bit of himself.  Now, of course, the Yiddish of even 40 years ago has largely disappeared from our society, except in wisecracks and insults and jokes. It’s these jokes that have made my connection to the past a lot easier. I tell ‘em to my gentile wife. She laughs and I pretend I’m doing it for her. But I know different.  I’m doing it for myself.  And for my dad.  Now that I’m an old Jew myself, it’s the jokes that make me feel as if I’ve come home….

Try it, you’ll like it!

Rating (5 stars possible):  ****

The bottom line:  Hilarious, whether or not you’re Jewish

Who should go?  Anyone who wants to laugh

Do I recommend it?  Mach Shnel!

Infamous Flop Out For More Blood!....

                                                                                                              March 1, 2012

Those who have the time and money to waste on only one Anglo-American musical wreck on Broadway this year might well choose ''Carrie,'' the new Royal Shakespeare Company co-production at the Virginia Theater. If ''Chess'' slides to its final scene as solemnly and pompously as the Titanic, then ''Carrie'' expires with fireworks like the Hindenberg….From the Frank Rich review of the 1988 production of CARRIE.

“Carrie” started as a gothic Stephen King novel that sold many copies and had many fans.  “Carrie” the novel was turned into a horror movie that sold many tickets and had many fans, me among them.

Finally, in 1988, “Carrie” the movie was turned into CARRIE the musical, which played 16 previews and 5 performances, and which many consider the greatest debacle in Broadway’s history, as the above excerpt from the New York Times review suggests.

Now the musical CARRIE is being revived at the MCC Theater in what I can only in frustration say is a superb production doomed from the start by a story that worked brilliantly in the novel and movie, but is horribly (pun intended) out of place on the musical stage.

For those who have somehow missed it, here’s the premise:

Carrie (Molly Ranson), a plain, extremely unworldly high-school girl, is constantly tormented by her classmates.  We first witness this when Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death when she has her first period (at age seventeen, no less) – Mom, it seems, didn’t mention it to her – and the other kids taunt her until she’s sobbing on the floor….

The new production perfectly demonstrates the truth that a terrible recipe cooked using the finest of ingredients is still going to taste terrible. 

Sue (Christy Altomare), the one classmate who takes pity on her, persuades her boyfriend and school jock, Tommy (Derek Klena) to take Carrie to the prom in her place….

I can understand MCC’s attraction to the project:

• Since most of us never saw the original musical debacle, the curiosity factor is huge;
• School kids bullying an unfortunate classmate seems timely in view of the headlines about children committing suicide as the result of such bullying;
• A mother unbalanced by her Christianity brings to mind the press – all of it negative hereabouts – about the Tea Party and the Religious Right.

I’ve always been skeptical that perceived timeliness sold any tickets, but the curiosity factor is real enough, and is resulting in packed houses despite what the critics will say, or perhaps because of what the critics will say.  (MCC has announced a four-week extension.)

Her pill of a mother (Marin Mazzie) tells Carrie she can’t go to the prom, lest she suffer the same fate as the mother, which was getting pregnant and being deserted by the father.  Carrie overrides Mom’s determined opposition by scaring her with her newly learned telekinesis, slamming windows shut from across the room and so forth….

Ironically, telekinesis also plays an important role in the newest RSC musical, MATILDA.  These unexpected powers for little girls to use in their life crises are quite a lot like a device used by the Ancient Greeks – dubbed deus ex machina – in which a god (or some other unexpected element) descends at just the right moment to wrap up the play’s loose ends.

It was fun in the movie, actually, special effects and all, which the MCC production tries to replicate onstage with less effectiveness.

So Carrie dons a lovely pink dress she’s somehow found the skill to sew, and turns herself into Liza Doolittle going to the ball, a fairy princess more beautiful than any of the other girls there, and….  From then on, things go to bad to worse to awful, with the awful part having to do with a pail of pig’s blood….

One cannot, as they say, make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

But the thing is, if you ignore the story, the material in the show is really quite good.  The book by Lawrence D. Cohen tells the foul story well; the music by Michael Gore is powerful in the anthems and gorgeous in the ballads; and Dean Pitchford’s lyrics are invariably right in expressing each character’s feelings at that moment.

And the cast is plain great!  As Carrie, Molly Ranson combines a wonderful voice with an acting ability that shows the heartbreaking girl in pain, angry, feeling ugly, feeling beautiful, each utterly convincing.  If she gets the requisite break or two, Molly Ranson is going to be a Broadway star.

Marin Mazzie – looking gray, dowdy, and demented for a change - almost makes you like her in the mother’s thankless role.  As Ms. Mazzie and Ms. Ranson walked off stage after the curtain call, I felt I was witnessing the passing of the torch.

Christy Altomare and Derek Klena are both standouts as the kind girl and hunky jock; Carmen Cusack and Jenna De Waal made the most of their smaller roles.

My one complaint about the cast – 14 strong – is that it seemed at times to be smaller than it should have been, even on the moderately-sized stage of the Lucille Lortel Theater.  I certainly know about the need to keep costs down, but three or four more kids would have kept that stage from appearing under-populated.

Director Stafford Arima (ALTAR BOYZ, TIN PAN ALLEY RAG) put his strong vision fully in play, and choreographer Matt Williams did some fine work.

Last but far from least, the lighting of Kevin Adams, coupled with the projections designed by Sven Ortel, turned an essentially empty stage into anything called for, from lovely prom lights to raging inferno.

In all, the production of CARRIE we saw last night was well worth seeing, if you can see past the story.

Rating (5 stars possible): **½, which averages out the zero stars for the story, and the five stars for the production

The bottom line:  See the rating

Who should go?  Lovers of musicals and curious souls who have never seen the show

Do I recommend it?  Yes