A poll came out last week claiming that musical theater is the "least sexy" music genre. In response, I conducted a poll of my own, asking my Facebook friends to post their choices for genuinely sexy musical theater songs.
The discussion really took off—there were about 70 different songs named—and today, for Valentine's Day, I tweeted out a baker's dozen of my favorites. I tried to limit it to one song per composer (for variety's sake), though I broke that rule at the end.
Presenting the Valentine's Day 2017 Sexy Broadway Playlist.
1. "Play the Music For Me" from Jelly's Last Jam, introduced on Broadway by the great Tonya Pinkins.
2. Another Tonya Pinkins track: "Black is a Moocher" from Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party.
3. It's sexy, it's haunting, and it's based on Plato's Symposium. "The Origin of Love" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
4. Currently on Broadway and making Tolstoy sexy: Amber Gray singing "Charming" from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.
5. You knew this was coming. "Say No to This" from Hamilton.
6. Opposites attract and bicker and harmonize really, really well. "Take Me or Leave Me," from Rent.
7. Lots of songs in A Little Night Music are sexy (and check out its original Broadway poster, with the naked lovers hidden in the tree!) but I went with the twisted love triangle of "Now/Later/Soon."
8. I think the ritardando on "I…on…ly… know when he" in "I Could Have Danced All Night" (from My Fair Lady) is sexy, and it really makes the song.
9. How did we get this far in a Sexy Broadway playlist without any Kander & Ebb? Remedying that with "When You're Good to Mama" from Chicago.
10. Phantom of the Opera fans, I see you and I've got you covered. Time to pass "The Point of No Return."
11. Finishing off with three tracks from the sexiest Golden Age Broadway composer, Cole Porter. Eartha Kitt with a sultry "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."
12. Ella Fitzgerald's classic "Begin the Beguine"—I am still disappointed that 21st-century adulthood involves so few orchestras playing, palms swaying, nights of tropical splendor, and this whole sophisticated brand of sexiness.
13. Porter at the height of his lush, darkly romantic mode: "So in Love" from Kiss Me Kate, as sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell (I was lucky enough to see this onstage as a young teen!).
Showing posts with label musical theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musical theatre. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Why isn't FUN HOME sold out every night?
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| The cast of the touring production of Fun Home, at the Curran Theatre through Feb. 19 |
(Except I'm not really angry, because this means that if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, you still can!)
It’s a cliché to say that Fun Home is a highly specific story about Alison Bechdel that also happens to feel universal—in fact, the Curran’s program, with a cover illustration by Bechdel herself, calls that out. (The cartoon features some people outside the theater, saying “That was exactly like MY family! But totally different…”) But it’s true: it will make you think about your family, and coming of age, and coming to terms with the unique issues that troubled your parents and form an unwanted part of your inheritance.
For me, I thought a lot about the grandfather I never knew, who, like Alison Bechdel’s dad, worked long hours at a funeral home (“fun home”). He was a stern taskmaster, and never got to see as much of the world as he would have liked, and died of a sudden heart attack while my dad was still a teenager. I want that whole side of my family to see this show!
In the show, Alison’s lesbian coming-of-age feels universal too, at least for those of us who were cerebral and physically awkward adolescents who experienced life mostly through books. When Alison learns the pleasures of having a physical body that can make love with another’s body, but can’t describe these new sensations in anything other than academic language (“I’m changing my major to sex with Joan!”) it is adorable and heartfelt and true.
Though only 100 minutes long, Fun Home offers so much to think about regarding families, and sexuality, and gender. Alison can come out of the closet while her father Bruce cannot; partly, this is because she was born after the sexual revolution but also, I think, because it’s more socially acceptable to be a lesbian than to be a gay man. But at the same time as Bruce conceals his sexuality, he clings to his male privilege like the archetypal mid-century patriarch (“He wants, he wants,” his wife and children sing) and polices young Alison’s gender expression.
And, as everyone says, Fun Home is a tearjerker; it had my eyes swimming on a couple of occasions. (I tend to well up rather than full-on sob at the theater, no matter how emotionally moved I am.) I do want to throttle the person whose cell phone went off during “Ring of Keys,” though.
Also, the renovated Curran is pulling out all the stops for their inaugural production. I appreciated the chance to get a free glass of rosé and meet the actors in the lobby after the show (something I’ve never seen happen at a national touring production). But even more than that, I appreciated that the Curran didn’t slap any bullshit “handling fees” or “theater restoration fees” on top of the advertised price when I purchased my ticket. That's something that is, unfortunately, a rarity these days for big theaters that undergo renovation.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
It's The Little Things, or Why I Don't Like Modernized Productions of "Company"
There’s an Onion article, frequently passed around by theater people, called “Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play in Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.” Well, I have an idea for a similar man-bites-dog headline: it would say “Production of Company Set in 1970.”
I’ve seen Company three times: a student production at my college ten years ago; the PBS broadcast of John Doyle’s Broadway revival; and the production that’s currently running at San Francisco Playhouse. None of these productions made an effort to evoke 1970, the year the musical originally premiered; instead, all of them set the show in the present day. And there are plenty of other recent Company productions that feature cell phones and other 21st-century trappings (Terry Teachout reviewed one in Bucks County this summer), but not so many that acknowledge the show’s original time period. (One exception might be the 2011 New York Philharmonic production -- I didn't see it, but production photos show Stephen Colbert wearing a very '70s turtleneck.)
Certainly, this story of a 35-year-old commitment-phobic man, the five married couples he befriends, and the three women he half-heartedly dates, is still relevant for contemporary audiences. If anything, articles like "The Real Reason Women Freeze Their Eggs" suggest that commitment-phobic bachelors are even more of a problem now than they were in 1970. It’s easy to make arguments for why we should continue to stage and discuss Company. But that’s not the same thing as saying that we should set it in the present day.
Sondheim writes in Finishing the Hat, “God is in the details.” Or, to quote Company itself, “it’s the little little little things.” While the big-picture themes of Company are still relevant, dozens of little details in the dialogue and lyrics make clear that Sondheim and Furth are writing about a very specific milieu with specific cultural markers. And this is why I think it’s so hard to convincingly modernize Company.
It’s jarring to see characters wearing contemporary clothes and using cell phones, and then saying things that no thirty-something New Yorker in 2015 would ever say. Nobody these days drinks vodka stingers, or talks about being “square.” Marijuana is no longer an exotic drug, and we call it “pot” or maybe “weed,” but never “grass.” Marta would be crazy about some obscure pocket of hipster Brooklyn, not about 14th Street – and she wouldn’t say “I’ll call you in the morning or my service will explain.” Et cetera.
Over the years, Sondheim and Furth have made a few updates to the book and lyrics to keep them feeling contemporary. The “I could understand a person / if a person was a fag” line has been rewritten, and the dialogue now name-checks some post-1970 celebrities like Madonna and Oprah. But it would take a much more thoroughgoing rewrite to make Company seem like it’s truly a product of 2015. Chloe Veltman spends several paragraphs of her review of the Playhouse production arguing that the musical feels dated because all of the characters are heterosexual – and I agree that if someone in 2015 wrote a musical about modern marriage, they’d probably be sure to include a gay or lesbian couple in the cast. But since the rights holders of Company don’t allow you to change the characters’ genders, or any of the myriad references that sound odd in a 2015 context – why not just set it in 1970 already?
If Company is staged with 1970s costumes and emotionally honest performances, contemporary audiences will relate to it – they will see how what it has to say about marriage and commitment are universal, and they will accept the dated chatter about “optical art” and “telephoning my analyst” and all the rest. But if it’s staged with cell phones and contemporary fashions, the 1970s references can make it hard for an audience to suspend its disbelief.
Oddly, I can’t think of any other play or musical from Company’s era that gets updated to the present day with such frequency; most other ‘60s and ‘70s shows are now staged as period pieces. This might be because, in its time, Company was considered groundbreaking and progressive. It’s kind of amazing to think that it premiered just two years after Promises, Promises – which the Playhouse revived this past winter, and whose whole story is predicated upon ‘60s sexism. I do think that Company’s portrayal of ditsy flight attendant April is kind of sexist, but most of the other female characters are smart, interesting, and sharply drawn. And because Company’s characters still feel modern and relatable, people think it makes sense to set Company in modern times.
But times change, and 2015 is not 1970. It seems ludicrous to suggest that the life of a man born in 1935 (Bobby’s birth year, if the show takes place in 1970) would be similar to the life of a man born in 1980 (Bobby’s birth year, if it takes place now). Or, since I'm a fan of Mad Men, I try to remind myself that when Company premiered, Bobby and his friends were basically of the same age and background as the younger Mad Men characters: Pete, Trudy, Ken, Peggy.
And that’s the thing: most people who go to see Company at San Francisco Playhouse will have watched Mad Men or other historical-fiction TV shows; or read novels that were published more than 10 years ago; or otherwise discovered that they can relate to works of art that take place in the past. The Playhouse’s slogan is that the theater is an “empathy gym,” where we go to “practice the power of compassion.” But their decision to set Company in 2015 suggests that they think people can’t feel empathy or compassion for these characters unless the story takes place in modern times. Have some faith in your audiences, San Francisco Playhouse. We can handle a slightly more challenging workout in the empathy gym.
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| "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" in the San Francisco Playhouse production. Morgan Dayley as April, Michelle Drexler as Kathy, Teresa Attridge as Marta. Photo by Jessica Palopoli. |
Certainly, this story of a 35-year-old commitment-phobic man, the five married couples he befriends, and the three women he half-heartedly dates, is still relevant for contemporary audiences. If anything, articles like "The Real Reason Women Freeze Their Eggs" suggest that commitment-phobic bachelors are even more of a problem now than they were in 1970. It’s easy to make arguments for why we should continue to stage and discuss Company. But that’s not the same thing as saying that we should set it in the present day.
Sondheim writes in Finishing the Hat, “God is in the details.” Or, to quote Company itself, “it’s the little little little things.” While the big-picture themes of Company are still relevant, dozens of little details in the dialogue and lyrics make clear that Sondheim and Furth are writing about a very specific milieu with specific cultural markers. And this is why I think it’s so hard to convincingly modernize Company.
It’s jarring to see characters wearing contemporary clothes and using cell phones, and then saying things that no thirty-something New Yorker in 2015 would ever say. Nobody these days drinks vodka stingers, or talks about being “square.” Marijuana is no longer an exotic drug, and we call it “pot” or maybe “weed,” but never “grass.” Marta would be crazy about some obscure pocket of hipster Brooklyn, not about 14th Street – and she wouldn’t say “I’ll call you in the morning or my service will explain.” Et cetera.
Over the years, Sondheim and Furth have made a few updates to the book and lyrics to keep them feeling contemporary. The “I could understand a person / if a person was a fag” line has been rewritten, and the dialogue now name-checks some post-1970 celebrities like Madonna and Oprah. But it would take a much more thoroughgoing rewrite to make Company seem like it’s truly a product of 2015. Chloe Veltman spends several paragraphs of her review of the Playhouse production arguing that the musical feels dated because all of the characters are heterosexual – and I agree that if someone in 2015 wrote a musical about modern marriage, they’d probably be sure to include a gay or lesbian couple in the cast. But since the rights holders of Company don’t allow you to change the characters’ genders, or any of the myriad references that sound odd in a 2015 context – why not just set it in 1970 already?
If Company is staged with 1970s costumes and emotionally honest performances, contemporary audiences will relate to it – they will see how what it has to say about marriage and commitment are universal, and they will accept the dated chatter about “optical art” and “telephoning my analyst” and all the rest. But if it’s staged with cell phones and contemporary fashions, the 1970s references can make it hard for an audience to suspend its disbelief.
 |
| Bobby (Keith Pinto) and Joanne (Stephanie Prentice) in the San Francisco Playhouse production. Photo by Jessica Palopoli. |
But times change, and 2015 is not 1970. It seems ludicrous to suggest that the life of a man born in 1935 (Bobby’s birth year, if the show takes place in 1970) would be similar to the life of a man born in 1980 (Bobby’s birth year, if it takes place now). Or, since I'm a fan of Mad Men, I try to remind myself that when Company premiered, Bobby and his friends were basically of the same age and background as the younger Mad Men characters: Pete, Trudy, Ken, Peggy.
And that’s the thing: most people who go to see Company at San Francisco Playhouse will have watched Mad Men or other historical-fiction TV shows; or read novels that were published more than 10 years ago; or otherwise discovered that they can relate to works of art that take place in the past. The Playhouse’s slogan is that the theater is an “empathy gym,” where we go to “practice the power of compassion.” But their decision to set Company in 2015 suggests that they think people can’t feel empathy or compassion for these characters unless the story takes place in modern times. Have some faith in your audiences, San Francisco Playhouse. We can handle a slightly more challenging workout in the empathy gym.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Moved to Tears @ San Francisco Theater Pub Blog
My latest Theater Pub column is about the works of art that make me cry -- something I don't think we talk about enough, in an era that is skeptical of raw emotion. Click over there and read my piece to learn why I made sure to bring a hankie to the performance of Candide I saw last week and how seeing The King and I at the age of 5 utterly ruined me.
(My friend/editor Stuart noted "I think you're the only non-Asian person I know who was traumatized by The King and I... and most of them were traumatized for very different reasons.")
I've also convinced myself that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken must've modeled elements of Beauty and the Beast, especially the ballroom dancing scene, after The King and I -- they were no dummies and, as we all know, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."
In my column, I also mention seeing Rabbit Hole at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when I was in college -- which happened to be the subject of one of my very first blog posts. Crazy to realize that that was almost 8 years ago (also crazy that I haven't been back to Ashland since then, but that's a topic for another day).
(My friend/editor Stuart noted "I think you're the only non-Asian person I know who was traumatized by The King and I... and most of them were traumatized for very different reasons.")
I've also convinced myself that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken must've modeled elements of Beauty and the Beast, especially the ballroom dancing scene, after The King and I -- they were no dummies and, as we all know, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."
In my column, I also mention seeing Rabbit Hole at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when I was in college -- which happened to be the subject of one of my very first blog posts. Crazy to realize that that was almost 8 years ago (also crazy that I haven't been back to Ashland since then, but that's a topic for another day).
Thursday, January 1, 2015
One Midnight (of 2015) Gone
Happy 2015!
I spent the first afternoon of the year at the movies, seeing Into the Woods with my friend Corinne Proctor. She's a professional musical-theater actress who played Little Red Riding Hood at San Francisco Playhouse this summer; I'm a Sondheim junkie for whom Woods was the gateway drug. Needless to say, we were both "excited and scared" for the film adaptation!
After all, we'd spent December participating in Theater Pub's big Into the Woods blog-roundtable. Together with local theater luminaries Stuart Bousel, Brian Katz, Oren Stevens, and Nick Trengove, we analyzed the intricacies of this multi-layered show. Our discussion, in three parts:
Also, if the above three links aren't enough Corinne and Marissa for you, she and I made an additional appearance on the Theater Pub blog in December, when I interviewed her about playing "Marge" in Promises, Promises at San Francisco Playhouse. Our discussion touches on vodka stingers, holiday movies, and glamorous stage names... as well as less frivolous matters like Corinne's decisions to join Equity and move to New York City. She'll be in S.F. for another week finishing out the run of Promises, Promises, and then heading back to the East Coast. I'll miss her -- it's always sad when a friend who loves Sondheim and Stoppard as much as you do leaves town.
I spent the first afternoon of the year at the movies, seeing Into the Woods with my friend Corinne Proctor. She's a professional musical-theater actress who played Little Red Riding Hood at San Francisco Playhouse this summer; I'm a Sondheim junkie for whom Woods was the gateway drug. Needless to say, we were both "excited and scared" for the film adaptation!
After all, we'd spent December participating in Theater Pub's big Into the Woods blog-roundtable. Together with local theater luminaries Stuart Bousel, Brian Katz, Oren Stevens, and Nick Trengove, we analyzed the intricacies of this multi-layered show. Our discussion, in three parts:
- Part I, "Once Upon a Time" -- who we all are, why we love Woods, favorite moments and characters.
- Part II, "Honor Their Mistakes" -- the moments that we consider flawed or tricky, and whether we agree with certain frequently-heard criticisms of Into the Woods.
- Part III, "And Home Before Dark" -- thoughts on the meaning/significance of the show and the meaning of fairy tales in general.
Also, if the above three links aren't enough Corinne and Marissa for you, she and I made an additional appearance on the Theater Pub blog in December, when I interviewed her about playing "Marge" in Promises, Promises at San Francisco Playhouse. Our discussion touches on vodka stingers, holiday movies, and glamorous stage names... as well as less frivolous matters like Corinne's decisions to join Equity and move to New York City. She'll be in S.F. for another week finishing out the run of Promises, Promises, and then heading back to the East Coast. I'll miss her -- it's always sad when a friend who loves Sondheim and Stoppard as much as you do leaves town.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
He wrote the libretto, now he'll write the book
Ever since the whole Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark fiasco happened last year, I've been saying, "I really hope Glen Berger publishes a tell-all book about it."
Guess what? He is! Per the New York Times, Berger's Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History will be published in 2013.
Berger is the musical's co-librettist and one of the few people to be involved with the show throughout its long journey to opening night. When the producers fired Julie Taymor, they retained Berger, though they brought in a new librettist (Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa) to collaborate with him.
Because of this -- and because, y'know, he's a writer -- I've always felt that Berger is the ideal person to write the tell-all book about the Spider-Man musical. And, face it, this is a saga that's crying out for a tell-all book.
I should also note that I took a playwriting master class with Berger several years before this all happened and found him to be a likable, unassuming, smart, somewhat nebbishy man -- totally not the kind of guy that you'd picture writing the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced. He came to prominence writing whimsical Off-Broadway plays with a kind of shabby-nostalgic aesthetic (Underneath the Lintel; O Lovely Glowworm) and then found himself working with Bono on a multimillion-dollar superhero musical with flying and special effects.
I can't wait to hear what he has to say about all of it.
Guess what? He is! Per the New York Times, Berger's Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History will be published in 2013.
Berger is the musical's co-librettist and one of the few people to be involved with the show throughout its long journey to opening night. When the producers fired Julie Taymor, they retained Berger, though they brought in a new librettist (Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa) to collaborate with him.
Because of this -- and because, y'know, he's a writer -- I've always felt that Berger is the ideal person to write the tell-all book about the Spider-Man musical. And, face it, this is a saga that's crying out for a tell-all book.
I should also note that I took a playwriting master class with Berger several years before this all happened and found him to be a likable, unassuming, smart, somewhat nebbishy man -- totally not the kind of guy that you'd picture writing the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced. He came to prominence writing whimsical Off-Broadway plays with a kind of shabby-nostalgic aesthetic (Underneath the Lintel; O Lovely Glowworm) and then found himself working with Bono on a multimillion-dollar superhero musical with flying and special effects.
I can't wait to hear what he has to say about all of it.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
A Sondheim Weekend
Reading: Look, I Made a Hat, volume 2 of Sondheim's collected lyrics, which came out on Tuesday. It is just as full of odd, interesting insights as Volume 1 and is going to have an equally prized place on my bookshelf. I brought it to a Thanksgiving party of theater people on Thursday, where it was a big hit. As a friend of mine says, "The only thing better than having these books by Sondheim is if we also had a book by Shakespeare titled How I Wrote My Plays."
and
Ring Round the Moon, the Jean Anouilh/Christopher Fry play that Sondheim and Hal Prince wished to adapt into a musical. When they were unable to obtain the rights, they adapted Smiles of a Summer Night instead -- it has a similar theme of romantic entanglements at a European country house.
I found Ring Round the Moon completely delightful. Its witty aphorisms made me laugh out loud several times, and I love the idea of having one actor play the identical twins Hugo and Frederic. (You'll recall that the one-actor-playing-twins was my favorite part of my experience working with Un-Scripted Theatre last summer!)
My copy, above, is an adorable 1950 edition, I believe the first American edition, which I found at Readers Café and Bookstore. Why do I never hear anyone talk about this used bookstore? It has some amazing items (I once saw a 1910 edition of Playboy of the Western World there!) and the proceeds go to a good cause.
Speaking of supporting a good cause: In 1981, Stephen Sondheim founded Young Playwrights Inc., to foster the work of American playwrights 18 and under. In 2006, I won their National Competition with my first play, Deus ex Machina. And last week, the Young Playwrights office, on Fifth Avenue in New York City (right across from Lord & Taylor) was gutted by a fire.
This news is very sad, especially because Young Playwrights, like many arts nonprofits, always seemed to be a bit of a shoestring organization and, I know, was having difficulties in our current economic climate. (Young Playwrights used to present full productions of the plays that won the contest, but they have not been able to do that for several years.) As they rebuild, they are taking donations through PayPal.
In order to thank them for the amazing two weeks that they gave me five years ago (a workshop of my play in New York, tickets to 10 shows, a downtown hotel room with a balcony...) and to support them in their rebuilding efforts, I'm going to give Young Playwrights some money this holiday season. Would you consider doing the same?
Saturday, July 9, 2011
"Tales of the City: A New Musical" - San Francisco in Song
Shortly after moving to San Francisco in 2008, I read Armistead Maupin's first Tales of the City book and then learned that it was being adapted into a musical -- which I thought was a great idea. So I was very excited to see the world premiere, at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) here in town through the end of the month.
Adapted from Armistead Maupin's columns and novels, the musical has a libretto by Jeff Whitty and a score by Jake Shears and John Garden, of the 1970s-influenced band Scissor Sisters. (After writing this and Avenue Q, Whitty has cornered the market on musicals about young urbanites exploring their identities while living in a crazy apartment house presided over by a gender-ambiguous proprietor.) Shears and Garden draw on a mix of musical styles for the score, not limiting themselves to Scissor Sisters' glam-rock/disco sound. In an interview in the playbill, they make the point that the 1970s were a diverse era in music and that '70s Broadway composers (Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, John Kander) wrote music influenced by pop, rock, folk, jazz, traditional Broadway, etc. Thus, the score includes such items as a thumping disco number for the famous scene where Michael "Mouse" Tolliver participates in a jockey shorts dance contest, Janis Joplin-style blues-rock for Mona Ramsey's songs, and an outrageously campy Broadway-gospel song called "Homosexual Convalescent Center." Lyrics are more functional than brilliant, though I liked the rhyme of "marijuana / co-ed sauna" in a song where Mary Ann Singleton's friends enumerate the good things about San Francisco.
The Tales of the City characters are so beloved that it must be intimidating for actors to portray them, but this new musical is perfectly cast in its central roles. Betsy Wolfe is a sunny Mary Ann and her clear, pure voice suits her character's innocence. Wesley Taylor is an adorable Mouse, making his character's romantic woes instantly sympathetic. Judy Kaye is warm and dignified as Mrs. Anna Madrigal. At first, for all her kindness, she seems somehow distant from the other characters, but when Mrs. Madrigal's big secret is revealed at the end of Act 1, everything makes sense. Mary Birdsong captures Mona Ramsey's cynical, self-destructive side and delivers the funniest lines in the show.
The smaller roles sometimes suffer for not giving the performers enough to do or otherwise being underwritten. The character of DeDe Halcyon-Day gets two broadly comic songs and Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone plays them to the hilt, but she functions more as comic relief than as an integral part of the show. DeDe's husband Beauchamp (Andrew Samonsky) duly performs his plot function of seducing Mary Ann, then basically disappears from the show. A brief scene in Act II shows Jon Fielding (Josh Breckinridge) and Beauchamp hooking up at a gay bathhouse, but this should probably be cut because it raises more questions than it answers. One of the key features of the Tales of the City stories is their blend of high-society characters with marginalized, outsider characters. But the musical often seems to wish that the upper-crust characters didn't exist, in order to go back to having more fun with those crazy and wild folks on Barbary Lane.
Indeed, that's the pitfall of adapting Tales of the City into a musical. Yes, the '70s atmosphere is fun, yes, the characters are lovable and relatable, yes, the big events of the plot give them something to sing about. But there's just too much plot and the creators still haven't found the best way to shape and balance it.
For instance, most of the reviews have mentioned as an emotional high point Mouse's "Dear Mama," where he sings his coming-out letter in the form of a simple folk ballad, unrhymed and all the more affecting because of it. I could hear grown men in the audience crying during this song. But the trouble, from a storytelling perspective, is that we never find out Mouse's mother's reaction to the letter. Does she accept her gay son, or spurn him? It's a good song, but a weak choice to have Mouse sing it to Mary Ann and Mrs. Madrigal (he wants them to hear the letter before he sends it). Much better for him to sing it as a soliloquy, or else directly to his mom.
Then there's the question of whose story this really is: Mary Ann's, Mouse's, or Mrs. Madrigal's? The musical starts off seeming like it will be Mary Ann's story (the "wide-eyed girl in the big city" opening number that I predicted back in 2008) but by Act II, the other characters' stories have become more compelling. The different storylines also present conflicting messages. Mouse and Mrs. Madrigal gain the courage to stop hiding who they really are; they tell the truth and are rewarded for it. Meanwhile, Mary Ann learns that she needs to hide who she is, to tone down her innate good cheer and stop being so trusting. In most of Tales of the City, San Francisco is portrayed as a hippie paradise of love and acceptance, but in Mary Ann's story, it's full of horrible people who try to take advantage of her. Does this make the musical intriguingly complex -- or thematically muddled?
A friend of mine says that she thinks the treatment of Mary Ann, vis-a-vis Mouse, is unfair. By the end of the musical, Mouse has acquired a handsome, successful, loving boyfriend, while Mary Ann has had relationships with two complete scumbags. I can see my friend's point -- as a straight woman, I too identify with Mary Ann and want her to be happy. However, I also appreciate seeing an ingenue heroine whose character arc is not "move to the big city and find Mr. Right." In San Francisco, Mary Ann learns to stand up for herself and acquires wonderful new friends, but she also becomes increasingly hardened and cynical. In her eleven-o-clock number, "Paper Faces," she laments how we all put on masks and personae in order to survive. "Paper Faces" also makes use of one of my favorite musical-theater tricks: the chorus joins in, the orchestra drops out, and everyone keeps singing in soaring harmonies. It gets me every time.
I talked about the characters' arcs, and while that's a good thing to have in a conventional play or musical, maybe that's wrong for Tales of the City -- which after all is based on a loose, rambling, episodic narrative, the first serialized story in a daily newspaper since the 19th century. Though Tales of the City sounded like a slam-bang idea for a musical, it really did take a lot of work to squeeze it into a conventional musical-comedy shape, with character arcs, a happy ending, and a 3-hour running time. To their credit, the creators have obviously worked hard, and not just coasted on the nostalgia that some San Franciscans feel for this era and these characters. (Even though Tales of the City is not a great musical, it could be far worse than it is and still make money in this town, due to the nostalgia factor.) But just as Mary Ann Singleton learns that a 5-day vacation in San Francisco cannot compare with actually living here, a 3-hour musical of Tales of the City, by definition, cannot really be Tales of the City.
Photos by Kevin Berne. Top: Judy Kaye as Anna Madrigal and Mary Birdsong as Mona Ramsey. Bottom: Patrick Lane as Brian Hawkins, Betsy Wolfe as Mary Ann Singleton, Wesley Taylor as Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and Josh Breckinridge as Jon Fielding.
Adapted from Armistead Maupin's columns and novels, the musical has a libretto by Jeff Whitty and a score by Jake Shears and John Garden, of the 1970s-influenced band Scissor Sisters. (After writing this and Avenue Q, Whitty has cornered the market on musicals about young urbanites exploring their identities while living in a crazy apartment house presided over by a gender-ambiguous proprietor.) Shears and Garden draw on a mix of musical styles for the score, not limiting themselves to Scissor Sisters' glam-rock/disco sound. In an interview in the playbill, they make the point that the 1970s were a diverse era in music and that '70s Broadway composers (Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, John Kander) wrote music influenced by pop, rock, folk, jazz, traditional Broadway, etc. Thus, the score includes such items as a thumping disco number for the famous scene where Michael "Mouse" Tolliver participates in a jockey shorts dance contest, Janis Joplin-style blues-rock for Mona Ramsey's songs, and an outrageously campy Broadway-gospel song called "Homosexual Convalescent Center." Lyrics are more functional than brilliant, though I liked the rhyme of "marijuana / co-ed sauna" in a song where Mary Ann Singleton's friends enumerate the good things about San Francisco.The Tales of the City characters are so beloved that it must be intimidating for actors to portray them, but this new musical is perfectly cast in its central roles. Betsy Wolfe is a sunny Mary Ann and her clear, pure voice suits her character's innocence. Wesley Taylor is an adorable Mouse, making his character's romantic woes instantly sympathetic. Judy Kaye is warm and dignified as Mrs. Anna Madrigal. At first, for all her kindness, she seems somehow distant from the other characters, but when Mrs. Madrigal's big secret is revealed at the end of Act 1, everything makes sense. Mary Birdsong captures Mona Ramsey's cynical, self-destructive side and delivers the funniest lines in the show.
The smaller roles sometimes suffer for not giving the performers enough to do or otherwise being underwritten. The character of DeDe Halcyon-Day gets two broadly comic songs and Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone plays them to the hilt, but she functions more as comic relief than as an integral part of the show. DeDe's husband Beauchamp (Andrew Samonsky) duly performs his plot function of seducing Mary Ann, then basically disappears from the show. A brief scene in Act II shows Jon Fielding (Josh Breckinridge) and Beauchamp hooking up at a gay bathhouse, but this should probably be cut because it raises more questions than it answers. One of the key features of the Tales of the City stories is their blend of high-society characters with marginalized, outsider characters. But the musical often seems to wish that the upper-crust characters didn't exist, in order to go back to having more fun with those crazy and wild folks on Barbary Lane.
Indeed, that's the pitfall of adapting Tales of the City into a musical. Yes, the '70s atmosphere is fun, yes, the characters are lovable and relatable, yes, the big events of the plot give them something to sing about. But there's just too much plot and the creators still haven't found the best way to shape and balance it.
For instance, most of the reviews have mentioned as an emotional high point Mouse's "Dear Mama," where he sings his coming-out letter in the form of a simple folk ballad, unrhymed and all the more affecting because of it. I could hear grown men in the audience crying during this song. But the trouble, from a storytelling perspective, is that we never find out Mouse's mother's reaction to the letter. Does she accept her gay son, or spurn him? It's a good song, but a weak choice to have Mouse sing it to Mary Ann and Mrs. Madrigal (he wants them to hear the letter before he sends it). Much better for him to sing it as a soliloquy, or else directly to his mom.Then there's the question of whose story this really is: Mary Ann's, Mouse's, or Mrs. Madrigal's? The musical starts off seeming like it will be Mary Ann's story (the "wide-eyed girl in the big city" opening number that I predicted back in 2008) but by Act II, the other characters' stories have become more compelling. The different storylines also present conflicting messages. Mouse and Mrs. Madrigal gain the courage to stop hiding who they really are; they tell the truth and are rewarded for it. Meanwhile, Mary Ann learns that she needs to hide who she is, to tone down her innate good cheer and stop being so trusting. In most of Tales of the City, San Francisco is portrayed as a hippie paradise of love and acceptance, but in Mary Ann's story, it's full of horrible people who try to take advantage of her. Does this make the musical intriguingly complex -- or thematically muddled?
A friend of mine says that she thinks the treatment of Mary Ann, vis-a-vis Mouse, is unfair. By the end of the musical, Mouse has acquired a handsome, successful, loving boyfriend, while Mary Ann has had relationships with two complete scumbags. I can see my friend's point -- as a straight woman, I too identify with Mary Ann and want her to be happy. However, I also appreciate seeing an ingenue heroine whose character arc is not "move to the big city and find Mr. Right." In San Francisco, Mary Ann learns to stand up for herself and acquires wonderful new friends, but she also becomes increasingly hardened and cynical. In her eleven-o-clock number, "Paper Faces," she laments how we all put on masks and personae in order to survive. "Paper Faces" also makes use of one of my favorite musical-theater tricks: the chorus joins in, the orchestra drops out, and everyone keeps singing in soaring harmonies. It gets me every time.
I talked about the characters' arcs, and while that's a good thing to have in a conventional play or musical, maybe that's wrong for Tales of the City -- which after all is based on a loose, rambling, episodic narrative, the first serialized story in a daily newspaper since the 19th century. Though Tales of the City sounded like a slam-bang idea for a musical, it really did take a lot of work to squeeze it into a conventional musical-comedy shape, with character arcs, a happy ending, and a 3-hour running time. To their credit, the creators have obviously worked hard, and not just coasted on the nostalgia that some San Franciscans feel for this era and these characters. (Even though Tales of the City is not a great musical, it could be far worse than it is and still make money in this town, due to the nostalgia factor.) But just as Mary Ann Singleton learns that a 5-day vacation in San Francisco cannot compare with actually living here, a 3-hour musical of Tales of the City, by definition, cannot really be Tales of the City.
Photos by Kevin Berne. Top: Judy Kaye as Anna Madrigal and Mary Birdsong as Mona Ramsey. Bottom: Patrick Lane as Brian Hawkins, Betsy Wolfe as Mary Ann Singleton, Wesley Taylor as Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and Josh Breckinridge as Jon Fielding.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
"I've Got Six Weeks, You've Got Seven Weeks" (With Apologies to Rodgers & Hammerstein)
Earlier this month, I was hanging out at everyone's favorite dive bar with one of my fellow Olympians Festival playwrights. I asked her how the writing was going.
"Well, I'd like to have a first draft finished by mid-July."
"Wait! Isn't your birthday in mid-July?" I said.
"Yes -- I kind of thought it would be my birthday present to myself."
I thought this was a fantastic idea -- and it just so happens that my birthday is also in July, one week before my friend's. So we clinked glasses and made a pact to finish the first drafts of our plays by our respective birthdays.
July is coming up fast, though! We have just six or seven weeks to get this done. And when I realized that, I felt a song parody coming on.
I sent this to my friend last night, but I hope she won't mind if I post it here. By announcing this pact in public, it means that if you read my blog and know me in real life, I want you to pester me about my writing and hold me to my promise. Plus, this may serve as an explanation/excuse for why I'm blogging less these days. Also, I'm damn proud of myself for finding a rhyme for "Pleiades." So, here goes -- to the tune of "Sixteen Going On Seventeen":
We stare, dearest friend,
At an empty page
Which we know that we must write on
Lest we stare, dearest friend,
At an empty stage
When the Festival turns its lights on
So...
I’ve got six weeks, you’ve got seven weeks
To write our Olympians plays
A month and a half
To write a first draft
And finish by our birthdays
I’ve got six weeks, you’ve got seven weeks
I think your idea is wise
We'll write in a hurry
A frenzy, a fury
And then have time to revise!
Six weeks to finish Pleiades
(I hope it will be fun)
In seven weeks you'll be at ease
Joe Ryan will be done!
Here's our deadline
Coming up quickly
And so we mustn't shirk
You've got seven weeks, I've got six weeks
Let's get down to work!
"Well, I'd like to have a first draft finished by mid-July."
"Wait! Isn't your birthday in mid-July?" I said.
"Yes -- I kind of thought it would be my birthday present to myself."
I thought this was a fantastic idea -- and it just so happens that my birthday is also in July, one week before my friend's. So we clinked glasses and made a pact to finish the first drafts of our plays by our respective birthdays.
July is coming up fast, though! We have just six or seven weeks to get this done. And when I realized that, I felt a song parody coming on.
I sent this to my friend last night, but I hope she won't mind if I post it here. By announcing this pact in public, it means that if you read my blog and know me in real life, I want you to pester me about my writing and hold me to my promise. Plus, this may serve as an explanation/excuse for why I'm blogging less these days. Also, I'm damn proud of myself for finding a rhyme for "Pleiades." So, here goes -- to the tune of "Sixteen Going On Seventeen":
We stare, dearest friend,
At an empty page
Which we know that we must write on
Lest we stare, dearest friend,
At an empty stage
When the Festival turns its lights on
So...
I’ve got six weeks, you’ve got seven weeks
To write our Olympians plays
A month and a half
To write a first draft
And finish by our birthdays
I’ve got six weeks, you’ve got seven weeks
I think your idea is wise
We'll write in a hurry
A frenzy, a fury
And then have time to revise!
Six weeks to finish Pleiades
(I hope it will be fun)
In seven weeks you'll be at ease
Joe Ryan will be done!
Here's our deadline
Coming up quickly
And so we mustn't shirk
You've got seven weeks, I've got six weeks
Let's get down to work!
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Believe it or Not, I Enjoyed the "Women on the Verge" Musical
Yes, even though Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown got awful reviews, when I saw a preview performance of it toward the end of October, I had a good time. And lest you think that I was merely dazzled because I hadn't seen a Broadway musical in four years, the friend who I was with also liked it... and she lives in New York and sees practically every Broadway show.
Women on the Verge is not going on my list of "favorite" or "greatest" musicals, but I enjoyed myself, and without feeling like I was enjoying something that was "beneath me." As I read through the collected reviews on StageGrade, my opinions probably align best with John Lahr's or Jesse Oxenfeld's (both in the "B" range). I liked how the show is a genuine musical comedy that didn't feel the need to poke fun at the fact that it's a musical comedy. It felt old-fashioned, in the sense that it's a musical that mostly just aimed to please, but it wasn't hokey, or a nostalgia trip. I enjoyed the farce plot and the crazy complications and the emphasis on female characters.
My friend and I agreed that the Women on the Verge creative team must have had Nine on the brain. Just like Nine, Women on the Verge is based on a well-known foreign film that came out about 20 years before the musical did. These shows offer Americans the chance to see a show with "exotic, passionate" Mediterranean flavor, eavesdropping on the messed-up love lives of a big ensemble of characters. And both have lots of great roles for women.
(Mightn't it be fun to produce Nine and Women on the Verge in rep?) (This is why I am not a producer.) (Oops, except that I am.)
Probably my favorite part of the show was the cast that Lincoln Center Theatre assembled to bring the outsize characters to life. Patti LuPone plays Lucia, who is at least as crazy and as vengeful as that other famous Lucia (I mean the one from Lammermoor). She kicks up her heels to a '60s-style pop number in Act One, gives the full diva treatment to a ballad of lament called "Invisible" in Act Two, and makes all of her one-liners more funny than they have any right to be. LuPone has pointed out that this is her first time creating a role in a new musical in 35 years, and she's obviously having the time of her life.
Even better is Laura Benanti, who, as everyone will tell you, steals the show in the role of Candela, a ditzy fashion model. She is gorgeous and hilarious, and her patter song "Model Behavior" is the highlight of the night. There aren't enough patter songs -- particularly patter songs for women -- in the modern musical theater! Indeed, David Yazbek's score could have used a few more of them, especially if he wants to convey the sense of being "on the verge of a nervous breakdown." The main character, Pepa, played by Sherie Rene Scott, mostly has bland ballads to sing--and Scott, la pobrecita, is unfortunately upstaged by special effects (a burning bed) during her big solo.
The Broadway staging featured elaborate projections that have been the source of much criticism. However, because my seat was high up in the balcony, I didn't really notice the projections upstage, because I was mostly focused on the actors downstage. Perhaps this is one show where it's better to sit in the balcony than in the orchestra?
I won't comment too much more on Women on the Verge, because it was still a work in progress the night I saw it (October 24). I gather that the opening number of the show is now a lively salute to Madrid, but when I saw it, the "Madrid" song was at the start of Act II, and Act I opened with all the women singing a yearning song called "My Crazy Heart." I also hope that the production team had a chance to work up a better set for the scenes that take place at the courthouse. As I mentioned, the show is full of colorful, shifting projections. But, during the courthouse scenes, the stage was bare and white, save two drops painted with sketchy Ionic columns, like something from a high-school play. Hideous and very cheap-looking, especially compared with the color and motion that otherwise filled the stage.
As I said, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is not a great musical--the score just doesn't contain enough first-rate songs. But it was a perfectly entertaining evening of theater, and I wouldn't dissuade anyone from going to see it, particularly if they want to see some excellent musical-comedy performances from LuPone and Benanti.
Women on the Verge is not going on my list of "favorite" or "greatest" musicals, but I enjoyed myself, and without feeling like I was enjoying something that was "beneath me." As I read through the collected reviews on StageGrade, my opinions probably align best with John Lahr's or Jesse Oxenfeld's (both in the "B" range). I liked how the show is a genuine musical comedy that didn't feel the need to poke fun at the fact that it's a musical comedy. It felt old-fashioned, in the sense that it's a musical that mostly just aimed to please, but it wasn't hokey, or a nostalgia trip. I enjoyed the farce plot and the crazy complications and the emphasis on female characters.
My friend and I agreed that the Women on the Verge creative team must have had Nine on the brain. Just like Nine, Women on the Verge is based on a well-known foreign film that came out about 20 years before the musical did. These shows offer Americans the chance to see a show with "exotic, passionate" Mediterranean flavor, eavesdropping on the messed-up love lives of a big ensemble of characters. And both have lots of great roles for women.
(Mightn't it be fun to produce Nine and Women on the Verge in rep?) (This is why I am not a producer.) (Oops, except that I am.)
Probably my favorite part of the show was the cast that Lincoln Center Theatre assembled to bring the outsize characters to life. Patti LuPone plays Lucia, who is at least as crazy and as vengeful as that other famous Lucia (I mean the one from Lammermoor). She kicks up her heels to a '60s-style pop number in Act One, gives the full diva treatment to a ballad of lament called "Invisible" in Act Two, and makes all of her one-liners more funny than they have any right to be. LuPone has pointed out that this is her first time creating a role in a new musical in 35 years, and she's obviously having the time of her life.
Even better is Laura Benanti, who, as everyone will tell you, steals the show in the role of Candela, a ditzy fashion model. She is gorgeous and hilarious, and her patter song "Model Behavior" is the highlight of the night. There aren't enough patter songs -- particularly patter songs for women -- in the modern musical theater! Indeed, David Yazbek's score could have used a few more of them, especially if he wants to convey the sense of being "on the verge of a nervous breakdown." The main character, Pepa, played by Sherie Rene Scott, mostly has bland ballads to sing--and Scott, la pobrecita, is unfortunately upstaged by special effects (a burning bed) during her big solo.
The Broadway staging featured elaborate projections that have been the source of much criticism. However, because my seat was high up in the balcony, I didn't really notice the projections upstage, because I was mostly focused on the actors downstage. Perhaps this is one show where it's better to sit in the balcony than in the orchestra?
I won't comment too much more on Women on the Verge, because it was still a work in progress the night I saw it (October 24). I gather that the opening number of the show is now a lively salute to Madrid, but when I saw it, the "Madrid" song was at the start of Act II, and Act I opened with all the women singing a yearning song called "My Crazy Heart." I also hope that the production team had a chance to work up a better set for the scenes that take place at the courthouse. As I mentioned, the show is full of colorful, shifting projections. But, during the courthouse scenes, the stage was bare and white, save two drops painted with sketchy Ionic columns, like something from a high-school play. Hideous and very cheap-looking, especially compared with the color and motion that otherwise filled the stage.
As I said, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is not a great musical--the score just doesn't contain enough first-rate songs. But it was a perfectly entertaining evening of theater, and I wouldn't dissuade anyone from going to see it, particularly if they want to see some excellent musical-comedy performances from LuPone and Benanti.
Monday, November 29, 2010
"Maybe it's 'cause you're a girl"
I spent Thanksgiving with friends that I met doing theater, meaning that before the turkey came out of the oven, I got into a debate with someone about whether The Light in the Piazza is a great musical or not. I am an enthusiastic fan of this musical; my friend is not all that impressed with it. At one point in our conversation, he said, "Maybe it's 'cause you're a girl."
"Really?" I said. I felt slightly patronized.
"It's just, in my experience, the people I know who've loved this show the most have all been young women. And I have to wonder if it's because this show is an unabashed, sentimental romance, and we don't get a lot of those in the theater nowadays, so it feeds some kind of hunger."
"Huh, maybe," I said. "I can see your point. But I don't just relate to it on the level of romantic fantasy. It's not that I want to be Clara--"
"Of course you don't, Marissa--you'd never want to have the mental age of a 10-year-old!"
"Ha, ha -- I mean, the reason I like the show is not because I want to go to Florence and fall in love with a handsome Italian. It's really the mother's story, after all... and I thought that that was very well done."
I do see my friend's point about The Light in the Piazza feeding a hunger for a musical that is a real, rapturous love story. After all, I saw it when I was still in my teens, and far more liable to be swept off my feet by romance. I remember that the guy I had a crush on at the time told me he'd been to see The Light in the Piazza, and hated it -- he'd left at intermission. "Oh no!" I thought. "How can I possibly be in love with someone who hates The Light in the Piazza?" It was as though by rejecting this musical, he had also rejected me, and my love, and the way I feel and express love. Which would seem to prove my friend's theory correct. Nowadays, though, I'm still a fan of The Light in the Piazza, but it wouldn't bother me if I had a crush on a guy who hated it!
But I want to return to my friend's other comment, "maybe it's 'cause you're a girl," and my feeling vaguely patronized by that remark. I want to ask: did I have a right to feel patronized?
On the one hand, I bristle at the suggestion that men and women have inherently different reactions to works of art. It seems awfully reductive, saying that gender trumps all. Also, it's a slippery slope from "because you're a girl, you have different taste than me" to "because you're a girl, you have worse taste than me." We were trying to have an argument about aesthetic merit, after all.
On the other hand, don't I praise works of art that I feel capture the essence of being a woman, plays and novels that touch something in me that stories about men do not? (Of course, I can also be moved by works of art that feature male protagonists! But I must admit that they move me in a different way.) Aren't I annoyed when theater companies produce far more male than female playwrights in a season? Don't I always say "Female playwrights are still in the minority, so I think it's very important to tell women's stories in my writing?"
Well, I can't have it both ways. Either women and men are inherently different, or they're not. If I want to go on touting the importance of women's stories and female authors, I must realize that such stories don't necessarily speak to a male audience, and not be bothered when someone suggests that I might have liked a certain work of art "because I'm a girl." Conversely, if I feel patronized when someone suggests that I liked something "because I'm a girl" -- that is, if I want to take gender out of discussions of artistic merit -- I can't complain about theaters that produce plays by men four times as often as they produce plays by women, as long as the work that ends up onstage is good.
It's a thorny issue, and logical consistency is a real pain.* I guess I just can't decide whether it is more feminist to say "I am a woman, I am proud to be a woman, hear me roar," or to say "I am so secure in who I am that I don't need to keep mentioning that I'm a woman, and the best way to stop sexism is to stop insisting that the sexes are fundamentally different."
*I was going to say "logical consitency is a bitch," but that would just open up a whole 'nother can of worms about gender and language and whether I am a self-loathing female if I use the word "bitch" in this context!
"Really?" I said. I felt slightly patronized.
"It's just, in my experience, the people I know who've loved this show the most have all been young women. And I have to wonder if it's because this show is an unabashed, sentimental romance, and we don't get a lot of those in the theater nowadays, so it feeds some kind of hunger."
"Huh, maybe," I said. "I can see your point. But I don't just relate to it on the level of romantic fantasy. It's not that I want to be Clara--"
"Of course you don't, Marissa--you'd never want to have the mental age of a 10-year-old!"
"Ha, ha -- I mean, the reason I like the show is not because I want to go to Florence and fall in love with a handsome Italian. It's really the mother's story, after all... and I thought that that was very well done."
I do see my friend's point about The Light in the Piazza feeding a hunger for a musical that is a real, rapturous love story. After all, I saw it when I was still in my teens, and far more liable to be swept off my feet by romance. I remember that the guy I had a crush on at the time told me he'd been to see The Light in the Piazza, and hated it -- he'd left at intermission. "Oh no!" I thought. "How can I possibly be in love with someone who hates The Light in the Piazza?" It was as though by rejecting this musical, he had also rejected me, and my love, and the way I feel and express love. Which would seem to prove my friend's theory correct. Nowadays, though, I'm still a fan of The Light in the Piazza, but it wouldn't bother me if I had a crush on a guy who hated it!
But I want to return to my friend's other comment, "maybe it's 'cause you're a girl," and my feeling vaguely patronized by that remark. I want to ask: did I have a right to feel patronized?
On the one hand, I bristle at the suggestion that men and women have inherently different reactions to works of art. It seems awfully reductive, saying that gender trumps all. Also, it's a slippery slope from "because you're a girl, you have different taste than me" to "because you're a girl, you have worse taste than me." We were trying to have an argument about aesthetic merit, after all.
On the other hand, don't I praise works of art that I feel capture the essence of being a woman, plays and novels that touch something in me that stories about men do not? (Of course, I can also be moved by works of art that feature male protagonists! But I must admit that they move me in a different way.) Aren't I annoyed when theater companies produce far more male than female playwrights in a season? Don't I always say "Female playwrights are still in the minority, so I think it's very important to tell women's stories in my writing?"
Well, I can't have it both ways. Either women and men are inherently different, or they're not. If I want to go on touting the importance of women's stories and female authors, I must realize that such stories don't necessarily speak to a male audience, and not be bothered when someone suggests that I might have liked a certain work of art "because I'm a girl." Conversely, if I feel patronized when someone suggests that I liked something "because I'm a girl" -- that is, if I want to take gender out of discussions of artistic merit -- I can't complain about theaters that produce plays by men four times as often as they produce plays by women, as long as the work that ends up onstage is good.
It's a thorny issue, and logical consistency is a real pain.* I guess I just can't decide whether it is more feminist to say "I am a woman, I am proud to be a woman, hear me roar," or to say "I am so secure in who I am that I don't need to keep mentioning that I'm a woman, and the best way to stop sexism is to stop insisting that the sexes are fundamentally different."
*I was going to say "logical consitency is a bitch," but that would just open up a whole 'nother can of worms about gender and language and whether I am a self-loathing female if I use the word "bitch" in this context!
Thursday, October 14, 2010
"Sooner or Later," I'll Write Better Blog Posts. In the Meantime...
An old favorite: Stephen Sondheim
A new favorite (after seeing Scapin at ACT last night): Bill Irwin
So I have to post this video of Karen Ziemba singing, and Bill Irwin clowning, to Sondheim's "Sooner or Later," from Dick Tracy. Enjoy!
Monday, May 3, 2010
Sweet Sweet Lovin': "Girlfriend" at Berkeley Rep
Over the weekend I went to see the new musical Girlfriend at Berkeley Rep. (Full disclosure: one of my friends from college was operating one of the spotlights--I made sure to applaud extra hard after the songs that featured her expert tracking of the actors with the spotlight!)
Like American Idiot earlier in the season, Girlfriend is a "jukebox" musical--it is based on the pop-rock music of Matthew Sweet, particularly his album Girlfriend, from 1991. I had never heard of Sweet before I saw this show (the early '90s are kind of a cultural blind spot for me), but it's good music--timeless, poppy, earnest and melodic.
In Berkeley Rep's Girlfriend, the music is played by a 4-person all-female band (styled and costumed to look like butch lesbians) and sung by two young actors, Ryder Bach and Jason Hite, as they enact the story of two gay Midwestern teenagers struggling to express their attraction to each other. Neither the characters nor the plot is going to win many points for originality; it's the old story of young love having to overcome societal obstacles. And it's a wish-fulfillment fantasy too: one of the boys is a geeky, epicene outcast and the other is a smart, guitar-playing, All-American jock. And perhaps the show (which runs about 2:05, with intermission) takes a little too long to tell its sweet but slender story.
At the same time, though, the audience really does fall in love with these characters--and, as a writer, that is not an easy effect to acheive. It is much easier to shock or offend an audience, than it is to make people care for your characters as though they are real human beings--and say "awww" aloud as the story wraps up. While the Girlfriend boys are archetypes, there is an attempt to give them backstories and witty dialogue that fleshes out their characters--they are several degrees more rounded than the young men of American Idiot. The Green Day musical certainly got my heart pumping to a punk-rock rhythm, but it didn't stir my emotions; Girlfriend left me with a sweet little smile.
Though Berkeley Rep is doing its best to encourage the link, American Idiot might actually be the wrong musical to compare Girlfriend to. The more I think about it, the more Girlfriend reminds me of a contemporary version of Kneehigh's/ACT's Brief Encounter (my review): a story of a love that society wants to repress, a wish-fulfillment fantasy where a mousy protagonist finds himself/herself desired by a smart, handsome, successful guy. And all accompanied by the most upbeat pop music of the era. In both cases, too, the show is not only about the love between its two lead characters. It's about our love for these kinds of stories and songs, and the enduring hold they have on our imaginations; about the fact that we all can remember what song we were listening to in high school when that special someone glanced our way...
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Happy (Belated) Birthday, Stephen Sondheim
So yesterday was Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday (and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 62nd) but I was too busy hanging out with the wonderful people who attend the San Francisco Theater Pub to write a blog post in his honor. At one point in the evening, about 11 PM, someone pointed out that the day ought to be an official holiday for theater lovers, and we drunkenly sang "Happy Birthday, Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber!" I may also have broken into a tipsy version of "The Ladies Who Lunch."
Two years ago I went to see Sondheim and Frank Rich's lecture tour when it came to Portland. (It was a few days before he turned 78 and the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to him then, too.) Here are a couple of posts I wrote at the time:
Now, for years, I had wanted to write a letter to Sondheim; not only is he a genius whose songs touch my soul, but he also, in 1980, started Young Playwrights Inc., whose national playwriting contest I won in 2006. I wanted to thank him for that (and I knew that I could ask Young Playwrights to deliver my letter to him directly). Seeing him in Portland was what finally pushed me to write that letter that I'd been planning for years.
And I got a response back!--I still remember the excitement I felt when I opened my mailbox at college to discover the envelope. Sondheim still uses a typewriter for his correspondence, and fine Crane letter-paper. I'm not going to reveal what the letter said... but it is one of my most treasured possessions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that not only is Sondheim a brilliant composer and lyricist, he also seems like a truly good man--because he is so indebted to the great artists, like Oscar Hammerstein, who mentored him when he was young, he gets the importance of nurturing future generations of writers and composers. I admire the way that he refuses to publicly comment on the works of living composers (including his co-birthdayist's) because he realizes that people in the American musical theater tend to take everything he says as though it was the word of God, and he wants to use his power in a positive way. Yes, he's famed for writing songs about ambivalence and negativity. But he doesn't come across as a grouchy old man! At his appearance in Portland, he was engaging and enthusiastic and emotionally open (crying when telling a touching story about Hammerstein).
Still, though, for those of us who can't get enough of the "word of God," it is wonderful news that Sondheim has a book coming out in October: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. I know what I want for Christmas!
And now for a few of Sondheim's many dazzling compositions. First, Bernadette Peters will rip your heart into pieces singing "Not a Day Goes By" from Merrily We Roll Along:
And here is Peters, with Mandy Patinkin, in the original production of Sunday in the Park with George, singing "Move On." This is one of those songs that I can always, always, return to and find a deeper wisdom in it. The struggle of my life is a struggle to live out the message of this song.
This just barely scratches the surface of what Sondheim has done, though, so I really enjoyed reading this Playbill feature in which younger composers and lyricists select their favorite Sondheim songs. It is easy to concur with just about every one of their choices!
Thank you for everything, Mr. Sondheim.
Two years ago I went to see Sondheim and Frank Rich's lecture tour when it came to Portland. (It was a few days before he turned 78 and the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to him then, too.) Here are a couple of posts I wrote at the time:
Now, for years, I had wanted to write a letter to Sondheim; not only is he a genius whose songs touch my soul, but he also, in 1980, started Young Playwrights Inc., whose national playwriting contest I won in 2006. I wanted to thank him for that (and I knew that I could ask Young Playwrights to deliver my letter to him directly). Seeing him in Portland was what finally pushed me to write that letter that I'd been planning for years.
And I got a response back!--I still remember the excitement I felt when I opened my mailbox at college to discover the envelope. Sondheim still uses a typewriter for his correspondence, and fine Crane letter-paper. I'm not going to reveal what the letter said... but it is one of my most treasured possessions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that not only is Sondheim a brilliant composer and lyricist, he also seems like a truly good man--because he is so indebted to the great artists, like Oscar Hammerstein, who mentored him when he was young, he gets the importance of nurturing future generations of writers and composers. I admire the way that he refuses to publicly comment on the works of living composers (including his co-birthdayist's) because he realizes that people in the American musical theater tend to take everything he says as though it was the word of God, and he wants to use his power in a positive way. Yes, he's famed for writing songs about ambivalence and negativity. But he doesn't come across as a grouchy old man! At his appearance in Portland, he was engaging and enthusiastic and emotionally open (crying when telling a touching story about Hammerstein).
Still, though, for those of us who can't get enough of the "word of God," it is wonderful news that Sondheim has a book coming out in October: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. I know what I want for Christmas!
And now for a few of Sondheim's many dazzling compositions. First, Bernadette Peters will rip your heart into pieces singing "Not a Day Goes By" from Merrily We Roll Along:
And here is Peters, with Mandy Patinkin, in the original production of Sunday in the Park with George, singing "Move On." This is one of those songs that I can always, always, return to and find a deeper wisdom in it. The struggle of my life is a struggle to live out the message of this song.
This just barely scratches the surface of what Sondheim has done, though, so I really enjoyed reading this Playbill feature in which younger composers and lyricists select their favorite Sondheim songs. It is easy to concur with just about every one of their choices!
Thank you for everything, Mr. Sondheim.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "Nine"
...the next in my occasional series...
Title of movie: Nine
Reasons for anticipation: Musical theater! All-star cast! Beautiful, talented, lauded performers! Singing and dancing! Cool Italian style! Etc.
Seen at: Castro Theater
Songs played on the Castro Theater organ beforehand: "From This Moment On" (Cole Porter), "Torna a Surriento," and some other melodies that I didn't recognize. Frankly, this was one of the best parts of the event, which leads me to...
My verdict: Critical opinion on Nine is remarkably unvaried, and I'm afraid I'm going to be boring and agree with the consensus: it doesn't really work, it seems kind of flat and pointless, and while none of the performers embarrass themselves, only Marion Cotillard stands out.
Elaboration: OK, Nine has kind of a strange premise: based on a 1980s Broadway musical (one that was praised and had a decent run, but never permeated the popular culture), which was in turn based on a renowned '60s art-house film. I was familiar with Nine's pedigree, having heard some of the songs and seen 8½, so I accepted it for what it was... but otherwise, the movie doesn't do a good job of justifying its own existence. If I weren't familiar with 8½, I'd be asking a lot of questions: "Why does this movie take place in the '60s? Why is Daniel Day-Lewis talking with an Italian accent? Why tell this story at all?" I imagine that many audience members who aren't foreign-cinema buffs asked themselves the same things.
Incidentally, it's surprising to realize that Nine is set in the same year as An Education and the latest season of Mad Men. Those works feel like a detailed firsthand experience of the early 1960s, but Nine doesn't, it seems too modern.
Then Nine has other problems, like staging all the musical numbers as fantasies of the protagonist, Guido Contini (Day-Lewis). First, this robs the songs of urgency, because they can only comment on the story, not drive it forward. It also makes the movie really choppy, because the songs do not blossom naturally out of the action, but are wedged into it. It feels like each famous actress comes on, has a song and a scene with Guido, then disappears from the movie.
The exception is Marion Cotillard--she gets two songs, and steals the movie with them. Playing Guido's long-suffering wife Luisa, she looks beautiful, has a good voice, and knows how to infuse it with real feeling. Most of the musical numbers in Nine are edited to death, but for Cotillard's first song, "My Husband Makes Movies," the movie slows down and just lets her sing. And through her performance, you see all the facets of Luisa's character: she is proud of Guido's talent, she deplores his weaknesses, she loves him, she hates him, she hates herself for putting up with him, she knows she is the only woman who can put up with him, etc. You understand Luisa better than you understand any other character... because even though the musical numbers ostensibly allow us into Guido's head, he remains kind of opaque.
(N.B.: on re-listening to "My Husband Makes Movies," it struck me as similar, emotion-wise, to "Something Wonderful" from The King and I, which used to be my audition song. Maybe I have a weakness for these kinds of songs/characters.)
And then, that's another problem with the songs taking place in Guido's head: it's the male gaze, robbing the women of their agency. Luisa expresses her emotions so powerfully that it's depressing to realize that according to the rules of Nine, she's not actually expressing them... instead, Guido is imagining that she feels that way. This undercuts the scenes that do attempt to show a strong female perspective, such as when Guido's favorite actress, Claudia (Nicole Kidman), rejects his plan to cast her in the role of a muse who inspires a great male artist, saying "I'd rather be the man." (I liked Kidman's performance, though I wonder how much of this was residual affection from Moulin Rouge making me happy to hear her sing in a movie again.)
Even though Guido's situation is serious, 8½ has a rich and bizarre sense of humor (according to Wikipedia, Fellini's motto when filming it was "Remember, this is a comedy"). But Nine doesn't find much humor, even when the situation calls for it. Penélope Cruz plays Guido's mistress, Carla, and in her big song, she phones him and coos about all the things she'd like to do to him. Guido, not wanting to reveal to the other people in the room that he has a mistress, pretends that it is "A Call from the Vatican" (the title of the song). So while Carla is making love to the telephone, Guido can only say "Yes, Monsignor," and struggle to hide how turned on he is. A classic farce situation, but Nine completely downplays the joke.
The blame for Nine should rest much more with the writing and direction than with the actors. No one makes a fool out of themselves, and maybe if the editing wasn't so hectic, some of the other actors could make the impression that Cotillard does. As it stands, performers like Sophia Loren and Judi Dench are basically wasted. Oh well, at least the movie looks nice: I loved a shot where Guido is hunched over in front of a movie that's being projected in his screening room, and it briefly fools you into thinking that Daniel Day-Lewis is in your movie theater, in front of your screen, having emerged in Purple Rose of Cairo fashion. (Who needs 3-D glasses?)
A while back, I mentioned 8½, Nine, Synecdoche New York, etc., as falling into a sub-genre of works called "The Artist and His Women." Now, I didn't think that Synecdoche worked as a film, but it was an interesting failure: afterwards, you wanted to discuss what it was trying to say and whether or not it succeeded at getting the message across. You can also appreciate 8½ for what it says about the way that artists relate to the world. But with Nine, the only thing to discuss is which performances you liked best and which musical numbers did and didn't succeed. And that is not a very interesting way to talk about the movies.
Title of movie: Nine
Reasons for anticipation: Musical theater! All-star cast! Beautiful, talented, lauded performers! Singing and dancing! Cool Italian style! Etc.
Seen at: Castro Theater
Songs played on the Castro Theater organ beforehand: "From This Moment On" (Cole Porter), "Torna a Surriento," and some other melodies that I didn't recognize. Frankly, this was one of the best parts of the event, which leads me to...
My verdict: Critical opinion on Nine is remarkably unvaried, and I'm afraid I'm going to be boring and agree with the consensus: it doesn't really work, it seems kind of flat and pointless, and while none of the performers embarrass themselves, only Marion Cotillard stands out.
Elaboration: OK, Nine has kind of a strange premise: based on a 1980s Broadway musical (one that was praised and had a decent run, but never permeated the popular culture), which was in turn based on a renowned '60s art-house film. I was familiar with Nine's pedigree, having heard some of the songs and seen 8½, so I accepted it for what it was... but otherwise, the movie doesn't do a good job of justifying its own existence. If I weren't familiar with 8½, I'd be asking a lot of questions: "Why does this movie take place in the '60s? Why is Daniel Day-Lewis talking with an Italian accent? Why tell this story at all?" I imagine that many audience members who aren't foreign-cinema buffs asked themselves the same things.
Incidentally, it's surprising to realize that Nine is set in the same year as An Education and the latest season of Mad Men. Those works feel like a detailed firsthand experience of the early 1960s, but Nine doesn't, it seems too modern.
Then Nine has other problems, like staging all the musical numbers as fantasies of the protagonist, Guido Contini (Day-Lewis). First, this robs the songs of urgency, because they can only comment on the story, not drive it forward. It also makes the movie really choppy, because the songs do not blossom naturally out of the action, but are wedged into it. It feels like each famous actress comes on, has a song and a scene with Guido, then disappears from the movie.
The exception is Marion Cotillard--she gets two songs, and steals the movie with them. Playing Guido's long-suffering wife Luisa, she looks beautiful, has a good voice, and knows how to infuse it with real feeling. Most of the musical numbers in Nine are edited to death, but for Cotillard's first song, "My Husband Makes Movies," the movie slows down and just lets her sing. And through her performance, you see all the facets of Luisa's character: she is proud of Guido's talent, she deplores his weaknesses, she loves him, she hates him, she hates herself for putting up with him, she knows she is the only woman who can put up with him, etc. You understand Luisa better than you understand any other character... because even though the musical numbers ostensibly allow us into Guido's head, he remains kind of opaque.(N.B.: on re-listening to "My Husband Makes Movies," it struck me as similar, emotion-wise, to "Something Wonderful" from The King and I, which used to be my audition song. Maybe I have a weakness for these kinds of songs/characters.)
And then, that's another problem with the songs taking place in Guido's head: it's the male gaze, robbing the women of their agency. Luisa expresses her emotions so powerfully that it's depressing to realize that according to the rules of Nine, she's not actually expressing them... instead, Guido is imagining that she feels that way. This undercuts the scenes that do attempt to show a strong female perspective, such as when Guido's favorite actress, Claudia (Nicole Kidman), rejects his plan to cast her in the role of a muse who inspires a great male artist, saying "I'd rather be the man." (I liked Kidman's performance, though I wonder how much of this was residual affection from Moulin Rouge making me happy to hear her sing in a movie again.)
Even though Guido's situation is serious, 8½ has a rich and bizarre sense of humor (according to Wikipedia, Fellini's motto when filming it was "Remember, this is a comedy"). But Nine doesn't find much humor, even when the situation calls for it. Penélope Cruz plays Guido's mistress, Carla, and in her big song, she phones him and coos about all the things she'd like to do to him. Guido, not wanting to reveal to the other people in the room that he has a mistress, pretends that it is "A Call from the Vatican" (the title of the song). So while Carla is making love to the telephone, Guido can only say "Yes, Monsignor," and struggle to hide how turned on he is. A classic farce situation, but Nine completely downplays the joke.
The blame for Nine should rest much more with the writing and direction than with the actors. No one makes a fool out of themselves, and maybe if the editing wasn't so hectic, some of the other actors could make the impression that Cotillard does. As it stands, performers like Sophia Loren and Judi Dench are basically wasted. Oh well, at least the movie looks nice: I loved a shot where Guido is hunched over in front of a movie that's being projected in his screening room, and it briefly fools you into thinking that Daniel Day-Lewis is in your movie theater, in front of your screen, having emerged in Purple Rose of Cairo fashion. (Who needs 3-D glasses?)
A while back, I mentioned 8½, Nine, Synecdoche New York, etc., as falling into a sub-genre of works called "The Artist and His Women." Now, I didn't think that Synecdoche worked as a film, but it was an interesting failure: afterwards, you wanted to discuss what it was trying to say and whether or not it succeeded at getting the message across. You can also appreciate 8½ for what it says about the way that artists relate to the world. But with Nine, the only thing to discuss is which performances you liked best and which musical numbers did and didn't succeed. And that is not a very interesting way to talk about the movies.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Nigerian Night
In the evenings I like to cook and eat dinner while watching the reruns of the previous night's Daily Show and Colbert Report. Last night, for the first time, Colbert featured a performance from a Broadway show: the cast of Fela!
Fela! is a musical about Afrobeat superstar Fela Kuti. And as fate would have it, as I watched the Fela! performance today, I was cooking the only West African-style dish in my repertoire: the Minimalist's Peanut Soup with Chicken and Yams.
I very much recommend the recipe and it would certainly be good fuel for a night of shaking your hips to Afrobeat! And I think I'm going to call it "Fela Soup" from now on, because I'm a fan of giving recipes catchy/unique names, rather than ones that are just lists of ingredients.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Fela! - Zombie | ||||
| ||||
Fela! is a musical about Afrobeat superstar Fela Kuti. And as fate would have it, as I watched the Fela! performance today, I was cooking the only West African-style dish in my repertoire: the Minimalist's Peanut Soup with Chicken and Yams.
I very much recommend the recipe and it would certainly be good fuel for a night of shaking your hips to Afrobeat! And I think I'm going to call it "Fela Soup" from now on, because I'm a fan of giving recipes catchy/unique names, rather than ones that are just lists of ingredients.
Monday, November 9, 2009
"American Idiot": The Kids of War and Peace
It was announced today that American Idiot, the Green Day rock musical, is going to Broadway! All right, there's been speculation to that effect for weeks, and this press release is still quite vague. Nevertheless, I have been meaning to write about seeing this show at Berkeley Rep, so tonight's a good time to do it.
I actually saw American Idiot twice--first, with my friend Anushka, about four weeks ago (see her excellent comments on the show). We sat in the second row, which blasted our eardrums and allowed us to really admire the performers' drive and energy, but was almost too close, because there is so much going on at every moment of the show. After seeing it with Anushka, I realized that my friend Chanelle (a punk rock fan) had to see this musical too, and I wouldn't mind going again if I could sit further away, and Berkeley Rep has that wonderful half-price-tickets-for-young-people deal... so I ended up returning last week.
Seen from the balcony, American Idiot is still plenty loud, and you gain a better appreciation for the actors' blocking and the gigantic set (which includes a car hanging from the ceiling). At times, I didn't know where to look: there are about 30 video screens, and projections, and flashing LEDs, and traditional lighting effects, and a high-powered young cast who haven't had all their idiosyncrasies ironed out of them. In the true punk rock spirit, each person executes their dance steps in a slightly different way, even if they're all using the same movement vocabulary. This is not traditional Broadway, where every dancer kicks their leg at the same precise angle--instead, these performers dance according to their personalities and their instincts, meaning that everyone onstage is doing something unique.
It amazes me both that American Idiot is such a whiz-bang technological marvel (the first time I saw it, the hydraulic lift malfunctioned, requiring a 5-minute pause to fix it), and also that the cast, these flesh-and-blood human beings, have the stamina to go out and perform it every night!
The Green Day songs are catchy and some of them directly tap into the universal well of post-adolescent angst. When the cast performs the ballads "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends," it's a great communal moment as we acknowledge that we all feel the loneliness, alienation and pain described by the lyrics and set to these soaring choruses. But there are also plenty of punk-rock barnburners, such as "American Idiot" and "St. Jimmy."
The main character of American Idiot is Johnny, aka Jesus of Suburbia, played by John Gallagher, Jr. What energy that guy has! I saw him in Spring Awakening as the nerdy, twitchy, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin Moritz--and in American Idiot he was twitchy, too, but in a different way. He perfectly incarnated the snot-nosed, eye-rolling post-adolescent. Johnny is the only character with any spoken dialogue--just a few lines between some of the songs, to clarify the plot. This narration can be over-the-top, e.g. "I've got an axe to grind, and it's splittin' my head open!" But that also makes it a modern-day kind of street poetry--the bastard child of Clifford Odets.
Not that the plot of American Idiot is hard to understand: just the tale of a suburban kid who goes to the city with nothing but a backpack and a guitar, falls in love, gets hooked on drugs, ruins his life, gets clean, and returns to the 'burbs, a little wiser. There's only one thing that confused me, and it's more a problem of character than of plot. When Johnny first arrives in the city, he spots a beautiful girl (Whatsername, played by Rebecca Naomi Jones) leaning out of an upstairs window. Dressed in white, pure and angelic, she reminded me of Maria on the West Side Story fire escape. So I assumed "OK, this is going to be the old story of the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who must prove himself worthy of the love of the cool, upper-class city girl." But the next thing you know, Whatsername is dancing around in her underwear and enthusiastically shooting up drugs with Johnny. She's not Maria from West Side Story, she's Mimi from Rent--a sweet girl deep down, but also a wild child! And I feel that this should have been clearer when Whatsername first appeared.
Subplots deal with Johnny's friends' attempts to leave suburbia. Michael Esper plays the incredibly thankless role of Will, who can't go to the city with Johnny because his girlfriend is pregnant. He spends the entire show moping on a couch at stage right, unable to participate in much of the singing or dancing. My friend Anushka suggested that the show could be improved by adding "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" for Will to sing--the song fits his situation and, by singing one of Green Day's biggest hits, Esper could have a better moment in the spotlight.
Heather, Will's pregnant girlfriend, is played by Mary Faber, although the first time I saw American Idiot, it was with an understudy in the role. The understudy sang sweetly and earnestly, but Faber has more of a rock-n-roll edge to her voice, so I preferred her.
Johnny's other friend, Tunny, joins the Army and goes to Iraq. He is wounded, but finds love with a hospital nurse. The actors in these roles, Matt Caplan and Christina Sajous, have great chemistry--and they'd better, because they are performing a complex aerial ballet eight times a week! Their flying sequence, set to the song "Extraordinary Girl," is one of the show's highlights.
Anushka and I were both a little bothered, though, by the way that the gender roles in American Idiot are so reductive. They're reductive in the same way that the gender roles in Spring Awakening were--but Spring Awakening is based on a 100-year-old play, so it would be unreasonable to expect its female characters to conform to modern ideals. American Idiot, as a 21st-century musical, doesn't have that excuse. I don't mean to say that it's offensive or misogynistic... just that it doesn't allow the female characters the same complexity or subjectivity or range of experience as the men. They're all a little objectified. They're all angels. Maybe that's par for the course with punk rock?
The devil of the play, meanwhile, is St. Jimmy, the drug dealer--played by Tony Vincent, an amazing, androgynous presence. Upon reflection, it struck me as a little funny that so much money and talent has gone into a show whose moral could be described as "Hey Kids, Drugs Will Fuck You Up," as though it were a bad after-school special. But that's a little uncharitable: I don't believe American Idiot is a particularly deep show, but it is certainly a fast-paced and entertaining one, not a chore to sit through twice, and Green Day has a knack for writing songs that capture a mood.
They say that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the stupidity (idiocy?) of the American public. But I also think that no one has ever gone broke overestimating American adolescents' craving for works of art that tap into the angst of their generation. I predict that American Idiot becomes a big hit on Broadway.
Top photo: John Gallagher Jr. and Tony Vincent. Bottom photo: Gallagher.
I actually saw American Idiot twice--first, with my friend Anushka, about four weeks ago (see her excellent comments on the show). We sat in the second row, which blasted our eardrums and allowed us to really admire the performers' drive and energy, but was almost too close, because there is so much going on at every moment of the show. After seeing it with Anushka, I realized that my friend Chanelle (a punk rock fan) had to see this musical too, and I wouldn't mind going again if I could sit further away, and Berkeley Rep has that wonderful half-price-tickets-for-young-people deal... so I ended up returning last week.
Seen from the balcony, American Idiot is still plenty loud, and you gain a better appreciation for the actors' blocking and the gigantic set (which includes a car hanging from the ceiling). At times, I didn't know where to look: there are about 30 video screens, and projections, and flashing LEDs, and traditional lighting effects, and a high-powered young cast who haven't had all their idiosyncrasies ironed out of them. In the true punk rock spirit, each person executes their dance steps in a slightly different way, even if they're all using the same movement vocabulary. This is not traditional Broadway, where every dancer kicks their leg at the same precise angle--instead, these performers dance according to their personalities and their instincts, meaning that everyone onstage is doing something unique.
It amazes me both that American Idiot is such a whiz-bang technological marvel (the first time I saw it, the hydraulic lift malfunctioned, requiring a 5-minute pause to fix it), and also that the cast, these flesh-and-blood human beings, have the stamina to go out and perform it every night!
The Green Day songs are catchy and some of them directly tap into the universal well of post-adolescent angst. When the cast performs the ballads "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends," it's a great communal moment as we acknowledge that we all feel the loneliness, alienation and pain described by the lyrics and set to these soaring choruses. But there are also plenty of punk-rock barnburners, such as "American Idiot" and "St. Jimmy."
The main character of American Idiot is Johnny, aka Jesus of Suburbia, played by John Gallagher, Jr. What energy that guy has! I saw him in Spring Awakening as the nerdy, twitchy, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin Moritz--and in American Idiot he was twitchy, too, but in a different way. He perfectly incarnated the snot-nosed, eye-rolling post-adolescent. Johnny is the only character with any spoken dialogue--just a few lines between some of the songs, to clarify the plot. This narration can be over-the-top, e.g. "I've got an axe to grind, and it's splittin' my head open!" But that also makes it a modern-day kind of street poetry--the bastard child of Clifford Odets.Not that the plot of American Idiot is hard to understand: just the tale of a suburban kid who goes to the city with nothing but a backpack and a guitar, falls in love, gets hooked on drugs, ruins his life, gets clean, and returns to the 'burbs, a little wiser. There's only one thing that confused me, and it's more a problem of character than of plot. When Johnny first arrives in the city, he spots a beautiful girl (Whatsername, played by Rebecca Naomi Jones) leaning out of an upstairs window. Dressed in white, pure and angelic, she reminded me of Maria on the West Side Story fire escape. So I assumed "OK, this is going to be the old story of the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who must prove himself worthy of the love of the cool, upper-class city girl." But the next thing you know, Whatsername is dancing around in her underwear and enthusiastically shooting up drugs with Johnny. She's not Maria from West Side Story, she's Mimi from Rent--a sweet girl deep down, but also a wild child! And I feel that this should have been clearer when Whatsername first appeared.
Subplots deal with Johnny's friends' attempts to leave suburbia. Michael Esper plays the incredibly thankless role of Will, who can't go to the city with Johnny because his girlfriend is pregnant. He spends the entire show moping on a couch at stage right, unable to participate in much of the singing or dancing. My friend Anushka suggested that the show could be improved by adding "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" for Will to sing--the song fits his situation and, by singing one of Green Day's biggest hits, Esper could have a better moment in the spotlight.
Heather, Will's pregnant girlfriend, is played by Mary Faber, although the first time I saw American Idiot, it was with an understudy in the role. The understudy sang sweetly and earnestly, but Faber has more of a rock-n-roll edge to her voice, so I preferred her.
Johnny's other friend, Tunny, joins the Army and goes to Iraq. He is wounded, but finds love with a hospital nurse. The actors in these roles, Matt Caplan and Christina Sajous, have great chemistry--and they'd better, because they are performing a complex aerial ballet eight times a week! Their flying sequence, set to the song "Extraordinary Girl," is one of the show's highlights.
Anushka and I were both a little bothered, though, by the way that the gender roles in American Idiot are so reductive. They're reductive in the same way that the gender roles in Spring Awakening were--but Spring Awakening is based on a 100-year-old play, so it would be unreasonable to expect its female characters to conform to modern ideals. American Idiot, as a 21st-century musical, doesn't have that excuse. I don't mean to say that it's offensive or misogynistic... just that it doesn't allow the female characters the same complexity or subjectivity or range of experience as the men. They're all a little objectified. They're all angels. Maybe that's par for the course with punk rock?
The devil of the play, meanwhile, is St. Jimmy, the drug dealer--played by Tony Vincent, an amazing, androgynous presence. Upon reflection, it struck me as a little funny that so much money and talent has gone into a show whose moral could be described as "Hey Kids, Drugs Will Fuck You Up," as though it were a bad after-school special. But that's a little uncharitable: I don't believe American Idiot is a particularly deep show, but it is certainly a fast-paced and entertaining one, not a chore to sit through twice, and Green Day has a knack for writing songs that capture a mood.
They say that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the stupidity (idiocy?) of the American public. But I also think that no one has ever gone broke overestimating American adolescents' craving for works of art that tap into the angst of their generation. I predict that American Idiot becomes a big hit on Broadway.
Top photo: John Gallagher Jr. and Tony Vincent. Bottom photo: Gallagher.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Super-Duper Trivia Quiz!
This year, some of my co-workers and I have been participating in a daily trivia game. Someone bought a page-a-day calendar that features Trivial Pursuit questions, and every afternoon, we ask that day's question and award bragging rights to the winner. And sometimes, when this is not enough to satisfy our hunger for trivia, someone prepares a special Friday Trivia Quiz. This week, it was my turn.
The people at my office, I should note, all have different areas of expertise. Some of the guys have an awe-inspiring knowledge of sports trivia. One girl knows everything there is to know about Russia. And I am the resident theater and literature expert, so I prepared a quiz heavy on those subjects. I wondered if I was making my co-workers go too far out of their comfort zones; nevertheless, I realized that the only way to write a good quiz was to choose subjects that made sense to me. For instance, I know so little about sports that I have no way to judge whether a sports trivia question is easy or hard, obscure or common knowledge. Whereas I am able to judge the difficulty level of the questions on this quiz. The musical theater questions, for example, require a good general knowledge of who wrote some of Broadway's biggest hit songs. But if I were making a quiz for an audience of theater geeks, I could also have chosen songs and lyricists who were way more obscure.
Even so, I really stretched my co-workers' brains... they all agreed that this was a hard, hard quiz! Want to see how you stack up? Here are the questions that I e-mailed to my co-workers yesterday. I'm going to post the correct answers to the quiz in the comments section, so write down your responses on a piece of paper and click over there when you're done. Feel free to post your score, as well--and to let me know what you thought of the quiz!
THEATER
Who wrote the following lines? Choose from: Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams. (Yes, there are four quotes and five potential authors. This is to make it harder!)
1. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
2. "Attention must be paid."
3. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
4."We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
MUSICAL THEATER
Who wrote the following lyrics? Choose from: Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter.
5. "I got rhythm / I got music / I got my man / Who could ask for anything more?"
6. "Birds do it / Bees do it / Even educated fleas do it / Let's do it / Let's fall in love"
7. "Some enchanted evening / You may see a stranger / You may see a stranger / Across a crowded room"
8. "Stick with me, baby, I'm the fellow you came in with / Luck, be a lady tonight"
ACADEMY AWARDS
9. In 1968, the Best Actress nominees were Katharine Hepburn, Patricia Neal, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbra Streisand, and Joanne Woodward. The votes ended in a tie. Hepburn was one of the winners; who was the other?
10. How many women have ever been nominated for Best Director?
11. Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick. Only one of these men ever won an Oscar for Best Director. Who?
12. What actor appeared in only five films before his early death--but all of them were nominated for Best Picture?
GEOGRAPHY IN HISTORY
13. What 1883 event affected weather patterns worldwide?
14. Napoleon was born on an island, exiled to (and escaped from) a second island, and died on a third island. Name the islands.
15. What does "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" refer to?
16. What city on the Baltic Sea was attacked by the Germans to begin World War II? Extra credit: Give both the German and Polish names of this city.
SCANDALOUS AUTHORS
17. What poet was described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"?
18. What American author married his 13-year-old cousin?
19. What writer's published diary reveals that she had an affair with her own father?
20. What American writer stabbed his wife with a penknife, nearly killing her?
COMPOSERS & ROYALTY
21. King Ludwig of Bavaria was obsessed with the music of what composer?
22. Emperor Joseph accused what composer's music of having "too many notes"?
23. What German composer wrote several pieces of music in honor of the British royal family?
24. What composer's music became associated with the movement to get Victor Emmanuel crowned king of Italy?
The people at my office, I should note, all have different areas of expertise. Some of the guys have an awe-inspiring knowledge of sports trivia. One girl knows everything there is to know about Russia. And I am the resident theater and literature expert, so I prepared a quiz heavy on those subjects. I wondered if I was making my co-workers go too far out of their comfort zones; nevertheless, I realized that the only way to write a good quiz was to choose subjects that made sense to me. For instance, I know so little about sports that I have no way to judge whether a sports trivia question is easy or hard, obscure or common knowledge. Whereas I am able to judge the difficulty level of the questions on this quiz. The musical theater questions, for example, require a good general knowledge of who wrote some of Broadway's biggest hit songs. But if I were making a quiz for an audience of theater geeks, I could also have chosen songs and lyricists who were way more obscure.
Even so, I really stretched my co-workers' brains... they all agreed that this was a hard, hard quiz! Want to see how you stack up? Here are the questions that I e-mailed to my co-workers yesterday. I'm going to post the correct answers to the quiz in the comments section, so write down your responses on a piece of paper and click over there when you're done. Feel free to post your score, as well--and to let me know what you thought of the quiz!
THEATER
Who wrote the following lines? Choose from: Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams. (Yes, there are four quotes and five potential authors. This is to make it harder!)
1. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
2. "Attention must be paid."
3. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
4."We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
MUSICAL THEATER
Who wrote the following lyrics? Choose from: Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter.
5. "I got rhythm / I got music / I got my man / Who could ask for anything more?"
6. "Birds do it / Bees do it / Even educated fleas do it / Let's do it / Let's fall in love"
7. "Some enchanted evening / You may see a stranger / You may see a stranger / Across a crowded room"
8. "Stick with me, baby, I'm the fellow you came in with / Luck, be a lady tonight"
ACADEMY AWARDS
9. In 1968, the Best Actress nominees were Katharine Hepburn, Patricia Neal, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbra Streisand, and Joanne Woodward. The votes ended in a tie. Hepburn was one of the winners; who was the other?
10. How many women have ever been nominated for Best Director?
11. Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick. Only one of these men ever won an Oscar for Best Director. Who?
12. What actor appeared in only five films before his early death--but all of them were nominated for Best Picture?
GEOGRAPHY IN HISTORY
13. What 1883 event affected weather patterns worldwide?
14. Napoleon was born on an island, exiled to (and escaped from) a second island, and died on a third island. Name the islands.
15. What does "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" refer to?
16. What city on the Baltic Sea was attacked by the Germans to begin World War II? Extra credit: Give both the German and Polish names of this city.
SCANDALOUS AUTHORS
17. What poet was described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"?
18. What American author married his 13-year-old cousin?
19. What writer's published diary reveals that she had an affair with her own father?
20. What American writer stabbed his wife with a penknife, nearly killing her?
COMPOSERS & ROYALTY
21. King Ludwig of Bavaria was obsessed with the music of what composer?
22. Emperor Joseph accused what composer's music of having "too many notes"?
23. What German composer wrote several pieces of music in honor of the British royal family?
24. What composer's music became associated with the movement to get Victor Emmanuel crowned king of Italy?
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Summertime, And the Opera is Splendid
The summer season at San Francisco Opera is now in session, and yesterday, I managed to get a standing-room ticket to the opening night of Porgy and Bess. Then, as I stood at the back of the auditorium waiting for the opera to start, a woman came up to me and offered an extra ticket she had in Row E! I was a little hesitant to take it (I'm an able-bodied young person who wouldn't have much trouble standing for three hours; some of my fellow standees were much older) but really, what else could I do? So I ended up paying $10 and sitting in a seat that normally costs $200. I was so close I had to crane my neck to read the surtitles (fortunately this opera is in English); so close that when the singers came over to my side of the stage, their voices really boomed out.
I'd been wanting to see Porgy and Bess for a long time: I love Gershwin and the 1930s and works that can be considered either unusually sophisticated musicals or unusually unpretentious operas. (To give you some idea of how hard Porgy and Bess is to classify: Stephen Sondheim has said that he is really not a fan of opera or through-sung musicals--and also says that Porgy and Bess is his all-time favorite score. Go figure.) And I came away thoroughly impressed. "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" is as great a love duet as has ever been written for either an opera or a musical. During intermission I walked around the opera house hallways humming that, and "I Got Plenty Of Nothin'," and "It Ain't Necessarily So"--I couldn't help myself!
Occasionally I thought that there were a few too many scenes of "local color" in Porgy and Bess, which got in the way of the storytelling (when a woman came onstage selling strawberries, I thought "enough with the street vendors already"). And I agree also with the program note that says that the role of Bess is a bit vague--defined by whatever man she happens to be with at the time, not by her own innate personality. But these are minor quibbles for what really is a great work. Can you believe that the same man who churned out perky '20s ditties like "I've Got a Crush on You" could also write the very complex choral work and orchestrations of Porgy and Bess? Or that he could so well imitate African-American spirituals--not just their melodic characteristics, but their stirring sense of faith? The final moments are wonderfully bittersweet and inspiring.
This production moved the setting to the 1950s, I'm not quite sure why. So some of the stage pictures ended up reminding me of West Side Story, of all things: the stylized, balletic knife fights, and the garishly colored lights that lit up the stage when Bess put on her Anita-esque orange dress and ran off to New York with Sportin' Life. (At curtain call, the director, Francesca Zambello, came out wearing an orange blouse that I was sure she had chosen to match Bess's costume!) Overall it was a fine production, except for some movement depicting Jake and Clara's deaths in the hurricane, which didn't really work. Also, why was the hurricane represented by strobe lights and thunderclaps? We should all know by now that a hurricane is not a thunderstorm!
The singing was very strong and everyone seemed well suited to their parts, physically as well as vocally. Eric Owens, who played Porgy, has a kindly face that made him instantly sympathetic; there is also something touching about seeing such a big and powerful man hobble around on a crutch. Laquita Mitchell, in a role debut as Bess, made sense of this victimized woman and sang in a rich voice. Chauncey Packer gave a wonderfully physical performance as Sportin' Life--I loved his dance moves in this scene-stealing part. Angel Blue had a beautiful voice with which to sing "Summertime" and begin the opera. Question: people always say that Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized musical theater by beginning Oklahoma! with a cowboy singing a gentle ballad, not with a big flashy production number--but didn't Gershwin get there the previous decade, beginning Porgy and Bess with a young black woman singing a lullaby to her baby?
Porgy and Bess is all sold out, so if you want to see it, you'll have to be like me and try for standing room. May you be as lucky as I was, and may you enjoy it as much as I did!
I'd been wanting to see Porgy and Bess for a long time: I love Gershwin and the 1930s and works that can be considered either unusually sophisticated musicals or unusually unpretentious operas. (To give you some idea of how hard Porgy and Bess is to classify: Stephen Sondheim has said that he is really not a fan of opera or through-sung musicals--and also says that Porgy and Bess is his all-time favorite score. Go figure.) And I came away thoroughly impressed. "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" is as great a love duet as has ever been written for either an opera or a musical. During intermission I walked around the opera house hallways humming that, and "I Got Plenty Of Nothin'," and "It Ain't Necessarily So"--I couldn't help myself!
Occasionally I thought that there were a few too many scenes of "local color" in Porgy and Bess, which got in the way of the storytelling (when a woman came onstage selling strawberries, I thought "enough with the street vendors already"). And I agree also with the program note that says that the role of Bess is a bit vague--defined by whatever man she happens to be with at the time, not by her own innate personality. But these are minor quibbles for what really is a great work. Can you believe that the same man who churned out perky '20s ditties like "I've Got a Crush on You" could also write the very complex choral work and orchestrations of Porgy and Bess? Or that he could so well imitate African-American spirituals--not just their melodic characteristics, but their stirring sense of faith? The final moments are wonderfully bittersweet and inspiring.
This production moved the setting to the 1950s, I'm not quite sure why. So some of the stage pictures ended up reminding me of West Side Story, of all things: the stylized, balletic knife fights, and the garishly colored lights that lit up the stage when Bess put on her Anita-esque orange dress and ran off to New York with Sportin' Life. (At curtain call, the director, Francesca Zambello, came out wearing an orange blouse that I was sure she had chosen to match Bess's costume!) Overall it was a fine production, except for some movement depicting Jake and Clara's deaths in the hurricane, which didn't really work. Also, why was the hurricane represented by strobe lights and thunderclaps? We should all know by now that a hurricane is not a thunderstorm!
The singing was very strong and everyone seemed well suited to their parts, physically as well as vocally. Eric Owens, who played Porgy, has a kindly face that made him instantly sympathetic; there is also something touching about seeing such a big and powerful man hobble around on a crutch. Laquita Mitchell, in a role debut as Bess, made sense of this victimized woman and sang in a rich voice. Chauncey Packer gave a wonderfully physical performance as Sportin' Life--I loved his dance moves in this scene-stealing part. Angel Blue had a beautiful voice with which to sing "Summertime" and begin the opera. Question: people always say that Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized musical theater by beginning Oklahoma! with a cowboy singing a gentle ballad, not with a big flashy production number--but didn't Gershwin get there the previous decade, beginning Porgy and Bess with a young black woman singing a lullaby to her baby?
Porgy and Bess is all sold out, so if you want to see it, you'll have to be like me and try for standing room. May you be as lucky as I was, and may you enjoy it as much as I did!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Crazy for Kushner
Speaking of Tony Kushner, I have recently been re-discovering my love of his work. I think he is the most quotable current American playwright, the one with the most lines that linger in my head. I've been reading the short plays and the one crazy full-length in the Death & Taxes volume for the last few days, which I just learned gives me a jump on Berkeley Rep's new season--they will begin next fall by producing a bill of Kushner one-acts entitled, cutely, Tiny Kushner. I've been pondering the themes that run through his work, too--how much he writes about death (his first two major plays confront the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis!) and yet I do not consider him morbid. I realized that that's why it's so appropriate that the New York Times Magazine, on three occasions, commissioned him to write a one-act play for their annual "The Lives They Lived" issue. It's not just that he is one of our most talented and acclaimed playwrights. It's that he is one of the best at writing about death and the dead.
Meanwhile, I'm listening to my iPod on Shuffle a lot at work, and songs from Caroline or Change keep popping up. I didn't love the score the first time I heard it (on CD--I've never seen the show), but it's really starting to grow on me. I love the use of the different musical idioms for each character. Part of me wonders if Caroline or Change appeared on Broadway five years too early, whether it wouldn't have done better nowadays. The repeated lyrics about "There ain't no underground in Louisiana / There is only / Underwater" resonate much more post-Katrina. And the two social forces that drive the story are black-white race relations, and poverty/income inequality. When do you think those two issues were more in the forefront of American culture: 2004, when the Dow was sitting pretty at about 10,000 and the (99% white) Republicans controlled the government? Or 2009, when we have a black president, and an economic crisis that has made everyone more conscious of the plight of the poor?
Sometimes I remember that Angels in America takes place a year or two before I was born, and I think "All right, it's a portrait of the world you were born into, with all of its problems and injustices. And you will have to change this world for the better." Similarly, Caroline or Change takes place around Kennedy's assassination, that is, two years after Barack Obama was born--and to produce it in 2009 would show how things have gotten better in his lifetime, but also how relevant its themes still are...
Meanwhile, I'm listening to my iPod on Shuffle a lot at work, and songs from Caroline or Change keep popping up. I didn't love the score the first time I heard it (on CD--I've never seen the show), but it's really starting to grow on me. I love the use of the different musical idioms for each character. Part of me wonders if Caroline or Change appeared on Broadway five years too early, whether it wouldn't have done better nowadays. The repeated lyrics about "There ain't no underground in Louisiana / There is only / Underwater" resonate much more post-Katrina. And the two social forces that drive the story are black-white race relations, and poverty/income inequality. When do you think those two issues were more in the forefront of American culture: 2004, when the Dow was sitting pretty at about 10,000 and the (99% white) Republicans controlled the government? Or 2009, when we have a black president, and an economic crisis that has made everyone more conscious of the plight of the poor?
Sometimes I remember that Angels in America takes place a year or two before I was born, and I think "All right, it's a portrait of the world you were born into, with all of its problems and injustices. And you will have to change this world for the better." Similarly, Caroline or Change takes place around Kennedy's assassination, that is, two years after Barack Obama was born--and to produce it in 2009 would show how things have gotten better in his lifetime, but also how relevant its themes still are...
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