I saw Frost Nixon, a play, at the matinee today. It’s based on the David Frost interviews of Nixon and the deal leading up to them. The play was brilliant. Frank Langella was channeling Nixon. It must be fun to play someone that is such a distinctive character. He’s got him down really well. Michael Sheen plays Frost and while watching him play his character, you can’t help but think of a real life Austin Powers. The drama surrounding the deal is very stage-worthy and the conclusion is nothing less than brilliant. I really hope this tours but I fear that without a big star like Langella in the lead, it won’t draw. Time will tell.
Legally Blonde is exactly how musicals should be. There should be half a dozen shows a year like this one, full of great music, great production numbers, characters you can love getting the upper hand of characters you can hate, and a compelling fun story full of twists and turns with tons of laughs thrown in. It’s just a delightful and playfully fun show. For amateur stock companies, in about 20 years this show will be the Guys and Dolls or Kiss Me Kate for its time – a perfect show for a season in Lodi California or Toledo Ohio. This is basically a good old fashioned, fun loving musical. And I love the Greek Chorus, a little weird but the audience had no problem going there with the story so it just added to the fun.
One more show tomorrow. I’m seeing Tarzan. It wasn’t really on my list but it’s the only show with an early Matinee. Most Sunday mats in NY are at 3:00. My plane is at 6. This show is at 1 and is out by 3:30 so I can see the show and still make my plane. And Disney tends to tour everything it does so there’s a good chance we might see this in San Diego someday so its worth seeing it anyway. The buzz is that this one is poor but I’ll give you my opinions when I get back to San Diego and can write again.
I just got back to my hotel room after The Color Purple and figured I should review this while it’s still fresh. This show just wrecked me. It was that rarest of rare shows where you leap to your feet when it’s over. No hesitations. Fantasia from that reality show played the lead, Celie and she was the embodiment of that character. She exuded a quiet and vulnerable strength that just bided its time till it could blossom, and when it did it was beautiful. It’s a terrific, triumphant, cathartic story that absolutely cannot fail to move its audience. Fantasia’s voice was a bit ragged. I’m thinking the 8 shows a week is not something she’s been trained for. But even that slightly raw edge served her character well. The ensemble is terrific, the score is heavenly and all serve the story at every step of the way. The show could probably have been improved with a little careful editing. It’s an epic story and there were a few parts that might get trimmed when the show is readied for the road. That could make it even better. There’s nothing in the show that couldn’t be included on the touring company. I think this show will do very well on the road.
Oh and one more thing. There’s a term in show business called Showstopper. It’s a performance during the show, not at the end, that is so good that the audience can’t contain itself and just has to applaud as long as it needs to in order to get it’s adulation properly expressed. The term exists but the phenomenon really doesn’t anymore. The history of reviews and show people’s biographies record when this happened in the annals of the Theatre but it’s just not seen on today’s stages. Well there’s a part in the story where Celie has her moment when she realizes that she doesn’t need anyone else to validate her. She comes to realize her own worth and self esteem for the first time and she slays us with a searing ballad. The audience stopped the show.
You know your going to have a great day when you are in NY for a Theatre Conference and the first person you speak to in the morning is Marvin Hamlisch. I was blocking his way to the coffee and he walked up behind me and introduced himself. I just gushed and told him how I’d written papers on him in grad school. He was speaking at the conference (they are reviving A Chorus Line). He actually played the overture to the show. The show doesn’t have an overture but they had written one that they didn’t use so we got to hear that and from the composer’s own hand. I saw him again later that night at Sardi’s – we had an after show private reception there. Yup, I was hanging at Sardi’s after shows with Marvin Hamlish.
I already told you about my high from 110 in the Shade. I still haven’t come down. I’m still humming the songs from that show in my head wherever I go. Let me tell you about the next show I saw called Spring Awakening. It’s quite the phenomenon in NY because its such a unique property. There hasn’t been anything quite like it on Broadway before, perhaps as a project at a university but not in the legit theatre. It’s a rock musical with very contemporary music but the show is set in Germany in the late 1800’s. Overall the show is pretty good. Well how can you go wrong with simulated sex acts on stage, you’re bound to draw attention. It’s about adolescents becoming sexually aware. Funnily enough it’s become a family show – a very specific kind of family show. Many parents with adolescent kids are taking them to the show in order to open conversations with them about sex. Because the 13-25 year old crowd universally LOVE this show, and it has the legitimacy of the Broadway stage, it’s become a catalyst for opening a frank discussion with your kids about sex. The show has a ragged and raw, somewhat punkish feel and look. It’s full of the requisite adult suppression of the children’s learning about the world and particularly about sex.
Some people are saying that this is the next big thing in Musical Theatre. That worries me, not because of the subject matter, or the style of music. Those things were rather appealing. But because of this—the scenes in the show would play out until a character needed to sing. At that point the character would pull a handheld mic from a pocket or from a hidden place on the stage, the action would stop, and they would sing their song and then go back to the scene. The actors had body mics on already, they didn’t need a handheld so the mic was obviously used as a convention to push the show into its Punk mode from its Story mode. And the song that was sung was always a comment on the thoughts or feelings of the character in that particular situation. Now the songs were good, very good pop, punk, rock stuff. Not the best crafted lyrically nor with the artistry normally required of the stage but still very good for radio music and fun to listen to and watch performed. But here’s the part that bothered me—there was never a time when a character had to make a transition from an actor to a singer in the story, and that is at the heart of the art of Musical Theatre. You can have a bunch of great songs and weave them in and out of a so so story line and never deal with what we call a Guzinta, where the scene guz inta the song. If you don’t have that you don’t truly have Musical Theatre, you have a play with music. Prime examples of this are the Movie of Chicago where every single song is something that is performed on a stage. A character never breaks into a song as part of their scene. A better example is the movie that Bjork did a few years back called Dancer in the Dark. A lot of people were calling that a musical but all the songs were only allowed to exist out of the reality of the show. The music has to be a part of the reality of the show to truly be a musical. That’s what’s hard about this art form. That’s where the true writing and directing, and the full collaboration of the talents creating a show, lies. Without that you have a play with music and that is a whole lot easier to create and to be successful with.
Don’t get me wrong. I still liked the show a lot. We need lots of different kinds of shows on Broadway all trying different things and pushing boundaries. To show you what strange effect this show had on its audience here’s a story. We went out to drinks after the show and were discussing what we thought. Some hated some loved and someone asked us to score it one to ten. One guy who was lambasting it from the theatre to the bar saying how much he didn’t like it gave it a 7. I, who enjoyed it and found it interesting gave it a 6. The show just hits you the way it hits you. It is a unique experience.
Another wonderful thing, as I was outside of the theatre waiting for my colleagues to come out, who should pop out of the theatre but a guy from San Diego that I’d worked with on lots of projects at The Stage Co. Big hugs and what the hell are you doing heres and he introduced me to his dad as the guy who got him started in theatre. That was a very pleasant experience.
So that was Sunday and Monday. Tuesday was A Chorus Line. I had lots of hopes for this show because it’s among the best musicals ever written. And the show was good, it was good. But it should have been kick ass. This is the quintessential Broadway show about putting up a Broadway show and carries the baggage of all the theatre insiders with it. The creatives had all of the best of the amazing gypsies to choose from to cast the show, and there were some brilliant performances but overall they were spotty. I shouldn’t ever have heard a weak voice, or watched a poor acting job, or a less than brilliant dance from that show. It must be seamless, especially on the New York stage. The show was fine, it was good but I bet an amateur stock company in Des Moines could do as good a job.
Wednesday Mat is a theatre slot in NY but I had to stay in the room and do some work. I’ve got a pretty good set up here with a second screen and an inet connection with remote access to my desktop at work so I was in pretty good shape to get some stuff done. Wednesday Night was Mary Poppins. Disney’s done it again. The first act left me a little fizzled. One terrific scene in the park but not much else. The second act is full of great geek tricks and fun production numbers. The story gets more compelling as Dad’s job is in jeopardy and Mary comes to the rescue. Lots of nice familiar songs and lots of fun on stage. We walked out having had a truly magical Disney experience.
Thursday night was The Pirate Queen. The buzz on this show has been flop, very expensive flop. I can see why the NY audiences say that. It looks and feels like Riverdance meets Les Miz and indeed the creators are from those shows. But it’s got great sets including projections that move enough to put you into the world of the piece while not looking like a movie set. Great costumes, very nice music and a story line that is compelling enough if not brilliant. The show is almost through sung, like Les Miz but I think the authors did the show a disservice by that. There were many scenes that shouldn’t have been sung. The action of some scenes would have been better as dramatic scenes. That and the second act was almost all ballads. The sad part is that it didn’t need to be. The story went through the outfitting of a ship and a triumphant entry of the Queen into the harbor of her enemy, lots of fodder for good uptempo music, but alas all ballads. I’m really surprised that a music director didn’t look at his music selection in the second act and notice a problem just from that standpoint.Anyway, I’m really hoping it tours because I think Riverdance meets Les Miz is a great selling point. I thought it was terrific stuff for the road. Perhaps not the best Broadway show for Broadway show people but likely to be a crowd pleaser.
I still have 4 shows to go before I get back on a plane to San Diego. I’ll write more then.
I’ve never been so happy to be wrong. I am in NY and I obviously hadn’t gotten my dates right because not only did I just see 110 in the Shade but, my God I was absolutely blown away by he performance of Audra McDonald. The show is a true gem. Beautiful sweeping music, ripe and juicy drama, and great musical theatre moments—the kind of stuff that makes you gasp, draw your hand to your mouth and get a lump in your throat--simply wonderful. Of course I’m not an objective observer. I put a lot of work and study into this piece when I was in Grad School so I was intimately aware of the beauty of this show. But this was my chance to actually see it performed, and not just performed but on Broadway, and not just on Broadway but with the best musical theatre performer of our time in the lead. Have I given you the impression that I enjoyed this show?
And here’s my real validation. My Jury Project for Grad school was this show. That project was kind of like an architect’s final project. He creates renderings, has the tech drawings made for how the building is going to be built, makes a model of the building, perhaps with a removable roof to show how a typical floor plan might look, but he doesn’t actually build the building. Well I didn’t actually produce the show but I created all the stuff you would need to do so. Costume and set renderings, lighting plots, elevation drawings for set pieces, and of course script analysis and rehearsal books. Well here’s my chance to see someone else build the same building that I designed and I get to see how their choices affected the final product. The two biggest points of contention I had with my project were with my Set Designer and with my Program Instructor. This show is a fanciful dreamy riff on sensible down to earth themes. I thought that the script screamed for a turntable. There’s a flow of action and movement in the piece that only a turntable will bring to a show. My Set Designer dug in her heals hard against a turntable; she didn’t see the need for it and would not give in. I finally prevailed in the end and our design had the turntable. Well this professional production included a turntable within a turntable and all the fluidity and whimsy of the show was highlighted by their use of this piece of scenic design. The Program Instructor thought that using real rain at the end of the show was cliché and obvious. She thought that using something that symbolized rain was a better choice. I thought that the celebration and delight at the cleansing and cooling rain was something that the script was leading up to for the whole show and to not give it at the end would be averting the very catharsis that I was promising my audience. Well sure enough this production brought on the real rain at the end and there could be no better exclamation point at the end of the show. So you can see that while I’m not impartial I still see this as one of my very best theatrical experiences. That tends to be true for most fans of theatre. If you ask what was there favorite show the response will often be prompted not merely by the quality of the piece but by that person’s life experience as they saw piece—how the piece affected them because of what they were going through at that time in their lives, or how it related to something they had been through. The real life affect of viewing live drama is the true essence of theatre and the reason why it has always existed and always will.
We (half the San Diego contingent to the conference) took the Red Eye in and normally I would abhor that, but I had a strong suspicion that the day before a big conference like this that the hotel would likely be able to check us in right away—that they would need to clear their rooms because they had a full capacity situation coming up—and indeed they did check us in. That meant that when I got to my hotel room at 6:00 in the morning (3am back in San Diego) I could go right back to sleep. I’d slept quite a bit on the plane so when I woke up in the hotel I was in really good shape. It’s a good thing too as NY has put out its rainy and cold reception for us. Luckily the room came with a hair dryer because I had to use it for my shoes. I’ve had to hang wet socks and pants in the shower and funnily enough, it has an extendable laundry line built in. I guess I’m not the first hotel guest who needed to dry out their clothes in New York.
Another reason that I’m glad I arrived early for this conference is that I finally have a chance to really nail down my itinerary. I’ve been so busy at work leading up to this trip that I haven’t had any chance to prepare. But here is a list of shows that I’m going to see while I’m here. 110 in the Shade, A Chorus Line, Mary Poppins, The Pirate Queen, The Color Purple, Curtains, Frost Nixon, Grey Gardens and Talk Radio. If I do succeed in getting all those shows in it will leave me one theatre slot remaining. I’m thinking I’ll sacrifice that so I can take my very good friends Josh and Jenny out for a wiz bang New York swankified dinner. Or maybe sneak off to a Soprano’s New Jersey, Italian food establishment like we did last time when Paula and I were here. That was so good. My only regret is that this trip, my honey couldn’t join me. But we will have other NY trips together in the future. Many, many others,
