The Dream of the Burning Boy

David West Read's new play, The Dream of the Burning Boy, presented at the Roundabout Underground, explores the repercussions when a star high school student dies. As often happens in dramas, secrets are revealed, emotions are stripped raw, and people grow and change--or don't. However, while the précis may be familiar and even cliché, the specifics are not. Read presents compelling, fully realized characters, and their secrets are both surprising and believable. He also deals with the realities of theatre in interesting ways. For example, having the bulk of the students take advantage of the school's bereavement leave, while the people who are genuinely grief-stricken show up, is a wry way of accounting for the sparsely populated schoolroom. Most strongly affected by the boy's death are his sister, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, a well-meaning, not-quite-as-ineffectual-as-he-looks guidance counselor, and, most importantly, the boy's English teacher, who is the dreamer of the burning boy. After a slightly rocky start, the cast is uniformly strong. Special attention must be paid to the subtle, smart Reed Birney whose complex portrayal makes his character sympathetic without ever downplaying his significant flaws. Well-directed by Evan Cabnet.

(Paid for my ticket--all seats are $20--sat second row behind a man with a big head.)

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which has been running at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway since mid-December, adds weight to the saying that it’s a lot easier to trash something in writing than it is to praise it. I thus have little to add to the many glowing reviews of this production, except more ecstatic superlatives. With the exception of some of the backdrops, which might have been painted a bit more richly, or made to look somewhat less fake—and ultimately, really, who cares about the damned backdrops?—this is about as close to a perfect production as I have ever seen. Even the woman playing the maid who walks on to serve tea in the second act and then walks right back off again is perfectly cast. The show, which I saw last week and which has only grown in my estimation since, serves as a humbling reminder that while there is a whole lot of very good theater out there, it is the rare production that comes as close as this one does to being absolutely superb.

I was told once by an old colleague that the infamous flop Carrie was so terrifically bad that it regularly earned wild standing ovations after many performances during its doomed New York run. In contrast, this production of The Importance of Being Earnest was so good that I was unable to bring myself to stand at the end of it. Standing ovations have become such a marker of mediocrity on Broadway at this point that to have stood for this production would, I think, have somehow cheapened the experience. This was an excellent show. Please don’t miss it.

Hello Again

Ten people. Ten couplings. A has sex with B who has sex with C, and so on, until H meets up with A, completing the circle across the 20th century. The hookups tend toward the cold, with affection, love, and foreplay in short supply. The characters range from lost to needy to manipulative, with unhealthy, unattractive self-involvement a frequent trait. Yet Hello Again, Michael John LaChuisa's musicalization of Arthur Schnitzle's 1900 play La Ronde, is often glorious. LaChuisa's music soars, and each section is an elegant theatrical creation. His paeans to neediness are heart-rending, and he combines humor with heartbreak perfectly.

As directed by Jack Cummings III in a large, feature-less loft, Hello Again happens in and around the audience, providing an intimacy that is simultaneously wonderful (having those singers right next to you, unmiked, is heaven) and, well, icky. Facing those naked pumping butts, so close at hand (literally), is weird. The first time I saw the show I found them funny, but the second time I felt I had been forced into an unwilling, unfulfilling voyeurism. Since lack of fulfillment is a theme of the show, I guess Cummings made an artistically legitimate choice--but still weird.

However, Hello Again is about the music, and the score is beautifully sung. The cast ranges from quite good to excellent to amazing. Particularly impressive are Bill Stillman, Alexandra Silber, and Elizabeth Stanley, who bring full dimensionality to their characters and definitively nail their songs. 

The costumes by Kathryn Rohe and lighting by R. Lee Kennedy are everything they need to be and much more, and the seven-piece band fills the loft space splendidly.

(Tdf tickets, twice, impossible to describe my seats in any useful way.)

 

Room

Ellen Lauren seems at first an odd choice to play Virginia Woolf. She is tall and strong, with large hands and a deep, impressive voice quite different from Woolf's flutey, fruity tones. It is hard to imagine her with Woolf's vulnerability. But Room, directed by Anne Bogart, does not aim to present a biographical depiction of Woolf. Instead, through movement (not quite dance, yet not quite not dance) and Woolf's own words (adapted by Jocelyn Clarke), it presents an emotional portrait of a writer in desperate need of, in Bogart's words, "the room to move, the room to breathe, the room to imagine; emotional room, creative room." Presented as a speech to a female audience, the show also spends time in the intense maelstrom of Woolf's mind, focusing on the act of creation and on being a writer who is a woman . Ellen Lauren's performance is both an acting triumph and an athletic triumph--she does entire speeches in positions that might challenge a yoga expert, never losing sight of the meanings and feelings of the words. Bogart's direction and the design aspects are simple yet evocative. The stage is lined on three sides by large panels of linen, with a single chair as the only furniture. A small window floats high above the stage, sometimes looking like the window of a jail cell, sometimes appearing warmer and more inviting. Where design elements often supplement or support performance, the excellent soundscape by Darron L. West and lighting by Christopher Akerlind are part of the performance.

(Press ticket, fourth row on the aisle.)

An Evening of Story and Song (Shirley Jones at Feinstein's)

Shirley Jones's act at Feinstein's last night was a treat for her biggest fans, who laughed, cheered, stood, and even cried. For the rest of us, however, the news was not as good. Jones starts the evening with a video recapping her career. It's way too long, and the sound is often painfully bad. Worse, it diminishes rather than enhances her stature with too many mediocre songs, movies, and TV appearances. (Also included is a shot of her singing the national anthem at a republican convention, a jarring note for this particular liberal.) When finally she appears, Jones looks great. Then she starts singing. Her voice is shot, gone, ravaged. Her range has shrunk considerably, and many of the remaining notes are unpleasant. Of course, a great singing voice is not required for a successful nightclub act; many people mitigate their voice's limitations by developing their interpretive skills. Jones, unfortunately, is not one of them.  She does okay on the songs she is famous for--the nostalgia aspect improves her renditions of, for example, "Goodnight, My Someone" and "People Will Say We're in Love." However, her forays into jazz are unconvincing, and her "Send in the Clowns" is easily the worst I've ever heard. (Her piano player/musical director Ron Abel and bassist Mark Vanderpoel almost redeem a few numbers.) Jones does somewhat better with her patter, including some cute and interesting stories. However, she is a second-rate story teller. I want to reiterate that her major fans had a great time. For me, however, the evening felt like watching someone's aunt grab the mike at a bar mitzvah.

(Press tickets, table to the side, audience left.)

The Changing Room

Photo: Daniel Terna

TheChanging Room, by David Storey, is not big on plot. A bunch of Englishmen enter a locker room, kid around, change, and go out to play rugby--Act One.  The owner of the team comes into the locker room and talks with the attendant until the rugby players, now bruised and bleeding, return, banter, attend to their bruises, then go back out to play; soon one of them is brought back in, blood streaming from his nose, unable to see--Act Two. After the game, the players banter some more, pick on a (possibly gay?) team member, talk with the owner, worry about the injured player, and leave--Act Three. There's no main character, no conflict of the traditionally theatrical sort, no recognizable arc. There is, however, meaning. The players are mostly working men, putting their bodies on the line. The owner, Sir Frederick, attempts to be one of the guys, but he is too falsely avuncular, too patronizing, and too damned clean to fit in. More importantly, he is the boss, the owner, and as such, he is the other--the lucky, wealthy, aristocratic other. In this microcosm of class in England, it's not just boss versus worker: when one of the players is revealed to be dating a teacher, the rest of the team is incredulous, wanting to know what on earth the couple would talk about. The play also examines how men do and don't bond, how they present themselves to each other, and how they find significance in their lives.

While all of this is theoretically interesting, it is not theatrically interesting--a big difference. However, the T. Schreiber production, directed by Terry Schreiber himself, is excellent, as T. Schreiber productions generally are. The performers, many of them T. Schreiber students, are uniformally effective; the set is evocative and impressive; the costuming and lighting and sound are all first-class. The nudity is a little awkwardly handled--full frontal would have been more realistic, and less distracting, then the careful turning away and hiding of genitalia, accompanied by the nervous checking that towels are secure. All in all, however, this production of The Changing Room is a very strong production of a not-so-strong play.

(Press ticket, third-row-center.)