110 in the Shade

It's never a good sign when you leave a musical without the scantest trace of a tune in your head. The Rainmaker worked best as a straight show, adding the townspeople and showing us Jim's little-red-hatted love, Snookie, only dilutes N. Richard Nash's sweet little story. As for Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, their score here is far from Fantastick, and everything from Santo Loquasto's minimal staging to Lonny Price's formulaic direction calls for a smaller stage. The script is all intimacy, and no spectacle (which is why the sun is bigger than anything else in the show), so what were the producers thinking to stage this at Studio 54? So far as dramatic acting goes, Audra McDonald's Lizzie is the center of this show, and her interactions with Bobby Steggert's brilliantly daft Jim and John Cullum's steadfast H.C. go over pretty well. But Steve Kazee's Starbuck is an energy-draining disappointment (as is Christopher Innvar's bland File), and the romance of this play winds up being an old maid, no matter what angle you look at it from. "Raunchy" is the only number with enough life in it for McDonald to sing through; the rest of her songs are breathy, overly vibrating numbers in search of some heart. It's not that I don't believe McDonald in "Old Maid"; it's that I believe her more when she's straight. The music is suffering a mighty heavy drought, and I don't think this cast has enough magic to make it rain.

Also blogged by: [Christopher]

The View From K Street Steak

Yowsa. A lot of the political satire went over my head, and I only caught brief glimpses of story in the references to the "Inner Loop," but the attitude of the show, written by Walt Stepp, is the type of nightclub amateur hour that's too irrepressible to hate. John and Al, a ventriloquist act (played by Brad Thomason and the perky, hyperactive Samantha Wynn) serve as the interlocutors for the evening, in etween old-school Jerry Lewis humor, they pull open the curtain onto exaggerated "insider" scenes at a bipartisan retreat. The vignettes are all short and rough, but a few make valid, coherent points: "Mimeo" deals with getting a senator out of the closet in private so that it doesn't hurt the party in public, "Snake" says the things about the God Lobby that everyone else is too terrified to mention, and "Take a Number" looks at the real story of competitive bidding. Politics is an act, and K Street does well to dress it up as such, but Tom Herman needs to tighten the technical cues, the cast's tendency for killing the jokes with their own exuberance, and the slipshod feel of it all if he wants this production to really stand up and be something more than a repetitious diversion.

Pippin

CAP21 productions, cast with second year music-theatre students at NYU, are a good place to see raw young talent in an intimate setting. Although often entertaining and smartly staged on a shoestring, these threadbare productions are more about giving the students a chance to put their training to use than about production value; they aren't open for review and I'm going to honor that. Still, I have to say that braving the rainstorm to drop in on the promising young people in Pippin was a pleasure and that one Larkin Bogan, who confidently fleshed out every moment as Pippin, is on my "To Watch For" list.

Essential Self-Defense

Am I just not hip enough for Essential Self-Defense? Dysfunctional humor is all too easy to write: just introduce characters who constantly say the unexpected (e.g., "Dolphins don't talk to terrorists") and you've got yourself a script. But awkward, funny lines do not a show make: this is Jack Goes Boating off the deep end, the Duranged end, and all you really need to do is replace the summer house of Betty's Summer Vacation with Kip's Karaoke Bar to see the same. I'm more impressed with the musical talents of Adam Rapp and his cohorts, Ray Rizzo and Lucas Papaelias than with the show itself (though Paul Sparks and Heather Goldenhersh lead an excellently absurd cast). This is the same way I would describe the surreal early Sam Shepard, but I sincerely hope that Rapp grows up and does more with his talent than these shallow amusements. Sweet as the roller-skate scene is, perverse as Klieg the Butcher is, ridiculous as Yul and Sadie are about grammar, is this the best we can expect of modern comedy? The trappings of form without the substance of soul?

Also blogged by: [David] [Patrick]

A Guy Adrift in the Universe

A Guy Adrift in the Universe is a playfully straightforward show that gets pretty close to summing up the meaning of life (if not the universe, and everything) in eighty rip-roaring minutes. The subtle direction by Jacob Krueger and the half-tender, half-boisterous cast (led by Cory Grant of Fringe 2006's Broken Hands) makes Larry Kunofsky's script more substantial than its curse-heavy dialog and relentlessly innocent jokes, but it's nice to see such a full-bodied comedy be so honest.

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transFigures

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Here we go, folks! Aaron's first unmissable show of 2007. I raved about Lear deBessonet's work last year in Bone Portraits, and I'm more than happy to do it again here. She's a theatrical DJ, sampling texts and themes from all over the place to make them stronger individually and overwhelming together (and that's no small feat when you're borrowing from Chuck Mee, Henrik Ibsen, and Joan of Arc). Hyperreligious delusions make for good theater, especially when you're a director who is unafraid of putting your actors "stage up" and "stage down," and when you've got a flair for the malleability of string, paper, and people. Wonderful lighting, beautiful choreography, and above all: passion. It's not a traditional plot, though there is a central story, but it evokes one heck of a powerful ambiance, and as a writer, mood makes the story, any day of the week.

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