Silverland

Silverland, one of the offerings at 59E59's Brits Off-Broadway festival, is juvenille, faux-hip nonsense about a few people who trip out on an unnamed drug at a Rave. There's a kind of self-important badness here that brings to mind the worst experimental theatre of the late 1970s, only now it's the apocalypse that is invoked rather than Vietnam to put the smell of relevance in the air. Avoid at all costs.

Peasant

Susan Ferrara's Peasant is somewhere between workshop and theater at this point: it's a bunch of raw material that's waiting for the yeast to collect, warm, and rise. In the meantime, there are a few fully saturated plot-points that help feed the audience tasty morsels of an immigrant past, and even the nondescript moments are far from indigestible. Ferrara sells the work with her character acting, but with no set or props, she's forced to sell the show more on mannerisms and comedy than with the underlying drama. Additionally, the show is still a little confusing, skipping between roles, times, and ideas as it does. While the clipped poetic pace is consistent (think Elmore Leonard), the narrative is not, and without taking anything away from the work, I hope Ferrara remembers to add enough conflict to her mixing bowl when she makes the final product.

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At the Word of Mouth Festival

I really wish I hadn't been sick all weekend long, as I'd have loved to spread word about this great site-specific festival sooner, but although it's gone, you should at least know that the World Financial Center occasionally puts up some great projects. The two that I attended were Bird Eye Blue Print and Girls Just Wanna Have Fund$.

Those who follow my writing understand that I have something of a crush on Lisa D'Amour's work, especially when she's working with director Katie Pearl. But I'll be objective when I say that Bird Eye Blue Print was a thrill. I promised not to review it so that I could attend as a guest, but the combination of eccentric tour-guides, a mysterious (and abandoned) office to explore, and the total freedom of the whole evening was fantastic. We were all told that there was one door that was never opened; as all the guests were leaving and given free reign of the facility, I felt like Charlie in the chocolate factory and I couldn't resist in peeking into that unseen room. Such unabashed thrills are almost criminal, but I've no regrets.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fund$, the Women's Project's anthology of five small moralistic plays, was also a blast. An overarching story about a missing "dime" sends a tour group from one end of the World Financial Center to the other, giving each play the opportunity to use the space in a different fashion. "The Dime Show" was silent vaudeville along a long corridor whereas "A Peddler's Tale: Buttons, Guts and Bluetooth" had the audience watching the action revolve from the first floor all the way up to our perch on the second. "Remembrance," my personal favorite, featured two young African-American women chasing each other up and down a single set of escalators. One was ghetto, the other successful: what stood out was how at the end of the play, they switched costumes and repeated the performance. How's that for a statement on status? Most amusing of all were the reactions of innocent bystanders (there's no such thing!), though I was saddened by how busy they all appeared to be: only one person actually stopped to watch one of the performances.

Site-specific, environmental theater. New York lends itself to such tourist-friendly activities, and it's my hope that the lower cost of doing outdoors or guerrilla work will help contribute toward getting some outstanding new works produced new year in this medium.

Passing Strange

Fascinating, frustrating, exciting, problematic, Passing Strange is the kind of flawed but wildy exhilarating show that leaves you jazzed about theatre and its possibilities. It’s uncategorizable, and - for anyone who is serious about the art form of musical theatre - unmissable. Oft-narrated in song by its composer and co-author Stew, this autobiographical portrait of the artist as a middle-class young black man moves beyond the anachronism of Spring Awakening and more boldly melds concert and narrative musical theatre. The show is too long, and it nosedives in the second act, but when it flies it’s a blazing arrow that lights up a new way that musicals might go. The score is flat-out phenomenal: credible and varied with lyrics that put this year’s Tony-nominated ones to shame.

Gaslight

photo: Carol Rosegg

Even if you don't know the story and you've never seen the Charles Boyer-Ingrid Bergman movie, Irish Rep's production of Gaslight is low on suspense and mystery, mainly because it doesn't exploit the room in the play to keep us guessing. From the very first scene, everything is telegraphed and painfully obvious: when the villain needlessly starts off figuratively twirling a moustache, our journey's been narrowed. In a good production, the play's final scene - in which our heroine scrambles for a razor - should have us on the edge of our seats wondering what she's going to do with it. In this production, there's no doubt at all.

Sherie Rene Scott: A Work In Progress

Just about everything in the first fifteen minutes of Sherie Rene Scott's solo performance piece, up to and including a revised "You Made Me Love You" sung to a framed eight by ten of Jesus, falls flat and needs to be rethought. And the show's treacly finish, in which Scott tries to enlarge a cute story about her two year old into a meaningful metaphor for her life philosophy, doesn't feel earned by what's come before. But most of what stands between those bookends is pretty wonderful: her tribute to the songstack of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood is played with a wink, but Scott also manages to mine the earnest simplicity of those songs for something unexpectedly lovely and poignant. A section in which she performs magic tricks, while recalling the New York street magician who was her first meaningful love affair, is well written and smartly performed; the simple, theatrical trick of making a bit of fabric disappear takes on emotionally loaded meaning. The show's biggest crowd-pleaser is an extended sketch in which Scott reaches out to a fan (played by Tyler Maynard) who lip-syncs to her version of "My Strongest Suit" on youtube: that's funny stuff, as fan and performer engage via emails. Scott is charming onstage throughout, and when she sings (accompanied here by a tight band led by Tom Kitt) she makes me bliss out on her full, smooth sound and her seemingly effortless ability. Most of A Work In Progress is delightful enough as it is for those of us who are fans - funny, revealing and full of Scott's warmth and humor - but with a little more work and a stronger throughline it could evolve into something wonderful for everyone.