The New 42 Follies

New Victory Gala Benefit

"I hate you and your ass face!", I imagined the director screaming over the phone to Barbra Walsh and Orfeh, two acts that backed out of this Monday night benefit at the last minute. I'm sure they had colorfully valid excuses and everything turned out fine as the remaining acts in this brisk 45 minute revue hosted by Sam Waterston kicked ass. Beth Leavel rocked it out with "As We Stumble Along", Marin Mazzie belted old school with "The Diva's Lament" and Josh Strickland finally made it onto the Hot Guy Alerts when he walked onto the stage and stood there and looked handsome while he sang. The surprise hit of the night was the last minute replacement Jeremy Smith performing "Caught" a thrilling modern dance from Parson's Dance Company that, with the use of carefully timed strobe-lighting, made it look like he was floating throughout the space. Fun!

Competing Narratives

photo: Ben Strothmann

There's a potentially provocative situation in this play, which links homophobia and racism by dramatizing a meeting between a gay man who could pass for straight and a black man who could pass for white. Unfortunately, because the plot is too full of conveniences and the dialogue too often lecture-like, the play doesn't deliver on the promise of its theme. It is, at least, well-performed: Sebastian La Cause is warm and charismatic but projects just enough caginess to convince that his character has a secret agenda; Matthew Boston is entirely believable as a once gay activist who's moved on to a quiet suburban life with his limp-wristed partner (played by Michael Vacarro, who helps to add some depth to what could be a stock character)

A Chorus Line

****

Broadway

When I got my drivers license at 16, the national tour of A Chorus Line was the first show I went to without a parental escort. This closeted gay theater junkie in West Houston suburbia was riveted with the character's stories and if they'd needed a towel boy he would have happily run off with the circus. This weekend's visit hit me in a different but still very special place: one of appreciation and reverence. This tightly staged revival had me drooling over that familiar choreography and had me wanting to sing along. I won the lotto (thanks Patrick!) and sat front row center. Perhaps I was a bit too close during the high energy full company dance numbers but during the solo numbers, like "Nothing" expertly delivered by a three feet away Natalie Cortez, were intense and very special.

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.

[Read on]

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.