Natascia Diaz: Dance With Me

It's not only that Natascia Diaz, who called this concert her "first solo show", is supremely super talented intrepreting a song, although she certainly is: she doesn't "act" the songs as much as she gets inside them and feels them out. It also isn't that she can achieve both a beautiful ringing tone and a tremendous power with her vocal instrument (sometimes, she brings to mind what Elvis Costello once said of Dusty Springfield's voice, "like a beautiful reed sailing over the music", while other times, her full-out declamatory belt reminds in its sheer power of early Linda Ronstadt before the lousy hit records). No, what finally makes Natascia Diaz absolutely kill in concert is that she seems to have unerring judgment for material that works for her and that reaches an audience immediately. In the songs of Michael Pemberton, which comprised all but two or three of the show's setlist, she has found a songwriter whose distinctive music is a perfect fit for her sensational abilities. His songs are terrific and intelligent but not easy to categorize - the lyrics achieve a simple soulful poetry without being flowery, and his music often feels like an amplified hybrid of folk/country and percussive quiet storm ballads - but as Diaz delivered them, one after another, they were all fully realized and instantly emotionally accessible. (And a couple of them rock hard, authentically) The band - a backup singer and six musicians (including the songwriter on guitar) - thinned out to just a few pieces for the evening's sole Jacques Brel... number: a wrenching interpretation of "Ne Me Quitte Pas" that was breathtaking in its emotional directness. This was a spectacular concert that needs to be remembered, reprised and - with any luck - recorded.

And yes, David..I know I can't count this in the race. ;)

The Fabulous Life Of A Size Zero

**
DR2

Can a high school student who gets a 2380 on the SAT be as shallow as the one presented here? This disjointed play about drunk self-destructive party girls with eating disorders provided no revelations beyond being that way is like, bad and stuff. The director and cast did their best to keep things light and brisk but they had little to work with in this script that seemed more like an SNL parody than a sincere character study (what it apparently wanted to be according to the final wtf?? scene). If u like totally luv Paris Hilton and think that she like totally shouldn't have gone to jail then this is like totally ur show.

From Riverdale to Riverhead

Did the three annoying, aging Bronx mothers of From Riverdale to Riverhead put a hit out on Studio Dante to get them to produce this show, or did Anastasia Traina's fourth character, the more intellectual Rosie (Bess Rous) confuse the producers into thinking this was something more than a tedious drama stuck in comic reverse? Dodging gaping plot holes by driving the premise into the ground, the show floors the dialogue so that nobody has a chance to catch on, but because all the "action" takes place within the repetitive space of a car, it's not hard to spot how strained this show is. There's really just endless streams of cursing and intermittent honking, with little attempt at plot. The characters are convinced that they're theatrical, but because director Nick Sandow has let them go so over the top, they are anything but. I can't think of a worse road trip I've ever been on; skip this so-called show and walk instead.

10 Million Miles

photo: Monique Carboni

When the story is tired and slight and feels like an excuse to have songs, but the songs are theatrically static and bring the story to a halt, you know you're in jukebox musical hell. This one, which uses country-tinged ditties by Patty Griffin, is a distinctive hell at least: it aims to be intimate and low-key, a chamber jukebox musical if you will, but it only succeeds if you define intimate as small and low-key as unexciting. The two lead characters (a guy and a gal on a road trip South a couple of months after their one-night stand: yep, you guessed it) lack the specificity that would make them believable: they're walking country song cliches, no matter what Matthew Morrison (charming) and Irene Molloy (a good singer) do to mitigate. Virtually all the other characters they meet are played by Skipp Sudduth and Mare Winningham, who is easily this show's most valuable player. Entirely at ease with Griffin's country-pop idiom, Winningham is able to create a small gallery of character snapshots over the course of the show that transcend cliche: she's the only reason that 10 Million Miles isn't entirely a trip to nowhere.

27th Heaven

Look, when Steve Martin put Picasso, Einstein, and Elvis in a Parisian bar, he at least had the courtesy to make them funny. Not so with Ian Helprin's 27 Heaven, a painfully pun-filled show about Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin forming a supergroup in Heaven (on account of them all dying at 27). Helprin is, or was, an investigative journalist for Rolling Stone, and between jokes, solemn obituaries are read aloud, from the script, by the narrator (when he's not on saxophone). The jokes are little more than read, though it pains me that any cast had to memorize lines about jamming on invisible Harpocasters, talking with "Pod" (God is a typographical error, as, supposedly, is Ragnarök), or quoting Nordic legends. Honestly? The whole show is a typographic error, nothing close to a "rock musical," and a waste of time. I'd tell you to see it for pure camp, but it apparently costs $43 and has a two-drink minimum, so I'll just give you the best line, which is also accurate for the author: "You wouldn't know poetic verse if it hit you between the iambic pentameter."

Beyond Glory

photo: Joan Marcus

Playing eight soldiers who have been decorated with the Medal Of Honor, Stephen Lang gives the best and most generous kind of bravura performance in this 80 minute docu-monologue play: you may marvel at the actor's characterization skills, as he transforms from one real-life wartime hero to another, but you will leave thinking less about the actor's craft than about the war stories of the men he has brought to life so vividly. Lang is also responsible for adapting the stories (collected in Larry Smith's book of the same name a couple of years ago) for the stage and his writing is no-nonsense and unsentimental: he generally doesn't make the mistake of editorializing or politicizing. The cumulative effect is therefore all the more thought-provoking and emotional, even cathartic, as Lang honors not only the heroic acts of these soldiers but also the humanity.