No Exit plus Paris Cafe

*
Richmond Shepard

Stuck in a room with annoying strangers for eternity? Ten minutes into it I knew how they felt.

Passing Strange

****
photo Michal Daniels

The Public

Following the journey of a young artist finding his voice, this musical was pretty fucking bad-ass. I lost count of how many different styles of music sprang from the score as our hero traveled from city to city. The phenom cast sang with personality and passion struggling valiantly to be heard over the band that was playing just a little too loud for its own good (my one complaint). You have to be a pretty special person to go by a single name and not come off pretentious. Author, composer, narrator Stew is a pretty special person.

Also blogged by: [Patrick] [Aaron]

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.