Doppelganger

photo: Ian Tabatchnick

Doppelganger, developed at 3LD through their Curated Residency Program, features a wealth of multimedia events, some of which are motion-activated by the actors and therefore left to chance. This idea seems to promise a risky, anything-can-happen playing ground (appropriate for a story that gets started following a freak accident) but the night I saw it, the multimedia mostly seemed as stiff as a Power Point presentation. Perhaps that's intended, in service of one of the play's subthemes of the inhumanity of corporate culture, but the result is that too much of the play is distant and inhuman; it's telling that the moments when the play most held the attention were ones that involved the least technological business.

Passing Strange

photo: Michal Daniel

The first time I gave Passing Strange a thumbs-up, I found it wildy exhilarating but frustratingly problematic. But I couldn't shake the thing - it just kept kicking around in my head saying "see me again". Now that I have, I want to say it's the most thematically sophisticated, musically exciting and stylistically inventive musical I have seen in years. Seeing it a second time, already knowing the lay of the land, I could appreciate another layer of the first act that I couldn't before - namely, the dynamic between the narrator and the main character, his younger self. (The show lets you come at your own speed to the connection between the two, but the show is far richer if you know it right at the get-go. Spoiler babies: just trust me on this) I initially had problems with the second act (the second half of it, specifically: the first half, in which our hero makes a hit on the 80's performance art scene in Berlin by exploiting his race, is flawless) but even those concerns disappeared when I realized that what I had interpreted initially as sentimental was actually quite dark and strange. The show's boldy ambitious blend of concert and music theatre creates many unique, exciting moments that open the door to a new way that musicals might be constructed - how often does something come along that is genuinely so ground breaking? The score of the largely sung-narrated show runs a gamut from funk to pop to punk spoof but is always authentic and sophisticated, both musically and lyrically. All four of us at Show Showdown are way into this show (hey Christopher - post your review already!) and it closes this weekend, on July 1st. Don't miss it - this is one that people are going to be talking about and referencing a decade from now when ten times the people who've seen it will be claiming they did.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] [David]

Rabbit

photo: Tristram Kenton

Early in the second act of this debut play by Nina Raine (who also directed) one character likens the phenomenon of memory in the brain to a room full of tuning forks: one vibration sets off another and another. It's only at this point that the bifurcated play reveals its purposefulness - it alternates punchy, lively scenes of a young woman's 29th birthday party with somber flashbacks of her interactions with her father, now deathbed-ridden. At its best the play depicts the chasm between what we display outwardly in a social situation while another secret unspoken story reverberates inside. The scenes at the party - where four of the woman's friends mostly needle each other about sex to hide the anxieties and animosities under the surface - are rendered naturalistically, credibly; Raine clearly has an ear for how these young, middle class people talk and flirt and one-up each other and for what they try to leave unspoken. On the strength of these snappy, sharply observed scenes, the play is worth seeing. The pity is that the flashback scenes, even allowing that they are memories, feel ill-defined and vague and aren't as compelling as the scenes at the party; the idea is better than the execution.

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. ;)