The Black Eyed

photo: Joan Marcus

***
NYTW

I generally agree with Patrick's ("stunningly lyrical") and Aaron's ("finely crafted") Showdown reviews for The Black Eyed. To my recollection, I have never even seen a play solely about Palestinians, female or otherwise, and that reason alone makes this production pretty darn unique. Four Palestinian women, each with their own story loaded with struggle, pain and strife, gather in the afterlife searching for answers (it sort of reminded me of the harrowing 9 Parts Of Desire, the one woman play about Iraqi women from a couple of years ago (jeez can't those poor middle eastern women catch a break??)). My one quib, which is admittedly a shallow one, is that shortly into the play it became obvious that each woman was going to have her 2o minute platform to tell her story and the predictability of this structure was noticeably taxing on a few of the matinee subscribers as well as my ADHD self.

The Day Before Spring

I'm fairly sure I am not the target audience for the popular Musicals In Mufti series at the York. While I don't mind watching an open-book, minimally staged reading of a dated, antique musical, I need the compensatory pleasures of a great score. (That a score is merely obscure or recently rescued - as this one was, per the Times article a couple of days ago - is not enough to ring my bell, although there is obviously an appreciative audience that goes ding-dong-ding for this.) While it was fun to see Hunter Bell steal a scene or two, and the cast was thick with good singers, I decided to make my exit at intermission: none of the Lerner and Loewe songs in the first act, excepting the lilting title song, did anything for me. Also, the show's story crawled so slowly that my mind wandered from the stage to the fancy people in the audience: How does Barrett Foa get his teeth so white? Is Jeff Bowen wearing the same sandals as in this iconic pic? Where can I get the shampoo and conditioner that Susan Blackwell uses?

The Day Before Spring

Mufti
Left at intermish.


This was a minimally staged, script-in-hand performance of a previously "lost" musical written very early in Lerner and Lowe's careers. This was perfect for those hardcore Lerner and Loewe fans who have a special interest in mapping the artistic evolution of these old school collaborators. Unfortunately, I am not one of those types of fans and I think perhaps Mufti may have reached too deep into that old dusty trunk as they retrieved a forgettably forgettable score. Sometimes musicals are lost for a reason.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

****1/2

Broadway

The unfortunate inevitability of most long-runs on Broadway is that with new actors migrating in and out it becomes a crap shoot from role to role as to whether or not we're going to get a character as three dimensional and unique as we did with the carefully selected original cast. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't and this production of Spelling Bee, now it its 3rd year, is no different. The good news is that here it just didn't seem to matter as much. This book and score are just so unabashedly charming and joyful that in spite of the forgivable loss of a little bit of nuance and clarity of character, I still found myself laughing hysterically at, and emotionally investing in, the aspirations of these needy little spellers. I always cry like a stupid fucking baby during "The I Love You Song" and at this performance I reacted no different. Take your mom to this show, she'll love it.

Blueprint

If you've been reading this blog you probably know by now that the Summer Play Festival puts on works in development, and that the productions are not open for formal review. Fair enough, I say, since tickets are only ten bucks. However, I don't see a reason not to say that in this one, Peter Strauss is giving a rich and altogether remarkable performance that achieves its power with restraint and understatement. The play has other merits, but even if it didn't, his performance (as a professor of architecture who lets down his emotional guard with a female student who idolizes him) would still make it well worth seeing.

EAST TO EDINBURGH: The Nina Variations

I love Steven Dietz's concept of trimming Chekhov's The Seagull so that the only story is that of Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev's love for Nina, and I like Douglas Rome's staging of the work, with a computer counting up through the 42 different scenes they've created as the ensemble (11 Ninas and 4 Treplevs) either sit facing the back wall, or glide in and out of center stage. I don't think it's fair to criticize high school students, but the performance of the piece itself is where The Nina Variations falters most. Chekhov is extremely difficult, and as a result, the show is at best a marvelous invitation to watch an ensemble doing a very specific set of scene-study exercises. However, because all the actors end up resembling each other very much, and because the scenes aren't variations so much as different scenes, there's a lack of risk in the 42 "moments" that become stifling and, to be honest, boring: it is, as Nina says, "Words alone," and the few finely accented moments (#7 delves into subtext, #40 is an freshly minted monologue by Kostya after his suicide). There's no doubt that all involved have a love for Chekhov, but they ought to listen to what they're actually saying: "Form is not the important thing . . . Soul is."