Tragedy! (A Musical Comedy)

I've never walked out of a show before; Tragedy! has the dubious honor of winning that distinction. I can't, in faith, review something I didn't watch all the way through, but after the amateurish first act, I'd seen enough of this Titus Andronicus satire. Aside from the tinny, MIDI-like sound quality, and the poor, straining voices (most notably that of Titus's son, Lucius), I found the musical to be offensive. "Rape's Just Another Way of Saying 'I Love You'," would have to be far cleverer to work, and "You Can't Spell 'Moor' Without 'B-L-A-C-K'," is the first rap song I've ever heard to be racist against itself. Satire and irony are dangerous tools when cast about blindly; Trey Parker and Matt Stone managed to harness this in Cannibal! The Musical!, but Michael Johnson's overly indulgent, recklessly bad production is just a mess.

Hail Satan

The first act of Mac Rogers' smart, darkly funny play (at the Fringe Festival) scores largely as a straight-faced satire of the soullessness of corporate culture, as wishy-washy new employee Tom discovers that all of his ambitious co-workers are part of a small prayer circle of Satan-worshippers. They're so reasonable and welcoming when they say so that it's not long before doubting Tom is sharing at their Sunday meetings and getting used to thinking of the devil when they greet each other with "The lord be with you". While carefully laying the solid groundwork for a tidy chiller, Rogers plays with our notions of religious tolerance and of our cultural acceptance of selfishness: this is clever, pitchfork-funny stuff. Although the second act - more plot-driven, more serious in tone, and focused more on family than on corporate dynamics - includes a plot twist that is thematically justified but not adequately prepared for dramatically, the play is always bold and effective both as swift, engaging entertainment and as needling social comment. As played by a virtually weak-link-free ensemble, Hail Satan is, ahem, a hell of a good show.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]

Animals

Sketch comedy shows are almost always hit and miss. This one (at the Fringe Festival) has two uneven but perfectly amiable skits at the top of the first act, and after that it's one winner after another, as three talented and very likeable performers (Erin Mortensen, Michael Hirstreet, and Ryan O'Nan, also the playwright) act out scenes that touch on the overarching idea of humans vs. animals. It has the feeling of a themed episode of Saturday Night Live, except it's often brainier than that show's been in a while and the skits don't peter out in exhaustion - they build and pay off. The scenes in the first act are organized around the action in a pig-themed diner in New Jersey and follow a nifty comic arc: we're first with the pig-costumed waitstaff who feel oppressed by the customers, then with the customers who are attacked by birds, then with the row of birds above the customers, and so on. The longer, more developed skits in the second act all touch on animal mythology. Even if they were not all terrific and terrificly clever (they are) the scenes of two gay unicorns, driven to desperate action when banned from Noah's Ark because they can't sexually reproduce, would alone make the show worth catching. And that's besides the welcome speech that Noah's wife gives to all the assembled animals, where she philosophizes that any animal she was able to capture is surely not the brightest example of the species. Animals is a hoot.

Fair Game

Fair Game might as well just run for office itself: it already has the buttery words, clever metaphors, and sinister secrets of a politician. But Karl Gajdusek's love story is sincere, and his politics are realistic: in other words, unelectable, but to the theatergoer, simply delectable. It's not the from-the-headlines story that's good, it's the handling of details: the lead is a woman running for president, the juicy part is that her son's involved in a sexual scandal. The design of the story is well executed by director Andrew Volkoff, and the script is rife with colorful "sidebars" given as lectures or genuine bon mots in conversation. The second act suffers momentarily from a jump into the future, but the words are still like butter: even as a lengthy play, it's a smooth feature article. Commendations, too, to the cast, particularly Chris Henry Coffey, who has the likable smugness of Michael J. Fox and the imposing insecurity of Nathan Fillion.

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Kiss And Make Up

The theatre is such a rich place to set a farce. In this one, an often zippy but ultimately uneven musical which takes place at a nerve-rattled community theatre, a variety of mishaps force the leading man to also play the leading lady on (of course) opening night, while his co-stars scramble about either to assist or to sabotage him. The show takes too long to get going - the first act is slow setting things up, and too many of the musical numbers throughout bring the action dangerously to a standstill when what's essential for farce is monentum - but once we're in the show-within-the-show (which, shrewdly, is also a farce) the book is often clever and lively. The show's biggest problem, besides that three times as many moments are musicalized than need be, is a persistent one with farce and concerns the specific brand of exaggerated performance style that it asks of an actor. Frankly, you either got it or you ain't. Only half of this ensemble has got it.

Susan Gets Some Play

Written (by Adam Szymkowicz) to show its star Susan Louise O'Connor to neurotic-adorable advantage (on that score, it mostly succeeds) this hour-long play is set in motion when one of Susan's friends gets the idea to pretend to produce a play in order to hold bogus auditions: how else will dating-discouraged Susan meet guys? The slight, brief comedy seems intended as a silly, goofy lark, but even a lark has to have rules and this one, by design, keeps changing them up. Once guys seated in the audience started to take the stage to audition (following one that entered from the wings) I knew that investing in Susan's dilemma was useless: the play, thick with theatre in-jokes and aggressive fourth-wall breakage, is more interested in mildly goofing on itself than in Susan's man problems. That's never more apparent than at the play's climax, when Susan - previously and self-effacingly oblivious to interest from guys right under her nose - wanders into the audience to deliver an earnest monologue promising to change her ways and her attitude. This personal growth moment is unearned and out of nowhere: we didn't see Susan do any work.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]