Into The Woods

Went to see the latest NYU/CAP21 production for the usual reason: it's a treat to see some young talented performers still in training, some of whom will undoubtedly go on to careers in musical theatre. These productions are not open for review, so I'm just going to shout out to Rick Bertone, who did a remarkable job as the show's musical director.

The Jazz Age

photo: Ryan Jensen

No man should go through life without loving another man. So says F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway in Allan Knee’s frustratingly superficial biodrama which traces the friendship between the two iconic literary legends from their first encounter to their last. Too often, the play feels like nothing more than star-gawking in Roaring ‘20’s dress: both men are written one-dimensionally as if to keep them safe within their respective mythologies. The superficiality is especially noticeable when the playwright has the men quoting themselves: the gap between what these men wrote and how they are depicted here is vast. There is a third character in the play (F. Scott's wife Zelda) who often seems outside of the play's main interest, since the play offers few insights into, and doesn't adequately chart, her mental deterioration and its effect on the men's relationship. The production visually achieves a pleasurable elegance, thanks in large part to good design work (particularly the lighting and the excellent costuming) and there is also a small musical combo (on stage on the two-tiered set’s upper level) underscoring the play with songbook standards of the era. The music is meant to be decorative, adding an air of sophistication to the proceedings. It isn’t the band’s fault that they often pull focus.

Artfuckers

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Plays that trade on shock value generally aren't very good, and even in this town a racy publicity shot and a name like "Artfuckers" scrawled in some sort of blood-red is shock value. I'm happy to say that Artfuckers isn't as bad as I've just made it sound -- there's some merit to the artistic struggle that's got Owen (Will Janowtiz) trying to kill himself after a bad review in Artforum. But I'm sad to say that not only does Michael Domitrovich's script come across as forced, but so does the sex: Bella (Nicole LaLiberte) is the only character who ought to be methodical about sex, using it to create the illusion of happiness. But Maggie (Jessica Kaye), her sister, comes across as hollow when she goes after Owen, and Trevor (Asher Grodman), a DJ who claims to hear sex in his pulse, is so sluggish that he must be suffering from bradycardia (a slow heartbeat). The most entertaining scene is the most shallow: Max (Tuomas Hiltunen), a gay fashion designer, speaks with his agent, Maggie, about the upcoming show for which Trevor is recording music, Owen is sculpting for, and Bella is modeling in. That's no surprise: Eduardo Machado directs Artfuckers like a rave, so it's only the most heartless and over-the-top acting that catches our attention.

Welcome To Nowhere (bullet hole road)

The actors, playing archetypal road movie characters, generally face out while standing in a physically limiting box-like enclosure. The subconscious visual associations of this are multiple: fortune tellers in a penny arcade, ticket takers at a tollbooth, criminals behind security glass at a prison, and so on. They mostly whisper their lines into microphones, while above them a letterbox-shaped screen plays (superbly realized) video that has been made to look like iconic road movie footage. This is Temporary Distortion's fascinating hybrid of theatre, cinema and art installation, a consistently mesmerizing experience that summons - just as American road movies do - an often dream-like mood comprised of both vague menace and strange melancholy. The show not only summons that mood, it sustains it with disciplined integrity for its full length without ever having to bow to conventional narrative storytelling and without disturbing the spellbinding stillness that initially draws us in. This is something entirely new and rule-breaking that quietly explodes some of the conventional ideas of what theatre is, and it's staggering.

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

photo: John Huba

After the last Broadway revival I didn't think I would ever need to see this old Tennessee Williams three-acter again - how many times can one watch Big Daddy work himself up over mendacity or hear Maggie seethe over those little no-neck monsters? - but this new all-black production is, a couple of weeks into previews, immensely entertaining and in some small ways revelatory. Let's get the minor complaints out of the way first: director Debbie Allen overdoes the effect of isolating some of the monologues with a spotlight - it's fine the first two times but distracting after that - and there is still some fine-tuning to be done with a couple of the lead performances and with balancing the comedic with the dramatic. Yet at this stage of the game there's every reason to believe that this Cat will be a big crowd-pleasing hit, not least of all because (unlike the other ten productions I've seen over the years) the center of its focus is where it makes the most sense: more on Brick than on Maggie. (Brick takes the last bow, for those keeping score at home, and Maggie fourth to last) The startling thing about this production is not that race recontextualizes the story - it doesn't - but that these actors deliver the lines in ways that are different than I've heard before. That's something of a small shock, since the conventional wisdom is that Williams' heightened language demands a highly specific rhythm. Thanks partly to that, and also in small part to the production's rare use of Williams' revisions which put the F word liberally in Big Daddy's mouth, the production has vitality and excitement. I don't want to be too specific about the performances, as this was an early preview, but I will say this: Anika Noni Rose, Terrence Howard, James Earl Jones, and Phylicia Rashad are all going to be Tony-nominated. I'd put cash down on that.

The Blue Flower

photo: Tyler Kongslie

Nothing if not ambitious and genre-defying, this off-beat musical (previously presented at the New York Musicals Festival in 2004) attempts a Dada-ist approach to both storytelling and presentation: it's a highly theatricalized collage of often musicalized bits and pieces that sketch in the changing dynamics of four friends in the first half of the twentieth century. (One of the four is a Dada artist.) Perhaps in keeping with turn-things-upside-down Dada principles, the (often fascinating, eclectically-inspired) music rarely moves the story or defines the characters - rather, the lyrics usually strive for poetic imagery - but that proves to become tiring when you realize that the book scenes that connect the songs don't pick up the slack to clearly define the characters either. Despite the bold breaking of form and a nearly ceaseless parade of interesting stage pictures (which sometimes include projected movies and stills) the moments that work best in the show are the most conventional ones: the always wonderful Nancy Anderson does beautifully by the number that comes closest to functioning as a typical character song, and Marcus Neville and Jamie LaVerdiere break through the show's veneer of emotional remoteness in a simple scene of conversation near the end. Otherwise the show is so determined to break the rules that it fails to make new ones that meet us halfway.