Blue Man Group

No one is too cool and blase for The Blue Man Group. Sometimes silly, sometimes performance-arty, sometimes just funny, the show is by now an institution that most New Yorkers leave to the tourists. Score one for the tourists. There's a very good reason why. more than a decade into the show's run, the blue-latexed aliens are still very often a tough ticket: the show is loads of playful, high-stimulus fun for all ages. Set to highly percussive music, three mute blue men (my friend dubbed them "noisy mimes") perform a varety of acts ranging from the strange (drumming on liquid) to the weird (catching marshmallows in their mouths) but always with disarming mock-gravity and sharp comic timing. It's like losing a staring contest for ninety minutes: the Blue Men don't blink, but you're a hot giggling mess.

Beebo Brinker Chronicles

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

There's a moment where the text of Ann Bannon's 50s lesbian pulp novels is really turned to flesh -- a hot, torrid scene of tangled emotions that feels real, despite the intentionally cheesy writing. But Leigh Silverman's sparse direction ends up focusing too much on the swaggering one-liners, and while Marin Ireland, David Greenspan, and Carolyn Bauemler find ways to balance witticisms like "We can't think straight because we always think gay" with honest lines like "Do you think some pretty twenty-five year old is going to fall for a bald, middle-aged bastard without a bank roll to offer?" the same can't be said for Autumn Dornfeld, who relies too heavily on telegraphed actions, or Jenn Colella, who has to work so hard to make us buy her brutish turn as Beebo that she has little energy left to do anything else. For all that, I guess I'm a sucker for camp, because I still had a good time at Beebo Brinker Chronicles; I just wish the play had found better ways to balance the threads.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: David | Patrick]

Adding Machine

photo: Carol Rosegg

Arriving off-Broadway after great acclaim in Chicago, this production of a new musical adaptation of the 1923 Elmer Rice play adheres uncompromisingly to its strong visual style: from the dark drudgery of the accounting office where Mister Zero spends twenty five years before an adding machine makes him obsolete, to the show's final setting in which the human characters are dwarfed by machinery, every design detail is purposeful and effective. The cast, forming a cohesive ensemble with well-judged period-accurate performances, are also one with the show's bleak and Expressionistic vision, and the musical's insistent, often atonal score (by Joshua Schmidt) is focused on telling this serious, cautonary story with steadfast determination. The show's accomplishments are obvious and numerous, and yet - after my initial excitement over the first half hour or so (which is mostly focused on Mister Zero's monotonous job and unpleasant home life) and its Pennies From Heaven vibe- I sank into a state of boredom in my seat. The music does phenomenally well when depicting the soul-crushing dullness of Zero's home and workplace, but after that it's too much of the same. And while the show is faithful to the events of the original play, it misses or misjudges most of the dark wit because of its singular determination to be "serious". It doesn't start out that way, but by the end The Adding Machine becomes a museum piece to be admired more than enjoyed.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]

RUS(H)

RUS(H) spends a lot of time slowly drifting through the memories that trap its three characters in the throes of lost passion, but James Scrugg's text -- and video -- finds legs in Kristin Marting's physical direction, Anabella Lenzu's passionate Latin choreography, and Qui Nguyen's dark homoerotic fight choreography. On those legs, it manages to walk the jagged line between passion and violence better than anything I've seen on stage recently, although it gets tripped up overdosing on certain technologies that add pretension, not tension. Sonny (frighteningly played by Lathrop Walker) steals the show as the anhedonistic meth addict willing to do anything -- no matter how debased -- for more "Tina," and though he brings out the worst in Rus -- who leaves his wife, Sireene (chandra thomas), to explore his own inner sadism -- he brings out the best in Luis Vega, who plays Rus. RUS(H) isn't much of a rush, but it's one hell of a bender.

[Read on]

Sisters' Dance

photo: Erica Parise

Since the plot isn't anything new (sisters reunite on the ocassion of their mother's death to settle their differences and divvy up the property) and the characters are dangerously close to stock (the uptight "good" sister who stayed behind to nurse Mom and the sexual "bad" sister who didn't, for the most prominent examples) a whole lot depends on the actors to bring Sarah Hollister's amiable but derivative play to naturalistic life. But unfortunately the actors seem to have been steered in the wrong direction toward exaggeration: when the bad sister's no-good stud shows up drunk in the middle of the night, for instance, he's only a couple of pelvic thrusts away from turning into a Beetlejuice-like lech. "Good" sister walks around in what looks like a granny dress with her hair in a bun (the play's most wince-worthy cliche is the moment when she lets it down): this kind of obviousness is at odds with the play's tender slice-of-life moments.

Artfuckers

photo: Carol Rosegg

The young super-privileged scenesters who are this play's characters (and I use that word loosely) are all relentlessly selfish, self-absorbed a-holes. Typically their brand of willfull narcissism is cause for satiric ridicule but here the insufferable brats are meant to be taken seriously as they talk through their dramas (unconvincingly, and usually in direct address mode) and whine about this or that speed bump toward their own fabulousness. Almost none of it smells of real life: the play is as shallow and unsympathetic as its characters. As a writhingly insecure artiste who suffers suicidally over a bad review in Artforum, Will Janowitz fares best of all the actors; as for the rest of the cast I look forward to seeing them all in something else.