Hello Failure

Hello Failure is focused on the rich, excellent, substantive lives of seven submariner's wives who come together to discuss their feelings of isolation. However, Kristen Kosmas presents her material with overlapping text, fragments of thoughts, and gasps of self-confession that abruptly surface (and just as abruptly submerge), and the end result is often hard to grasp. The play is fixated more on the nuances of the conversation than what's actually behind the line ("sub"-text), and this self-inflicted meta-realism seems to be, like the characters, compensating for an absence of purpose. The actors are exceptional, especially given the untraditional deliveries and abrupt changes in scene (or mood), and special credit to Matthew Maher, who grounds Kosmas (and her play), despite seeming to be a figment of Rebecca's imagination. Kosmas uses many such devices, but this is the only one that forces the characters to confront their issues, the only one that isn't hiding failure behind cleverness.

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The Sea Gull

photo: Joan Marcus

How are Dianne Weist and Alan Cumming in CSC's new production of The Sea Gull? They're both woefully misdirected and often adrift, but since that's also true of nearly everyone in the cast, the blame surely belongs elsewhere. The ensemble isn't the least bit cohesive - each actor seems to be in a different production, and only David Rasche (as the Doctor, Yevgeny Sergeyevich) seems to be in a production you'd want to see. Otherwise, there are counterproductive choices made throughout that prevent this production not only from having a cumulative emotional impact but also from making any kind of thematic sense: even the notes that confidently sound in any average production of this play are missed or not attempted. There's a doozy of a directorial choice near the end of the three-hour play that I won't reveal. I'll only say that it's misguided and part of the reason why this production's climactic Nina-Konstantin scene is the weakest I've ever witnessed, unless Drowning Crow counts.

King Arthur

photo: Carol Rosegg

One of the most joyful and entertaining shows in town right now is at City Opera, where director/dance genius Mark Morris has taken Purcell's 17th century music for King Arthur, thrown out all the dialogue, sent the singing chorus out of sight to the orchestra pit, and put his wonderful dance troupe on stage with the principal singers. Now more a cheeky modern dance program set to Purcell's lovely music than a comprehensible production of the piece, the dancers outnumber the singers. But the witty and repeatedly surprising show has a lot of fun integrating the modern dancers and the classical opera singers on the same stage, and it is hard to imagine anyone but the most diehard purists having a problem with this: the music, under Jane Glover's baton, is respectfully and gorgeously rendered and the dancing, to put it mildly, brings a visual excitement and a fresh attitude not usually associated with Baroque opera. (Said fresh attitude extends to a few brief, unabashedly bawdy moments including mimed guy-on-guy oral: this isn't your Grandad's production of King Arthur!) Morris doesn't run out of ideas - there are new ones at every turn, and you leave not only delighted by the music but tickled by the production's cheerful playfulness and its high spirits.

I've posted about this before when I saw La Boheme last year but it's worth repeating: thanks to their new Opera For All program, a number of Orchestra seats can be had at City Opera for $25. The week's discounted tickets go on sale each Monday morning of the season, and yes, they can be purchased online.

Thank For The Scabies, Jerkface!

***1/2 (...out of 5)

Frigid Festival

This is yet another fine example of me racing to a show simply because of its title. Sexually transmitted parasites? Jerkfaces? It reeks of high drama. Dan Bernitt, one of the latest in a crop of emerging one-person-showpeople, treats us to a handful of stories many of which deal with the horrifying embarrassment of being a young adult. Topics such as tubes up the urethra to parents who talk to stuffed animals to yes, scabies, are presented in a fresh, charming and wholly engaging way by our bright hero. All the more impressing is this darling chap is only 21 years old. At 21, I also caught scabies but I wasn't nearly organized enough to write a show about it.

Adding Machine

Photo/Carol Rosegg

In truth, Adding Machine doesn't add up. The music doesn't portray the mechanical; instead, it's tinny and dissonant, and only really effective when shrilling out of Mrs. Zero (Cyrilla Baer), who relies upon her husband's constant and considerable failures to make herself seem better. Combined with the original text of Elmer Rice's 1925 expressionistic play, the stark, dimly lit sets convey a gloom that is abject and anachronistic with the synthesizers, and even the racial slurs seem defanged. Joel Hatch, as Mr. Zero, does a tremendous job of carrying the leaden pace on his shoulders, a walking figment of defeat, but when he first sings -- a confession of murdering his boss -- he seems defeated by the song, too, drowned out and hoarse. If that's intentional, it adds nothing, and only heightens the contrast with a fellow-prisoner, a tenor named Shrdlu (Joe Farrell), who steals focus (by default; Farrell himself is quite forgettable) from what should be Zero's self-inflicted fall from grace. The staging is fun, with the lights creating a claustrophobic darkness and walls or cages creeping ever closer upstage, but overlong set changes make things like the uneasy transition from the real world to the Elysian Fields even more confusing. Adding Machine talks about efficiency and purpose in both the real world and in what passes for the afterlife; David Cromer's direction is to the point, but Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt need to learn to subtract.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Paradise Park

photo: Carol Rosegg

Sadly, the third and final show in Signature's Charles Mee season is easily the low point of the series. An intermissionless fantasia that drifts around a group of people who've chosen to live indefinitely in an amusement park, the play has no rising action to speak of and is instead, in typical Mee collage style, organized thematically. But in the absence of a narrative spine, Mee doesn't do enough with the theme of escapism American style to sustain (much less, build) interest over the play's length, and the slow-paced production ends up feeling longer than its two hours. The play is loaded with whimsical business - a freefall of toys, a castle that inflates and deflates before our eyes, etc. - that mostly just sits on stage dead, failing to resonate. Some of the actors cut through the numbing mood now and then - Veanne Cox and Christopher McCann most effectively among the able ensemble - but Paradise Park is otherwise remote and unreal.