Almost an Evening

Photo/Doug Hamilton

Almost an Evening is the right name for Ethan Coen's three one-acts (now transferred to 45 Bleecker): it's almost an evening of theater. Unfortunately, the middle third, "Four Benches," is an empty punchline, and the strained final piece, "Debate," never achieves the effortlessly bleak comedy tackled so well in the opener, "Waiting." The slick, spirited cast keeps the show oiled enough to do more than squeak by, particularly Joey Slotnick, who, despite his character getting stuck in a hellish sort of limbo, is never static himself. Operating with a sense of the sublimely ridiculous, F. Murray Abraham plays God Who Judges with such Carlin-like brio that he earns a slap on the wrist from God Who Loves (a fine Mark Linn-Baker): "This is not David Mamet." No, it's certainly not. But by being acutely aware of that, Almost an Evening gets by with a consistently terse minimalism that's matched by Ilona Somogyi's old-fashioned costumes, Riccardo Hernandez's specific and to-the-point sets, and Neil Pepe's economic direction. (Only Donald Holder's lighting was off, but that's more a problem with the cues than the design.) You may have to stretch the metaphor that Young Woman and Young Man (Atlantic founders Mary McCann and Jordan Lage) use to discuss their relationship, but these plays fuck you in the pussy, not in the heart.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Cry-Baby

photo: Kevin Berne

I saw a half-priced early preview of Cry-Baby. It would have to get a hundred times better by opening night to be worth full price. There's plenty of athletic, high-energy dances for the boys in the chorus - Rob Ashford's choreography is easily the best thing about the show - and one person in the cast (Alli Mauzey) nails the trashy tacky-fabulous style of the John Waters movie that is the show's source material. No one else seems to have been asked to even try: the bland and unsexy musical - yet another set in the mid 1950's with the good girl falling for the bad (read: misunderstood) hip-swivelling rebel - not only lacks Waters' gleeful-weirdo personality, it lacks any personality at all. It's a dull and derivative Grease wannabe that always feels been-there and done-that-better-before.

Six

A one act is the right place to experiment, and this festival of Six one-acts (part of Second Generation's Eleven series, which also premiered a full-length play and four staged readings) serves as both a warning and a shining example to playwrights looking to find their voice. Most of the plays on display get trapped in their style, but all the same, you have to admire their attempts to be a little different, or little wild. So Sung Rno's The Trajectory of Heart, Fractured loses the connection between two lovers in the central metaphor of an airplane crash; there's still something beautiful in the Victor Maog's staging. Michael Lew's Moustache Guys is a manic mess of mustache cameos (video-game icon Mario and Gangs of New York's Bill the Butcher, to name a few) -- but gosh darn it, it's fun. More importantly, when style melds with substance, as with Julia Cho's Round and Round, the result can be heartbreaking: George (Joel de la Fuente) plays a linguist who simply can't find the words to stop his wife, Mary (Jennifer Ikeda), from leaving him. Kate Whoriskey's direction completes the picture, changing genres where appropriate to emphasize the Romance of it all, or the Tragedy, and this device allows Cho to reset time or to speak to the audience without ever seeming cheesy or out of place.

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Missives

photo: Barbara Iams Korein

If I'm going to believe that two seemingly well socialized young urbanites - Lia, a straight black woman, and Ben, a gay white man - conduct an intimate years-spanning friendship only through written letters even though they live across the hall from each other, I'm going to need a lot more convincing than I got from Garret Jon Groenveld's play Missives. The playwright clearly intends for their letters to strike us as deeply personal and revealing, but that's where he's most wrong: nothing the two write to each other is so naked or humiliating as to forbid face to face contact, so the premise that they continue to avoid anything but letter-writing begins to grow precious. The play is mostly a flashback, framed by Lia giving us direct-address information that immediately drains any suspense out of the show: it isn't until late in the first act when Ben gets a boyfriend (played with vibrancy and endearing vulnerability by Ryan Tresser) that the play has any measure of dramatic conflict. As Lia, Shamika Cotton builds judiciously to the play's final emotional scenes and it's to her credit that she got me to feel something long after I went numb on the play (which was about half an hour earlier, with the second-act introduction of a character right out of crime-drama stock).

The American Dream/The Sandbox

Photo/Jaisen Crockett

In the first half of The American Dream, Edward Albee's revival of two of his early and absurd one-acts, the first thing you'll notice is probably the color scheme: a red and blue chair, divided by a love seat, with a faded background of American stripes and bars, looking more like a circus prison than wallpaper. That's all fitting, for Mommy (Judith Ivey) and Daddy (George Bartenieff) are -- though they seem tame at first -- animals, living, breathing embodiments of that savage (and soon to be savaged) American Dream. However, the ensuing eighty minutes of awkward pronouncements ("I just giggled and blushed and got sticky wet") have aged about as well as the emasculated, shuffling Daddy: they have little impact. Part of this is the acting, which is either wooden itself (granted, Lois Markle is a last-minute replacement for Grandma) or as paper-thin as the character: as Young Man, who is literally the American Dream, Harmon Walsh bears a huge responsibility on his shoulders, but he neither snuffs out his emotions nor instills the character with a sense of strength, and this leaves his role with a great deal of ambiguity, as does the play (which isn't even theater of the absurd at its finest). As for The Sandbox, which is shorter than the intermission preceding it, at least it and its Angel of Death (Jesse Williams) are swift.


[Also blogged by: Patrick]

In The Heights

Photo/Joan Marcus

Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical about a cheery community in Washington Heights has been scrubbed clean of any hard-hitting drama, but it's still a fresh, fun new show in its own right. In The Heights is best when it's playing to the larger-than-life atmosphere, rather than when it focuses on the rather simple problems of its individual residents. Additionally, few performers beyond Miranda (Robin De Jesus as the comic relief, Sonny; Andrea Burns as the sassy salon girl, Carla; and Karen Olivo as the strong-backed but loose-limbed Vanessa) have the necessary charisma or vocal presence to carry solos or duets. Just as there's no charisma between Benny and Nina (Christopher Jackson and Mandy Gonzalez), there's no conviction behind songs like "Inutil" or "Enough," and that hurts Carlos Gomez, Priscilla Lopez, and the whole show. Thankfully, In The Heights focuses most often on the whole neighborhood, a confection that's completed by Andy Blankenbuehler's merengue-flavored choreography, Howell Binkley's fireworks in the light department, Thomas Kail's constantly moving, urban-flowing direction, and Miranda's fusion of familiar Broadway tropes with the shaken-up spasms of rap or the multicultural beats and grooves of a whole new rhythm.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick]