A.N.T. Fest

Why toy with a catchphrase that works? According to their press release, their first annual A.N.T. (Ars Nova Theater) Fest is a chance to catch "genre-defying emerging artists from beginning to trend." While there was nothing groundbreaking in the short previews of this premiere--unless you've never seen good step dancing before (10/16's Step) nor heard a nebbish white guy talk about his failed love life (11/13's Girls I've Like Liked)--there were plenty of emerging artists, as evinced by the self-deprecating deadpan of Sara Schaefer (of 10/17's Liquid Gold) and the slightly off-kilter humor of Becky Yamamoto (10/23's The Story of America). The rock band Goodbye Picasso may not be next year's Jollyship (11/1's The Book of Aylene), and Eric March and Jared Weiss aren't as endearing as [title of show] (11/17's Songs About Real Life), but they're in the progress of getting their act together, thanks to A.N.T. Fest's act. Why should we need to make sense of the white-guy dancing, intentionally awful jokes, and political commentary of 10/20's Just Jump!? As is pretty clear from shows with titles like Pirates and Ninjas, Dial 'P' For Pasties, and Outre Island, now's as good as any a time to jump. Ars Nova isn't reinventing the wheel (The Brick has been doing eclectic festivals for years now), but with their beautiful space, excellent liquor selection, and comfortable seats, they're driving in the right direction.

To Be Or Not To Be

Photo/Joan Marcus

As MTC has stupidly begged the question, the answer, definitively, is "not to be." Nick Whitby's adaptation of the 1942 film To Be Or Not To Be is slow, under-rehearsed, badly staged (Faith Healer meets Gypsy), and unable to establish a tone--as Colonel "Concentration Camp" Erhard (Michael McCarty, one of the few good things about this show) points out at a gestapo soiree, "I've misjudged the tone of the room." Boeing Boeing, for all its flaws, knows that it is a sex farce, and the energy crackles through the play, building and building until take-off; not so for To Be Or Not To Be, which sputters through video clips and recordings that defuse the action. It's also horribly dated: even though "Heil myself!" stems from Lubitsch's original, it now seems like secondhand Brooks. Casey Nicholaw's direction is astoundingly aimless, as if he set out to direct The 39 Steps but wanted all the glitz of The Drowsy Chaperone, too. The space is badly used, and Anna Louizos's set could've taken some cues from Roundabout's revival of Twentieth Century. Erhard comments that Josef Tura, a hammy actor (hammily played by David Rasche, which is a most unkosher choice) did to Shakespeare what Germany has done to Poland; one could go a step further and compare what Germany did to Poland to what MTC has done to this film (and to a wasted Jan Maxwell).

Waves of Mu

It's a credit to Amy Caron's current obsession that Waves of Mu is able to tackle the heady neuroscience of mirror neurons in a playful way that won't go over anyone's head. But perhaps it should have: knowing exactly what's going on tends to make the individual demonstrations drag on. What's more, the cloying tone of the play gives out a lot of mixed signals: for instance, during a video interview with V. S. Ramachandran (whose work Caron is expressing through theater), an actor stands to the side, mocking his gesticulations. The art installation is cute, too, with its secretary-cum-thalamus, but this view of the mind doesn't connect with what follows--a multidisciplinary translation of mirror neurons that relies too heavily on video. All that empathy, and yet I often found myself being very self-aware, unable to relate.

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Kindness

photo: Joan Marcus

Adam Rapp's new play has some stray moments, many of which belong to Annette O'Toole. but they're hard to enjoy once it's clear that the play's lone conflict is the unconvincing and unwelcome suspense of whether the teenaged main character will bash his mom's brains in with a hammer. No matter how much cheap condescension Rapp (who also directed) heaps on Mom - we're cued for most of the play to snicker at her bad cassettes (Juice Newton, for instance) and at her awe of "Rent" (thinly disguised in the script as "Survivin': The Musical") - she's infinitely more interesting than her son, a walking and talking blank slate. A good deal of the play is devoted to his interactions with a mystery woman, a contrived character if there ever was one but at least Katherine Waterston's intensity makes her initially fascinating to watch.

The Master of Horror

Photo/Aaron Epstein

I don't want to say anything negative about the latest Blood Brothers anthology from Nosedive, so I'll try to just blame everything on Stephen King. By adapting three of King's little-known short stories, far from the goriest or most interesting, James Comtois, Qui Nguyen, and Mac Rogers have put straightjackets on their creativity, and their attempts to balance their styles with King's have led them to muddle through this show, all zombie-like. Effort and good intentions simply aren't enough to provide the show with a backbone, and without one, we don't really care how many times it gets stabbed, splattering blood all over the first row.

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Nightmare: Bad Dreams Come True

Timothy Haskell's fifth-annual haunted house, Nightmare: Bad Dreams Come True isn't likely to give you nightmares, especially if you're with a talkative or sarcastic group, but it's going to scare you at least once, and that's the most one can expect (or actually want) from the experience. More than that, there are at least four really original moments, which, to preserve their horror, I can only describe as involving a strobe light, a liquid stream, a locker room, and a giant face. However, the "play" lacks structure, and the ambiance diminishes each time you accidentally walk out a fire exit, double back on an unprepared actor, or worse, have an apologetic monster double back to get you. The moment-to-moment shocks are also a bit of a tease--worse, in fact than a strip club's champagne room, for not only can't you touch the performers: they can't touch you. This leads to some tame sections of the house, like the action-less Saw V room, or the Frankenstein exhibit. It's also remarkably short (well, you do run/stumble quite a bit), with our group in the dark for less than twenty minutes (both sections). It's ooky, but it's not altogether spooky. Snap snap.