Judge Me Paris

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can send Company XIV's way is that this exciting, dance-fusion troupe (under the expert leadership of Austin McCormick) continues to evolve with each new show. Though their latest, Judge Me Paris returns to the well of their 2009 Judgment of Paris, it now does so with the operatic sensibilities that were honed in 2009's Snow White and 2010's Le Cirque Ferrique (indeed, Brett Umlauf and Amber Youell are back as Pallas and Juno), with the classy eroticism mastered in 2010's near-perfect Nutcracker Rouge, and the stunning live cinematography that was utilized in 2011's Lover.Muse.Mockingbird.Whore. (There's live music, too, from the lingerie-and-wigs-clad members of SIREN Baroque: Antonia Nelson, Claire Smith, Kelly Savage, and Anneke Schaul-Yoder.)

Photo/Corey Tatarczuk

Perhaps an even greater compliment, then, is in the way the works of Company XIV remain impossible to set down and describe on the page: such transitory images are as slippery as they are beautiful. Don't miss another chance to see them.

[Read full review here]

When Half the Sphere Is Visible

The Drafts, the acting company of the Horse Trade Theater Group, recently presented When Half the Sphere Is Visible, an unusual collaboration among four playwrights, five directors, and nine actors. The four playwrights were tasked to write in response to the word dichotomy. Their work was then weaved together into one 90-minute piece.

While I admire the adventurousness of this conceit, I'm afraid the whole was less than the sum of its parts. The constant switching from one play to another ended up interrupting each's continuity and momentum. Granted, the idea of another evening of one acts isn't as interesting as the idea of this theatrical collage, but I think it would have served the writing better.

Take the TSA storyline, in which a traveler tries to develop a method of getting through airport security without losing all privacy and dignity. It's a comic piece, and of course the secret to comedy is timing. And perhaps in a movie, with quick cutting from scene to scene, the timing wouldn't have been quite so fractured. But this was a play, and between the interruptions for scenes from other shows and the moving on and off of scenery, all hope of comic build was lost.

The story of a lonely young woman who meets a spookily familiar stranger on a train was intriguing and moving--and even more damaged by interruptions. In this case, some of them were written into the play, in flashes (the woman in bed; the woman on the train; the woman at work) that couldn't actually flash because of the physical limitations of live theatre. When a scene change is longer than a scene, it hurts a play, and this one in particular deserved better.

The other two stories were less hurt by the interruptions, yet I still think that they would have been helped by being presented straight through. One, a sort of sci fi romance between a movie star and a librarian, lost some of its potential sweetness in this presentation. The other, a character-based good brother-bad brother tale, was left looking generic as the audience didn't have a chance to really get to know this particular good brother and this particular bad brother.

The writers were Jesse Cameron Alick, Matthew Gutshick, Michael McGuire, and Germono Toussain. The directors were Ilaria Amadasi, Jaclyn Biskup, Lindsey Moore Sproul, Sara C. Walsh, and Donya K. Washington. The actors were Juliana Carr, Reiss Gaspard, Paul Herbig, Alex Hodgins, Ben Kaufman, Lauren Kate Morrison, JB Rote, Marchelle Thurman, Amanda Van Nostrand, and Gary Warchola.

While this evening of plays ultimately got in its own way, there was plenty of talent involved, and I look forward to seeing more work by this company.

(press ticket; second row)

Evita

There is a moment in Evita when, with a single note, you know something magical is about to happen. Unfortunately, it happens halfway through Act I. Even more unfortunate, the actress, playing Peron’s mistress, finishes her solo and never returns. It is hard to tell just how talented Rachel Potter, that show-enlivening actress, is. The show to that point was such a lamentable mess that the audience was so desperate for some genuine entertainment that the worst liquid in that desert would have quenched its collective thirst. To be completely fair, Rachel Potter was not only the best thing in the show, by a mile; she’s damn good regardless of the context.

Also thrilling is Christopher Oram’s majestic set. Rob Ashford’s choreography is uneven but trends toward very good. When he lets the dancers dance, everyone delivers beautifully. Unfortunately, he often descends into traffic patterns with players Pied Pipering around to make the stage look busy. If that were his only goal, he was effective.

For me, that was where the joy ended.

Ricky Martin is about the happiest Che you’ll ever see. Either he is concerned about turning off fans or he simply can’t act. There is ample evidence for the latter. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, doesn’t seem to know what his relationship to Eva is supposed to be, and is about as fired up as a match in a down pour. Every time he took the stage with Eva, it was a master class in Chemisn’try. His singing is lovely but completely without grit; and in the most bizarre choice (not sure if it was his or the director’s), he throws his full Spanish speaking proficiency into the pronunciation of only the two dozen or so actual Spanish words in the score. For the remainder of the evening, he sings and speaks as if his dialect coach was a 14 year old girl from Connecticut.

Elena Roger may be a trained dancer, for what that’s worth in one of the hardest scores ever written for a woman; but that proves to make about as much sense as hiring someone to redo the Sistine Chapel just because they do a nice job painting toenails. She is also authentically Argentinian. If that is the only qualification you need, perhaps she can be replaced by Laura Bush, just because she was once first lady to an impotent political puppet. Personally, I’ll take an actual singer anytime. In this case, the actress hasn’t learned the notes you’d like to hear. I have never in my life heard someone control their vibrato with their adenoids. Ms Roger makes some of the most unpleasant noises I have ever heard on a stage or in a slaughter house. She has a trill that makes her sound like the love child of Edith Piaf and a goat. Perhaps her vocal limitations would be less noticeable if she could act. Alas, no one will ever find out. I will say, Elena Roger did something I never thought possible. She made me root for Eva’s cancer. And, during Intermission, I officially forgave Madonna. It really could have been worse, Madge.

Michael Cerveris received a Tony nomination for his 15 minutes on stage. I suppose in a year when Ron Raines can get a nomination, the bar is pretty low. I anticipated that Mr. Cerveris’s usual pompousness would serve him well here. It does occasionally. He shifts too quickly into his oft- and over-used I’m-going-to cry-now voice. He started foreshadowing her death before the Mistress’s suitcase was packed.

Max Von Essen, as Migaldi, raises the bar on pompousness well before Cerveris takes the stage. He apparently thinks he was cast in an actual opera. He slows down and stretches out every note he sings. I can only imagine if he has to step out of his understudy role and go on for Ricky Martin, the show will go past midnight—and I’m talking about a matinee performance.

The entire score is slowed down to a glacial pace that serves no one. Also serving no one is Michael Grandage’s direction. He makes choices that defy sense. The Art of the Possible is about the fact that any tool in the right place at the right time can steal an election. I know, I know, it’s just theatre. It could never really happen. By staging the number as a pathetic wrestling match, he changes the tone and intent of the narrative. That this new narrative is carried out by a man barely taller than Eva Peron tackling someone twice his size is preposterous. It was one of the few earned laughs of the evening. And how you can stage And The Money Kept Rolling In with a single card or a pad or a ticket? Could they not afford a broom?

I, like the show, could drag on; but I, unlike the show, won’t. The applause the night I saw the show spoke volumes without decibels. You could count the number of times the audience applauded during the performance on one hand—or maybe they were only using one hand to clap. During the bows, applause was tepid, picking up for Rachel Potter, and exploding for Ricky Martin. People were clearly applauding him, not his work, as they were calling out his name like lovesick school girls—well, perimenopausal school girls. My friends and I were sitting next to a young man from Italy who, like all of us, grew up listening to and loving the score and Elaine and Patti and even Julie Covington. He’d been waiting to see a production for over a decade. At the end of the show, he said, “Not the show I wanted to see.”

Indeed.

I can only imagine that, at some undisclosed location, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s career is rolling over in its grave.

Triumphant Baby: The Songs of Iconis and Maddock

Lorinda Lisitza is amazing. And she was born to sing the songs of Joe Iconis and Robert Maddock, who are pretty darn amazing themselves.

In Triumphant Baby: The Songs of Iconis and Maddock, the Nightlife Award-winning Lisitza sings thirteen Iconis-Maddock songs, and it is no exaggeration to say that each is a full and wonderful one-act play. Lisitza is not only a kick-ass singer with an extraordinary range (both vocally and stylistically), but she is also a top-notch actor who completely inhabits each song. During Triumphant Baby, she is sad, funny, sly, rueful, crazy, suicidal, sweet, heartbroken, heartbreaking, and, yes, triumphant. With her talent, red hair, and large, attractive features, Lisitza belongs on stage. Y'know, like in a musical on Broadway. (Years ago, I saw her in Brecht and Weill's Happy End at Theatre Ten Ten, and I promise you, she is the real thing.)

Before Triumphant Baby, I was not familiar with the work of Iconis and Maddock, and all I can say is, shame on me! Composer Iconis is comfortable in any and every genre. His songs are melodic and inviting but never cliche. His arrangements beautifully support the meaning and the feeling of each song. Maddock's lyrics are some of the best I've heard in years. He is fond of rhyming across three lines, and the third rhyme is often unexpected, funny, and smart. He is also master of the simple, catchy, memorable phrase, as in "We might not get to heaven but I'm always up for hell" (from the energetic and funny "Just as Long as You and I Are in Cahoots") and "If I can't be a rising star, I'll be the kind that falls" (from the wistful "The Kind That Falls"). Iconis and Maddock also write about twarted passion ("Eddie Got a Color T.V."), loss ("Camden County Penitentiary"), enthusiastic murderers ("Yolanda at the Bottom of the Stairs"), and, well, everything.

Triumphant Baby features a wonderful band: Iconis himself on piano, happily bouncing around; Mike Pettry on guitar, mandolin, and melodica; Matt Wigton on double bass; and Tanya Holt and Liz Lark Brown on vocals.

If you enjoy excellent cabaret performances, see this show. If you enjoy excellent Broadway performances, see this show. If you enjoy excellent country performances, see this show. If you want to say, "I knew them when," see this show. (Two performances left, May 19 and 20, at the Metropolitan Room.)

(center, press ticket)

Announcement: Show Showdown Review Nominated for Media Award

The Show Showdown review for Company XIV's version of Snow White posted on December 16, 2011 written by Sandra Mardenfeld is a finalist in the Press Club of Long Island Media Award competition. The winners will be announced at the club’s June 7 awards dinner. See the following links for more information. 

Snow White Review  

Press Club of Long Island Media Awards

Evita

Jason Kempin/Getty Images North America

Like Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita was one of those shows I grew up with, but never actually saw staged. And perhaps not coincidentally, these two are the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice scores I take most seriously and love the most. I've written on Superstar elsewhere (specifically, here), but I found myself comparing it with Evita after seeing the latter at the Marquis on Friday night.

Both Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar were conceived as concept albums, and were subsequently staged. At least when it came to Superstar, this wasn't Lloyd Webber and Rice's intention. They wanted very much to develop that show as a musical, but were met with so much resistance--and were laughed out of so many West End producers' offices--that they went the sound-recording route instead. The result was an absolutely dynamite concept album about the last days of Jesus's life, featuring an orchestra that builds to Wagnerian proportions as Ian Gillan wails dynamically, Murray Head suffers miserably, and Yvonne Elliman pines appealingly. I loved the record so much that I have never seen a truly satisfying stage adaptation of Superstar (and don't get me started on the screen version); I'm convinced that one is not possible, at least for me, because I have spent so much time creating my own, highly personalized and idealized visuals to go with the album I listened to so obsessively in my formative years. I wasn't alone on this one; Superstar was so enormously popular in the United States, where it spent 65 weeks on the Billboard charts when it was released in 1970, that the 1971 Broadway version suffered. The show made its money back due to an extraordinarily huge advance, but closed after a year and a half, largely as the result of too many unflattering comparisons with the album. 

Like Superstar, Evita began life as a concept album, recorded in 1976. Julie Covington played Evita, Paul Jones was Peron, and Colm Wilkinson was Che. It, too, is awesome, but while it exceeded sales of Superstar in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and a number of European and Latin American countries, it fizzled here. The stage version that followed the concept album (in the UK in 1978, and on Broadway in 1979) did not garner as many unfavorable comparisons, and proved a lot more popular; it ran for eight years in the West End and for four years here, and made the careers of both Patti LuPone (Evita) and Mandy Pantinkin (Che).

The scores to both Superstar and Evita strike me as his richest and most thrilling. This might have to do with their concept-album origins, or with the fact that under all the treacle, Lloyd Webber really does know how to play around with lots of different kinds of music. Or maybe it's both. But even the repetitions--the frequently recurring motifs and endlessly repeated refrains that Lloyd Webber has been accused of relying overmuch on in his later shows--make sense within the narrative framework and contribute to some sense of dramatic cohesiveness and propulsion. Both shows, however, can also seem frustratingly incomplete when they are staged: Superstar essentially follows a number of characters fretting their way toward the crucifixion. Such hysterics make for exciting listening, but watching characters pacing around and fretting for two hours doesn't always make for great theater. Evita sort of goes in the other direction: characters aren't so much developed as they are described, or used to narrate important events in the short, strange life of the titular first lady of Argentina. We learn of her death in the opening scene, watch her rise to power, succumb to cancer, and die; all of this is described for us, often by Che, but sometimes by the rest of the cast. We are told repeatedly that Evita is a powerful, driven, conniving woman, but we don't really ever learn much more about her, or about Che, or about Peron. The musical thus disintegrates particularly rapidly when she dies: the score simply rehashes every number we've heard in a brief, increasingly dissonant montage, and then the lights fade abruptly. With no more Evita, there is no more show. This is not exactly a dramaturgical triumph. Rather, the show, like its title character, is flawed and ultimately doesn't function all that well. And yet both the character and the show are great fun, warts and all.

Indeed, the revival of Evita may be a warts-and-all production, but even the warts are gorgeous. Frankly, I can't remember having as much fun at the theater as I did on Friday.

Michael Grandage, late of the Donmar, directed the revival, which is smooth and tight and graceful. The remarkably strong ensemble is, to a member, committed and compelling, and, as an added bonus, their flouncing "Dangerous Game" practically made me cackle. Rob Ashford's choreography is also terrific--the tango (surprise!) is an overarching theme, both visually and musically, and while some of the new arrangements and orchestrations did not work for me (I was particularly disappointed by "The Art of the Possible," which was slowed down considerably and infused with references to Piazzolla, which worked only to kill the momentum), the look of the production is sinewy and sexy, with plenty of undulations and intertwining limbs helping to propel the action along.

I never once forgot that Che was being played by Ricky Martin, but then again, watching Ricky Martin be Ricky Martin for two hours is hardly torture. I was a little worried for him at the start, and he really has no idea what to do with his left arm most of the time, but his voice is well-suited for the part, he seemed to be having as good a time as the ensemble, and dancing is hardly a problem for him, so I ended up being perfectly fine with him as Che.

I ended up liking Elena Roger, as Evita, a lot too, but as with Martin, I had some reservations, especially early on. Roger is a tiny woman with a highly expressive face, and her voice reminds me a great deal of Edith Piaf's. This was a good thing most of the time--Roger was fascinating to watch, and had the kind of dynamism that I am sure the actual Evita possessed. But there are times when the title character needs to be--well, to be Patti LuPone. I admit here that I have never before quite understood the appeal of LuPone, but having seen this revival, I can only imagine that she made absolute mincemeat of the role. LuPone can sustain enormous strength in higher registers, and Roger really struggled with this. As a result, some of the numbers that LuPone made famous--notably "Buenos Aires," "A New Argentina" and "Rainbow High"--suffered, here. Roger sounded, however, quite beautiful in the quieter, more contemplative numbers, and since the second act of Evita is chock full of those, she won me over in the end.

Really, though, the revival belongs to Michael Cerveris, whose Peron was not only superb, but whose utter awesomeness galvanized the rest of the cast. Cerveris is a consistently fine actor--one of the best we've got on Broadway, I think. And when the casting for Evita was first announced, I found myself somewhat miffed that Martin, and not Cerveris, was slated to play Che. But I was wrong--not because I don't think Cerveris would be fine as Che, but because he was just so unbelievably compelling as Peron. His mere presence on the stage partway through act I, in fact, lifted the energy of the show so dramatically and so suddenly that I could practically hear the rest of the cast click. In the "Charity Concert"/"Surprisingly Good for You" scene, Cerveris stands, initially, in the shadows, awaiting his cue to take the stage and address the crowd. His eyes, eerily dead, and his face, bizarrely flat, grow animated only once he steps into the spotlight; this is the portrait of a politician so cold and calculating as to send chills up your spine. And yet, once Peron meets Evita later in the same scene, his growing lust, and eventual love for her is not only entirely believable, but infectious. She's a complicated woman, depicted inaccurately in a show that doesn't always work, and yet she's dynamic enough to bring life to the coldest of cold, dead eyes.