Grace

There is a tremendous amount of talent on display at Craig Wright's play Grace at the Cort Theatre.  Michael Shannon continues his run of brilliant performances, subtly yet vividly limning the pain and tentative hope of a physically and emotionally damaged man. Paul Rudd brings energy and compassion to a man who wields his God like sledgehammer, ever trying to beat belief into nonbelievers. Director Dexter Bullard provides clear direction and good pacing. Beowulf Boritt (scenic design), David Weiner (lighting design), and Darron L. West (sound design) provide an impressive (and attractive) atmosphere of tension.

Unfortunately, the best that all of these talented people can do is build a handsome carapace around an empty, unaffecting play.

Photo: Charles Caster-Dudzick

Steve (Rudd) and Sara (the likeable Kate Arrington), religious Christians, have moved to Florida to start of chain of religious motels (Steve likes the name Crossroads Inns; Sara doesn't). Their next-door neighbor Sam (Shannon) wants to be left alone with his pain and loss, but Sara needs a friend and won't take no for an answer. Steve waits for the money that an investor has promised him (and that he perceives as proof of God's love and power). Sam and Sara hang out together. Karl-the-exterminator (Ed Asner) tells some stories. Some predictable things happen. People's beliefs in God shrink or grow. And none of it is particularly convincing or compelling.

A major problem is that it is difficult to care about Steve. If he were kind, if he really cared about other people's souls, rather than just about being right, the show would gain some much-needed complexity and balance.

[spoilers a-comin']

The decision to have the play begin at the end removes what little suspense it might have had. Not that an ending has to be a surprise--beginning at the end certainly doesn't hurt the movie Sunset Boulevard. But Grace has so little in the way of surprise or tension that the show can't afford to tip its (weak) hand.

In addition, playwright Wright can be lazy. For example, even though we know that Sara and Sam will fall in love, he doesn't bother to show it happening. Nor does he show Steve's growing frustration and fear as days and weeks pass and the money he has been promised doesn't appear

Perhaps most importantly, the presentation of questions of faith is simplistic and the characters' back stories rise little above cliché.



[end of spoilers]

All in all, Grace is a disappointment. I wanted--and want--to see Shannon and Rudd in a piece that is up to their talents. This isn't it.

(press ticket; 12th row, audience left)

God of Vengeance

The father and mother have made their fortune in less-than-legal ways, but the father yearns to be respectable. He sees their innocent daughter as their ticket into acceptance from both their neighbors and God. But the daughter has her own dreams. For one thing, she's in love, and the person with whom she's besotted is female and not exactly of the upper echelons. In fact, she's a prostitute who works in the parents' brothel.

Joy Franz, Leanne Agmon, Molly Stoller
Photo:  Jill Usdan

Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (translated by Joseph C. Landis) judges only the manipulative and hypocritical father. The prostitutes and the lesbians, in contrast, are treated with sympathy and understanding. This is particularly notable because God of Vengeance premiered, in its original Yiddish, in the early 1900s. A production in New York in 1923 was deemed "obscene, indecent, disgusting, and tending toward the corruption of the morals of youth" by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the entire cast was arrested. Unfortunately, that response would not be surprising in many locations in 2012.

God of Vengeance is not a great play, but it is a compelling and compassionate one. Director Lenny Leibowitz and the able cast, led by the excellent Sam Tsoutsouvas as the father, tell the story clearly and efficiently, overcoming some of the play's lagging, repetitive moments. The scenery by Tijana Bjelajac is effective, although the scene changes could have been much faster.

The Marvell Rep has provided a great service by reviving this fascinating and surprising play, over 100 years after its premiere.

(press ticket, sixth row on the aisle)

Patti Issues

Though a gay man dishing about Patti LuPone at The Duplex is not an uncommon occurrence, Ben Rimalower's very funny and moving one man play, Patti Issues, elevates Patti worship to a whole new level. Speaking very candidly, a chatty Rimalower opens up about the strained relationship with his gay father and his subsequent escape into all things Patti. As he analyzes and dissects different Patti recordings he makes analogies between his home-life and the lyrics Patti sings. The play gets very fun and insider when Rimalower speaks about the time when he had the dream job of assisting LuPone, herself. Rimalower, with a photographic memory, relishes in describing her every expression and turn of phrase. It must have been thrilling and nerve-wracking for Rimalower as LuPone actually attended a performance a couple of weeks ago. "He is a very talented man and I am so proud of him," she stated. I agree.

Ten Chimneys

When the superb actor Byron Jennings looks awkward and uncomfortable on stage, something is wrong. In this dreadful production of Jeffrey Hatcher's Ten Chimneys, directed by Dan Wackerman, that's the least of the problems, although perhaps the most astonishing. It takes work to make Jennings look bad.

Byron Jennings, Carolyn McCormick
Photo: Carol Rosegg

Carol Rosegg

Carol Rosegg

Here's the setup: theatre legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne have invited Sydney Greenstreet to visit them to socialize and get a leg up on rehearsing The Seagull. But when Greenstreet appears, ingenue Uta Hagen is with him. Lunt and Hagen flirt; Fontanne and Hagen bicker. How will this affect the Lunt's fabled marriage? Time will tell.

Ten Chimney's two hours or so include explorations of love, ambition, obsession, loss, meaning, and responsibility, and the play tries to be funny beside. It fails on pretty much all counts, although some of the discussions about Chekhov are reasonably intelligent.

A lot of the faults of this production are clearly the doing of director Wackerman. Playwright Hatcher at least makes genuine attempts to be sensitive to the complexities of people's lives. Wackerman, on the hand, keeps the performances at an almost-cartoon level, and he allows the play and the players to flail much of the time.

(six row, on the aisle; press ticket)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Reviewers are generally embargoed from writing about shows until their opening nights. The producers of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opted for a different approach, inviting theatre bloggers to the first preview and giving us the go-ahead to write about the show immediately. They knew they weren't taking any chances--this production has already played Chicago and D.C. and received rapturous reviews. The only possible hitch would be if expectations had been raised too high.

No such problem. Thanks to exceptional direction and acting, this beautifully accomplished production hits every harrowing, exhausting, and funny note in Edward Albee's brilliant play.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Carrie Coon is far and away the best Honey I have seen. In the least interesting, least developed role, she registers as a three-dimensional human being and not a living prop. And Madison Dirks is quite effective as Nick. You can feel his swagger and humiliation collide.

Tracy Letts is a full-blooded George whose deference to Martha is a tactic rather than a surrender. His love and his anger are both vividly etched, and the places where they overlap sizzle. He is a man who knows his limits but also his strengths. His final act is the logical conclusion to the evening, rather than the last-minute bravery of a timid man.

Amy Morton as Martha is as brilliant as I hoped she'd be. Having seen her superb performance in August, Osage County, I knew that she would be a powerful Martha. But she's more than that. She often underplays, making her Martha both less and more monstrous and completely original. She makes palpable Martha's addiction to drama--and to an audience--and how it exhausts and exhilarates both her and George.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is often presented as a domestic Grand Guignol, but this amazing production feels almost realistic as four deeply damaged people fight for their lives, or their sanity, or at least to make it to another day. Tremendous credit must go to Pam MacKinnon, whose clean, smart direction allows the play to be new and fresh without shoehorning it into some dumb concept, as so many revival directors like to do. 

The play itself remains breath-taking and odd and overwritten and yet not and wily and mean and emotional and shocking. I can't imagine how it must have felt to see it in 1962, but the fact that it was denied the Pulitzer Prize because it was not "uplifting" enough is surely a clue.

A few details struck me this time around. First, in many plays, movies, and TV shows, there comes a moment where one character should--and would--just leave. But the writer has to make the person stay, no matter how unconvincingly, so that the story won't abruptly end. Nick, on the other hand, has genuine reasons to stay. Martha would not have invited Honey and him over otherwise--as an experienced user, she can easily spot a victim.

Another overused--and often misused--device is the character who talks to him- or herself when alone. Again, this can be awkward and off-putting. But Martha talks to herself because she is the person she likes least in the world, and to sit quietly is out of the question. So she natters along, and it's convincing and elucidating and sad.

I think--and perhaps this is sacrilege--that the play could use to lose 10 or 15 minutes. But, then again, maybe that extra time is needed to completely exhaust the audience as the characters are completely exhausted. It's Long Night's Journey Into Day, but so much more perceptive and rich than O'Neill's work. 

At the first preview, the cast received a ragged standing ovation. It took a while for the audience to find our feet after having had them so thoroughly knocked out from under us.

(press ticket, first preview, third-row-center mezzanine)

"Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City"

See the picture above, of the happy, naked people embracing one another as they stand in a line? It was taken by Ormond Gigli in 1969, at the final--um--dress rehearsal of Oh! Calcutta! It's a stunning photograph, and I am thrilled that it was chosen for use on the cover of my forthcoming book, which is due out in late October or early November, and which can be pre-ordered here <Hard Times>, or here <Hard Times>.  Because there was some concern that a book with nudity on the cover could offend potential buyers, the picture has been--I think--most excellently altered. As the cover of my book, the photograph looks like this:

I don't mind the relative dearth of breasts or pubic hair on the cover--there are plenty of pictures of nudies within. First of all, books like these are hardly likely to top the New York Times bestseller list--or any bestseller list--so I'm happy to court all the potential buyers I can get. And second of all, the PG version of the book helps assuage one of the many anxieties I have about it just prior to its release: that people will be interested in it only because they think it will be titillating, in the way that pornography is titillating. These people will inevitably be disappointed because in the end, Hard Times is less a book about "porn-musicals" (which is the way some of my friends and acquaintances have described my book project in the past few years) than it is a scholarly treatment of the ways that the sexual revolution influenced musical theater in 1970s New York. This is no dense, overly-written tome, mind you. I think that for an academic, I am a pretty straightforward writer. Nonetheless, no matter how you slice it, Hard Times just ain't porn.

Of course, potential disappointment among the men-in-raincoats set is hardly the most acute anxiety I am experiencing. Other, bigger concerns include: Will anyone even buy the thing, let alone bother to read it? Will anyone review it? Will the reviews be really, really mean? Or will everyone just ignore it?

I hope that Hard Times is not ignored, if only because so many of the musicals discussed in it have been ignored for so long, and I don't think they deserve to be. In fact, I've sort of fallen in love with some of them and, in the process, with some of the people who wrote them. And I hope that readers will fall in love with--or lust, or, at the very least, vague, flickering attraction to--them, too.

The show that sparked my interest in "adult musicals" was not Oh! Calcutta!--although I do admit to having had a real fascination with that long-running show, which advertised heavily in Times Square during its impossibly long run through the 1970s and 80s, and which my parents would never let my sister and me see when, as a young family, we waited on line at the TKTS booth debating what shows we'd try to get cheap tickets for. Rather, the show that led to this book was a revue called Let My People Come, which was a huge hit in New York and across the world in the mid-1970s, but which I'd never heard of when, almost a decade ago, the friend of a friend learned about my first book, on rock musicals, and responded by sending me a cassette tape simply marked "Bad Musicals." Side one had selections from "Nefertiti," a 1976 musical that was scheduled for Broadway but that fared so poorly in its out-of-town run in Chicago that producers thought better of bringing it to New York. They were smart: I couldn't get through that side of the tape.

The second side, though, had selections from a show called Let My People Come, which ran for several years during the mid-1970s at the Village Gate in New York, as well as on tour and in various other cities all over the world. Songs on the tape included "Give It to Me," "The Cunnilingus Champion of Company C," the titular number (have you noticed that I keep using words with "tit" in them? Hope so!), and the incredibly explicit "Come in My Mouth." This was on stage? At the Village GATE? I was astounded. I was fascinated. I had to find out more.

So I did. In the process, I interviewed a whole lot of people who were involved in writing and producing and performing these shows: The journalist Jonathan Ward, whose article "Come in My Mouth: The Story of the Adult Musicals of the '70s" was the first thing I read when I started my research (it's still online and you can read it here.). Many lovely, gracious actors, who answered my questions with enthusiasm and good humor, and more than one of whom joked that they'd be a lot more comfortable talking about their adult musical past were they to take off all their clothes (none did). Earl Wilson, Jr, who wrote and composed Let My People Come, and who is a doll. The co-authors of one of the first gay musical revues, Lovers, who joked and laughed and finished each others' sentences as they reminisced about writing their show for the landmark gay theater company, TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence). The son of a high-ranking member of the Genovese family who eschewed getting made because he wanted to be an escape artist and produce a burlesque show called We'd Rather Switch. And the late David Newburge, composer and author of the musical Stag Movie, who had me over to his West Village apartment, showed me his many, many, many birds, let me interview him, and then broke out some porn that he'd written the scripts for, was particularly proud of, and wanted me to see.

Yeah, that's right: I sat around with a total stranger in the middle of the afternoon and watched porn with him for the sake of this book. All in a day's work. You know what? He had a right to be proud--that was one wacky, layered, well-scripted porn flick. He even had a cameo in the middle of it, in which he played Madame Defarge. Don't ask.

Anyway, the book was a lot of fun; one last anxiety I have been having is that I'll never land on such a fascinating, quirky little topic again. I hope among hope that I do. In a strange way, I'll really miss Hard Times when it's released--I guess in the same way a parent misses their kid when they go off to college or out into the world. But out into the world it must go. When it gets there, I hope people get as much enjoyment from reading it as I got from researching and writing it. The shows and the people I write about deserve that much.