And now....the audience

Have you seen the Broadway League's recent report on the demographics of the 2013-14 Broadway audience? If you haven't, and you're interested, you can check it out here.

I recognize that demographic surveys strike a lot of people as about as interesting as watching a boring person eat a sandwich. But I look forward to the ones the League release, because they give us as clear a picture of the commercial theater audience as anyone can get. Believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more maddening, when it comes to writing about popular entertainment, than not being able to truly assess the audience. Until we develop some sort of magical device that allows us to read, with incredible accuracy and clarity, the Borg-like hive-mind that makes up any group of spectators, the Broadway League's demographic reports mean a lot, and I'm grateful for them.

That being said, the findings in this particular study don't strike me as especially celebratory.

Side Show

Call me Joanne Kaufman. I knew from the downbeat of the horrifically misguided new production of Henry Krieger and Bill Russell's Side Show, currently in its final weeks at the St. James Theatre, that when intermission came, it would be time for me to go. The original production--which made Broadway stars of Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, despite a similarly short run--is beloved by many, myself included. Coming of age musical-theatre obsessed in the late nineties, I don't think there was a cast album I subjected my parents to more. (Love ya, mom and dad!) The compelling story of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, the unabashedly melodramatic score, and the harmonious blending of those two leading voices--what more could you want? Maybe my personal bar was set too high, but the heavily revised book and lyrics pale in comparison to the original, and Act One (which is all I can fairly judge) crawls along at a snail's pace. The staging, by Academy Award winning film director Bill Condon, has no spark; attempts at freak show hyper-reality bring to mind Spencer's Gifts more than Tod Browning.

It also doesn't help that Emily Padgett and Erin Davie, playing Daisy and Violet, respectively, are as charisma-free a pair of headliners as I've ever seen in a major musical production. In the original production, Skinner was a strong alto capable of riffing her face off, while Ripley employed both an angelic soprano and a fearlessly high belt. Padgett and Davie both sing like church sopranos, dull as dishwater. It's smart singing, perhaps, but never exciting. Their voices and physical presentation (both done up in mousy brown wigs) are so similar that it's often hard to tell them apart, much less care about their hopes and dreams, which they enumerate in "Like Everyone Else," a merciful holdover from the original production. The rest of the cast--which includes Ryan Silverman, Matthew Hydzik, David St. Louis, and Robert Joy in principal roles--is serviceable, if hardly captivating.

photo: Drew Angerer

Side Show will shutter on January 4, 2015, seventeen years and one day from the original production's closing date. It will have played even fewer performances than its predecessor. Perhaps, as was the case then, the closing notice will bring renewed interest to this struggling revisal. I'd say that you'd do just as well to stay home and listen to the vastly superior original cast recording.

[Last row orchestra, all the way to the side, TDF]

Pocatello



photo: Jeremy Daniel

Since his brilliant debut play, A Bright New Boise, had its New York premiere in 2010, Samuel D. Hunter's output has been both prodigious and prolific. At 32, he's already picked up an Obie, a Lucille Lortel Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. He's been averaging 2-3 new plays a year, including The Whale, a problematic, fascinating look at obesity and isolation, and The Few, a strange and satisfying little play that recalled early Sam Shepard. Time and again, Hunter has chronicled life in his home state of Idaho with the same gimlet eye that August Wilson once brought to Pittsburgh. All of which makes the spectacular failure of his latest work, Pocatello, so nakedly glaring. Set in a failing Italian chain restaurant (you know the one, even though it's never named), this boring and formless attempt at dark comedy is staler than a day-old breadstick.

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical

Beautiful is one of those shows I meant to see when it first opened, and then right before Tony time, and then right after Tony time, and then over the summer. . .  and then I just sort of moved on once I realized that (a) getting cheap tickets to the show wouldn't be easy as long as the Tony Award-winning Jessie Mueller was heading up the cast as Carole King, and that (b) I did not want to cough up a lot of cash to see a musical that was roundly received as sweet and diverting, if hardly brilliant.

But then, fellow-blogger and longtime friend Sandra got a special offer, and we leapt upon discount tickets to Beautiful like--well, honestly, like two middle-aged women who grew up listening to Tapestry and who are exactly the target audience for this particular musical would. The upshot? Beautiful is indeed sweet and diverting, if hardly brilliant. That doesn't mean I didn't tear up a couple of times, and chuckle genuinely at other times. An added bonus: Jessie Mueller remains in the show, as does a vast majority of the original cast. They remain fresh and committed and sharp, and I was glad to see them. Mueller is as strong in the title role as everyone in the universe has already said she is; I'd like to add that Anika Larsen, as Cynthia Weil, and Jarrod Spector (no relation) as Barry Mann, are particularly appealing and well-suited, too.

Asymmetric

Is all really fair in love and war? Not according to the thriller-comedy-love-story-political-commentary Asymmetric, written by the wonderful Mac Rogers, directed by the also wonderful Jordana Williams, and produced by Group UP and Gideon Productions at 59E59. 

Sean Williams, Kate Middleton, Seth Shelden
Photo: Deborah Alexander

As political commentary, Asymmetric offers a fascinating and important debate about the idea of "us" versus "them," with one character viewing "us" as the United States, our people, our guys, and the other viewing "us" as the human race, with no "them." I am struck by the fact that Rogers uses a woman character to embrace humanity and turn against drones and killing, despite (because of?) her previous close relationship with human destruction. Rogers is the second playwright this year to have a tough woman fight the idea of raining death down from the sky, and I have the same questions I discussed in that review (Grounded by George Brant):

... I wonder, does Brant believe that women, ... feel sympathy/compassion differently/more than men do? Is [the main character] supposed to be unique or representative? Or both? Would Grounded be the same if it were about a father rather than a mother? Men and women can be so different and yet so similar....

Sticks and Bones

The 1950s and early 1960s masqueraded as an innocent time in the United States, and nowhere was the masquerade more vivid than on television, with its faux perfect white families with their faux problems and their faux reality. In his deeply disturbing play, Sticks and Bones, David Rabe uses one of those families--Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky Nelson--as his canvas to show how America's war in Vietnam stripped the United States of its masks and revealed the confusion, hatred, and violence underneath. What raises this angry comedy to brilliance is Rabe's compassion for the faux perfect family as their willful blindness is destroyed when David, the older son, returns from Vietnam suffering from actual blindness.

Raviv Ullman, Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter,
Ben Schnetzer, and Morocco Omari
Photo: Monique Carboni

In a way, the main conflict in Sticks and Bones is between reality and denial: David can only survive with reality, and the others can only survive in denial. [spoiler] This is why the family is so eager to aid David by helping him to kill himself. It is not his pain that are seeking to end, it is their own, and they are all willing to have him die for their sins. [end of spoiler]