Shame of Thrones: The Rock Musical: An Unauthorized Parody

There's good news and there's bad news.

Good news: Shame of Thrones: The Rock Musical: An Unauthorized Parody (what would be the point of an authorized parody?) largely succeeds in getting laughs--some big laughs--lampooning the oh-so-lampoonable TV hit Game of Thrones. 

Bad news: it's often difficult to impossible to hear what's going on. Only some performers have the voices to be heard unmiked; of the others, only a few performers are miked; the prerecorded music frequently drowns out the singers; and many of the cast could use lessons in enunciation.

In other words, get out of your own way, Shame of Thrones! Why take all that time to write good jokes and funny lyrics if we often can't hear them? (The music is by Erin Stegeman and Peter Frintrup; book and lyrics by Steven Christopher Parker and Steven Brandon; additional lyrics by Erin Stegeman.) I understand that budget is probably an issue. However, it would help a lot if the prerecorded music was piped from the back of the stage instead from four speakers in the auditorium, where it drowns out much of what goes on on stage.

Shame of Thrones is a pretty fun couple of hours and I suspect it could be a very fun couple of hours if all the jokes and singing could be heard.

The cast ranges from D+ to B+; happily, there are more of the latter than the former. The cast includes Ariel Barber, Peter Berube, Drew Boudreau, Jeff Bratz, Konrad Jeffrey Custer, Billy Finn, Mandie Hittleman, Zachary Evan Kanner, Randy Wade Kelley, Delilah Kujala, Allison Lobel, Ace Marrero, Meghan Modrovsky, Ryan Pifher, Milo Shearer, Kacey Spivey, Erin Stegeman, and Jay Stephenson.

The costumes (Katie Stegeman) are silly and imaginative, as they should be; the choreography (Jessica Anne Peavy & Brittny Sugarman) is, hey, silly and imaginative, as it should be. The set has little to do with the show, which doesn't matter.

I laughed a lot. I would recommend the show to anyone who knows and loves Game of Thrones. I would recommend it even more highly if the sound was improved.

Wendy Caster
(press ticket, third row)

Marine Life (Toronto)

After being stuck in bed with a cold, I could not wait to attend the next Extraspace production at my main mid-sized theater in Toronto, the Tarragon: Marine Life by Rosa Labordé.

Marine Life is a romantic comedy with a touch of magical realism that sticks an environmental activist in a love quadrangle--does she pick the planet, her brother, or her lover? Sylvia (Niccola Correia-Damude) is is literally caught by lawyer Rupert (Matthew Edison) in the first scene's meet cute--when his fishing line hooks into her neck instead of a fish's. As the two fall for each other, Sylvia's mentally unstable brother and one-man mariachi band John/Juan (Justin Rutledge) fights to maintain her full attention.

Nicola-Correia-Damude in show poster for Marine Life

I knew this would be an environmental show from the moment I entered the Tarragon Extraspace. Opaque styrofoam lunch boxes were clumped around the stage and growing out of the audience, almost like clouds or growths of unnatural coral. And if that weren't enough, the projection screen stage and backdrop started with a projection of the globe at the top of the show.

Usually a show so obviously about a political issue would have my "preachy show" sirens blaring, but Marine Life depicted flooding, protests, the effects of human activity on the world's ecosystems, and even directly call out our role in global warming without preaching.

Don't Feed the Indians - A Divine Comedy Pageant

Don't Feed the Indians - A Divine Comedy Pageant has inflated its title a bit. The La MaMa world premiere of Safe Harbors Indigenous Collective Projects was created and features an all Native American cast that proudly showcases each members' heritage on the bios displayed in the lobby.

Conceived, written and directed by Murielle Borat-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock) with musical direction by Kevin Tarrant (Hopi/Ho-Chunk), the show attempts to tackle Native cliches, from the alcoholic Indian to the bare-chested, feather-garbed performer by using vaudeville, dance, music and cultural rituals to show the stereotypes that were formed and are still perpetuated by the entertainment industry as well as the difficulties of being an Indian performer.

Don't Feed the Indians relies on its actors, posed as a group of traveling performers, to mix a loose tale of their showbiz experience with video montages and asides to both entertain and educate the audience. Unfortunately, the show merely brushes the surface of the many complex topics threaded through the dialogue. Names and phrases such as Leonard Peltier, Standing Rock, Wounded Knee Massacre, Indian Removal Act, Indian Boarding Schools become more a litany than a lesson since, often, no context is offered to connect the audience. Lines such as "Tribal members on reservations were not allowed to vote until 1970" give better resonance because they provide understanding -- and the show needs to do more of that. Lampooning the inequities of Native Americans without trying to explain the history more thoroughly is a missed opportunity.

Even the videos have no captions so the audience does not recognize what they're seeing. Yet, the script includes some commentary: for instance, "Hey Ya on Grammys, Rock Hudson in Winchester '73, Burt Lancaster in Apache, Iron Eyes Cody, Natalie Wood in The Searchers, Alana Sanders from 'Peter Pan Live,' Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. All while the Peter Pan 'Ugg a Wugg' song plays." Some of the delicious irony is lost here when the audience doesn't get the references.

Borst-Tarrant, who comes from a five-decade family business that did Wild West shows and pageants, shines as the drily humorous centerpiece of the play's show, Bea. Under her delivery, the rather tepid jokes find more fodder than they should and her rapport with her drum-playing husband is acerbic and delightful. Many of the skits in Don't Feed the Indians simply don't work, though. A bit called "Keeping Up With Pocahontas," where the family confesses to eating her pet raccoon one Thanksgiving is humorless and features screeching participants. It's unfortunate because Safe Harbors Indigenous Collective has a noble goal of creating a "new paradigm for the presentation of Indigenous arts and culture within the broader American theatre to combat stereotypes and support vibrant Native American communities." I hope their next effort is more successful.

John Scott-Richardson (Haliwa-Saponi Nation), Danielle Soames (Mohawk/Kahnawake Nations), Kevin Tarrant (Hopi/Ho-Chunk Nations), Nicholson Billey (Delaware/Choctaw/Creek Nations), George Stonefish (Delaware/Chippewa Nations). Photo by: Maya Bitan. 

 

The show runs from Nov. 2-19 at La MaMa's Downstairs Theatre (66 East 4th St.). For more information, visit http://lamama.org.

Illyria

Last season, Richard Nelson's Gabriel Family trilogy was a comforting beacon in a traumatic time. Watching the tight-knit Rhinebeck family mourn their dead, contemplate their future, prepare homey meals around a beaten wooden table, and talk--wearily, anxiously--about American politics in the months leading up to the presidential election felt weirdly, sadly comforting: these fictive people, like the real ones I sit amongst, have had the rug ripped out from them, but here we all are, strong and clear-eyed, together. I'm forever grateful to Nelson for that cycle, which made me a fan. So when the Public announced that it had commissioned Illyria, a Nelson play about the Public Theater in its very earliest days, I snapped up tickets as soon as they became available.

Joan Marcus

I suppose I needn't have been so hasty. Even though the Public is giving some of the tickets to Illyria away free in the lobby 90 minutes prior to every performance, the house during the performance I saw was about 3/4 full. I guess this is why I feel compelled to mention the obvious every time I write about him: Richard Nelson's plays are really, really, really just not for everyone.

They work for me, though. Illyria might not feel like quite the lifeline the Gabriel plays were a year ago, but I found it to be similarly comforting and moving just the same. Maybe it's the presence of more beaten wooden tables, or the food that inevitably appears atop them. Or maybe it's that the pretty ordinary-seeming men and women who debate, fight, plan, and kibbitz while sitting around those tables are all at least partly responsible for the beloved institution Nelson often writes (and directs) for in the first place.

Set in 1958, well before the Public was ensconced in its current home at 425 Lafayette Street and only shortly after its mobile stage unit broke down on the lawn beneath Belvedere Castle, Illyria depicts the organization's very early history without ever coming off too much like a Wikipedia page. Conversation, typically ultra-natural, steers clear of obvious exposition (one or two exceptions--"remember how we met? With that show at that time in that place? My, that was swell"--clash pretty clearly with the rest of the dialogue). Still, the play manages enough detail for audience members who know very little about Papp or the Public to make sense of what's going on. We learn, for example, that Papp (John Magaro) is stubborn, controlling and not an especially effusive or attentive family man (Kristen Connolly plays Peggy, the second of his four wives). We learn that he has recently been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and fired from his day job at CBS (not mentioned in the play: he entered arbitration to get the job back just so he could quit, because he was hilariously oppositional and thus a total badass). And we learn how singularly obsessed he is with realizing his vision of bringing free theater to the people of New York City.

Of course, we also learn about the Public in the process: its scrappy origins and its near-desperate reliance on up-and-coming white-hot talent like Colleen Dewhurst (Rosie Benton) and George C. Scott (never depicted, but drunk as a lord nonetheless). We meet some of its earliest champions; Emma Duncan and John Sanders are Gladys and Stuart Vaughan, Papp's first assistant and go-to director, respectively; their marriage is even more obviously doomed than Papp's is to Peggy. And we get plenty about just how rootless the organization is, and how shaky it is financially.

It's no spoiler to note that it all works out okay in the end, if not for any of the couples then most certainly for the Public. Nelson leaves Illyria's characters, tipsy and taking a moment to celebrate the closing of Twelfth Night, sitting together  and passing a flask on a rainy lawn in Central Park--strong and clear-eyed, together--at the site of what will eventually become the Delacorte Theater. Fifty years later, the story of the Public is still unfolding

Big Apple Circus

There are certain humans who seem to be their own species. In the case of circus performers, it would be homo sapiens amazingus. The Big Apple Circus is full of these wondrous folk, flying through the air, bending in ways the body seemingly cannot bend, juggling more balls than seemingly can be juggled, balancing in the air on a thin rope in a seven-person pyramid, zipping around on roller skates on a space barely bigger than a dining room table, and generally defying gravity, the limitations of the human body, and good sense.

Elayne Kramer

The Big Apple's claim to fame is its intimacy, with no seat further than 50 feet from the stage. It's a great way to watch circus acts, although occasionally a little intimidating, as when a contortionist operates a bow and arrow with her feet and you think, what if she slips? (At least your death would make all the websites, papers, and TV news shows.)

Cloud (Toronto)

As an indie theater supporter and huge fan of plays that stage science fiction, fantasy, and other genre work, I bought my ticket to Scapegoat Collective's Cloud as soon as I could.

Cloud imagines a world where technology--also named Cloud--can connect us to a new level of internet. Our individual consciousness becomes directly connected to the collective so we think and feel the same as everyone else who is connecting. Would the collective consciousness bring about world peace? Or would it strip the meaning out of the relationships that define us: friendship and love?

Cloud explores these hypotheses through three main groups of characters. The first group includes the first beta testers for Cloud: the creator Edward (Tim Fitzgerald Walker), his best friend Geoff (Jonas Widdifield), and Edward’s girlfriend Jessica (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah). After Edward convinces them test the technology and save its funding, the experience does lead to one awkward night of sexual reconnection, but then splits the three individuals onto separate paths as they try to cope with reality after they’ve been in the collective.

Roberts-Abdullah was my favorite part of the play. I enjoyed the way her constant cursing and presence threatened and challenged the two men. And I was not the only one cheering when she finally chastised Walker for casting himself as the savior in this dystopian epic instead of the Dr. Frankenstein he really is.