Queens Boulevard

photo: Carol Rosegg

The second play in Signature's Charles Mee season is a fairy tale which begins with a joyous and colorful marriage ceremony. The play-with-music gently questions how romantic love can be balanced with social responsibility, as Mee contrives a series of events that keep the newlyweds apart for nearly their entire first day as marrieds. Contrives is the operative word, regretably: although Mee scores many thematic points over the course of the intermissionless 100 minute play, and his collage style of narrative keeps things lively and layered with meaning, the play's events begin to feel manufactured. There comes a point when you just want to yell at the continually detained groom to get on home to his wife already.

The Eight: Reindeer Monologues

Jeff Goode's The Eight: Reindeer Monologues have a lot of creativity poured into them, but not enough energy to keep that overladen bag of toys in the air. Each reindeer is tethered to the same stockpile of jokes (although they each have different attitudes about it), but without a belligerent Santa breathing whiskily down their necks, they only manage to go in similar circles. Dasher (Robert Brown) tells us, in his best Tom Arnold impression, how the Rudolph thing was a fluke; Donner (Jason Unfried) uses alcohol to forget the screams of his retarded son, Rudolph, upon meeting Santa's "jolly old elf"); Blitzen (Rachel Grundy) speaks rationally as to why the reindeer need to go on strike; and poor Vixen (Jennifer Gill) "accepts" that Santa's rape of her was something she had coming because of her frisky lifestyle. Some of the actors explode onto the stage with memorable impressions, like the openly gay Cupid's (Peter Schuyler) dance to Electric Six's "Gay Bar," or the flamboyant Hollywood's (Geoffrey Warren Barnes III) cooler-than-the-North-Pole attitude about movie-making. But ultimately, the show is just low comedy, strung together with some reindeer ears thrown on for good measure (which, admittedly, is good for a laugh).

[Read on]

Queens Boulevard (the musical)

photo: Carol Rosegg

***1/2

Signature

(now in previews)

Though the writing is not as succinct and focused as the searing Iphegenia 2.0, the same uncontainable passion that explodes into music and dance also brings technicolor vitality to Charles Mee's latest production at Signature. As a newly married groom wanders the streets of Queens searching for a rare flower for his wife, he learns lessons about marriage, lust, life and love from the colorful characters who reside in the neighborhood. Many of the stories that our residents tell crackle with witty and keen observations and if perhaps one or two get bogged down in exposition or pat philosophy it isn't long before our play zooms along to the next pit stop on our hero's journey. Mimi Lien's scenic design, a cacophony of neon signs and cluttered shops, is spectacular- to the point that I audibly gasped when I walked into the theater. And as always when dealing with Signature, we have a perfectly cast production and a director (Davis McCallum) who honors the spirit of the playwright's work. I am very glad I got to see this production.

A Christmas Carol

Tiny Tim is a deejay for the town's radio station, Scrooge is a nerdy entrepreneur, Crachett is a woman. This modern-day Christmas Carol musical (currently at the Vortex Theatre) makes systemic revisions to the story, mostly in pursuit of satiric social comment. Although just about everything has been done to disturb the conventions of holiday-time stories (it's even set during a heat wave: one of the show's funniest moments occurs when a character proposes that everyone think of global warming as a new kind of Christmas miracle) the tone of the show is not abrasive or condascending: there's real invention here rather than nose-thumbing. Risky and rule-breaking, with edgy hybrid musical sensibilities that (save for one brassy show-stopping piano number for the Ghost of Christmas Present) have not the faintest whiff of Broadway, the show is "downtown" in the best sense of the word. However, it's stuffed with so many distortions and revisions of the oft-told Dickens tale that it loses narrative focus: we lose the forest for the trees.

Local Story

The plot of Kristen Palmer's Local Story would either be buried deep in some small town's monthly newspaper or found running in The National Enquirer, but either way, it lacks drama and truth. How else to deal with the entropic, meandering plot, a series of disjointed ideas flung across space and time to eventually coalesce in the nameless town and faceless homes of this play? One moment, Betsy (Keira Keeley) is in Colorado; D'lady (Sarah Kate Jackson) is on the road, talking about fate; and Jimmy (Mark David Watson) is calling after his lover to come back, if not for him, then at least to return his car. The next, Betsy's suddenly living with Gloria (Marielle Heller), a solitary figure with a penchant for strays, and Jimmy's shacked up with Bubba (Travis York), a man who hasn't left his house since his heart went idle three years ago. D'lady's the girl who broke his heart (for Jimmy), and Betsy's the girl who stole Jimmy's: oh, and every so often, the sky opens to rain down Betsy's dreams upon her (car keys, for example). If that weren't enough, Bubba's sister, Amory (Havilah Brewster) keeps nudging her husband, Roy (Ben Scaccia) for a baby, so much so that he sees ghosts on the side of the road. Nobody seems to like anybody else, nor to have a clue as to why that's the case, and Palmer's writing keeps getting lost in a moody wistfulness that is too much past tense, and not enough of the present.

[Read on]

Doris To Darlene

photo: Joan Marcus

First, there's the mid-1960's story that recalls Phil and Ronnie Spector, in which an obsessive pop record producer cribs a Wagner melody to score a "wall of sound" hit for his discovery Darlene; second, there's the story of Wagner writing that melody, while financed and coddled by his most obsessive fan King Ludwig; third, there is the contemporary story of a gay teenager who obsesses over Darlene's song while nursing an attraction to his high school music teacher, a Wagner buff. This ambitious but only occasionally successful new drama, which rotates and mashes-up those three stories spanning over a century, may want to speak to the powerful mysteries of music that language can not summon, but it is anything but mysterious: it spells everything out and doesn't risk anything as chancey as subtext. The playwright (Jordan Harrison) has the characters authorally speaking their thoughts in the third person nearly as often as they simply speak dialogue to each other: that's distancing rather than involving. It takes a long time to get used to the continual juxtapositions of the stories: I suspect that the playwright's aim is to make a kind of verbal music out of the rotation, but the dialogue is not sufficiently heightened to achieve that. For most of the first act we may as well be watching stick figures go round in a revolving door. The second act is better - a couple of the performers (most notably Tom Nelis, as the music teacher) are able to flesh out their characters and register as human beings - and the big moment that the play has been leading to undoubtedly works. But it would work a lot better if the playwright had more trust in the audience.