Venus in Fur

Photo: Joan Marcus

Most of Venus in Furs' critical reception has centered around the force of nature that is Nina Arianda, and on this front I have nothing but more praise to add. She is, quite simply, amazing. I say this as someone who is both enormously cynical and often willfully oppositional, and also as someone who has been hearing endless accolades about Arianda since Venus in Fur premiered Off Broadway in January, 2010. That's a lot of accolades. And yeah, she deserves them. She's dynamite.

David Ives's play, however, for all its twists and turns, ultimately didn't thrill me as much as Arianda did. This has probably been discussed to death at this point, too, but I haven't read much from a feminist angle. Which is odd, since the play--a play within a play, really--is all about gender and sexuality. Ives, a male playwright, has created a male playwright (and, from the get-go, an all-too-thunderingly obvious misogynist), who has adapted a play based on the 1870 novella Venus im Pelz by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which, in turn, is all about gender and sexuality. Ives's fictional playwright, Thomas, is frustrated as the action begins, because he can't find a single woman to convincingly play Vanda, the idealized dominatrix at the center of his play's action: they are all, he complains via cellphone to his fiancée, stupid, needy, and crude. As he's ranting, in gusts an actress, curiously named Vanda, dressed from head to toe in bondage wear. Much to Thomas's dismay, she immediately exhibits all of the purportedly feminine traits that he has just listed as most irritating to him.

But then the two begin to read, and lo and behold, this actress, Vanda, turns out to be perfect in the role of his character, Vanda. And Thomas gets drawn in--and increasingly aroused--by her interpretation, even as he becomes more and more confused by who, exactly, this woman is. Why was she not on the audition list? Why is her name Vanda? How did she get her hands on the script, and why has she already memorized the entire thing? Why does she know so very much about his personal life? As the show progresses, Vanda slowly but thoroughly subverts Thomas's preconceived notions about women; neatly demonstrates that he is the one who is stupid, needy, and crude; challenges the deeply rooted sexism in both the Sacher-Masoch novella and Thomas's adaptation; feminizes the playwright; and finally, we assume, destroys him. Also as the play progresses, Ives sees to it that we, the audience, ask our own questions: Does Thomas, the fictional playwright, represent Ives? Or is Ives Vanda? Where does character end and playwright begin? And what, exactly, does Ives think of Sacher-Masoch's work?

Ives is clearly well aware of the overwhelming meta-ness of his creation; it's obvious in the way he's constructed Venus in Fur. For all the sexual twisting, turning, subverting and reverting, Vanda is certainly the more interesting, sympathetic, compelling character, while Thomas is a real dickhead. Vanda makes mincemeat of Thomas and everything he stands for; Thomas, evil misogynist that he is, gets what he deserves in the end. Score one for women everywhere!
 
But see here, now: One can't eat one's male gaze and have it, too. And that's my problem with Ives's play. It was fun, sure, and there is nothing more thrilling than watching good actors make very physically and emotionally demanding roles look fresh, easy and graceful, especially two years into a run. But never for a minute did I forget that Arianda as Vanda--powerhouse though she may be--was being triply subjected: by Ives, by his fictional playwright, by the audience. It always strikes me as both kind of funny and kind of sad that feminism goes down so much more easily when its ideals are being touted by a woman who conforms to heteronormative perceptions of Western desireability. Call me crazy, but somehow, I just don't see this show flying quite as high or lasting nearly as long had the central female role been written for a woman who doesn't spend most of the evening in black lingerie, spike heels, and lacy garters. Call me a man-hating, ball-busting, frigid bitch of a feminist if you will, but the fact that Arianda is almost never wearing more than black, bondage-themed lingerie (well, okay, and a dog collar) while she strikes a blow for women just makes me feel sort of tired at this point.
 
As did the ending to the show. Ives's play spends a tremendous amount of time and energy admonishing its central male character to stop being so reductive when it comes to gender roles. I suppose that Ives found himself kind of stuck at the end, but his summation struck me as tremendously reductive, and thus a particularly crushing copout. This is not entirely fair of me: the questions Ives raises through the show are far too big to be answered neatly in one 100-minute play. After all, male social constructs loom long and large in these parts. And even though Thomas gets his just desserts, Ives alone is not responsible for coming to terms with the fact that Venus--and the very civilization that spawned her--were male constructions, too.

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