Spring Awakening

It's so great. It's the greatest musical of our lifetimes.

I was so thrilled to see this again. I counted every second until I was finally at the show. It was just as perfect as I had hoped. Better, in fact.

Since we've both seen it, I'll just talk about what was different in this West Coast premiere compared to Broadway. The female lead was much better. Stronger, less Mimi-esque and a lot more fun to root for. Melchior was BETTER- looked more like the other kids and sang SO WELL.

I think this show featured the "original" Melchior and Hanschen. Could be wrong? Can you verify? It said they debuted the roles on Broadway. Anyway, they were amazing.

The "My Junk" song was ten times more elaborate than I remember it- they added TONS- it was HILARIOUS. I could've sworn that the gay-makeout scene took place on the swing platform on Broadway... maybe I'm wrong? This time they just sat on the steps near the front of the stage and kissed.

Our audience was amazing. Ten minutes of laughter on every joke. It was SO FUN to see this show with such a vibrant audience!

The only other thing to add was that I noticed a line early in the show where Melchior is describing Goethe to Moritz and talks about this one story Goethe wrote called "-some girl's name- and Child." Melchior complains, "Everyone focuses so much on that story just because of an illegitimate child!" The lady in front of me was telling her husband that Spring Awakening's plot parallels that story- that was interesting- we should research that.

Anyway, I hope to see it a few more times before it leaves SF. It might be fun to try and score seats on stage too! Check out this review that dares readers to do what we joked about, sing from the audience!

The Mikado

I don't know how it's possible that I had never even heard of this musical, considering it turns out to be this classic Gilbert and Sullivan show. Well, now I've seen it, now I know.

This was not bad. It was good in fact. Put on at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, it was a very professional deal.

For a while I cringed at all the politically incorrect insulting-Asian jokes, but then you realize that they're in fact mocking England and so it's all ok. Despite knowing two people in this show (through Beth), nothing caught my attention until the Lord High Executioner, Ko-Ko, made his appearance and every scene from then on out was a joy! He threw his character around in a Jack Sparrow-type flamboyance, with a Jim Carrey-type self-consciousness that completely endeared the audience to him. I could've watched him all day and fortunately he was in most scenes, so it was great. The show builds on the typical Gilbert and Sullivan type misunderstandings and backwards logic and there were some fun fun songs.

Also kudos to the female antagonist (played by one of Beth's friends) who had a fun role as well and a great voice!

This show put a smile on my face. I'm glad I saw it.

A Chorus Line

I loved this show. It was incredible. It combines the excitement and tension of auditions with an interesting psychological back-story for each character. What better two aspects of drama are there to combine? I loved every minute of it.


I really liked how the director and his voice-from-the-megaphone was a character all his own, with his own story and his own baggage that slowly plays out over the course of the show. I really liked how simple and elegant this show was. I wanted MORE- I wanted to hear everyone’s life story. I’m not sure why they chose to have no intermission and make it all one act. I could’ve watched three more acts of this show and loved every minute of it.

I know I’m always complaining about plays that are about plays, musicals about musicals. But I actually found it really endearing this time to focus on the chorus members and show that even for a non-speaking role, so much passion and life has led up to this audition moment for each person and everyone has different motivation and drive. I’m a sucker for all of it. This was a great show for me.

I’m fairly sure they either preserved or recreated the 1970s choreography. It would’ve been interesting to see more modern choreography since disco-era dancing is now dated. But it worked. I also particularly liked the choice the SF Curran Theater’s version made to have giant rotating mirrors as the backdrop, which proved incredibly powerful for those of us in the balcony who now saw an entire theater reflected behind each dance number. Very cool. I never stopped smiling during this show.

Insignificant Others

Insignificant Others is a modern day "Tale of the City" about five friends who move from the Midwest to San Francisco looking for love and adventure.

Yes, it’s a familiar plot. Yes, they moved from Ohio. Yes, I really really wished they would bust out at least one verse of “Why-o Why-o Why-o did we ever leave Ohio?” and give props to Wonderful Town. No luck. Instead, we got this:

The Good

• It’s been a long-time dream of mine to write a musical that takes place in the tech world. I’d love to see some choreographed typing and dancing around cubicles and modern office spaces. This show took a stab at it and actually did a whole musical number involving modern rolling office chairs! It was pretty great actually, they did some fun choreography and cleverly danced around each other as they navigated their chairs into different patterns. Only four dancers and chairs though, and nothing else but chairs and them on stage- still it made me smile and I was impressed.


• The main character, Margaret (played by Sarah Kathleen Farrell) has to really hold this show together. As the red-head fag-hag, she does one outrageous musical number after another, each time raising the stakes, until eventually she’s acting out an S&M scene in full leather. If she had been weak, this show would’ve crumbled. Instead, she was having a blast on stage and helped us have a great time too.


• There were two songs I loved. One is the up-beat very fun song “Heterosexual” where Margaret belts out her joy at finally finding a guy in SF to date who isn’t gay. Bringing in a kick-line and taking this song entirely over the top, gets a laugh out of everyone. This is also the tune that stuck in my head and I was singing days later. Next, I thoroughly enjoyed the song “Plumbing.” Upon discovering that her straight boyfriend is actually a transsexual, Margaret sings a dark tune about “the wrong plumbing” while her backup male dancers hold up actual plumbing pipes in different patterns to spell and insinuate things during her song. It was an impressive clever way to pull off a dance number.


• This show is constantly chiding Starbucks every chance it gets. Starbucks becomes more and more powerful throughout the show, beginning to sell groceries, oil, and even Chinese food. The little riff they sing each time Starbucks acquires a new product line was alright. But after drilling it into our heads through the entire show, having the final Starbucks riff come when a two-timing boyfriend finds himself “so busted at Starbucks” is pretty funny.

The Bad

• I think the first rule of theater is that no one singing alone on stage should EVER put their hands in their pockets. Don’t give these actors pockets if they’re going to do that. Luke’s ballads should be strong and powerful, instead he came across as scared and insecure. Too bad.


• The first act ends with a car crash. The second act begins with a song whose chorus tells us that “time heals all things.” We as the audience naturally assume a death has happened. Imagine our surprise when we learn that our male protagonist has instead “moved back to Ohio.” WHAT? That made no sense.

The Ugly

• I have never, in my entire history of seeing shows, been more distracted by a set. This set almost single-handedly ruined this show. It was a cartoony/childish construction of the façade of some SF houses, with a stylized Golden Gate Bridge backdrop. One problem- it never changed. Whether they were in an office, Rainbow Grocery, Starbucks, their apartments, a nightclub- same set. They just stood in front of the very colorful, very poorly made, very unaligned and off-perspective set. The set screamed “don’t take this show seriously, this is a spoof, this is silly.” The show tries to throw in a lot of serious songs and moments, which is totally thwarted by the set. Other problems… when they would open a window from the set, it didn’t line up with where the painted window was. Intentional no doubt, but ultra distracting! The lines weren’t straight on any window, the bridge changed perspective angle halfway across it- I spent way too much of this show being distracted by this cartoony set. Even a minimal set or a blank wall would’ve been more effective than what they have. Considering this show has been running for over a year now, I wish they’d invest a bit more effort in the set.

If You See Something, Say Something

On Friday I got an email about a secret Mike Daisey show that would take place at noon on Monday. Daisey and his director/manager/wife Jean-Michele Gregory were back in New York for one day doing a new show at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater. They'd just been in Sante Fe performing a preview run of the show. After Monday's performance they were off to DC to perform the show there for a few months before returning to New York again in the October to begin a run at the Public.
How often do you get a chance to see a great show on a Monday at noon, for free? Not often enough I say. So I went. The new show is called IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING. It's about the manhattan project, but also about 1,000 other things. This monologue was even longer than the last one. I couldn't believe it. Two Hours he spoke. And a packed house sat and listened. It's really very satisfying to be in Daisey's audience. He gives you two hours of good, clean input. And it's interesting to remember that his shows are theater. He's peforming. He's not just reading a script. In fact there supposedly isn't a script. Just an outline. I like to go to his shows and walk out and think, if that was theater, what else could be theater?

How Theater Failed America

I hadn't heard of Mike Daisey until I read a review of his show How Theater Failed America in the NYT.  It's a one man show.  A monologue.  Him sitting at a desk and talking.  Whatever you want to call it.  Since I wasn't sure if I could make his show, I found an audio version online.  I listened to the first 5 minutes and turned it off, unimpressed.  But then about a month later I couldn't sleep, and my thoughts kept coming back to the article I'd read about Mike Daisey, and so I turned on  my computer and googled him.  It turns out he is incredibly prolific.  He started doing these one man shows in Seattle in the early 2000's.   I also saw that his show had transferred to a different theater and was still running.  So tonight, I went.  

The theater was packed.  I couldn't believe it.  Before I went to the show, I saw a few clips of another Daisey show on You Tube, and I kind of had an idea of what I was going to see.  I knew he would be sitting down and telling a story.  I had no idea it would last 1:45 minutes.

It was the most memorable show I saw this weekend, by far.  What seems amazing to me is that Daisey doesn't write a script.  He keeps a few pages of notes on the desk, and then just pretty much rants off them.  The show is a scathing critique of regional theater in America, but the show itself is an inspiring example of what theater can be.  It's a comedy.  I didn't laugh much, but most people around me did.  

He ends his show by saying there is young person in the audience who is going to make a lot of failures but who is going to do great things, blah blah.  He manages to pull it off without too much cheese, and it was kind of neat to think he might be talking about me.  Why not?  I'm a young person in his audience.  

After the show there was a panel discussion.  I guess each week after his show there are panel discussions with different themes and new panelists.  This week's theme was do-it-yourself theater, and the panelists seemed to have an impressive resume - the guy who wrote the book to Urinetown, a woman who took her solo show Well to Broadway,  and various others.  Now, I  tend to love panel discussions.  I love how people on panels always seem like they have everything together.  The right clothes, the right hair, the right vocabulary.  But this group of panelists didn't fit the mold.  They looked pretty sad actually, and pretty tired.  They didn't seem like any kind of role models to me, and I actually started feeling scared I'd end up like them.  I'd convinced a friend to stick around for the panel discussion, citing how much I loved panel discussions as a reason he should stay.  But in the middle of tonight's discussion I couldn't take it anymore and ditched my friend and left. It's such a shame.  Daisey's show was so inspiring.  I'm trying to erase the panel discussion from my head, but I can't really.  

'Tis Pity She's A Whore

Last night I saw 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Impact Theater in Berkeley. One of my classmates, Jai Sahai, was in it, so my other classmates and I went to check it out.

Good stuff, this show. It was written by John Ford in the early 1600s, so it comes across basically like Shakespearian English. Considering that, they did a great job putting a modern spin on this and keeping us interested.

Things that were awesome:

• The opening scene! With a modern hip-hop-esque song playing, the play opens with different characters in their own moments of time: the hitman/bodyguard is on his knees praying with rosary beads, a couple is having an affair, the lead female (Annabella) is pulling petals off a flower one by one. It all syncs perfectly with the music and feels like you're watching a modern live music video, especially when Annabella unexpectedly bites the head off the now-plucked flower on the last beat of the music.


• The chemistry of the two lead characters! Considering this play is about incest and love between a brother and sister, it would seem tempting to present this in a spoof way or have a couple "winks" to the audience. But not here. These characters act their hearts out until the passion they feel for their sibling is on par with Romeo and Juliet or any other epic couple. They handle the intimate bed scenes surprisingly well and do an amazing job of making us feel their passion for each other even in scenes where they're physically apart. Impressive stuff!


• The concentration! This theater is actually in the basement of a pizza/beer/sports place in Berkeley that is full of college kids. On the plus side, you can eat pizza while you watch the show. But at the same time, tons of noise and footsteps from above pour into the theater despite their best attempts to soundproof it. Therefore, major props to the actors of this show who were not only able to do challenging, emotional material and stay completely in character, but also able to pull our attention away from the college kids above and into every moment of this play.


• Jai! Not being biased because I know him, Jai completely stole this show in every possible way. He transformed his slow-to-mature character, who is being forced by his rich uncle to court Annabella, into a modern teenager straight off the streets of Oakland. With modern slang, modern movements, and a thoroughly impressive amount of energy; he springs off walls, bounces while playing video games, and jumps around in place, completely capturing the energy of puberty in a way to rival even the teens in Spring Awakening! It's an amazing performance and when he becomes the accidental victim of a poisoned dagger meant for someone else at the end of Act I, the entire audience is shocked to think we'll have to sit through Act II without him (I heard many audience members actually voice this complaint). Also, Jai does amazing death scenes, so it was great to see him get to do one in this show.


• The gore! This show has it all when it comes to violence; guns, knives, stabbings, knife fights, poison, hair pulling, and even a bloody heart on a dagger that drips blood onto the stage! The special effects were absolutely unexpected and impressive considering the low-budget feel of the rest of the show (check out the dagger-across-the-neck effect they handle so realistically here).
  
  
  
  I also loved how the director decided to handle the growing number of dead characters. The first woman to die at the start of Act II gets politely placed in the corner of the stage by the hitman/bodyguard. As the show continues, he keeps literally piling bodies in that corner, and it's a great visual since they then spend the rest of the show lying there dead. Nice job on the part of those actors who have to stay in place where they're dropped for the rest of the show!


• The extras! In a brilliant move, this director chose to add a whole string of young men to this cast who are not in the script. They have no speaking part and their entire job is to appear, one after the other, in every scene with the older mother. Each time, one of them stands near her, and often massages her neck, but they never speak. Basically, they just represent a string of "boy-toys" that the mother has and is constantly refreshing. It's so creative and effective and hilarious. Nice work!

Wow, I had a lot more to say about this show than I thought when I began writing this. :)

In terms of what didn't work in this show, I think Jai's character was SO strong and entertaining, that every scene he wasn't in felt a bit like a let-down. Also, he was the only character that was significantly "different" in the way he delivered the old-English dialogue. It would've been fun to see a few other characters tweaked (accents? pacing? mannerisms?) to add more variety and modern-flare to this show. But otherwise, it was definitely well acted and an impressive undertaking. Great job!

Octopus Revisited

I know it's cheating to do another post about Octopus, but I find myself with more to say about it and I also discovered some cool photos from the show that I wanted to post.

First of all, I'm amazed how much this show has stuck with me and stayed in my thoughts since I saw it. I can't remember the last time I was still discovering symbolism and finding new meaning in a show weeks later, just by replaying it in my head. Also, I can't stop telling people about it. For all those reasons, it deserves this second post. :)

Here is a great shot showing the way the water plays out on stage. This scene comes from about halfway through the show, so the water's depth will double before the show ends, but even here you can see how interesting it is to have the characters interact as their world is being flooded.



I just recently realized that the only window in the main characters' apartment is in the shape of a porthole! Nice.



Below is a cool shot from the scene that takes place on the bottom of the ocean floor. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this scene. At first I really wished this character would deliver his dialogue in a more surreal way, like from a "ghostly narrator" or in a disconnected overview type voice. Instead, he gives his monologue as if you were having a long talk at a coffee shop with him, very enthusiastically and sincere and it felt like such a contradiction to his setting. The more I think about it though, the more I think that's an effective way of getting at their message that we all face the "dark unknown depths of the ocean" in our daily lives and have to deal with "what lurks in the darkness."



On that same note, I'd like to take back my critique of the dialogue in this show from my last post. The more I think about it, the more I can't imagine this show without the rhyme and meter that it has. It really is effective and really is almost a character in and of itself. After some reflecting, I think more realistic modern dialogue wouldn't be half as effective as they way they have it now. I just wanted to officially change my stance for the record.

Meanwhile, the final scene in this play really deserves to be called out. Not only is the staging and acting brilliant in that scene, but the actual stuff they're saying is amazing- almost every line is jarring and powerful, and the culminating final moments are really some of the best I've ever seen on stage. The final line of the Telegram Delivery Boy is perfect, and perfectly met with what is happening to the other characters. I really can't give enough praise to how impressive this final scene is!

Ok, now I feel a bit better about having given this show the writeup it deserves. Hope you can see it sometime!

Passing Strange

Meet Stew. He's a performer from Los Angeles who's written a memoir show and brought it to Broadway. It's nominated for best musical. The show started out at Berkeley Rep, so maybe you already know something about it.

Plot Summary: Stew narrates the story, and an actor plays the young Stew. Young Stew lives in LA and doesn't fit in with his church. His mother bugs him. He decides that music is the most important thing to him. Then he moves to Amsterdam to be free. Then to Berlin. And then his mother dies and he feels bad. The end.

I went to this show because everybody loves it, and I hear nothing but praise for it. And yah, I laughed. I cried. (The actress playing the mother was amazing, and she was an understudy.) But I also rolled my eyes a lot. The best part was the beginning when young Stew goes with his mother to church and joins up with rebels in the church choir who smoke pot in their cars. This is when the show is the most fun. The show becomes annoying though when Stew starts tackling questions like "what is real?" and "what is art?" His answer is that "only art is real." When I left the theater I felt like taking a bunch of art and throwing it in the trash in protest. The very last line of the whole show includes the phrase "the real is a construct." Blah blah blah the real is construct blah blah. BLACKOUT. What kind of an ending is this?

I'm also wondering if it's possible to write and star in a Broadway musical about yourself that doesn't make you see so self-obsessed.

Port Authority

One of the benefits I hope to get from this blog is to retain my overall experience of the theater and movies I see a little longer.  Whatever it is I feel I've learned after seeing a show, or whatever catharsis I've had, tends to dilute over the walk home, and it's always such a shame. 

So tonight I saw Port Authority, starring John Gallagher, Jr, of Spring Awakening fame.  It's a collection of monologues told by three generations of Irishmen.   (It was very weird at first to hear John Gallagher speak in an Irish accent, but I think he did it well.)   Each of the monologues deals with falling in love and then not taking the opportunity to pursue it.  (I'm not quite sure if the "middle aged" character's monologue fits exactly into this mold, but you get the point.  Regret and love. That's what the show was about.)

Gallagher's character, Kevin, loves a girl named Claire.  Claire has a boyfriend and Kevin has a girlfriend named Trish.  Claire and Kevin are housemates, but Kevin never makes his move.  He decides there are fighters and there are people who go with the flow, and he thinks he and Claire both fit into the latter category.  He thinks Trish is a fighter, and so he resigns to being with Trish.  

It's the ho-hum, this-is-the-way-things-are attitude in each of the monologues that makes them so sad.  

Lee, don't let me turn out like Kevin!

Port Authority

by Conor McPherson

Octopus

Tonight I saw an interesting play called Octopus by Steve Yockey. This was its "West Coast Premiere" so I assume it's been out on the East Coast for a while. You should catch it if you can, it's definitely worth seeing.

Here's the blurb:

A love story rendered through a post-modern gay lens, Octopus examines the fallout of one night of lust on four men. This universal story of love, jealousy, and commitment commingles with a mysterious telegram delivery boy and a ravenous monster from the ocean floor.

There's a lot of cool stuff say to say about this play, as well as some things to critique. Without wanting to ruin it too much, I'll just make a list of what made it really different from anything I've seen on stage before:

• The opening scene involves a four-way full-nude make-out scene with four men. The eldery audience didn't quite know what to make of it.


• The use of water in this show was absolutely amazing and truly refreshing :). Not only would certain characters show up with water pouring out of their clothing somehow, but the set itself was slowly flooding during the entire show. This becomes more effective when rivers of water start running through the main character's apartment and soon a lake pools on the apron of the stage (clear plastic walls keep it from spilling into the audience). Quite a few dramatic arguments take place in this lake, and even a few fight scenes- which is a really satisfying thing to watch on a stage, with all the splashing! It was also fantastic when and how the characters entered and exited water to mirror what was happening in the story.


• I think most post-modern writing usually tends to bring in more and more surreal things to a normal person's life until chaos spins wildly out of control and it all spirals downward infinitely until the lights go out or the novel ends or someone dies. But to my complete joy, this play takes you into the depths of total chaos and insanity, but then pulls you out with a very satisfying and not despairing conclusion. Granted, it's no "happily ever after" but it's definitely a new twist and I thought it worked in a hopeful yet realistic way. A character grows and changes, rather than just "going insane" upon realizing his tragic flaws- which I never see!! It was great.

Now to be fair, I will add a few critiques:

• It was disappointing to have HIV be such a prominent issue in this play. For a play that is being lauded as "universal" and pushed as one of the few gay-themed plays whose characters could easily be straight and have the same script, I was definitely disappointed to see how much time was spent focused on HIV. I think this play would've been much more powerful if the "unknown" was left vague and although it still tried to keep that possibility going, there was far too much insistence on correlating "gay" and "HIV", in my opinion.


• Since so much of this play was modern-day and "every-day", it would've been nice to see the dialogue also more modern. It felt "theatrical" and "formal" and that took away a bit from the believability, thus making the surreal events less shocking and effective.

But all in all, still definitely worth seeing. Check it out if you get a chance! I'm curious how other directors/set designers would handle the water- I bet there are a lot of fantastic ways. I asked the lady-answering-questions-in-the-lobby how it was handled in the Atlanta version, but she didn't know.

Lee

The Birds

Tonight I saw a cool performance of The Birds as part of "Attack of the Killer B-Movies" at The Dark Room Theater.

Having never seen the original Hitchcock film, I probably am unqualified to review this. But instead I'll just review it from the perspective of someone who had never seen the film. The result being: it was awesome!

As you know, we debated how they would handle "the birds" themselves. To the joy of the audience, they used a variety of amazing techniques. The gull attack on the boat was a fake bird on a string. The birds flying in through the chimney was done with video projection and actors flailing. Some birds were done with flashlights and cutouts, other birds were never shown but just pointed at and described. The phone booth scene was done amazingly by Josh Lenn (my friend in the show) who used his hands to create birds and slam them into the non-existent glass. But my absolute favorite creative way they handled the birds was an opening scene in a pet shop, where actors held metal grates in front of their faces and used their own heads to be the birds. They would whistle and look this way and that, it was surprisingly effective and amazing.

Anyway, the show found a perfect balance of scaring us and making us laugh, all the while not taking itself too seriously and making great use of the tiny space they had for performing.

I also loved all the references to Bodega Bay and I'm so glad our own trip out there gave us a taste for the desolation and fear captured in this story. "You know what makes this fog so scary... ten minutes ago it was floating over the pitch dark Pacific Ocean."