Fringe Festival 2015 Review: The Wreck of the Spanish Armada

1h 30m
VENUE #14: The White Box at 440 Studios
Performance seen: Sat 15 4:45

There’s a scene in the movie Real Genius where Val Kilmer’s character tries to fly a remote-controlled helicopter around his dorm room. When it crashes, he asks his roommate, “Would you qualify that as a launch problem or a design problem?” When the all-too-well-named The Wreck of the Spanish Armada crashes, it’s clearly a failure of design, though in fact, like Chris Knight’s helicopter, it barely gets off the ground before failing.

When a hotel bellhop, wearing Errol Flynn’s pirate garb from the Sea Hawk, lingers after carrying a woman’s luggage (five perfectly matched Samsonite cases, just to deliver a conference keynote), and then pours her champagne, and then pours some for himself, he’s clearly not a hotel bellhop. Yet she fails to recognize him as her former lover of 30 years ago—even though he has the same unusual name, Drake (as in Sir Francis Drake, of defeating-the-Spanish-Armada fame. Much—way too much—is made of this.)

The coincidences don’t stop there. In the intervening years, her eventual husband became an oil trader on Wall Street, and Drake has become a Somali pirate whose specialty is stealing oil tankers—not for reasons of revenge, because, apparently, the one was a husband and oil trader before the other was a pirate. I say apparently, because it’s impossible to make sense of the story’s timeline, though it’s discussed endlessly. Nor of the character’s motivations, though they too are endlessly discussed.

In fact, the entire play, except its improbable opening minute, and its bookend, an utterly nonsensical final minute, consists of exposition and explanation, much of it of backstory known to both characters.

Except what they conveniently don’t know. Or conveniently mistake or misremember. “Remember when I picked you up at the airport last night?” Drake asks, as if he were an airport redcap, instead of a hotel bellhop, and as if she had arrived at night, instead of in the morning on a redeye flight with a breakfast over Dublin (part of the improbable opening minute). Would that I could misremember, or just plain forget, this entire play.

Fringe Festival 2015 Review: ReLateAble

ReLateAble
1h 15m
VENUE #5: The Celebration of Whimsy
Performance seen: Fri 14 @ 5:00

I saw ReLateAble at its first showing and it felt, inevitably, unrehearsed. The largely excellent dialogue calls for a particular pace, and two of the actors had already mastered it, while the other two had not—one by way of being too frantic, the other not frantic enough. These are good actors, so this a temporary issue.

The bigger problem with ReLateAble will not work itself out with more performances. While individual lines of dialogue sparkle and shine, doubly so in the reflection of laughter and the obvious enjoyment of the audience, the underlying beats repeat themselves endlessly, never increasing through further conflict, never getting an closer to solution.

Ann’s old college friend Fran is come for a visit; her roommate Jon is expecting the imminent arrival of Paul, a potential beau he met just last week. Meanwhile, the entire city’s Internet is inexplicably down. Jon is suffering withdrawal symptoms generally and a specific need to track Paul through every conceivable social networking platform.

Only one story thread resolves; fortunately, it is the most important one, and it does so satisfyingly with a dizzyingly perfect speech near the end. (The play could end there but for one final nice joke.) But the playwright needs to track all the story lines and give them beginnings, middles, and ends—and create one for Fran. Early on, she’s the strongest, most interesting character, but she becomes a plot-needed functionary as a loose cannon, before losing all relevance.

Fringe Festival 2015 Review: Naked Hamilton

Naked Hamilton
1h 0m
VENUE #5: DROM
Performance seen: Fri 14 @ 7:30

For better and for worse, we rarely walk into a show without expectations. (So much so that this reviewer has devised, mainly for movies, a four-S rating system: surprisingly not dreadful; surprisingly not bad; surprisingly watchable; surprisingly good.) Fringe shows might be thought to escape the tyranny of expectations—there are no previews, and its small venue and audience sizes generate little word-of-mouth. Still, two expectations mar an otherwise enjoyable Naked Hamilton.

First, the venue, DROM, is set up with a working bar along one wall, and a long stage at right angles to it, with four-tops nestled in the L thereby created. (Fringegoers who saw the hit play “Who Loves You Baby?” a few years ago at the similarly-laid-out Bowery Poetry Club know how ideal this arrangement can be; the conceit of that show was that Telly Savalas had come back from the dead to do a nightclub show.)

The audience at Naked Hamilton, naturally, set itself up to optimally look at the stage. But since the story of is of two alcoholic former lovers rowdily hanging out at their favorite bar, the actors, naturally, played the entire first half of the show, and some of the remainder, at the bar. Many in the audience were facing the wrong way, and a pillar impeded the view for those sitting along the long back wall. An announcement by the venue manager before the show starts, and a minute given over to people reseating themselves, would help immensely.

The second expectation involves the show’s length. Listed in the Fringe guide for one hour, it barely went forty minutes. This subtly changes how one sees the action—for one thing, when watching the final conflict, one expects there to be at least one more to come. (If it seems unreasonable to build subliminal expectations along these lines, think of the experience of the diminishing thickness of the right-hand side of a book as you read it—which is important enough that e-book readers tell you how many e-pages remain.) Again, an addendum to the venue manager’s opening announcements would help.

The show itself embodies a noble idea—that the improvements of gentrification are (to use a word my cousin once invented) deprovements for pre-existing populace, attracted as they are to low rents or down-and-out environs. Tom and Tee’s beloved bar is closing early one night for a photoshoot. Already drunk, they protest, are locked inside, and the cops are called. Besides the imminent threat of arrest, they fear their home-away-from-home will close; almost as bad, or maybe worse, its clientele and character are already changing.

To do this as a two-person play is an interesting, not entirely successful, idea. It relies on an unseen and improbable bar owner, and magnifies the perennial dramatic problem of revealing backstory with two and only two characters, who know each other intimately. That problem is partly overcome by one character revealing a secret that may or may not be true. The veracity question is never answered, though, contributing to the abruptness of the ending.

Finally, while both performances were excellent, they were unevenly so. Sky Gilbert’sScott McCord’s Tom fills the room; he’s brilliantly inebriated and fully formed; it helps he has the stage (/bar) to himself for the first ten minutes. Suzanne Bennett as Tee cannot make herself as large with Tee, an effort not helped by an awkward signature gesture of a double-fisted double-armed rock-star arm raising.

Despite or because it is imperfectly realized, Naked Hamilton is well worth its 40 minutes—and would be even at 60.

Certified Copy Certified Copy

Is a perfect copy of The David as good as the original, if you think it’s the original?

Is the Mona Lisa just a copy of the woman it is a painting of?

Is a memory a copy? What if it’s not really a memory? And what if we simply don’t know? How does our knowledge—or lack of knowledge—change something?

In Certified Copy, an author, James (William Shimmel), has recently published a book in which he asserts that copies have their own integrity. As proof, if someone doesn’t know it is a copy, he is filled with all the same feelings of beauty and artfulness as is the person who looks at the original. In the opening scene, he gives a reading, eagerly (though only briefly) attended by a woman, Elle (Juliette Binoche). What is her interest in him? We wonder.

The thesis seems wrong, maybe even a bit absurd. At one point James looks at a newlywed couple and says they ought to know what lies ahead for them, that their happiness is an illusion they should be disabused of. What is the harm, Ellie asks him. And hasn’t he just repudiated the thesis of his book?

Partway through the movie, the two, having traveled to another town to look at a work of art—a copy, naturally—are mistaken for being married to one another by an old woman who runs a café. Elle, does not correct the error. For the rest of the movie, the couple—on their own, far from the café, continue the charade. But what if it isn’t a charade? Our understanding of the couple, our feelings for and about them, change depending on whether we think they have just met, or have been married for 15 years.

As far as reality is concerned, it makes all the difference in the world whether they are married or strangers. But this is a movie, a work of art. How we regard (look at) it determines how we regard it (assess it as a work of art). Is a perfect copy of as good as the original, if you regard it that way?

IMDb / Box Office Mojo / Rotten Tomatoes (88%/69%)

Hugo – short for huge letdown

Hugo’s ratings at Rotten Tomato—94% for the critics, but only 83% for audiences—is the first clue that all is not well inside this giant clockwork of a movie.

Look inside, and you’ll see a lots of gears that need oil—David Edelstein’s review for New York Magazine, for example, is counted as favorable, but to read it is to find more green splattered on the page than red. He concludes it by noting that Hugo tells his young friend Isabelle that

machines have no extra, unneeded parts, and if he were a piece of a machine he’d have a reason for being. We know, of course, that he is a piece of a machine: Scorsese’s Colossal Stupendous 3-D Thrill Generator. It’s not clear if the irony is intentional.

That hints at what Joe Morgenstern says directly, over at The Wall Street Journal:

thematic potency and cinematic virtuosity—the production was designed by Dante Ferretti and photographed by Robert Richardson—can’t conceal a deadly inertness at the film’s core.

That’s it exactly. The movie’s dialogue is so entirely on the nose, from beginning to end—as if it isn’t enough have Hugo explicitly say that people are machines and need to have a function, and he says it several times—with Isabelle finally replying, gee, maybe that’s what’s wrong with my dad. Doh! Marty, we got the point an hour ago when you made an automaton a central character in the movie.

Even the 3-D didn’t work for me. As it was supposed to, the effect heightened the distance between them when one person was closer to the audience than another, but the people themselves, especially the front person, looked like a cardboard cutout—two dimensional, in other words. And throughout, the 3-D was just plain distracting.

Then there’s the matter of the movie’s tutorials on the history of cinema. I can think of no one I would rather hear lecture on the subject than Martin Scorsese—and if he would deign to teach us, a thousand at a time in a big lecture hall at NYU for twelve bucks a night, sign me up for all of them. But I didn’t take the subway in the other direction to a theatre in the middle of Queens to watch Marty at his most didactic, channeled through the character of Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg). You know that public service commercial that Scorsese does for film preservation? That’s most of the third-act plot in Hugo.

Finally, speaking of film school—Screenwriting 101 isn’t too early to learn a handy little rule of thumb: The protagonist has to resolve the biggest conflict—the crisis—by his own actions. James Bond can’t just sit there enchained by Blofield until Felix Leiter comes to rescue him, he has to escape by his own devices. But Hugo’s final salvation—I’m not really giving anything away, because it’s inconceivable that this movie not have a happy ending—comes as he stands hopelessly in the middle of the train station until Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) saves him.

I have no doubt that Hugo will enter the pantheon of great films, as The Departed did. If only the Academy had given Gangs of New York the Best Director title it arguably deserved, we wouldn’t have to keep rewarding Scorsese for the disappointing movies that have followed.

IMDb / Box Office Mojo / Rotten Tomatoes (94%/83%)

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p2947-eH

We Need to Talk About We Need to Talk About Kevin

The opening scene of We Need to Talk About Kevin involve a bizarre giant mosh pit filled with buckets and buckets, barrels worth, of tomato sauce. It goes on and on. The viewer becomes impatient. Still, it continues.

When the scene finally ends, it gives way to not one, but a series of flashes of very different scenes, none long enough to make any real sense. Eventually, like a child being disciplined, it becomes clear that you need to sit still and take it. You’re not going to get any quick or clear explanations. You settle in for the long haul. You hope the payoff will be worth it. It is.

Tilda Swinton is just extraordinary, in a role that can’t have seemed even possible to play when reading the script. She’s the mother of a teenage boy who has done about the worst thing a teenage boy can do.

The other performers, notably Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller as the child and teenage Kevin, are exceptional as well. John C. Reilly is also excellent, but we don’t see as much of him, though it’s hard to know whether, or how much, that contributes to what finally happens.

The movie has no easy answers, no answers at all in fact, for questions that almost surely have no answer. How much discipline? How much love? How much is nature, and how much nurture? Can a boy be born bad? Can people living in the same household live in different realities?

Instead, it spends its time exploring these people, giving substance to things that can ordinarily only be talked about and never embodied—this particular boy, this particular mother, these other family members, and those other mothers, whose children were the victims of this particularly horrific event.

There is nothing wasted, nothing extraneous, in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Events unfold in three chronologies, shuffled like decks of cards (once the three stories sort themselves out, you’re never confused about which you’re watching): Kevin and his mom, from his birth onward; mom, and eventually Kevin, on the horrific day; and mom, and eventually Kevin, in the frozen, undead days and months that followed.

Tilda Swinton’s portrayal of a woman dragging herself through one day after another, in the shell of her former self, has to be seen to be believed. This story needs to be seen, not to be believed—nothing can make the unbelievable believable—but because it at least makes it it seeable. Few movies try something this hard. A very rare fewer still, succeed.

IMDb / Box Office Mojo / Rotten Tomatoes (82%/86%)

Short link: http://wp.me/p2947-er

The Big Heat: Fritz Lang’s Serpico

Straight-as-an-arrow police sergeant Dave Bannion has no truck with the corruption that surrounds him, until he finally has to team up with kept woman Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) to solve a crime and extract revenge.

The Big Heat, 1953

Police sergeant Glenn Ford is tough as nails, but has a heart of gold. Gloria Grahame is a kept woman, but has a heart of gold. Everyone else is a crook and a louse, except for the woman who works at the auto repair shop, and you can tell she’s a good egg because she walks with a cane.

The plot of The Big Heat is a straight line from the first scene to the end, with a single I-can’t-believe-they-did-that moment in the middle that’s telegraphed so thoroughly the they should save their money and put a first class stamp on it.

Still, even on an off day Fritz Lang can create eye candy out of nothing but lighting and camera angles. If you want to see Gloria Grahame when she has some real material to work with, go straight to In a Lonely Place. As for the other principal, he’s quite good here, but has there ever been a truly great Glenn Ford movie?

Trust

Directed by David Schwimmer; Written by Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger; IMDb / RottenTomatoes / BoxOfficeMojo

“Trust” is a hard movie to watch; it isn’t so much enjoyed as experienced.

A 14-year-old girl, Annie, falls into a relationship on a teen website with a boy, Charlie, who’s 16, then 20, then 25, then, when they finally meet and end up in a motel room, 35. The police get called in fairly quickly, but it takes much longer for Annie to see him for what he is, a sexual predator of adolescent girls.

Roger Ebert’s one-liner in his top 20 films of the year, on which it occupies number 17, is “The bravest thing about David Schwimmer’s ‘Trust’ is that it doesn’t try to simplify.” That’s a fair statement. It doesn’t try to simplify Annie, nor her father Will (Clive Owen, brilliantly playing a role that has almost no place to go), nor even Charlie, who is all the more creepy for how normal he appears, and is never demonized even as the audience, like Will, wants to kill him for what he’s done to Annie and her entire family.

Nor does “Trust” take a simple path even in its structure. It has a plot point number 1, of sorts, but not a plot point number 2, not least because it doesn’t really have a protagonist (nor an antagonist, beyond the demons in Will’s mind and, eventually, Annie’s).

“Trust” strikes something like false notes only occasionally, as the characters all too often are able to articulate exactly what’s going on with them in a preternatural way, but when it happens in the climactic scene, the words fit the characters like gloves and they give the entire film a prefect resonance.

“Trust” is eminently worth enduring. I don’t see nearly as many movies as Ebert, but for me, too, it’s one of the best of the year.

Fringe 2011 Review: I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe

I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe
1h 20m
VENUE #17: Manhattan Theatre Source
Performance seen: Fri 26 @ 2:45

Rating: 10
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

I don’t know how Dawson Nichols came up with the show “I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” but it’s fun—and might even be integral to its experience—to wonder that he did.

“I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” apparently started life as a fully-cast radio drama, but as a one-man show it opens with a man writhing on the floor while reciting a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. He stops to chat a bit with the audience, leading to the moment when he utters the title phrase. “Oh,” he continues, “I know I’m not Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe is dead. I’m not Edgar Allan Poe.” And yet. It’s not the hesitation of an irrational person unsure he’s not Edgar Allan Poe. It’s that of a rational person presented by a strange set of circumstances that are best explained by a hypothesis he knows must be false. Plato asks in “The Republic” how a just man can live in an unjust polis. So too, how can a man be rational when he has the bad fortune to inhabit an irrational corner of the universe.

“I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” inspires just such philosophical thoughts—on madness, reality, and the power of art to get under the skin of an entire culture and stay there for 150 years. It’s impossible to listen to “The Tell-Tale Heart”—and yes, in the most forceful moments of a tour de force performance, Craig Mathers recites all of “The Tell-Tale Heart”—without remembering having read it, even if it were years and years ago.

As he does, the barriers between artist and art begin to dissolve. Remember back to the story. Madness is expressed with such power and intimacy that it’s impossible not to wonder how the author could be other than mad himself. We have been wondering for half the play whether its central character is other than mad, and as he recites it— even though, within the context of the play, it isn’t mad to be doing so—the equivalent question about him becomes insistent, and then finally answered.

The miracle of the play is that for a moment we even wonder this about the playwright. For a moment—just for a moment, but for that one long moment—madness is expressed with such power and intimacy by “I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” that we wonder, how the author could be other than mad himself? This is powerful theatre.

We never wonder that about Mathers himself; indeed, it’s a tribute to his acting abilities that we never question his sanity. He is, instead, a perfect vessel for 80 minutes of fine madness.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: Noir

Noir

2h 0m (but see below)
VENUE #7: Connelly Theater
Performance seen: Thu 25 @ 8:45

Rating: 7
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

I liked “Noir.” I wanted to like it more. I wanted there to be more of it to like.

McQue (no first name), a big lug of a 1950s New York cop, is stymied in his ambition to advance beyond the level of detective, mainly held back by his jerk of a lieutenant, Norbert Grimes. McQue is also a little bit jealous of the department’s golden child, newly-made detective Clay Holden. Holden is in charge of an investigation of a sweet little murder, and McQue wants in on the case. Holden is also, though, involved in the very crime he’s investigating, thanks to a doll who’s not as innocent as she looks.

Here’s what I liked about “Noir.” (1) The central character of McQue, as likeable a private dick since Philip Marlowe in “The Big Sleep.” (2) The simplicity of the story—four characters: three cops and a dame. It’s all so efficient—a complete noir in an hour. Sweet.

Here’s what I didn’t like about about “Noir.” (1) McQue is far too likeable. The problem with “The Big Sleep”—and what makes it properly not a noir movie at all—is the lack of moral ambiguity in its central character. (2) The tight simplicity of the story. Part of the charm of noir is the convoluted plots. It’s possible to go too far—“Red Harvest” comes to mind, as does that all-McGuffin-all-the-time classic, “The Maltese Falcon”—but all things being equal, too much complexity is better than too little.

The two problems compound one another. McQue is not very believable as a big lug. For one thing, it’s made instantly and painfully clear in the first scene that he isn’t, and so it’s not believable that his lieutenant or anyone else thinks he is. Nor is it necessary for the story—it’s apparently his motivation for pushing himself into the case, which in turn explains how he’s on it, but is all this machinery needed? Couldn’t it have simply been his turn?

Given these limitations, Michael McCoy as McQue is perfect, from his voice to his physique. His character addresses the audience with knowing charm even as he addresses Grimes with contempt. I thought Andrew Dawson had some problems as Grimes, though they may be endemic to the part as written. The character spins long stories to make his points, rendering impossible the quick repartee we both expect from noir and get elsewhere (for example, when Grimes tells Clay, “You’re holding onto false hope,” Clay responds, “Is there another kind?”).

Author Stan Werse, an attorney in his 50s who started writing plays and screenplays less than a decade ago, does a generally wonderful job recreating the conventions of the genre, but he may need to make some tough choices between adhering to them or giving us characters with more complexity than an affectionate send-up can handle. Or maybe Werse just needs to go out a little bit further on the limb he has constructed.

If you were to plot the story’s complexity over time, it would slowly rise to about the 55 minute mark and then fall off a cliff. Five minutes later, it has wrapped up it’s entire plot in a single neat bow. The Fringe catalogue lists the show as running 120 minutes, not 60. Sometime between acceptance and performance, did Werse simplify the noir out of “Noir”?

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: When the Sky Breaks 3D

When the Sky Breaks 3D

1h 0m
VENUE #5: Dixon Place
Performance seen: Fri 26 @ 9:15
http://decadancetheatre.wordpress.com/

Rating: 7
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

On the Friday that turned out to be the last day of the Fringe, I was determined to see three shows, as I had on the Friday that the festival opened. That first night I saw COBU as the last show. It was a wise choice; the torrent of drumming and hip-hop dancing washed over the audience—the perfect thing to see at 9:45 pm. So last night I employed the COBU strategy and ended the evening with “When the Sky Breaks 3D,” a 3D-enhanced show by the Brooklyn-based hip-hop troupe Decadancetheatre.

Dance is already the most 3D of all the arts. As it turns out, when I put on the 3D glasses to best see 3D images being projected onto a back wall, the images popped forward in the way they’re supposed to, but the dancers in front of them flattened. Worse still, dance requires sharp lines, but, like the way a prism breaks up light, the 3D glasses turned the outlines of the dancers into rainbow blurs. In only one number, which featured complicated angular hand gestures (picture a hip-hop version of the sign language of the deaf), did that work to an advantage.

The 3D images consisted, as the show’s name would suggest, mainly of skylines and other cityscapes as seen looking upward. For me, the urban images served no particular purpose. I suppose cornfields would have been incongruous with the hip-hop music but they would have been no less integrated with the dance.

There were only a couple of points in the show that offered the hoped-for integration. In one, the dancers, facing away from the audience, run in slow motion through a beautiful blue sky. In my favorite piece, the finale, which was a sort of ecstatic urban rain dance, raindrops fell onto the dancers quite believably. In other numbers, however, the backdrop was ignorable or worse—occasionally images were faintly projected onto the dancers’ grey shirts.

There was little integration between the music and the dancing, either—nothing that went beyond matching steps to the beat, and one number, to Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” didn’t even do that. The audience didn’t seem to care one whit, though, as it rewarded break-dance body sculpture moves, poses, and spins with applause and whoops of glee—as it did for just about every number.

The music was terrific throughout and there’s no having a bad time watching human forms in coordinated motion to it, but I think the 3D hindered the show at least as much as it enhanced it. Technologists have taken on the challenge of large-scale glasses-free 3D (it already works for handheld game devices); when it works not just for the living room but the dance stage as well, Decadancetheatre will really have something.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Master List of New York International Fringe Festival 2011 Reviews

NOTE: The Fringe has cancelled all shows for Saturday and Sunday, 27-28 August.

It also announced a first round of shows to make the Fringe Encore series:

The 2011 series will include PigPen Presents the Mountain Song, The Legend of Julie Taymor, Fourteen Flights, The More Loving One, Facebook Me, Araby, Paper Cut, You Only Shoot the Ones You Love, Parker & Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End Of the Rainbow, Pearl’s Gone Blue, Felony Friday, COBU, and several more shows yet to be determined (including the TheaterMania Audience Favorite Award Winner). A complete schedule of performances and showtimes will be announced Sunday, August 28.

Four of those shows are reviewed below.

Useful links:

Fringe Festival search/database

NYTheatre.com Fringe Reviews

Broadway World thread

Here are all my reviews to date:

Yeast Nation (the triumph of life)
2h 30m
VENUE #9: The Ellen Stewart Theatre @ LA MAMA
Rating: 10

Fourteen Flights
2h 30m
VENUE #3: CSV Kabayitos
Rating: 10

PigPen Presents: The Mountain Song
1h 0m
VENUE #12: 4th Street Theatre
Rating: 10

I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe
1h 20m
VENUE #17: Manhattan Theatre Source
Rating: 10

COBU
VENUE #14: Bleecker Theatre
0h 45m
Rating: 9

74 Minutes of Stereo Radio Theater
1h 15m
VENUE #18: The Studio at Cherry Lane Theatre
Rating: 9

Who Loves You, Baby?
0h 50m
VENUE #13: Bowery Poetry Club
Rating: 9

Life Insurance
0h 37m
VENUE #17: Manhattan Theatre Source
Rating: 9

Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage
2h 0m
VENUE #14: Bleecker Theatre
Rating: 8

Felony Friday
2h 15m
VENUE #7: Connelly Theater
Rating: 8

The Bardy Bunch: The War of the Families Partridge and Brady
1h 40m
VENUE #9: The Ellen Stewart Theatre @ LA MAMA
Rating: 8

The Eternal Husband
1h 15m
VENUE #8: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMA
Rating: 8

The Toughest Girl Alive!
1h 50m
VENUE #15: Le Poisson Rouge
Rating: 8

leonard cohen koans
1h 15m
VENUE #15: Le Poisson Rouge
Rating: 8

The Apartment: A Play With Four Sides
1h 15m
VENUE #1: Teatro SEA
Rating: 7

22 Stories
0h 45m
VENUE #10: IATI Theater
Rating: 7

When the Sky Breaks 3D
1h 0m
VENUE #5: Dixon Place
Rating: 7

Noir
2h 0m (really 1h 0m)
VENUE #7: Connelly Theater
Rating: 7

Virgie
1h 0m
VENUE #13: Bowery Poetry Club
Rating: 6

Wilhelmstrasse
1h 55m
VENUE #8: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMARating: 6

Bette Davis Ain’t For Sissies
1h 10m
VENUE #3: CSV Kabayitos
Rating: 5

Chagrin
1h 0m
VENUE #8: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMA
Rating: 5

WHALE SONG or: Learning to Live With Mobyphobia
1h 15m
VENUE #8: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMA
Rating: 5

Rachel Calof
1h 30m
VENUE #2: CSV Flamboyan
Rating: 4

The Day the Sky Turned Black
0h 55m
VENUE #10: IATI Theater
Rating: 3

Em O’Loughlin was a BIG FATTY BOOMBAH!
1h 0m
VENUE #16: Players Theatre
Rating: 3

Fringe 2011 Review: Leonard Cohen Koans

leonard cohen koans

1h 15m
VENUE #15: Le Poisson Rouge
Performance seen: Tue 23 @ 7:15
Remaining performances: Fri 26 @ 8:30 Sat 27 @ 3
http://www.aliandthethieves.com

Rating: 8
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

If you were going to select an artist to create a show “built from our personal responses to the essences of the stories being told in his work,” in which “the arrangements cross genres and are interwoven with selections of his poetry and prose,” it’s hard to imagine a more likely oeuvre than that of that iconoclastic poet, songwriter, raconteur, singer, and occasional mystic, Leonard Cohen.

I’m a bit of a Leonard Cohen fan. I’ve watched the documentary “I’m Your Man,” several times. His two songs on k.d. lang’s “Hymns of the 49th Parallel” are my favorites. I can remember the first time I ever heard “Suzanne.” I have a favorite version of “Hallelujah” (Rufus Wainwright’s).

And most importantly for a prose writer like me, Cohen writes like a writer. Despite everything that Sondheim says about the differences between lyrics and poetry, Cohen’s lyrics read like poetry, and, more than any other kind of poetry, they read like prose poems.

Who else could represent freedom with the image of “a drunk in a midnight choir”? Or a woman’s hair as having been woven on a loom “of smoke and gold and breathing”? Who writes songs infused with Biblical references—Jesus walking on the water, David, Babylon, and a man weakened when a woman cuts his hair—and blowjobs?

For that matter, how many Jewish Canadian songwriter-poets have a Zen master? And I didn’t really know that much about Cohen’s poetry or his philosophy. I looked forward to a show that connected the many chain links of such an artist. It would be like fusing the theatrical existentialism of “The Flies” with the academic existentialism of “Being and Nothingness.” But with music!

Unfortunately, music is just about all there was. Twelve songs in 75 minutes. That doesn’t leave much room for Ali Hughes and her Thieves to “explore the work of Leonard Cohen, infusing his poetry, prose and song with their intricate, and very personal, elixir,” as the Fringe description promised.

The songs themselves were terrific, and Hughes and her musical director, pianist, and all-around collaborator, Daryl Wallis, have reached into the Cohen oeuvre to pull out a bunch of lesser-known works, including only a few favorites and ignoring some others.

Four songs in the show (Avalanche, Winter Lady, Lady Midnight, and Feels So Good)—fully one-third of the twelve-song playlist—are not among the 31 songs in the album “The Essential Leonard Cohen.” And going the other way, of the album’s five most popular songs, as judged by iTunes, two weren’t in the show (“Hallelujah” and “Everybody Knows”), nor is the other k.d. lang cover, “Bird on the Wire.”

(Here’s the complete song list, at least the night I attended, as best I could get them commited to notes: The Guests / Avalanche / Dance Me To The End Of Love / Chelsea Hotel No. 2 / Sisters Of Mercy / Winter Lady / Lady Midnight / Famous Blue Raincoat / I’m Your Man / Suzanne / Feels So Good / If It Be Your Will.)

The show was essentially a cabaret act with a veneer of Cohen as interstitial material. A Zen koan started and ended the show (a single koan, with a 70-minute cliffhanger), another koan was related, a few random Cohen quotes, and a couple of lines of “Hallelujah” made their way into “Feels So Good,” medley-style. Other than that, it was all songs, all the time. Even the song selection itself seemed to favor the love songs of a cabaret act, instead of the more story-oriented songs of a philosopher-poet.

The part of the show that perhaps best followed its description was the very center. Hughes told a koan about a couple that elope and, years later, return to the home of her disapproving parents. It was followed by two of the most story-like songs of the evening, “Winter Lady” (which seems to contradict the koan), and “Lady Midnight” (which reinforces the question of the koan).

Musically, “Suzanne” was by far the most interesting. I could imagine a hundred other singers singing most of the songs in much the same way Hughes did, but on “Suzanne” her voice snaked through the lyrics in unique ways, for example going up instead of down when bridging the two parts of the line, “all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them.”

“I’m Your Man” was even more successful. Throughout, the musicians were exceptional and the two thieves (Marty Thomas and Chris Dilley) sang flawlessly, but for this number, all five elements of the music matched perfectly: the piano, bass, drums, backup singers, and lead vocal.

Hughes herself has a beautiful voice, and made a striking appearance. A tall 30something honey blonde woman, she wore a black dinner jacket with just a leotard or camisole barely showing itself underneath, black stretch pants, and black high-heeled open-toe bowtie patent leather pumps. I was disappointed in “Leonard Cohen Koans” as a Fringe show, but I would see her cabaret any time.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: The Toughest Girl Alive! (Candye Kane)

The Toughest Girl Alive!

1h 50m
VENUE #15: Le Poisson Rouge
Performance seen: Tue 23 @ 9:15
Remaining performances: Fri 26 @ 5:45 Sat 27 @ 7:45
http://www.candyekane.com/

Rating: 8
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

For most of her life, singer and sex star Candye Kane was told if she would just slim down she’d be perfect. As a longtime aficionado of the female form, I beg to differ. As a longtime aficionado of theatre, however, it’s pretty much dead on when it comes to her autobiographical show, “The Toughest Girl Alive!”: if the last half hour could go on a diet and exercise regimen, the show would be just about perfect.

Here are some of the elements of her perfect show: Great singing (both country and western, and blues), great honesty, and a great story of genuine aspirations and enormous obstacles in the way of achieving them. Candye’s desires aren’t so unusual; she wants a singing career, and she wants love. Nor are the two unrelated. She explains (twice, for some reason) that when she was 6, she learned she could get people to like her by singing.

What’s unusual is two things. First, she’s almost completely uninhibited. She starts working at a young age on a sex phone line and soon is posing for girlie magazines. (I may have the order wrong—Candye unfortunately jumps around chronologically without much in the way of signposts along the way. I asked the three people I sat with, and they all had the same problem I did.) Second, she’s overweight, normally a problem in building a career in show business. She perseveres, however, and helps create a niche within the porn industry for large women.

The obstacles in Candye’s twin paths to music and love are epic. An abandoning father, an alternatingly loving and cruel step-father, exploitive photographers and producers, gang violence, teenage pregnancy, a suicide attempt, the premature birth of her son, drug dependencies, prostitution, abusive boyfriends, a music manager with a conflicting and unrealistic vision of her career, more pregnancies, and throughout, a psychologically abusive mother and physically abusive men.

There are also high moments as well—her first magazine cover (Juggs Magazine), high-paying stripping gigs, the health of her low-birth-weight son, relationships that work out, at least for a while, great friendships, and the way Candye gets closer and closer to a record deal with a major label, which provides a much-needed narrative thread through the ups and the downs. Also helpful were the many photographs of Candye throughout her varied career. Her extremely public life is documented in way that is common only now that we have cellphone cameras, blogs, and Facebook.

Toward the end of the show, unfortunately, Candye begins to preach to the audience, against the censorship of large breasts, the anti-choice movement, and the criminalization of sex work (“We should outlaw poverty, not prostitution”), to name just three occasions when Candye breaks faith with the particulars of her story. It’s not only untheatrical and counterproductive, it also serves no purpose. The audience has no trouble drawing these lessons from Candye’s wayward life.

This represents the only major flaw in an otherwise stellar show. The minor flaws include the hard-to-follow chronology, and a similar difficulty in sometimes understanding who is who. Scenes from Candye’s life are enacted by her with the aid of two excellent singer-actors, Robert Kirk and Bethany Slomka. They necessarily represent many people over the course of Candye’s life story, but the two women in particular jump from person to person like body-snatchers being chased through a crowd. In one scene, for example, Candye plays herself until Slomka says, “Your mother and I,” at which point we’re supposed to understand that Slomka is Candye’s grandmother and Candye is now her own mother. (At least, that’s what I think happened.)

Kirk and Slomka have beautiful voices and do an excellent job of distinguishing by gesture, volume, and accent the many people they’re portraying. The live band (bass and lead guitar, drums, and keyboards) was excellent as well. Much praise is also due Javier Velasco, who wrote the story. It’s common in publishing that an autobiographical story is written by someone else, but rare in theatre. Here, as there, it seems to be a good idea. The story is well shaped and has a powerful arc.

Candye is a terrific singer in both her genres, and something like this show would easily work well as cabaret with the story reduced to patter—especially easy to imagine in the lounge atmosphere of Le Poisson Rouge. As a full-blown narrative, though, it’s perfect for the Fringe.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: Wilhelmstrasse

Wilhelmstrasse

1h 55m
VENUE #8: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMA
Performance seen: Wed 24 @ 4:15
Remaining performance: Fri 26 @ 2
http://www.stuartsvault.com/

Rating: 6
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

Here’s a description of the show that it seems Stuart Caldwell wanted to write in “Wilhemstrasse”:

A 1990s friendship between a Samuel, a New York Jewish man and Rica, a German woman, never tips into romance in this story that moves forward toward its dramatic and backward to its beginning, as the differences pulling them apart prove stronger than the attraction that pulls them together.

Here’s the show as Caldwell himself describes it in his Fringenyc.org description:

A provocative relationship between a beautiful German girl and sarcastic New York Jew probes art, sexless love and the struggle to comprehend the Holocaust and its enduring stigma. Part travelogue, part polemic on identity, religion and the Past’s binding ties.

I trust it’s obvious that that’s not a show, nor would it be even if the relationship were provocative (which it isn’t), even if the guy were sufficiently sarcastic (he isn’t), and even if the show probed art and sexless love (which it doesn’t and doesn’t).

Before I create the impression that I hated this show, which I didn’t, let me first say it fills me mostly with frustration at what it could have been. The idea of the show is fine: a two person play in which a Jewish man’s inability to forgive the Germans for their Nazi past is embodied in his inability to regard a German woman he cares deeply for more as an individual person than a member of the German people.

There, are, however, a couple of other constraints that Caldwell placed on his story, and they prove to be its undoing.

First is that this is not a romantic relationship. It’s all fine and well for Caldwell to want to explore friendship instead of romance, but the problem then becomes, what’s at stake for these two people? Samuel seems to want a romance, though with an uncertain intensity of desire—by which I mean, we never really know how much he wants it (and by the way, I suspect we don’t because Caldwell himself doesn’t know)—and she unequivocally doesn’t want it.

Worse, because the story unfolds forward and backward in alternating scenes, with the penultimate scene being their last time together, and the final scene being the time they met, the play starts in the middle and we instantly know that there will be no romance for them.

So what’s left? Some kind of friendship. But to sustain a two-hour show such as this one, it has to face obstacles, and they must want it very much.

Here again, Caldwell’s decision to tell the story forward and backward compounds his problems. The scene that clearly shows the wit, charm, regard, and growing affection between them falls in the second act; then too, the obstacles are all in his head. They are internal to him, making them literally invisible to us, and they leave her out of the conflict except to be its object. Rica never, for example, has to make a choice—say, one between her prestigious and exciting lawyering job at the Volkwagen company that employed slave labor in the Nazi era and now is dragging its heels over reparations, and her growing love for Samuel.

As the beginning of this review might suggest, my reaction to this play in its first couple of scenes was a fairly violent hostility, and I came within an inch of the exit at the intermission. My initial thought was to blame the actors, specifically Nick Masson as Samuel. His every line was preceded by a pause, or followed by one, and often both occurred in the same piece of dialogue.

I still think Masson is wrong for the part, but I don’t think that’s the bigger share of the problem. Frankly, the acting in the Fringe is almost uniformly fine or better, and actors are invariably held back from better performances by the limitations of their material. Sure enough, my inclination now is to blame the play. Masson is fine whenever a scene has some rising beats of conflict. Most of the time, he just doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Giordona Aviv seems a very good actress—again, as much as she can be with a part that ought to be filled with a protagonist’s actions and dilemmas, but instead is mostly standing around watching the Samuel character wrestle with the demons in his head.

In the end, I’m glad I stuck it out. There are some good moments in this play, and they’re almost all in the second act. The storyline ends with a whimper, not a bang, but then, there weren’t many bangs along the way.

It’s a pity. The basic idea of the play still seems sound to me. But sometimes you need to let your basic chrysalis of an idea shed the cocoon of whatever other ideas you had, and fly where it wants. If the impetus was autobiographical, as several theatregoers around me hypothesized, then sometimes you have let go of that as well.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: Theatre of the Arcade

Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage

Rating: 8
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

2h 0m
VENUE #14: Bleecker Theatre
Performance seen: Sat 20 @ 4:30
Remaining performance: Sat 27 @ 7:45
http://www.theaterofthearcade.com/

“Theatre of the Arcade” is a very clever and well-played (pun intended) show. Each of its five scenes (with one intermission) constructs a story out of two themes—the actions, characters, and objects of a classic arcade game, and an iconic theatrical work.

Sadly for me, I’m not in the target audience for this show. I got the theatrical references (well, all but one), but other than a single afternoon spent playing air hockey with my daughter, I’ve never even stepped into a game arcade.

My knowledge of Frogger (the arcade game for the first segment), for example, is limited to a classic Seinfeld episode about it. I sort of understood, that Donkey Kong was the game in the second segment, which was the best realized, I think, as a piece of theatre (it used “A Streetcar Named Desire” as its starting point, with the Stanley Kowalski as an out-of-work barrelmaker). I enjoyed the fourth segment almost as much; it uses some kind of Spacewar game (Asteroids, as it turns out) to reimagine one of my favorite plays, “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Though it went on a bit too long, the Mamet-like dialogue was spot-on.

The audience, fortunately, seemed in the main the right one for this show, and seemed to like the final segment the best. I thought the videogame references were too explicit—I didn’t get a single one of them, but could tell they were explicit references (to Super Mario Bros, as it turned out. And I never got the theatrical reference, though a friend thought it was something by Sam Shepard, maybe “Fool for Love”)—but the audience seemed to love them. By not naming the game, apparently they could serve as punchlines to an ongoing joke.

This is, in short, a tremendous show for anyone with at least a passing understanding of the arcade games and at least an okay show for anyone else.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: Felony Friday

Felony Friday

2h 15m
VENUE #7: Connelly Theater
Performance seen: Sat 20 @ 7:15
Remaining performances: Wed 24 @ 9:15 Sat 27 @ 4 Sun 28 @ 3:30

Rating: 8
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

Few plays, at the Fringe or elsewhere, approach complicated themes, like the ambiguous nature of evil, or man’s eternal quest for salvation, with as much confidence as “Felony Friday.”

Paul Giaciomatti, scion of a New York crime family, finds himself locked up for the weekend after cops plant drugs in the trunk of his smashed-up car on a Friday night. It seems Paul and his cousin Tony have been reducing the number of the devil’s minions by killing killers and rapists, a la Murder, Inc. Their latest victim is Jack, a corrupt cop who raped Paul’s cousin Angela, and it’s in Jack’s body that Paul is visited by one of the devil’s top lieutenants.

The others in the lockup include a transvestite hooker and his john; BBI, an ex-boxer; and a hippie dude replete with a Castaway/Gump beard, a joke that is exploited endlessly, mostly to good effect.

After a reasonably brief prolegomenon in which each character is introduced with a moment in the spotlight, the real action begins with the arrival of Jack, played brilliantly by the play’s author. I don’t know if Scott Decker does as well with roles he doesn’t himself create; if he does, I want to see everything he ever performs in.

Unfortunately, the play’s second act goes much like the first, except that it takes much longer for Jack to return on stage, a digression that feels yet longer still because this time around we’ve already been privy to Decker’s magnetic pull and are impatient for its return.

The digression consists of little more than an extended, and quite tired, riff on race relations and the words we use for race, occasioned by the twin introduction to the lockup of a new inmate, CJ, and Paul’s cousin Tony, who has contrived to get himself locked up in order to help Paul battle Jack. The play comes to a grinding halt as we consider the reasons blacks can use the n-word while whites cannot. Yawn.

All of the actors stumbled over their lines in this performance, especially John Amos as BBI, the ex-boxer. While the inevitable kinks of opening night surely played a part—in Amos’s case especially, because he came to the play only a few weeks earlier—I think there was another reason.

The worst stumbles occurred in this first half of Act II and I think it’s precisely because the material is so aimless. The cast, led by Joe Wissler as Paul, is uniformly excellent, and Amos in particular is a fine actor who surely would have no trouble memorizing a relatively small part. But without any beats to go on, some of the lines sound similar to others, and it must be easy to get lost.

Better would be to just lose the additional character, CJ (well played by Jas AndersonJaime Smith), get Tony into the action right away, find some other, less artificial way to engage BBI in the story, and get Jack back on stage quickly.

If, in the course of losing this mostly useless material, the play shed a few of its 135 minutes, so much the better—indeed, it could be tighter all around. For example, there’s a terrific set of jokes early on riffing on nicknames in general and prison nicknames in particular. But then it’s dropped—Paul is never even referred to by the new name he has negotiated for himself. A play is not a novel. These kinds of digressions are self-indulgent luxuries that can’t be allowed to make the editorial cut. Every gun, not just the one above the mantel, has to go off.

When the play finally shifts out of neutral, it picks up speed quickly, and by the end is flying down the highway as quickly as it did in most of Act I. The action builds nicely, the revelations explode as they should, and the ending is one of those shocks that come as no surprise. It also left me thinking, as it intended to, about retribution and redemption.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: Yeast Nation

Yeast Nation (the triumph of life)

2h 30m
VENUE #9: The Ellen Stewart Theatre @ LA MAMA
Performance reviewed: Sun 21 @ 2:15
Remaining shows: Mon 22 @ 8:15 Tue 23 @ 8 Thu 25 @ 2
http://www.yeastnation.com/

Rating: 10
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

“Yeast Nation” is nothing like “Urinetown,” yet it’s destined to be the next “Urinetown.”

Like “Urinetown” it’s an absurd story requiring a simple disbelief easily suspended, and, like “Urinetown,” once suspended, the plot hangs together surprisingly well. (“Urinetown” in particular is as complicated and tight a story as “The Sting” or “Three Days of the Condor”; Yeast Nation gets its science all wrong but freely self-comments to that effect, hilariously.)

The story is of the first colony of yeast—and therefore the first life forms on Earth— living in the ocean, three billion years ago.

The yeast have overdivided, so they are low on salt, their only food (I know, and they know, there are no hydrocarbons in salt) and so the first and eldest, and therefore king, yeast has decreed that they avoid any further (asexual) reproduction; nor are they allowed to travel beyond their prescribed salt-hunting boundaries, nor shall they float to the surface. In a hilarious song, the king extols the virtues of stasis. Yet of course, as in all societies, the center cannot hold and, in Act II, anarchy is loosed upon the yeast world—forbidden asexual reproduction, sibling rivalry, Goneril-like treachery, and treasonous floating to the surface.

Why is the first yeast therefore king? It would have been an interesting question for “Yeast Nation” to explore: What would be the human correlates of a yeast colony’s social structures? “Yeast Nation” goes another way. It dresses the yeasts in togas and robes and a group of them function as a Greek chorus led by Jan the Unknown (one of the conceits of the show is that every character is named Jan—the Elder, the Second, the Sly, the Wiser, etc.).

Rather than concern itself with social structures (as “Urinetown” did) “Yeast Nation” takes on other, arguably broader, themes, notably love. Socrates, in “The Symposium” and elsewhere, proffers the theory that humans originally were male and female combined; having been separated, we spend our lives searching for our other half. In “Yeast Nation” love newly unifies hitherto unjoined entities, it brings together the show’s romantic couples, and it’s the force of nature that impels single-celled organisms to become multi-cellular ones (and yes, that’s yet more crackpot science, as the show acknowledges).

The show’s plot contains jealousies and betrayals of Shakespearean proportion (and more than a few Shakespearean references) but mostly cuts out the middlemen and mines the same mythologies as the Bard did. Jan the Unknown, for example is a sort of Tirelas, that is, a blind prophetess (Harriet Harris, brilliantly).

In one of the show’s many hilarious apologias, “Yeast Nation” notes how badly the Earth’s currently-dominant species is messing things up, and speculates, “If science can’t save them, perhaps a piece of biohistorical musical theatre can.”

If “Urinetown” represented a biocultural future, “Yeast Nation” is exactly the opposite, a bioanthropomorphic past. But Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’s new show shares an important quality with the old one: a New York Fringe run that will propel it to further much-deserved success.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: The Apartment

The Apartment: A Play With Four Sides

1h 15m
VENUE #1: Teatro SEA
Performance reviewed: Fri 19 @ 8:30
Remaining performances: Mon 22 @ 9:30 Wed 24 @ 2 Sat 27 @ 4:45
http://www.playwith4sides.com

Rating: 7
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

The Apartment is a mostly charming collage of four vignettes written separately to a common element—a desireable apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A few additional common elements were added later; the overall effect is seamless.

In the first, a couple comes home to find the A/C doesn’t work. They quickly discover that the entire city has been in a blackout for two hours. He, a lawyer, covets her, but settles for her apartment, which she has been packed up to leave for two years. He writes the lease on the spot.

In the second, a couple sublet from the lawyer, who is traveling; the third is another couple, also subletting, despite the man having to carry the woman and her wheelchair up the walk-up’s stairs. In the fourth, something has happened and the apartment is being cleaned up as violent crime scene by the owner of the small cleanup business and his new employee. This vignette, like the others, takes us through a few ups and down in their romantic relationship.

The third is the weakest (nor does it match the description at fringenyc.org); there’s a surprise in the center that’s fun but can’t sustain a playlet by itself, and the whole piece functions mainly as the backstory to the fourth, which was my favorite and apparently that of the rest of the audience as well. It was the funniest and had several Marty-esque qualities that mostly serve it well, except that movie’s habit of telegraphing its strongest punches.

The acting, especially the various ethnic and regional accents, was strong. The sets were the most elaborate I’ve yet seen in this year’s festival, though a few problems with a doorway and a window evidenced the reason most shows keep it simple.

There were a couple of other small nits to pick. The plot of the first vignette requires both that they arrive at the apartment in the daytime and at night. In the fourth, the cleanup couple wear rather complete and nicely authentic disposable hazmat suits but without the overbooties needed to keep blood and brains from ruining their shoes. These are easily fixed and in any case only minorly detracted from an enjoyable show.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

Fringe 2011 Review: Virgie

Virgie

1h 0m
VENUE #13: Bowery Poetry Club
Performance reviewed: Fri 19 @ 6:30
Remaining performances: Wed 24 @ 9:30 Sat 27 @ 2
http://www.themoxycollective.com

Rating: 6
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

What is it about Australians? Are they disinterested by stories?

Vergie is a reconstruction of the life of “a little-known female actor, Virgie Vivienne, who brought Shakespeare to the desert in the 1890s.” according to a program note. She is, unfortunately, almost as little known to us after the show as before. As the notes continues, the show “tracks her life through Australia and Europe, love, tragedy, and of course, theatre.” As it turns out, that’s an excellent and revealing choice of words.

Renee Newman-Storen has done an admirable job researching Virgie’s life, “sourced,” she says, “from textbooks, literature from the era, newspaper articles, theatre reviews, and oral histories….” Unfortunately most of Virgie’s footprints through the historical record consist of theatrical reviews in Australian newspapers and they make by far the greater part of Newman-Storen’s script. Having Virgie read her own notices with demure pride may help us track Virgie through the desert, but it’s not much as drama goes.

The program note goes on to promise, “…and original writing connecting what we don’t know and who I think Virgie might have been.” There’s far to little of that, and rather than actually connect Virgie’s dots Newman-Storen engages in the interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, device of representing gaps in the historical record as lapses of Virgie’s memory. We get in fact only three or four scenes, one with a syphilitic gold miner and the others with a brothel madame with the obligatory heart of gold. Though we’re told Vergie is very close to her mother and follows her everywhere, she isn’t represented in scenes nor is she even described except for her age and date of death. Likewise unrepresented are Virgie’s husband as well as a man who she sues for breach of (marital) promise.

Newman-Storen is a terrific physical actor with a charming manner whose repetoire includes a spot-on ability to portray a camel. As a fellow writer I understand her fascination with Virgie and I admire her unwillingness to distort the historical record but I wish she had asked herself if, in the absence of artifice, there’s any story here to tell.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]