Adults are obligated to have fun so that children will want to grow older.
— Hobart Brown
Archive for January, 2010
Quote of the day: ADULTS
January 5, 2010Performance diary: best theater of 2009
January 4, 2010It’s been a surprisingly rich year for theater. Here’s my list of top 10 productions:
1. Fela! (fantastic production directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, with spectacular sets and costumes by Marina Draghici, brilliant lighting by Robert Wierzel, fantastic video projection designed by Peter Nigrini, a hot band onstage (Brooklyn’s Antibalas), and a sizzling star performance by Sahr Ngaujah)
2. Exit the King (Ionesco’s play adapted and staged by Neil Armfield with star performer Geoffrey Rush, strong cast with beautiful performances by Lauren Ambrose and Susan Sarandon, exquisite design work in all categories)
3. Let Me Down Easy (Anna Deveare Smith, directed by Leonard Foglia)
4. Two Men Talking (written and performed by Paul Browde and Murray Nossel)
5. Ruined (fine play by Lynn Nottage, excellent ensemble directed by Kate Whoriskey, standout performances by Saidah Arrika Erulona, Condola Rashad, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine)
6. Becky Shaw (excellent play by Gina Gionfriddo, well-directed by Peter DuBois, fine performances by Annie Parisse in the title role and David Wilson Barnes)
7. Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them (Christopher Durang’s play, beautifully directed by Nicholas Martin, with an ingenious David Korins set and especially impressive performances by Laura Benanti, Kristine Nielsen, and Amir Arison)
8. Notes from Underground (fantastic adaptation of Dostoevsky by director Robert Woodruff, actor Bill Camp, and designer David Zinn)
9. The Provenance of Beauty (a Foundry Theatre gem, created by writer Claudia Rankine and director Melanie Joseph)
10. Angela’s Mixtape (smart piece written and starring Eisa Davis, well directed by Liesl Tommy)
The Next 13
1. Soul Samurai (playwright Qui Nguyen, director Robert Ross Parker, costumes by Sarah Laux and Jessica Wegener, game young ensemble cast)
2. The Lily’s Revenge (maestro Taylor Mac, costumes by Machine Dazzle)
3. The Temperamentals (Jon Marans’ play, directed by Jonathan Silverstein)
4. Ka and O (Cirque du Soleil spectacles in Las Vegas – they’ve been running for years, but I just caught up with them, and I was knocked out)
5. Crotch (Keith Hennessy’s intimate epic at Dance Theater Workshop)
6. Les Ephemeres (spellbinding seven-hour slice of life by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil
7. The Christine Jorgensen Story (conceived and performed by Bradford Louryk)
8. La Didone (The Wooster Group)
9. Our Town (superbly dry staging by David Cromer, who played the memorable Stage Manager)
10. Mary Stuart (Peter Oswald’s adaptation of Schiller’s play, beautifully staged by Phyllida Lloyd, with standout performances by Janet McTeer, Harriet Walter, and Chandler Williams)
11. Next to Normal (astutely restaged for Broadway by Michael Greif, with an unforgettable performance by Alice Ripley)
12. Grasses of a Thousand Colors (Wallace Shawn’s play, directed by Andre Gregory at the Royal Court in London, with Miranda Richardson, Jennifer Tilly, and Emily McDonnell)
13. Pour Your Body Out (Pipilotti Rist installation at MoMA)
Productions that Others Raved About That Left Me Cold:
God of Carnage
The Norman Conquests
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Memphis
reasons to be pretty
Next Fall
Other Noteworthy Performances:
Matt Cavenaugh, Curtis Holbrook, and Karen Olivo in West Side Story
Nathan Lane and John Glover in Waiting for Godot
Stephin Merritt’s score and Leigh Silverman’s direction for Coraline
Santino Fontana, Noah Robbins, and Dennis Boutsikaris in David Cromer’s impressive staging of Brighton Beach Memoirs
Ensemble cast of Circle Mirror Transformation, but special attention to Tracee Chimo
Performance diary: tail end of 2009, part two
January 4, 2010
December 17 – A whole gang of us posse-fied to see Tamar Rogoff’s Diagnosis of a Faun at La Mama, stoked by the New York Times feature about the making of the piece. The choreographer used a good chunk of her Guggenheim fellowship to spend several months working with Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, exploring ways for him to expand his physical capacity and to make creative uses of his bodily limitations. The piece they created together wittily and poignantly expands beyond the novelty of watching a guy with CP dance to contemplating the essence of dance, movement, our bodies, how we feel about them, what we do with them. The show told a loose tale about two doctors presenting their research based on treating two different individuals, one an injured ballet dancer (Lucie Baker) and the other one a mythological faun (Mozgala, above). The doctors, who both spoke and danced, were played by modern dancer Emily Pope-Blackman and Donald Kollisch, who is a real middle-aged M.D. with no dance training. (In the talkback afterwards, Rogoff mentioned that growing up with a doctor father gave her an appreciation for medical language, so she used a lot of it in this piece.) Having Mozgala play a faun – a satyr-like horned creature with a human upper body and a hoofed lower body – was a brilliant stroke, funny and fascinating, and it gave Rogoff a few different jumping off points, including the famous Nijinsky ballet to Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun.” The piece was only 65 minutes but it still felt 20 minutes too long, as the choreographer dutifully came up with duets for each pair of performers. But we enjoyed talking about it over dinner at Counter in the East Village.
December 27 – I was psyched to see Kneehigh Theatre’s stage production of Brief Encounter at St. Ann’s Warehouse because I only recently saw David Lean’s masterful 1945 film starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, a triumph of romantic neo-realist cinema based on an extraordinarily deft play (originally titled Still Life) by Noel Coward. That may not have been the best preparation for the stage production, for which adaptor-director Emma Rice has wrapped the play in a dozen music-hall numbers and tons of broadly comic business, as if not trusting that the audience would sit still for the understated drama of two married people conducting a chaste, short-lived but life-changing love affair. I liked that in her program note, Rice makes an explicit connection between Coward’s homosexuality and the portrayal of a doomed “secret love.” But I thought virtually everything about the show was overplayed, cutesy, annoying, including the central performances by Hallah Yelland as Laura and Tristan Sturrock as Alec. In the last couple of scenes, as their sad parting draws near, the show does tone down the Must-Keep-the-Crowd-Entertained-at-All-Times shtick, and the final scene does pack its restrained, heartbreaking punch. (You can watch the film version of the scene here.) I recognized Rice’s efforts to use the tools of theater (including music, sound, projections, and actors moving through the audience) to bring the story closer, and there was a clever use of having actors step through the movie screen into the movie. The production was similar in many ways to Matthew Bourne’s zippy, thrilling staging of The Servant at BAM a couple of years ago – which I liked much better – and bore a family resemblance to Katie Mitchell’s staging of The Waves last year – which I detested. I guess I’m allergic to shows that are so heavily calculated toward crowd-pleasing. But the crowd was quite pleased. Andy certainly liked the show much better than I did, was dazzled by the multimedia storytelling and especially enjoyed the video projections (the sequence of champagne bubbles turning into stars in the night sky, for instance, which was spiffy).
Performance diary: tail end of 2009, part one
January 4, 2010December 9 – Andy had warned me in advance that Jonathan Coulton attracts the geekiest audience in New York, and it’s true that the IT world was amply represented at the Music Hall in Williamsburg. Coulton is a singer-songwriter who made his name by giving away a “Thing of the Week,” a format by which he challenged himself to write songs on a regular schedule, and he’s amassed quite a catalogue of fascinating, funny, witty, tuneful compositions that speak to smart schlubs everywhere. I expected him to have churned out a bunch of new numbers, but he pleased me (and the rest of the audience, I expect) by leaning heavily on his greatest hits, which include loving tributes to Ikea, George Plimpton, and Soterios Johnson, a suburban dad’s ode to his shop vac, a corporate memo from the office zombie maestro, and highly romantic sagas featuring love-starved mad scientists and computer programmers. His albums feature a tough, tight pop-rock band. In concert he performed solo, and I was quite knocked out by his densely packed energy, though I wasn’t surprised by his charm and skill at entertaining the crowd. He frequently does hilarious arrangements of other people’s songs (my favorite is the bluegrass version of “Baby Got Back”). In this show, the closest he came was hauling out a strange instrument covered with a lot of digital pads – he described it as an electronic man-purse – to play his song “Mr. Fancy Pants,” which somehow morphed into a mashup with “Single Ladies.” As noted before, his song “Skullcrusher Mountain” is a spectacular piece of sci-fi romantic comedy, and Coulton is so confident that the audience knows every word of it that he drops out and lets them sing the chorus. And he brought out Kristen Shirts to lead her ukulele-based, slowed-down version of “Code Monkey,” which brought tears to my eyes. “Code Monkey” is my very favorite JoCo song and has become a frighteningly persistent earworm, that’s how catchy it is. You can read the lyrics here or better yet download his rockin-sockin studio version here, and Kristen’s version (winner of a wacky online competition) here, but be forewarned about its infectiousness.
December 16 – The ever-adventurous Mr. David Zinn invited me to accompany him to Joe’s Pub for HTML clipboard“Our Hit Parade,” the downtown hipster vaudeville co-created and co-hosted by Kenny Mellman (of Kiki and Herb), Bridget Everett, and Neal Medlyn. This edition was a tribute to the top songs of the decade. We made it about halfway through before we had to split – a little too lame and witless to tolerate. If you by what the Billboard charts proclaim were the top songs year-by-year, or for the whole decade, it winds up being a lot of crap, and facetious take-downs of crappy pop don’t hold my interest very long. The evening did start me thinking about what I would consider the best songs of the decade just ending. Which is a consideration that inevitably brings up the song vs. recording dilemma: Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” is absolutely one of the great records of the decade (produced by Mark Ronson), but is it a great song? Sort of hard to tell. Ditto Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box,” Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary,” and Amy Ray’s “Driver Education.” Maybe even Jeff Buckley’s “Everybody Here Wants You.” Hmm. What about Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle”? That was high on my list, but now I’m thinking that may fall in the category of best recording, as opposed to show-tune-style songs like, say, “Another Winter in a Summer Town” and “Will You?” from Grey Gardens or “Pretty Lies” from Taboo or “Totally Fucked” from Spring Awakening. OK, well, in addition to those, here are some of my nominations, in no particular order:
“Top of the World,” Patty Griffin
“In State,” Kathleen Edwards
“Fifteen Seconds of Grace,” Jane Kelly Williams
“Shine So Bright,” Teddy Thompson
“Invisible Tattoo,” Sharon Robinson
“Title of the Song,” Da Vinci’s Notebook
“Extraordinary Machine,” Fiona Apple
“Everything Is Free,” Gillian Welch
“This Is How It Goes,” Aimee Mann
“Perfect Blue Buildings,” Counting Crows
“Vibrate,” Rufus Wainwright
“Come Pick Me Up” and “Wish You Were Here,” Ryan Adams
“Wake Up in New York,” Craig Armstrong
“Casimir Pulaski Day,” Sufjan Stevens
What are yours?
another eye opens 