skygiants

This weekend I went to go see a production of Sweeney Todd, notable for being 'immersive' and featuring pie, like real edible pie. (It was also going to be notable for featuring Norm Lewis, aka Handsome Javert in the Les Mis 25th Anniversary Concert, but TRAGICALLY FOR ME left a week before I got there.)

A few notes:
- the immersive aspect was largely based on the fact that most of the audience was sitting at long pie-eating tables, and cast members would frequently come and sit at the last seat of them and stare you intently in the face while singing at you, or march up and down along the top of them and stare you intently in the face while singing at you
- ...it was weirder when you were looking up at them marching along in front of you because you became very conscious of the fact that your neck was extremely exposed
- the Beggar Woman was double-cast as Pirelli sashaying around in a giant moustache chewing on all the scenery, which was delightful and also I imagine nice for the actress to get something to do in the show besides wail at people
- also she lounged around our table for a bit and flirted with me during the big Pirelli number, which, no complaints
- on the flip side, they cut most of her "City On Fire," which is one of my favorite numbers :(
- the three-person orchestra all got to ham it up being visibly nervous during the bit in "A Little Priest" about the respective taste factors of fiddle player and piccolo player
- Johanna's actress was amazing -- very good at selling Johanna as a character and not just just an ingenue, and all her desperation about her situation throughout
- Mrs. Lovett and the Beadle were also extremely good
- I did not love our Sweeney though, who spent most of the time sort of pulling his face down and opening his eyes really wide to signify that he was INTENSE
- most importantly, the pie that they fed us beforehand was delicious
- (and probably not made of people)

This weekend genarti, wickedtrue and I went to go see Arrabal at the A.R.T. -- a theater piece in my favorite genre, dance dance revolution.

I haven't seen very much dance theater that isn't just straight-up ballet. Arrabal uses the language of tango rather than classical ballet, but it still feels quite a lot like a ballet -- there's very minimal dialogue (two brief scene-setting news-clips, two significant letters read aloud, and a brief callout song in which the psychopomp/magician makes fun of the love interest for his machismo comprise the whole of it) with everything else conveyed through motion and mime.

The music is gorgeous, the dancing likewise. The plot is relatively simple, and not actually as depressing as I thought it would be. Arrabal is the infant daughter of an Argentinian protester. Eighteen years later, she's haunted by his absence; his surviving friends, meanwhile, decide it's time for them to meet her and tell her his story.

....his surviving friends run a dance club, so along the way Arrabal gets a cute new dress and a pair kicky high heels, learns how to tango, falls for the leader of the pack, makes out with the leader of the pack's girlfriend, and briefly visits an orgy before deciding that it's maybe not for her, thanks. None of us were entirely sure what was actually going on with the orgy, plot-wise. This is the downside of ballet theater with minimal dialogue. But it's all very pretty and beautifully danced!

And then we cut back to Arrabal's grandmother and her friends marching for their disappeared children and suddenly we're all crying, so, you know. The important parts come through.

Tonight obopolsk and I went to go see Indecent, a play about a play -- to be specific, about Sholom Asch's Yiddish-language God of Vengeance, in which the nice young daughter of a pious hypocrite who makes his money from a brothel falls in love with one of the prostitutes.

So basically it is a show about a.) lesbians b.) Yiddish theater c.) metatheater, aka BASICALLY ALL MY INTERESTS, hi Paula Vogel and thank you for this. You will be unsurprised to hear that I almost entirely loved it.

The cast consists of seven actors, and three extremely brilliant musicians (including an accordionist with more swagger than I've ever seen from an accordionist before). All of the cast whirl from role to role. Sholem Asch is almost always the same, until he gets too old to be the young man, and then he's the old man. Manke and Rivkele, the two lovers in God of Vengeance, are always the same, even when they're different people -- the first cosmopolitan German Manke, who has no difficulty playing a lesbian but worries about how to portray a Jew; the two young Yiddish actresses who express their feelings for each other onstage every night, until one of them can't speak English well enough to make the leap to Broadway; the rookie all-American actress out to shock her parents by playing a lesbian Jew onstage (who gets the biggest laugh of the night when, after she surprises her Manke with an extremely passionate onstage kiss, she mentions that she went to Smith).

Lemml, the Polish villager who happens by luck to be there at the first reading of the play in I.L. Peretz's living room and falls in love with it, is always the same actor and the same person too -- God of Vengeance's guardian spirit, stage managing every production until the entire Broadway cast is arrested for public indecency, and a disillusioned Sholem Asch can't or won't do anything to stop it.

It's all very good, the cast is very good, the music is fantastic, the linguistic shifts are too. Here's the thing I really want to talk about, though. The play is an hour and forty minutes long. We were probably about an hour and twenty minutes in when Lemml went back to Poland, when the actors put stars on their shirts, when we were in the Warsaw Ghetto with the cast doing the show in pieces in order so as not to go up against curfew.

I'd been loving the play up until then, but at this point I started to get angry. I knew that we had to be near the end of the play at this point, and I was sitting there fuming and thinking to myself, 'oh, come on, Paula Vogel, you're going to end the story here? They ALWAYS end the story here, it's a huge black slash across our history but it's not the end of it by any means, ending it here takes a story that was about the power of love and language and literature and just makes it about this one thing that it's always about, PLEASE don't end it here --'

And just as I'm thinking this, as the cast is grimly lining up in front of an invisible concentration camp with ominous pronouncements about dust and ashes printed on the wall, the actor playing Lemml looks out at the audience and says, "Please don't let it end here," and the actresses playing Manke and Rivkele burst out from the line and run off into the wings for the next scene.

AND OK, SARAH VOGEL! Fine! FINE! You knew exactly what you were doing! I've never had my mind read in such an impressively infuriating fashion before.

(The play does not, in fact, end there. It doesn't go as much beyond it as I would like, but it doesn't end there.)

Right before going to New York this past weekend, cinaed happened to toss me a link to Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator, a one-hour show that JUST HAPPENED to be running during the, like, 36 hours I was going to be in the city.

I was supposed to be meeting nextian for coffee during that part of the afternoon, so of course I immediately emailed her to ask if in addition to having coffee she would like to see Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe fight supernatural crime in a tiny black-box theater, and the rest was destiny.

Here is what you ought to know about Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator:

- Emily Dickinson is, of course, a brisk, competent, no-nonsense, Sherlock Holmesian detective who happens to investigate the paranormal, and also write poetry So. I mean. Is it worth ten dollars and an hour of your time? ABSOLUTELY it is, why would you EVEN ask me that, purchase your tickets IMMEDIATELY.

I'm home in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving, and my dad suggested that we all go and see Equivocation at the Arden Theater. If you happen to be in the area: WORTH THE PRICE.

Equivocation posits a hypothetical in which Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to James I, commissions Shakespeare to write a "true history" play of the Gunpowder Plot.

SHAKESPEARE: I don't write propaganda stories.
CECIL: You wrote Richard III! You made Richard of York a hunchback!
SHAKESPEARE: He was a murderer!
CECIL: They're all murderers! He balanced the budget.

In his attempt to turn the Crown's version of events into a coherent and semi-truthful play without getting executed for it --

SHAKESPEARE: A group of men plan to blow up Parliament, and then they don't. There's no plot!
CECIL: It is TREASON to say that there was no plot!
SHAKESPEARE: ...
CECIL: .... ohhhh, you mean there's no plot!

-- Shakespeare goes hunting for the actual truth about what happened during the Gunpowder Plot, along the way confronting interpersonal conflicts among his actors, questions of morality and politics and posterity, and his own stoppered-up emotions about the death of his son Hamnet. Judith Shakespeare, Hamnet's cranky and neglected twin, who keeps track of the number of deaths in Shakespeare's plays and has VERY strong feelings about soliloquies (she hates them) plays a major role. She's the one woman in the production, but she has a lot to say; Shakespeare's relationship with her is either the heart of the story or very close to it.

Richard Burbage also plays a major role. He has a passionate scene in which he confesses that Shakespeare means more to him than anything in the world, and then he strides forward and clutches Shakespeare's face and the fact that they don't actually make out at that point surprised me more than just about anything else in the play. It could just be that Richard was probably the best actor in the cast; he doubled as an incredibly powerful Henry Garnet, a historical figure about whom I previously knew nothing, so it's really quite unfair that I'm now extremely sad about him. James I, who doubles as hotheaded young actor Richard Sharpe, is also much more interesting than he initially appears (although his Scottish accent stays sadly terrible throughout the whole thing.) The cast of Shakespeare's company is rounded out by Nathan Field, who doubles as Cecil and does all his interesting acting there, and Robert Armin, who doesn't really get to do anything interesting as far as I recall except a brief scene in which he doubles as Buckingham in order to bang King James.

The playwright is clearly very pleased with himself for the opportunity to play around with plays within plays -- Shakespeare goes through multiple (intermittently terrible and/or treasonous) drafts of the Gunpowder Plot play, many of them performed with/during/around his interviews with the participants -- and somehow manages to turn the line "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" delivered exactly as per Macbeth's script into one of the best brick jokes in the entire show.

It's not a perfect play; it's very clever and very pleased with its own metatextuality and it's probably got too much crammed into it, but this is one of those cases where the flaws probably make it more fun for me, specifically. (Except some unnecessary slanders on the name of Anne Hathaway. RUDE.) But it gives me lots of what I like best, which is lengthy explorations of why people write things the way they do, and also getting to watch people watching shows and reacting to them in interesting ways. Anyway, it's all HIGHLY enjoyable and I would absolutely recommend.

I'm on a bus right now on my way back from a very whirlwind 24-hour trip to New York for the purpose of meeting with various people about long-term archiving projects left over from last summer. Most of the people I was meeting with are also friends from grad school; one of them has a subscription to Theater For a New Audience in Brooklyn, and asked last week if I wanted to go see a play with her while I was there, which is how I ended up seeing An Octoroon.

An Octoroon is constructed as a collaboration between two people -- Dion Boucicault, wildly popular white nineteenth-century melodramatist, and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, up-and-coming black playwright, who begins the show by re-enacting the conversation with his therapist that led to him deciding to adapt Boucicault's 1857 popular melodrama, The Octoroon. ("Are you angry at white people?" "....no? Most of my best friends are white." "But, like, really, deep down, are you sure you're not angry at white people?") He leaves the stage, then comes back: "Just kidding. That's not true. I can't afford a therapist."

(Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright, is played by Austin Smith.)

After that, "BJJ" (as he's credited in the program) comes back in again to apply his whiteface makeup: because he's having trouble finding white actors who are willing to play explicitly racist characters in a nineteenth-century melodrama, he explains, with irritated resignation, he will be playing all the white men in the show himself.

(The Jacobs-Jenkins monologues are in general witty, incisive and cutting, although I was briefly distracted by the part where he's relating a dream that concludes "then I realized the bees weren't attacking me ... I WAS the bees." DAMN IT, JUPITER ASCENDING.)

At this point, we are interrupted by an angry white man in underwear: hello, Dion Boucicault! Boucicault is VERY DISAPPOINTED in the state of the theater today, wants to know why this low-grade theater doesn't have a petting zoo, and bemoans the days when he was the king of town and "everyone was hating on me. LIKE JESUS. ... I was the JESUS OF THEATER."

Boucicault then sits down to apply redface makeup: he'll be playing Wahnotee, the noble savage. "You can put Negros on the stage these days -- though you have to pay them! -- but you still can't get an Indian actor anywhere." His assistant, also onstage, gives the audience a speaking look before starting to apply his own blackface. (The assistant, played by Ian Lassiter, is also clearly not white; I wouldn't be surprised if he were Native American, but I couldn't say for sure.)

OK, now we're ready to start the actual play.

The Octoroon, the original melodrama by Dion Boucicault, centers on a noble young white man, George who comes back to his aunt and uncle's failing plantation and falls in love with his uncle's beautiful illegitimate child Zoe, daughter of a slave but raised as a young lady in the house. Alas! due to a bureaucratic technicality, Zoe still belongs to the estate, and is going to be sold at auction along with everything else to the evil M'Closky. M'Closky is extra evil because he murders an adorably mischievous slave boy in order to get his way and blames it on the boy's hapless Indian friend Wahnotee and it's all INCREDIBLY TRAGIC.

An Octoroon progresses its way through the first three scenes of the melodrama, retaining large chunks of the original text, with most of the cast -- in their various switched-around racial identities -- giving gloriously satirical performances. Austin Smith, as Every White Guy including Noble George and Evil M'Closkey, gets particular joy out of George's tragic declaration that he's going to SELL HIMSELF in marriage to a woman he doesn't love, to get the money to SAVE THE ESTATE AND THESE POOR SLAVES, while the loyal, elderly slave played by Lassiter trembles in teary-eyed awe at his sacrifice.

Meanwhile, slaves Dido and Minnie (played by black actresses; all of the men are race-swapped, but none of the women) switch on a dime from acting as background scenery in Boucicault's drama of white people to swapping jokes and gossip in stereotypical inner-city dialogue; they're brilliant, and it's funny, until the lines that drop in to remind you that no, actually, it's not funny at all, and then they keep going and it's horrifically funny again.

(Also, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, every act is concluded with the entrance of somebody in a giant white rabbit costume who wanders around tidying up the stage. I have no idea what this is meant to represent.)

And then there's Zoe, portrayed by the absolutely gorgeous Amber Gray, who is the only one in the show who's playing it one hundred percent straight. Unlike everyone else, Zoe doesn't know she's in a satire. Zoe's confronting gut-wrenching racism, external and internal, and Amber Gray sells it one hundred percent.

The third act ends with Zoe sold to evil M'Closkey, Dido and Minnie also sold to a noble sea captain and pretty excited for their new life ("girl, we're gonna live on a BOAT!"), and Austin Smith-as-George getting in a knock-down drag-out fight with Austin-Smith-as-M'Closkey in the most hilarious piece of physical comedy I've seen in a long time.

And then comes the fourth act. ( I'm going to put this under a spoiler-cut, since it includes stuff that's potentially triggery and is definitely in the show for deliberate surprise and shock value as part of the point of the experience. )

"Well," said my friend, as we walked out, "I feel really weird right now."

She's planning on seeing it again. If I were still in New York, I think I might too.

Tonight I dragged nextian with me to see The Winter's Tale: A MUSICAL starring A SIGNIFICANT PERCENTAGE OF NEW YORK, because a.) last year's Tempest Starring A Significant Percentage Of New York WAS AMAZING and b.) tonight is actually my last night for at least a while as a resident of the city, which is really weird, and going to go see the city celebrate itself seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

Anyway, Winter's Tale was not quite as good as last year's Tempest, which was just, like, mind-bogglingly wonderful, but it was still pretty delightful! The ballerinas had significantly less swagger, but on the other hand, a swing band on stilts. Also, still on the other hand, SESAME STREET.

( If you were wondering if Sesame Street is just as good live: yes. Yes they are. )

I got like three hours of sleep last night so I'm going to go fall over now, but I'm really, really glad this is how I decided to spend my last night in New York. Tomorrow I move to Boston? TOMORROW I MOVE TO BOSTON. File under: things that I still haven't fully internalized yet.

I just got back from one of the more incredible theater experiences I've had in New York, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about it.

The Mysteries is a six-hour retelling of the Bible (Old and New Testament), as interpreted by 48 playwrights and one director. Disparate pieces of the story that get sutured together, with mood, characterization and interpretation changing wildly from scene to scene -- it really shouldn't work, but somehow it SUPER DOES. Some of the scenes are gorgeous, some are hilarious, some think they're funnier and smarter than they are, and some of them, in my opinion, are wild missteps (although I suspect everyone's opinion on that will be different), but everything that didn't work for me ended up balanced by a moment of incredible grace. ( The rest is cut for images and sacreligious content, in case anyone is bothered by that. LET'S TELL EVERYONE JESUS RODE A UNICORN. )

So one of the things I did this weekend in Boston was hang out at Arisia, on which possibly more anon. But the other thing I did was go see a play called The Heart of Robin Hood with genarti, thewickedlady and sotto_voce, which is certainly one of the most ridiculous Robin Hood adaptations I have ever experienced.

The Heart of Robin Hood involves a lot of ( crossdressing, shirtlessness, adorable moppets, and ... creepy meat puppets ....? )

In other news, the set was amazing, the aerials and acrobatics were pretty stellar, the costumes were hilariously all-over-the-place (why did Adorable Moppet #1 get a Regency jacket and the random nobles get random steampunk bustles? WHY NOT), and all the actors chewed every piece of scenery they could get their teeth into with the greatest of glee. GENERALLY AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE FOR ALL.

A few weeks ago, obopolsk and I went to go see Water By the Spoonful (thanks to obopolsk's subscription theater tickets) which . . . I did not actually realize until just now was the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner. Go us and our classy taste!

Anyway, Water By the Spoonful has two main storylines. One follows Elliot Ortiz, a war veteran who is haunted by an interaction he had in Iraq, and his cousin Yazmin, a professor of music who feels distanced from her family because of her privilege. (Sidenote: I was so excited when I figured out the play was set in Philly! Elliot works at a Subway on Lancaster Ave and I'm like ". . . my Lancaster Ave? My Lancaster Ave!" Too few things are set in Philly, is the moral of this story.)

The other plot thread focuses on an online . . . chat? Messageboard? This was actually never one hundred percent clear. Anyway, it's an online support group for cocaine addicts, and the story is about the development of friendships and connections in virtual space, and how the person you are online does and does not reflect the person you are in real life. The two storylines are of course DRAMATICALLY CONNECTED, but the how is a spoiler!

The play had a director's Q&A afterwards, which ended up translating to the producer asking the audience questions about what worked for them while the director nodded sagely and put his thinkiest face on.

First question: how did the representations of online dialogue work for you?

As various audience members chimed in helpfully about the little ding sounds! and the user-icons projected on the back of the wall! we started to look around . . . and gradually realized that we were the only people under sixty in the audience.

Producer: "So, how many of you have ever been on an online forum or chat?"
obopolsk and I: *awkwardly raise hands . . .*
Everybody else: *polite blank smiles*

It turns out that while I'm very happy to share critique of stuff online, I'm a lot shyer about doing so while the director is staring at me wearing their thinkiest face, and therefore I kept a subdued silence for the rest of the Q&A. But for the record, Davis McCallum, if you happen to come across this, I'm sorry for being a coward two weeks ago, and here are my thoughts:

- overall the play was great and cast was magnificent, and yes, the representation of internet chats worked very well
- although the ghost!victim angrily following Elliot around occasionally verged into overkill, especially when big booming subconscious guilt voices echoed from beyond the stage
- and speaking of overkill . . . you might want to consider restaging the reverse pieta pose at the end, or at least lighting it less DRAMATICALLY. Because it made me have to try really hard not to giggle during a meaningful moment and I don't think that's what you want