Posts tagged theatre
Oh my god, Neil LaBute, what is your fucking problem?
Fair money that David Cote’s review was dead-on. But even if it weren’t. BUT EVEN IF IT WEREN’T.
Nothing makes me happier that I left theatre than Neil LaBute.
I have an essay up on Hooded Utilitarian about Clybourne Park, Eula Biss, gentrification, and bullshit that makes you think it’s actually saying something real. Please enjoy.
Just didn’t want any of you to miss out on this.
Fair warning if you ever tag, alongside your director and playwright friends, your former dramaturgy teacher the preeminent dramaturg in the country and current head of the Public Theater in a post about dramaturgy because it amuses you and surely he never checks Facebook.
I saw Now. Here. This. at the Vineyard last night. It’s the new musical from the [title of show] people. I’d seen a workshop of it last year - lo these many years out of new play development, I still love seeing how a play can develop and change. Obvs this applies to writing prose, too.
It’s a lovely, really interesting show, a musical structured the way you see essays and sometimes plays, but rarely things with songs. Nonfiction, direct address storytelling, songs woven into dialogue and storytelling, collage and juxtaposition that give an emotional and idea-oriented arc, but not a throughline of story. And still silly and fun and weird.
After the show I hung around to talk to (co-writer, co-star, amazing lady) Susan Blackwell. The best part of the show was a story of hers that bleeds from her father’s childhood, ten years old and illiterate, through his adulthood, writing poems on the back of receipts on his lunch break at the auto plant, to adult Susan and dad getting their Master’s degrees at the same time, to Susan singing of a golden palace where the artists and poets and scientists are, singing of the distance from her to that palace, sitting at the MacDowell writer’s colony, where she has been accepted to write the words she is singing. (There is also, for me, the layer of realizing that Susan, who was not one of the writers of [title of show], is an amazing writer, as she sings of her insecurity in coming to terms with that, more or less.)
Susan gives good hugs. She said writing is hard, and to just write a lot, and I’m late to the library to try to do that for an hour before class. The next couple of weeks, to the end of the semester, are gonna be fucked up and hard and Meg peed on the counter last night, but I’m looking forward to the summer, which as far as I’m concerned starts April 28th. But now I’m gonna put shoes on and head out.
Top five things about this:
5. Carl Kassel’s voice
4. Lots of excellent singing
3. Stephen Colbert watching Sutton Foster
2. Yo-Yo Ma and Michelle Obama look like BFFs
1. Meryl Streep is, apparently, the best audience member ever
So far the NY 1 red carpet pre-show is making me deaf from shouting & giving me seizures from flashbulbs. Deaf seizure Tony Awards! Yay!
I don’t think I’ve shared with you, have I, my glowing enthusiasm for what Sutton Foster is doing right now in Anything Goes, nor my (surprised) love for the entire production, and, why not mention, my ongoing love for Sutton Foster in general? Roundabout has for the first time in YEARS done something right - not counting deciding to import an awesome production of The Importance of Being Earnest - probably in hiring Kathleen Marshall to direct and choreograph, because what Kathleen Marshall does is take sweet, old, creaky musicals and make them sparkling and brilliant. What Sutton Foster does is command every inch of your attention, while dancing and singing the fuck out of everything. But even watching her and Joel Grey (duh, credit also due) WALK IN SLOW STEPS AROUND EACH OTHER was one of the most compelling things I’ve ever seen on a stage.
One of the good things about Roundabout, other than this happy accident - seriously their track record is so abysmal that I can give them no conscious credit - is their HipTix program, which offers, like, $25 tickets for folks under 35. No rush, no standing in line at the box office. Tickets in advance, all civilized-like. The seats are way up in the back, but do not worry, Sutton Foster’s every note and oddly, charmingly gawky twitch will easily reach you.
The orgy of tap dancing that ends the first act was so glorious it brought tears to my eyes. Basically a religious experience.
Beowulf is going on tour…
I’m seeing this with Amanda next Friday at East River Park. I saw the production when it first came to New York maybe a year ago or something. It was one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen - a powerful, bombastic rock score coupled with intensely detail-oriented design and direction. (This is the too-short-to-do-it-justice thingy I wrote about it then.)
I’m curious how it will work, though, outdoors, in an amphitheater. Will there be microphones hanging from the sky like the four posts of a boxing ring? Will the academics sit in a little moat set into the front of the stage? Will the sound be a little less eardrum-deadening? At least one of these things is, at least, likely.
Beowulf’s on tour, btw, hitting not just SummerStage (next Weds-Fri!) but also Joe’s Pub - indoors, but a smaller space, and even more sure to be set-less - and elsewhere around this great nation continent. Go see it.
