Theater
Friday, February 3, 2012
3.5 stars (out of 5)
Broadway Series South / North Carolina Theatre
Through Feb. 5
Unfortunately, AMERICAN IDIOT is not—repeat, not—the great American grunge opera.
Not with seven central characters this poorly defined and developed. And not with a flimsy book that reads, more than once, like a downer version of HAIR retrofitted specifically for Generation Y.
Since it’s hardly the first—or the twentieth—retelling of the story of disillusioned youth trying to come of age, it’s particularly disappointing that AMERICAN IDIOT comes up with so few new findings.
Much of that difficulty lies with director Michael Mayer. Though Green Day's 2004 propulsive, raw concept album made a number of lists for best album of that year (and decade), the main plot points in Mayer's stage adaptation appear to have been lifted from a couple of that era's movies of the week instead.
Johnny and Tunny, two not particularly robust examples of the genus man-child, forsake the crushing banality of suburbia by fleeing to the big city. (A third man-child, Will, opts to stay home after his girlfriend becomes pregnant.) The experience humbles both in short order: one gets into drugs, while the other joins a military that is—wait for it—dehumanizing and nothing like the commercials on TV.
Just imagine. I’ll wait; it shouldn’t take you very long.
With only a small handful of dialogue lines written (by Mayer and singer Billie Joe Armstrong) to link the various songs, the album’s lyrics basically form the book for these far too familiar tales. Unfortunately, it’s one that’s uneven at best.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Disclosing arts education dilemmas in New York, and North Carolina: "No Child..." at PlayMakers
- photo by Carol Rosegg
- Nilaja Sun in NO CHILD...
4 stars (out of 5)
PRC2
Through Jan. 15
To be truthful, I haven’t taught drama in a “worst of the worst” New York City classroom like playwright and performer Nilaja Sun, whose semi-autobiographical one-person show, NO CHILD… closes at PlayMakers Rep on Jan. 15. I taught high school drama in an economically and culturally impoverished North Carolina county during half of the last decade instead. It was the hardest—and most rewarding—job I have ever undertaken. And on the basis of the experience, I can say this much: Ms. Sun clearly knows whereof she speaks.
NO CHILD…is reportedly based on her years of experience as a teaching artist in New York public schools. The news is that it’s not a world apart from the challenged classrooms I saw in the rural South. Both reflect a popular culture supersaturated with sexuality, violence and speed. And if either had once cornered the market on ADHD, emotional, sexual and physical abuse or attitude, ignorance and pride, neither does now.
Yes, the quest Sun’s character faces during a short-term (and short-sighted) state grant—staging the Australian penal drama Our Country’s Good with a group of at-risk high schoolers who are theatrical beginners, in six weeks—is certainly quixotic. But it’s hardly unfamiliar in North Carolina, where a public education in the arts mandated by the state’s master Basic Education Plan still hasn’t yet been fully implemented, much less evenly distributed, across urban and rural systems—some 27 years after its ratification in 1985.
A new legislative commission tasked with finally closing that deal this Spring would give some cause for hope—had the Republican-led legislature it will ultimately report to not slashed millions of dollars from education last year and then declared open political warfare on the teachers who dared oppose them. In the meantime, the sort of inconsistent, “drive-by” arts education on display here remains hauntingly familiar, to say the least. If one of Sun’s central points in NO CHILD…concerns the wholesale abandonment of children by their families, society and the state, it bears noting that the troubled kids of New York aren’t the only ones who have suffered—and still suffer—this on a number of fronts, including public education and the arts.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
More of a psychiatric casebook than a life: The Journals of Spalding Gray
Edited by Nell Casey
Knopf; 368 pages
$28.95
The world primarily remembers actor and playwright Spalding Gray for a body of some 20 theatrical works he wrote and staged over three decades between 1975 and 2004. Improbably, he performed almost all of them, alone, while seated on a stage whose set design rarely included much more than a wooden table and chair, a microphone, a glass of water—and a notebook containing a skeletal outline of the evening’s subject, handwritten, in all caps.
Even more improbably, their subject matter was clearly, overtly autobiographical. Early monologues like Sex and Death to the Age 14 and Booze, Cars and College Girls openly disclosed their contents in their titles. His mid-career masterpiece, Swimming to Cambodia (which director Jonathan Demme captured on film in 1988) detailed Gray’s idiosyncratic discoveries—about the world, U.S. and global politics, relationships and himself—during his experiences as a supporting actor in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. The film, which detailed the horrific aftermath of the Vietnamese war on the mainland of Southeast Asia, won three Oscars.
During the ‘80s and ‘90s, a number of critics claimed that Gray actually created the genre of autobiographical performance. If that’s an overstatement—and it is—Gray’s work still had an undeniable influence on a generation of writers (and performers) of autobiography, creative nonfiction and postmodern storytelling, as well as those who have followed.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine the work of Ira Glass, David Sedaris, Mike Daisey or Tim Miller without him. The poetic journalism of Anna Deavere Smith clearly owes Gray a direct debt as well. Along with every writer who has ever appeared on This American Life, The Monti and its inspiration, The Moth in New York City, all suddenly become a lot more speculative absent the groundwork Gray did a quarter-century before.
- Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
- The first page of Gray's notebook for SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA
Still, having edited previous books on writers and depression (2002’s Unholy Ghosts) and writers providing extended care for sick family members (An Uncertain Inheritance, in 2008), it’s telling that Casey ultimately emerges as well here with a Gray who remains—over nearly 40 years—perpetually hyperaware of a series of self- and other-diagnosed personal psychological dysfunctions and dilemmas, requiring the ongoing care of family members and significant others, frequently to the exclusion of all other individuals and concerns.
In short, those expecting a juicy, ribald ride behind the scenes of Gray's most engaging narratives are in for a shock. THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY ultimately seems the joyless casebook of a forbidding psychiatric enigma more than a famous monologist and humorist's back pages.
Monday, December 19, 2011
The death last weekend of Vaclav Havel reminds me that this region's last independent production of the Nobel laureate and playwright’s work took place 14 years ago this month. ArtsCenter Community Theatre mounted Tom Stoppard's translation of LARGO DESOLATO in December, 1997.
It wasn't just one of the best shows of that year; it was one of the strongest works this area has produced in any of the ensuing years. The only local staging of Havel I could find after it was an undergraduate student show at UNC's LAB Theatre in 2001.
If anyone’s wondering what we’ve been missing ever since, read on.
Below: a mixdown from two pieces I wrote on LARGO DESOLATO in 1997:
= = = = =
Apocalyptic music from some forgotten 1950s monster movie blares into a darkened theater. Just as the audience gets a good case of the creeps, someone pulls the plug and the music grinds to a halt. The lights come up on a man in the grips of a terminal bad hair day inspired by comic great Stan Laurel, seated upon a sofa half-covered in olive-drab acoustical foam.
He stares at the audience. The audience stares back. After a moment, he agitatedly goes to one of six differently painted doors, looks through a peephole, and then puts his ear to the door.
That's it. The lights fade.
The scene repeats. Bad horror music, grinding halt, lights, stare, look, listen, fade. A third time through these paces, something different happens.
Funny? Undeniably. But the absurd opening to Vaclav Havel's black comedy LARGO DESOLATO bears a hidden barb in the joke. A dissident in a totalitarian state, where government thugs can knock on that door—or break it down—at any hour, would sooner categorize this simple scene as journalism, not paranoid farce.
These and other plot devices in LARGO spring from Havel's own experiences as a Czech theater artist whose political activism predated the Prague Spring of 1968. During 14 years of systemic intimidation, abuse and imprisonment under the regime of Gustáv Husák, it's telling that, after a four-year stretch in a labor camp, the first thing Havel wrote was this: a scathing satire about an intellectual anti-hero who once opposed a totalitarian government—but now finds himself very carefully counting the cost of further engagement.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
UPDATE: Dec. 21, 2011:
Our Year in Theater article is now available here. Short link: http://bit.ly/Tt2011. Happy holidays!
= = = = =
"It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds.
And they had all arrived at the same building
at more or less the same time.
And they were all free.
And they were all asking themselves the same question:
What is behind that curtain?"
— Laurie Anderson
In each issue, the Independent's critical crew is more than happy to answer Laurie's question.
But when it comes to sizing up an entire year on the area's stages...well, that take a little more time.
So we've been busy over the last two weeks, putting our heads together on what will be, by far, the region's most comprehensive look at the year in local theater.
That sounds pretty confident, we'll admit. But we say it because we've never settled for a single, arbitrary "top ten" list.
Our critics present the whole picture, instead: the best they saw in shows, in acting, in designs, original scripts—and 11 other theatrical categories. Because the region's artists—and audiences—deserve no less.
That's what's behind our curtain.
Showtime's next Wednesday, Dec. 21.
And best of all, admission's free. At a newsstand and a website near you.
Say—who's on your awards list this year?
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
- Evan Fulks
2.5 stars out of 5
J&J Productions
@ Raleigh Ensemble Players
Through Dec. 17
brownpapertickets.com/event/210573
417-2477
Director Joshua Benjamin and actors John Honeycutt and Jess Jones find themselves in the best of theatrical company this week. Would that that were better news than it is.
For after I witnessed two of the region’s most renowned actors humbled by the demands of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at PlayMakers Rep the night before, this upstart company’s production of Romulus Linney’s last play, Love Drunk, similarly seemed a theatrical puzzle only partially solved by last Sunday night in Raleigh Ensemble Players' Fayetteville Street theater space.
By now Honeycutt is certainly no stranger to the independent theater set, and Jones has been quickly assembling a respectable portfolio of roles over the past two seasons. A wildcat production at this point wasn’t a bad move for either artist. And, truth to tell, after I read the first half of Linney’s script the week before, I could see these actors in these roles.
But on one level this tale of two ill-met and addictive personalities—an aged, solitary homebuilder and a young, unstable woman he’s just picked up in a mountain-town cafe—has nearly as many emotional switchbacks and plot twists as Albee’s famously imposing text. In Linney’s play, a variation on Ibsen’s cautionary work The Master Builder, both Wilbur (Honeycutt) and Karen (Jones) repeatedly realize that the stories each other is telling them—about their past, their present and their true intentions—keep not adding up. Two strangers who came to a room for a sexual encounter—if not something a bit darker—are forced to reassess one another. Then they have to reassess again.
You get the picture. As these characters lead us through two interpersonal labyrinths, an early, Hitchcock-like suspense is supplanted by a more profound, existential one as our sense of Wilbur and Karen’s downward personal trajectories fill in.
Friday, December 2, 2011
It's a nice enough show—but is "A Christmas Story" really a local production?
- photo by Carol Rosegg
- Clarke Hallum with that obscure object of desire, in A CHRISTMAS STORY
3.5 stars out of 5
Broadway Series South, N.C. Theatre, Hot Summer Nights
Through Dec. 4
Apparently there's some confusion about whose production of A CHRISTMAS STORY: THE MUSICAL is currently running in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium.
It's understandable enough. After all, this time last year, North Carolina Theatre and Hot Summer Nights collaborated with long-time Raleigh presenter Broadway Series South on a joint venture—a locally produced stage adaptation of Jean Shepherd's classic holiday tale, A Christmas Story. That gentle saga of triple dog dares, a table lamp resembling a leg in fishnet stockings on a stiletto heel—and, of course, a genuine Red Ryder carbine action BB gun—enchanted critics and audiences so much that a return engagement was virtually guaranteed.
A year has passed and, yes, the three companies have gotten together again—this time, to bring us the Shepherd yarn in a musical form.
But the production on stage this week in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium is actually a professional touring version of the show, one created by New York's Alchemy Production Group. The names of N.C. Theatre and Hot Summer Nights prominently appear on the playbill, publicity and the companies' websites ("Our next production," says NCTheatre.org—while the show’s cast page remains blank, and its gallery features photos from a 2009 production in Kansas City, with actors not appearing in this version).
In reality, though, aside from a handful of local musicians hired to round out the orchestra pit, no directors, designers or artists affiliated with either N.C. Theatre or Hot Summer Nights are connected with the show. They've just brought it here, and put their brands on it.
And since N.C. Theatre will shortly do this twice again, in January and February, when they co-host—and co-claim—professional touring productions of Green Day's American Idiot and Les Miserables, two significant questions are raised that aren’t going to go away when A Christmas Story's final curtain falls on Sunday.
Friday, November 25, 2011
- Ken Howard/ Metropolitan Opera
- Jay Hunter Morris in the title role
The Met Live in HD
Regal Brier Creek Stadium 14
All my life, I’ve been hearing—words and music—the epic story of Siegfried, the hero of the eponymous third section of Richard Wagner’s four-part opera inspired by Norse mythology, Der Ring des Nibelungen, or the Ring Cycle. I had my mother’s childhood books on the Ring (published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild in 1939), and my father liked to tell the story to his children, because his father had told it to him. Yet in all these years, I’d never seen Siegfried, never experienced the full force of the operatic work, in which the visual component must attempt to equal the power of the aural.
Siegfried premiered in Bayreuth, Germany in 1876 during the first performance of the entire cycle, which immediately ignited the passions of operagoers. Those who love Wagnerian opera really love it; those who don’t (for reasons both aesthetic and philosophical) can be quite disdainful. But however you feel about its worldview, you cannot doubt that the Ring is the Gesamtkunstwerk—total work of art—that Wagner asserted it to be. In each section (all can stand alone), the music and lyrics (Wagner wrote both), the instruments and singing, the dramatic action, the sets, costumes and lighting all add up to a great wholeness. The four parts together create a staggering totality.
They cannot be experienced consecutively all at once: There are not enough hours in the day. In fact, unless you are able to travel to the annual festival in Bayreuth, the opportunities to see any part of the Ring live are few and far between. A new staging by any major opera company is a notable event. Not only does any staging cost as much as the vast hoard of gold in dragon Fafner’s cave, at any given time there may be only three or four singers available who are capable of fulfilling the demanding roles.
Siegfried runs well over five hours with intermissions, with the tenor Siegfried onstage and singing an incredible amount of that time. There are just not that many men young enough, heroic enough and strong enough; who know the part, are sensitive to the complex music and whose voices’ can hold up through that much singing. The dissatisfied young Siegfried has to grow up before our eyes, break away from the evil dwarf who has raised him, re-forge the great sword of his slain father, kill the dragon, take the magic ring and helmet, journey through a forest and cross a ring of fire to discover and awaken to womanhood the spellbound Valkyrie Brünnhilde—at which time he must summon his most delicate and beautiful vocalizations.
Or, his “prettiest singin’,” as The Metropolitan Opera’s surprise new Siegfried called it in an interview segment during the Met’s Live in HD presentation of the Opera’s new Siegfried on Nov. 5. Jay Hunter Morris is a strapping youngish tenor from Paris, Texas (it’s next wide spot west of Texarkana, in the Red River valley just south of the Oklahoma line—about 100 miles southwest of the birthplace of my mother’s mother, she who inculcated the love of opera in her daughter with the little illustrated books), and I am pretty sure his natural accent is one never before heard backstage at the Met. Certainly his path to stardom on that stage is unique. His scenic route to success recently included stops in New York’s Central Park, where he hawked rollerblades, and at an athletic club back home in Paris, where his jobs was handing out the towels.
Not that he was inexperienced when the Met called him in just days before the opening (tenor Gary Lehman had withdrawn due to illness). He has sung a wide repertoire, and had sung Siegfried in the San Francisco Opera’s new production earlier this year, receiving good reviews. But to be cannoned in to Robert Lepage’s high-tech production (with its sometimes-effective 45-ton machinery of moving slabs, its video projections and 3-D animated bird) with a cast of already-famous first-class singers—just in time for the dress rehearsals! What an amazing twist of fate and bucket of luck. He got to be a hero and to play the hero, while having his biggest dream come true, and the energy released by all that glowed brighter than the magic ring.
I’m not capable of judging the finer points of the singing, especially at the remove of broadcast. I thought it was wonderful. Some reviewers have noted that Morris’ voice is not that big, but that is probably why I found him pleasantly un-bellicose (except of course when he’s slaying man and beast). Dramatically, he was excellent, with natural gestures and magnetism off the chart. When Siegfried finally gets to Brünnhilde, the chemistry between Morris and voluptuous soprano Deborah Voigt pales the digital flames all around them as they sing together. Whew.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
- Bourbon Room Rocks/ DPAC
* * 1/2 stars
Durham Performing Arts Center
A visit to the Durham Performing Arts Center for the touring production of Rock of Ages yields a number of odd sights. Audience members, mostly people in their 40s and 50s, are wearing suits and evening wear to a play that’s based, in part, on the fashion excesses of 1980s youth culture. They also sip cups of red wine in front of a set labeled “The Bourbon Room.”
And as they trudge along the red-carpeted floors, the sound system blasts the likes of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” and Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” How did low-rent entertainment become the subject for a top-dollar production?
Understand, that’s not a dis of 1980s music, something I greatly enjoy and often use as a pick-me-up. But with the 30th anniversary of MTV occurring this year and the excellent new oral history I Want My MTV now in bookstores, it’s fascinating how the 1980s rock culture—those songs and videos that were often mocked even by the artists who created them—became such a massive mainstream force. Big hair, androgynous fashions and lyrics that barely qualified as single entendres represented a force of youthful enthusiasm and exuberance.
This actually offers some potential for a musical premise; the strength of most musicals comes from characters articulating in song what they can’t in mere words. But Rock of Ages suffers from letting the silliness just be silliness.
With a jukebox musical, the audience is likely to already know most of the songs, so there’s a moment of groaning when a character headed out on a date breaks into Foreigner’s “Waiting For a Girl Like You,” or the lead-in to a club’s demolition is, yes, Europe’s “The Final Countdown.”
Again, there’s some fun you could have with that, particularly as lyrics are recontextualized in different situations, but Chris D’Arienzo’s book is, frankly, not very good. The story concerns Sherrie (Shannon Mullen) and Drew (Dominique Scott), a couple of dreamers who fall for each other at the 1980s Sunset Strip hangout the Bourbon Room and find their plans deferred by fate, misunderstanding and the spoiled rock god Stacee Jaxx (Matt Nolan). The plot is so thin that narrator Lonny (Justin Colombo, who seems to be channeling Tenacious D-era Jack Black) has to explicate such major points as the fact that the first act coming to an end.
Friday, September 9, 2011
- PRC photo by Andrea Akin
- Ray Dooley and Josh Barrett in A NUMBER at PRC2.
5 STARS — HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION
Playmakers Repertory Company - PRC2
Kenan Theatre, UNC
Through Sep. 11
Given that Caryl Churchill’s drama A NUMBER is at least ostensibly about cloning, you could say that each production mounted out of the theatrical DNA embedded in Churchill’s script constitutes a clone of the play.
It’s a tempting argument, but it’s wrong.
I actually touched on one of the reasons why in Tuesday’s review of Somewhere Out There. If a group of graduate students assaying Beckett can all but be counted on to reach a bewildering range of conclusions from a script in which all production elements are spelled out in significant detail, what chance of accord is there with a script like Churchill’s, in which almost none of the same specifics are?
For after describing the four character’s names, ages and familial ties—Salter, a man in his sixties, who is father to Bernard, age 40; a second character, also named Bernard, age 35; and Michael Black, age 35—Churchill’s complete stage directions for A NUMBER read as follows: “The play is for two actors. One plays Salter, the other his sons. The scene is the same throughout, it’s where Salter lives.”
Beyond that, the director, actors and design team are on their own.
Here’s where I’m supposed to say that it shouldn’t be so surprising, then, that director Mike Donahue, designer Jan Chambers and actors Ray Dooley and Josh Barrett reached several significantly different conclusions in this PRC2 production, which you should hasten to before its close on Sunday, than Raleigh Ensemble Players did in the regional premiere in 2007.
And yet, at least one surprise in this laudable production came as little less than an interpretive revelation.
Awesome work, ladies! I love getting know a bit more about the micro communities around the Triangle. And I can't …
by April McGreger on At the gas station, biscuits, tortillas—and community (Food Feature)
@michael pollan
"Occupy Chapel Hill has been on the whole very supportive of both the building takeovers. "
…
by Michael Czeiszperger on Carrboro Commune occupies CVS building (Orange County)