Who Knew Nihilism could Be So Gracious?

If theatre, both the comic and the tragic, is supposed to be cathartic as I think it should be, then the Paper Lantern Theatre Company’s production of Deborah Zoe Laufer’s End Days falls hopelessly flat. To be fair, it’s more a fault of the playwright than the cast and crew. While quite funny at some points, End Days ultimately fails in its attempts to put a hopeful spin on modern man’s devil-may-care tragic metaphysic by presenting us with a family’s almost farcical process of healing after the events of September 11^th. But characters stripped down to the single dimension of their reaction to the tragedy and Laufer’s hapless slapping of band-aids on bullet holes can’t fool the audience into believing that nihilism is okay.

Arthur Stein, who worked in the World Trade Center, is paralyzed with survivor’s guilt and hasn’t left the house in a year. His wife, Sylvia, having succumbed to the fear of losing her loved ones, “found” Jesus and the hope of the Rapture as her cure all. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Rachel has turned into an angry, hateful goth chick, searching for meaning while rejecting everyone else’s answers. Enter Nelson Steinburg, a borderline-autistic, borderline-stalker with an omnipresent Elvis outfit and an unstoppably sunny disposition, despite his tragic past. Nelson’s optimism pulls Arthur out of his seclusion, Rachel out of her selfish hatred, and Sylvia out of her fear of the future almost all in the space of one, 24-hour vigil for an apocalypse that never happens.

As I said, the fault does not belong to the actors. Lee Spencer as Arthur comes as close three-dimensions as a good actor can and the emotional honesty of his cereal box-breakdown in the grocery store is easily the most moving portion of the show. And the brilliant physical comedy of the young actor who plays Nelson kept the audience from getting too lost in the dysfunctions of the family as a whole. In addition, the cardboard box set brought a focus to the characters as a family in transition from sorrow to joy.

Despite all this, there is a problem. And the problem is not that happy endings are can’t be cathartic. The problem is that the ending isn’t truly happy. There’s a sort of repentance and reconciliation, but it’s at the expense of the truth. All the playwright can give us is, “In the end we all die, but that’s how it is, so it has to be good enough.” A nihilism that prides itself on its gracious acceptance of the supposed facts is still nihilism. And a gracious nihilism is still a false reality.

END DAYS by Debora Zoe Laufer; produced by the Paper Lantern Theater Company; January 19-22 & 27-29 at 8pm, 23^rd & 30^th at 2pm; adults $18, students and seniors $15; at Triad Stage’s UpStage Cabaret, 232 South Elm Street, Greensboro, NC 27401; 336.272.0160

Isn't It Rich?

A Little Night Music is an excellent musical, but it's not true. That is, it moves us most when its existential nihilism causes pain, but the supposed happiness of its leading characters in the end must, by the very nature of its philosophy, be tinged with hopelessness. It is a story that longs for eucatastrophe. We see its hopelessness in miniature during Petra’s breezy "The Miller’s Son." She sings of her inevitable marriage—whether to a miller’s son, a businessman, or a prince—but insists that, in the meanwhile:

There are mouths to be kissed
Before mouths to be fed,
And there's many a tryst
And there's many a bed,
There's a lot I'll have missed
But I'll not have been dead
When I die!

Because life is just passing by and we should celebrate while we can. The result is a stage full of fools—fools that move us, but fools nonetheless.

The entire musical, as one-woman Greek chorus Madame Armfeldt prologues, is about the follies of mankind. For someone with a deeply comic outlook on life, such follies can and should be funny (cf. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but the nihilist can only say with Fredrika, "I think it must be worth it. […] It's all there is, isn't it?" This outlook on life is nothing short of discouraging and turns hope into a mere childish fancy. So even when Desiree rescues Frederik from "renewing [his] unrenewable youth" and he rescues her from her endless series of liaisons, we can only look upon them sadly, as we might a desperately poor child waiting up for Santa on Christmas Eve. After all, "love's disgusting, love's insane, a humiliating business" and Desiree has already branded herself and Frederik as the fools in the farce that is their life. Tragic fools, whose comedic timing is on the fritz.

And yet, Stephen Sondheim has an unmatched gift for seeing truth. The hopelessness of such nihilism is impossible to miss. Each couple is struggling to choose between seeming opposites: renewing one's youth or surrendering to the effects of time, prudence or passion, freedom or domesticity, and that perennial choice, love or money. But Sondheim, as ever, holds on to the tragic metaphysic of the classicists before him, certain that we must choose between the opposites rather than live in the paradox of the Cross. But this is not syncretism or any sort of attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It's the struggle.

It's Pascal, it's Eliot, it's Christ.

Alice Ripley - 2009 Tony Award Winner - Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical

Princess.

How could something go wrong that I can't see?

What do you love about this character?
His sense of purpose and his devotion and commitment to Diana [played by Ripley]. I’m a hopeless romantic myself and I love my wife tremendously, so I understand his desire to make his wife better. Most husbands, whether the issue is depression or an accident or illness, whatever the circumstance may be, want to be the knight in shining armor, to push a button and make it better. Dan is so adoring, and yet there’s something very naive about him. Because it’s not that easy. He has hidden in the shadows of denial for too long in his marriage and his life. And yet the thing that’s so beautiful about the show is that by the end, he has that moment of understanding and more importantly, acceptance.
- J. Robert Spencer on his character, Dan Goodman, in the new Broadway musical Next to Normal

"[The stage] demands a special discipline, a raft of technical skills that cannot be mediated by the ministrations of directors and cinematographers."
~ Charles Isherwood

Process and Processed

Another article for Patrol. This time on what theatre's got that film don't got.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Or, Why In the Heights Won Best Musical and Passing Strange Walked Away with Next to Nothing


The 2008 Tony Awards renewed my hope for the future of musical theatre and it wasn’t simply the fact that the Tony voters actually selected the best in each category this year. It was the spectacle of The Lion King’s opening performance, the indomitable Patti LuPone garnering a standing ovation for her performance of "Everything’s Coming Up Roses," the reaction of generations of theatre people to RENT’s farewell performance, and the large number of winners who stood on stage expressing their sincere gratitude for just being allowed to work in theatre. But, most of all, it was the fact that the Lin-Manuel Mirandas took the night with barely a glance back at Stew and his attempt at the autonomous musical.

Just looking at Stew, the creator and self-styled star of the mostly autobiographical Passing Strange, is enough to see how full of himself the man is. Sporting ever present sunglasses, a bright wardrobe, and an irritating take-me-as-I-am personality, Stew announced to the New York Times, as if it were a badge of honor, that he can count the number of times he’s been to the theatre on one hand. He speaks about musical theatre as if it were the most inferior of art forms, in need of his vulgar, over-loud version of reform. "In high school," he said, "when you're a rock 'n' roll stoner, your mortal enemies are the thespians. We thought that musical theater was the dorkiest thing in the world and had nothing to do with the music we listened to. And quite frankly we still feel that way." With all his talk about being an "outsider," one gets the overall impression that the man enjoys being on the fringe and will do all he can to remain there, as if appealing to a wider variety of people were some form of selling out.

Then there’s Lin-Manuel Miranda. Being a Latino on Broadway, Miranda is also a minority; what Stew would call an "outsider." But where Stew harbors this not-so-veiled dislike for Broadway, Miranda is a Broadway baby. He may have grown up in the mostly Latino community of Inwood at the top of Manhattan, with all its hip-hop and salsa influences, but just watching his reaction to the RENT tribute performance is enough to see how much he adores musical theatre. Like many Broadway fans his age, his first show was The Phantom of the Opera and his first Broadway obsession, RENT. It was only right that this theatre fanboy took home some of the biggest awards of the evening. Upon winning for an original score riddled with homages to shows like West Side Story, he burst into an unrehearsed rap and gave some love to Sunday in the Park with George, exclaiming, "Mr. Sondheim, look, I made a hat where there never was a hat! It's a Latin hat at that!"

Miranda did what every good creator does: he loved what came before. In bringing that love together with his love for the present, he created an old-fashioned show that nevertheless "illuminates the stories of the people in the street."

Tell Me, What Did I Do It For?

Now imagine that happening two feet in front of you. This means that when she chucks those itty-bitty pieces of paper, she chucks them IN YOUR FACE. That's why the woman is terrifying and that's why she won the Tony. Also, Laura's terrified gasp after "Momma is gonna see to it!" sort of makes my life. Good to note that at the beginning of this scene in the actual production, tears had actually been POURING down her cheeks and she was wiping them away like an 8-year-old. Not okay for me, really.

So, clearly, if you have the means and opportunity, go see this as soon as humanly possible. The show has effectively ruined all past and future productions of Gypsy for me, and I'm okay with that.

And, for good measure, the Tony speeches: Laura, Patti, and Boyd's isn't on YouTube, but you can read it here.

No Day But Today

I’ve never liked RENT. I still don’t. I think it is an objectively bad musical, poorly constructed, full of annoying songs and trite lyrics, and just barely carried out with flair. My dislike for this musical has embittered me against the oft-repeated refrain, “RENT was a revolutionary musical that changed the face of theatre forever.”

Then Tony night happened.

Since the Broadway production of RENT is closing this September, the powers that be brought the original and current casts together on the same stage for the 2008 Tony Awards in tribute to the show that “changed the face of Broadway.” They sang a “La Vie Boheme”/”Seasons of Love” medley and it wasn’t until they showed the audience reaction that I understood just what sort of impact RENT has had on the Broadway community. Among others, Sunday in the Park with George star Daniel Evans sat there grinning and singing along like the fan boy I now suspect he is and Patti LuPone herself was actually rocking out in her seat. These aren’t rabid, thirteen-year-old fangirls; these are industry professionals. But the most glorious moment – the moment that forever changed my perception of RENT – came when the old and new casts had barely finished singing and Lin-Manuel Miranda leapt to his feet, barely able to contain his tears of joy. It was then that I realized that the creation of In the Heights can be traced back directly to RENT.

RENT may not be the best of musicals, but it certainly broke the mold. It freed more talented creators to make musicals that speak to the youth of today, while retaining those elements of the Golden Age that make a musical a musical. And now I can join the throngs of theatre fans in honestly saying:

Thank you, Jonathan Larson.

More Like "Arrogantly Self-Important"

Stephen Holden of the New York Times recently wrote this about new musical Passing Strange:

The young man’s naïve infatuation with Europe, where he dives into a bohemian paradise of sex and drugs, inspires [...] a scathing response to his being fetishized as an angry black militant by a group of German cultural revolutionaries [...] In conclusion he wonders if he is “the postmodern lawn jockey sculpture.”

The term postmodern indicates the intellectual seriousness of the show."

I guess I should begin throwing in the term "postmodern" to my blog posts, lest all three of you who read it begin worrying about my intellectual seriousness.

Another Hundred People Just Got off of the Train

Yes, I did in fact go to NYC and make it back alive. The only reason I haven't written anything about it yet is because my real life decided to just start back up again right where I left it. Long story short, it was a theatre marathon and nearly as tiring as an actual marathon, but oh so satisfying.

Despite missing the first twenty minutes of In the Heights because United Airlines has the crappiest service in the history of the industry, the show was great and I had a great time with my aunt and uncle. That Saturday will go down as one the most memorable of my life because, after the show, I my aunt and uncle took me to dinner at The View and then I saw August: Osage County. If you enjoy really spectacularly excellent theatre -- the kind that leaves you breathless and screaming with delight all at once -- you have to go see it. Marvelous.

Then I had a Gypsy marathon comprised of the Sunday matinée, the best Tony Awards ever, a small Broadway by the Year - 1979 interruption on Monday night, the Tuesday evening show, and the Wednesday matinée. And the show got better every time I saw it and the dressing room fight at the end changed each night. But not like they were bored or goofing off. They were EXPLORING. It was brilliant. And Tuesday night's performance -- the one right after the cast won their respective Tony Awards -- was a performance that will live on as the most memorable show I've ever been too. Such entrance applause! And Laura breaking character (which she never does) and crying because of it. The intensity of the dressing room fight made me feel nauseated and "Rose's Turn" made me want to curl up in a corner and cry like a baby; Rose's hair was flying loose, she spat her words like snake venom, and then proceeded to have a complete nervous breakdown before my very eyes and I loved. Every. Second of it. Then I sat front row center on Wednesday afternoon, which really wasn't a good idea because Patti hit me in the face with the torn up letter at the end of "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and I almost died. No. Really. Front row is really too close for comfort if you get as emotionally involved as I do. I was on the verge of a heart attack from the train station scene on through the end. Ugh. I hate that show. And by "hate" I mean "love". Clearly.

Then I ended my trip with the jaw exercise that is the sweet show, Curtains. I have never smiled, laughed, and cried so much in a theatre in all my life. It was SO CUTE. Just a grand, old fashioned show with a lot of heart. I loved it. And we sat front row center (technically partial view, but not really), which made the stage door a bit embarrassing when half the cast recognized us. Oops. I'm so sad that it closes on Sunday. It's such a happy little show.

Anyway, great trip. And real live reviews will be coming soon, since I have the rest of the week off.

The Fairy Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

So despite the fact that A Catered Affair didn't win a single Drama Desk or Tony Award, the impossibly self-important Harvey Fierstein has repeatedly boasted that his precious show has had higher grosses than three of the four Tony Nominated new musicals this season. What he left out is that grosses are one thing, but if your show is too boring to have significant advance sales, you're screwed.

As a result, A Catered Affair will close on July 27th, opening up the beautiful Walter Kerr Theatre for a show worthy of the space. A kick ass straight play along the lines of excellence of August: Osage County, perhaps?

Tony Winner Laura Benanti

That is all.

Revive Me

There's something that has always bugged me about the theatre community at large and that is the widespread hatred of revivals. Lately, it's been all about the Gypsy hate. Not out and out hatred, mind you. These bitchy theatre queens will be the fastest to confess their love for the great musical. It's the "endless" revivals they can't stand. "It was JUST on Broadway," they complain. "The public is sick of it!"

But the public certainly isn't sick of it. Much of America doesn't even know what the hell Gypsy is, or A Chorus Line, or Company. They couldn't care less that you think Barbara Walsh was so inferior to Elaine Stritch that she doesn't even deserve the time of day from you. What your American tourist cares about is seeing a good show. Furthermore, and more importantly, what your teenage Broadway enthusiast ALSO cares about is seeing a good show. That 13-year-old who just got her socks blown off by Patti LuPone didn't get the chance to see Bernadette Peters in the very same role five years ago. And even if she did, she wouldn't have understood a lick of it.

Theatre by its very nature is a cultural art form. In order for the young'uns to know what is good, they must be enculturated with the good stuff. And that means revivals. It may all seem tiresome to someone who's been going to the theatre for thirty-some-odd years, but it's necessary to raise up the next generation of theatregoers, performers, directors, producers, and creators. Yes, new works are exhilarating. But you can't truly appreciate a new musical's newness until you've enjoyed what's come before.

So, when ten years from now Gypsy is revived again (Emily Skinner as Rose, anyone?), instead of complaining, stand outside the theatre as the show lets out and look at the faces of the young people who will have just seen it for the first time EVER. You'll no longer see a reason to complain.

More Baritone, Please

Say what you will about South Pacific, but it has some of the most beautiful baritone music in the history of Broadway. Perhaps that's why "Some Enchanted Evening" gets so many reprises in the show.

iTunes Top Five

Just because it's funny, my non-fudged top five most played Broadway songs:

1. "Unusual Way" - Laura Benanti - Nine
2. "I Know Him So Well" - Alice Ripley & Emily Skinner - Chess
3. "If I Told You" - Laura Benanti & Stephen Lynch - The Wedding Singer
4. "Another Hundred People" - Alice Ripley - Company
5. "Losing My Mind" - Alice Ripley - Follies

But if we're talking from the actual cast albums, it looks more like this:

1. "Unusual Way" - Laura Benanti - Nine
2. "If I Told You" - Laura Benanti & Stephen Lynch - The Wedding Singer
3. "No One Is Alone" - Laura Benanti - Into the Woods
4. "Someday" - Laura Benanti - The Wedding Singer
5. "My Husband Makes Movies" - Mary Stuart Masterson - Nine

Go ahead. Judge me. I deserve it. You don't even want to know the playcounts on these. Talk about embarrassing.

Reality vs. Reality

"In this age of reality TV, what is more real than watching a real person – with real talent – singing their heart out, or acting their heart out, or dancing—only for you? You paid [for] a ticket. You're sitting there and we're performing for you. To me, that is the ultimate human collaboration. And that's what's missing when it's just a camera in your face and you have to cry." (Laura Benanti, Broadway Beat: Meet the Tony Nominees)

Throw That Fairy Dust in My Hair

Sometimes I forget how much I love Stephanie J. Block. And then she sings "Never Never Land" again and I curse myself for ever forgetting.

Shoshana Bean gives and awkward and somewhat funny introduction, but feel free to ignore it and get to the good stuff. That being Stephanie acting the face off of Scott Alan's best song, "Never Never Land."

So Good, It's Painful

As I've said before, my favorite shows or movies are the ones that leave me incapacitated at the end. Literally in pain. These include shows like Gypsy and Next to Normal and movies like August Rush. But the funny thing about Gypsy is sometimes I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it. I don't even have to be watching it or listening to the cast recording. Merely thinking about the fight in the dressing room or last two minutes of "Rose's Turn" or the mocking laughter that erupts from the venom Louise's own mother cultured in her daughter's gut . . . I can't even deal.

And somehow I'm going to see this show three times in a row. Pray for me. I might just die.

You Can't YouTube It

Click open your iTunes (if it isn't already open) and search for the American Theatre Wing's Downstage Center podcast. You there? Okay. Now: download Sherie Rene Scott's May 2008 interview. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, listen to it around 28 minutes.

At that's why theatre kicks ass.