Day Five...

Posted 12:00 PM by sean
I saw three shows yesterday, and it was definitely a good day.

I had a couple of lovely stretches between shows when no-one was available on the phone for business, so I got to stroll. I mean, these were half hour strolls, so it shouldn't really count, but still, strolling is not something people generally do in Manhattan. We're head-down fast walkers. So, strolling first the West Side Highway at Houston and then the City Hall area at 9 o'clock at night were both real treats.

Anyway, I realized that I had some time earlier in the day than I had planned so I scanned the Fringe Guide for shows that might start early enough for me to still be able to see the two shows I had planned, and I cross-referenced it with a set of reviews and decided to go check out Barrymore's Body.

Several things drew me to Barrymore's Body. I love movies from this period, (I think everyone who does stage work wishes to God we could go back to movies that read like plays and asked their actors to act) and I wanted to see how they handled the impersonations of Bogart and, especially, Peter Lorre, one of my favorite actors of all time.

What these guys did was not so much impersonations as distillation and channelling. I didn't talk to any of the actors, but it seems like they watched all the movies and thought "Okay, if these guys act like this in movies, how would they act when they're just being normal". It was transporting. Christian Baskous was perfect as Bogey, slightly less sneering and cool than he is in the movies, slightly more human, and incredible. Dan Truman played Peter Lorre with such affection and precision that I am sure every review of the show is gonna shit themselves over his performance. He's so perfect, you wonder how he does anything else. Gregory Steinbrunner may have a harder time wowing people with his Paul Henreid, it is a slightly more thankless role and it's not a character that people have been impersonating forever, but his acting is wonderful. People make too much of accents when talking about actors, thanks to fucking Meryl Streep , but he had to have the accent of an Austrian who is convinced he sounds completely American, and he pulls it off wonderfully.

The play did expose the limitations of stage craft, it was impossible for them to change the sets fast enough to keep pace with the story and, in the second act, once a few larger set pieces were on stage and you knew you had met the entire cast, a lot fo the tension was gone. It shouldn't be this way, but the fact is, you don't worry about the cops coming if you've already met all the actors in the program.

But these are top notch performances in a play that is an actual *story*, which is hard to find in the theater sometimes. It's worth it just to hear Lorre and Bogart talk shit about the piece of crap they're working on right now. I would definitely say to go see this show.

Then I went down to my theater where I saw Bitches Funny Presents "Cows Gone Wild" and I had a good laugh. No, I didn't really, I had a laugh, not really a good one. But I'm a prick, what do I know. They did about thirty sketches and only a few of them were tailored to my sense of humor. I don't really find funny stuff all that funny. I liked it when someone did bad stand up, I liked it when they came out dressed in robes and did a chant for two minutes that made no sense, only to show us later on that the asses of their dresses were cut out, I like the sorta surreal stuff. But an interview with Karen Carpenter? (Hint: there's a joke there about how she should have eaten more). Beating the shit out of that Six Flags guy? Arabs who own Dunkin' Donuts aren't to be trusted? I know it's all funny, it just isn't funny to me. Because, like I said, I'm a grouchy old prick.

I did see my friend Matthew Kinney on the street before the show and we compared notes on the rest of the Fringe and on our own show, and then I ran into Matthew Brookshire (he did some choreography for The Bitches) who I had produced during Gideon's Indivisible Festival and it was cool to see him. It's fun to realize there is a spinning connection that we all have, Mr. Brookshire working with a company, founded by Missi Pyle , who worked, in Cincinatti, with Jordanai, who produced a festival in which Mr. Brookshire performed... it's nice.

But it got weirder as the night went on. Next is the best show I've seen yet at The Fringe and the twilight zone I ended up in...

Fringe Audience, Day Four

Posted 11:21 AM by sean
I'm a grouchy old prick, and if you don't know that by now, you haven't been reading my blog.

Is it fair for me to review other people's shows and say nothing of my own? I don't know. I could write a blog that was either heavily critical or heavily celebratory, but the reason that actors don't write their own reviews is that they have no way of knowing how good the show is. And you can't go by what people tell you. For a show you hated, have you ever hung around to tell the cast? No, you only hang around if you are touched, and people can be touched by almost anything.

I can give you some facts about the show. They nearly sold out an 80 seat theater. We had massive technical problems, last minute changes to the set and last second cue shifts. Most of us do not know our lines, there were a *lot* of dropped lines and, in my opinion, even worse, dropped moments. Because we weren't saying what the script had written, we were left to improvise totally different moments in order for the action to happen. The audience loved our show and laughed all the way through. Many people told me afterwards that they loved my performance.

So, those are the facts. The above is not interpretation of an artistic expression, that's simply what happened. I'll leave it to the audience to decide what was good and what was bad about this piece.

I'm willing to posit this opinion. I don't like the fact that everyone seems to think flip-flops are acceptable foot wear. New Yorkers have some ugly damn feet, and when you go into and out of a subway, you are making your actual *feet* dirty. God, the variations on the pinkie toe alone are enough to make your head swim when your looking around a crowded train. Ugh, it makes me shudder just to think about it.

Fringe Audience, Day Three

Posted 1:46 PM by sean
After I wrote yesterday's post at a Starbucks in far downtown Manhattan (right across from my brother Ian's favorite building) while drinking a large vanilla something or other, and then went to go see Comedeus, which might be the best way to see it.

Comedeus, also known as "The Andy Ross Experience" is one of those theater/comedy pieces that walks right up to the line of what you can stand, but Mr. Ross has the decency not to step over that line. His piece is organized with sound cues and a couple of props, but really he's just telling a story and he tries to make it funny for you. And it works. He makes it funny.

Here's the thing. It's not a coherent show, it isn't presented as a piece of articulate art whatsoever. And usually that pisses me off. But the story he is telling is about two characters, Comedeus (God of Comedy, I think, I don't know he was humping the stage half the time) and Tutheus (God of realism). Trutheus wants the world to be orderly, organized, disciplined and, y'know, he wants everyone to be off book by the performance. But Mr. Ross is on the side of Comedeus, so he just makes shit up. And almost all of it was either pretty funny, or really inspired and hilarious.

At one point, there was a noise from the theater next door that sounded exactly like horses. So, Ross decided that the character he was playing was on horseback. When we came back to that character, he remembered that it was supposed to be on a horse, but there was no noise from next door, so, on a whim, he asked us to bang on our chairs to make the horse noise for him. "Now you're in the show!" he hollered. "I'll pay you what I'm paying them!" he pointed to the stage manager with a huge smile that snapped into a scowl as he yelled "SUCKERS!"

Full disclosure, this guy is from the Carolinas, and as soon as I heard his accent and met his wife (the stage manager) I was totally on their side. I have friends that would have hated this, I know Jordana would have eaten her own tongue. But she has a heart of ice, as I've said before.

The second show was a bit of a mixed bag. Sound Of The Estate is one of the shows that makes legit theater people cringe. Uncle Vanya set in a harlem recording studio? But, of course, I'm a homer and anything with recording studios or hip-hop and I'll give it a shot.

The play was updated masterfully, and the cast was wonderful. Most of the people are either hip-hop artists or singers, and Chekov in the mouths of musicians is just magical. Singers and rappers are used to communicating with word combinations they wouldn't necessarily casually use, and the cast handled it really well. I loved the script, full of the same horrible feelings of inertia, the same horrible struggles between class and the unfairness of beauty and love.

If the playwright, Jehriko Turner had simply updated it and then given it to a director (he's listed as doing both), he would have done the project a huge favor. For those of you wondering what a stage director does, believe me you know it when he or she hasn't done it. If actors are unsure of their place on stage, if actors aren't off-book, if scene changes are over-long or awkward, if set pieces don't seem to belong, then you know the director didn't know how to run rehearsals.

Also, it was a great idea to set it in a studio, but no-one on stage seemed to know what happens in a studio. There was a mixer, a keyboard, a computer and a booth on stage, and occasionally someone would press a button on the mixer to make sound happen, or would ask someone in the booth to play something back. In fact, they constantly asked people in the booth to play something back, and they would yell through the glass to talk to each other. I'm just saying, it was a cool idea, and a theater director, a nuts and bolts woman or man, would have taken this wonderful script and amazing actors and turned it into a theater piece.

Tonight, our show opens, and then I might be getting drunk. Or I might go see another show at ten, I'm not sure.

Fringe Audience, Day Two

Posted 1:39 PM by sean
I’m in the curious position of having a little bit of time free. I was supposed to go see the Bigfoot musical, but they’ve sold out. Their entire run. So what the hell do they care about my opinion? I don’t even care about my opinion of a show that’s doing just fine without me.

With that in mind, that my opinion really shouldn’t mean that much, I’m treading into unfortunate territory. I understand that everyone who does a play thinks they have worked really hard at it, and I understand that for most people, speaking in front of people is their number one fear, (more than death, research has shown, leading to the inevitable joke that people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy), but when your show gets in to the Fringe festival and you run it along side so many other wonderful performances, you need to know when you’ve fallen way short of expectations.

I saw two shows yesterday, The Dead Sea and Mimi LeDuc. The Dead Sea is one of the worst plays I’ve sat through in a long history of sitting through terrible plays. I went and saw plays in Los Angeles that were better than this, honest to God, *Los Angeles*.

The ways in which this show failed are so many and so persistent that to list them one by one does a disservice to the effect the entire show has on a person. The performances were, at best, self indulgent and average, at their worst it was the dregs of college acting, people miscast for their age, guys not knowing their lines covering for other guys, self hypnotic meaningless speeches to dead mothers, all wrapped up in what I have to guess was meant to be a naturalistic piece.

At one point a character goes off stage to make some food, and there is no accompanying sound cues. Fine. But then a character goes off stage to take a shower, and there is a sound of a shower running the whole time. And then the shower had nothing to do with the plot of the show.

Two characters get into a fistfight, a third tells them to stop, they do, and nothing else happens. A character has the line, “I’ll never forget that day again”, about a day he has not yet forgotten.

Do you see what I mean? I have a thousand examples in my head, burned in there like spots of missing sunscreen, but to list them misses the point. They turned on a TV and left it on Mute for five minutes and I missed everything that was happening in the play while I watched Tom and Jerry, and yet I didn’t miss a second of plot development.

I saw a production of Fiddler on the Roof in 1994, where Tevya was drunk, Perchik was gay, Hodel was tone-deaf and Yente missed her entrance at the beginning. That play was worse than this one, only because the material was good and the worked to wreck it. This play should never be produced again.

I apologize. I know they worked hard on it, but it was god-awful.

Mimi LeDuc was wonderful. I am going to try to bring Mac and Jordana to it if we can get tickets. It is a great show and I will discuss it a little longer once we’ve all seen it again, but there were two small criticisms. Three or four of the songs didn’t quite end well, they didn’t know exactly how they wanted to dismount, so to speak.

That's stupid. I feel like an ass for saying that because this show was so great. If I devote two paragraphs to the show, one should be about the amazing execution, the fantastic orchestration, the producerial dedication to every possible detail, the simplicity of the choices and the deftness of the shepherds that brought this great piece in to the Fringe. The performances were INCREDIBLE, with the possible exception of the Mormon husband of the main character, who was simply quite good.

And that leads to my only real criticism. From the far outside, and perhaps from the deep inside, the Mormons look like a group of people who have a stranglehold patriarchy, simply because men hold the priesthood and are the heads of their households and stuff. But, man, from a slight distance, knowing the Mormons well but not being one, I tell you, this is a group of people led by women. The strongest, meanest, no bullshit-taking, hard as nail bitches in the world are making baked goods right now for their families. To imply that Mormon women are somehow in need of liberation more than, I don’t know, Baptists or something is not in line with my experience. It didn't wreck the show for me, and I like the "pioneer stock" jokes littered throughout, but I don't think that aspect of it is true.

Go see Mimi LeDuc, though, it is out-of-sight good. Actually, don’t go, because I need to get tickets for me and my producers.

Fringe Audience, Day One

Posted 11:18 AM by sean
Last night I saw "Gork! The Retard Always Wins", a one woman show about a midwestern family dealing with their retarded brother, (although even that description undermines the show somewhat). Autumn Terrill, the writer and performer of the piece, tells the true story of her brother Adam, who, like most kids with learning disabilities, goes through a series of diagnoses and medications while privately thrilling and terrifying his family.

As I talk about the Fringe, I want to say something about why I go to each of the shows I'm going to. There is at least one show I'm gonna go see that I am *dragging* myself to because the description sounds terrible and the title sucks, but I know one of the performers and Mac saw the last show these people did and said it was great. But a lot of these shows have their own private ways of getting me to come see them.

Gork got me for several reasons. I can smell affection from a mile away, and it was obvious in all the press stuff about this show that the producers *love* the material. Mostly because they love the subject, but you can also smell when someone is making a show that is a life's passion. That sock puppet showgirls thing? That sounds like hollow hatred. If they decided to remake a great movie with sock puppets, I would want to go, or if you could tell that they were remaking a movie that everyone else hated, but that they loved, I would go. But they hate the material.

I have to admit that it was subject material... plus the mention of "Iowa". Maybe that doesn't help anyone else sell their show, but if you're from Iowa, I'll come see your shit. Actually, the guy with the stillborn one man show was passing out flyers in line, and when I realized he was from the midwest and only in town for a little bit to do his show, it made me want to see it. So, I guess, feature your ethnicity whenever possible, even if that ethnicity is "Iowan".

Autumn Terrill and her producers and directors love the show and love the guy it's based on. And man, did they deliver. At no point during the show did Autumn ever make it seem as if living with Adam was anything other than *awesome*. She tells a story that contains almost no touchy-feely family love, which is the way our lives actually *are*. She walks that tightrope of describing a real fucked-up disfunctional family as it functions, not only normally, but normally with the addition of an ADHD Autistic Retard band marching through their lives wearing KISS make-up, and she describes it so well that you feel like it's your family. Most of our parents live lives of desperate hostility and mild affection, both with each other and with us, their kids and when you see someone portray that on stage, it's really an amazing revelation.

She also walks the fine line between theater and advocacy. You leave with a better understanding of the parameters of disorder, or rather the lack of distinction therein, but you also, y'know, laugh and laugh and want to know what happens. She plays each member of her family only with distinct physical cues. it's a lesson in simplicity and economy that would be good for anyone doing a one person show. Her mom folded her hands, her dad rounded his shoulders, her brother had one hand on his jock, and that's it.

Man, as an aside, I hate one person shows. There's nothing worse than one character saying something that the other character is surprised by, only to have the same actor play both characters. And there's nothing more boring in drama than *not* having one character tell the other characters something surprising. Also, I usually don't care about your story. Sure, yeah, you discovered you were gay and no-one understood, okay, you were at the Twin Towers when they came down, all right, your grandfather got cancer and you really miss him. If you're not going to spend an hour doing an impersonation of your retarded brother, I don't want to go.

And, actually, that's my only mild criticism of the show. It doesn't feed seemlessly between the stand-up, talking to the audience as Autumn sections and the act-'em-out, this is my family on vacation sections. She seemed to be really comfortable being herself, and really comfortable being her family, but not so comfortable making the transition from one to the other. In situations like this I blame the director, who's work besides this was remarkable, because it is problems like this that a director is supposed to fix.

But, the playing space was about 12 by 12, the audience space was about 13 by 13 and the ceilings were lower than my apartment. The director made the show work in these ridiculous circumstances, so I wouldn't dare want to criticize more than that. If you're in New York, go see the show. You won't cry, I promise, you won't need to. You'll just think it's awesome. It's fun and empowering and a *great* way to spend an hour.

Today, The Dead Sea, and maybe The Jammer. Reviews tomorrow probably won't be this extensive unless I really like them.