"CURTAIN
CALLS" #219
By
11/23/07
The Swallow
flies above, Punks and Cry-Baby beneath;
We all get by - By the Skin Of Our Teeth
Tear-Jerker
THE SHOW: Cry-Baby, a brand-new musical based on the music-infused 1990 (Johnny Depp-starring) film by John Waters, variously known as the
King of Camp, the Titan of Trash and the Sultan of Sleaze. The world premiere
has a book by Mark O’Donnell (Tony-winner for that ‘other’ musical based on a Waters
film, Hairspray) and Thomas Meehan
(two-time Tony-winner for Annie and The Producers), and songs by David Javerbaum (executive producer of “The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart) and Adam Schlesinger.
THE STORY:
The Squares
(and their white-bread leader, Baldwin) are threatened by Cry-Baby and his
followers (he’s “the most popular loner in school”). But the Drapes welcome
THE PLAYERS/THE PRODUCTION: The production is eye-popping (sets by Scott Pask,
lighting by Howell Binkley). When the curtain goes up, the look, lighting and
costumes are so brilliantly bright, colorful and ‘Up With
People’ wholesome, you have to blink your eyes to adjust. Then the Drapes come
bursting onstage in a red convertible (there’s even a peacock-blue ’54 T-Bird
parked outside the Mandell Weiss Theatre – or at
least there was on opening night). The culture clash is great fun throughout –
the farty, corny Squares with their ballads and
barber-shop harmonies vs. the oozing sex of the Drapes and their hip-swiveling,
gospel-inflected, R&B-meets-R&R wailers.
The energy is
incredibly high and the direction, by Mark Brokaw, is exciting and dynamic
without being hyperactive. But it’s Rob Ashford’s choreography that steals the
show. This is the best dancing in a musical in decades. The show’s heights of
creativity are scaled in the moves and the lyrics. Both perfectly capture the
twisted whimsy of Waters’ warped humor. The book isn’t always so successful.
Both acts bog down in unnecessary narrative detail (that Theme Park scene can
go, among others) and there’s a sense of repetitive numbers that sound like
other songs (heavy on the Elvis, R&B and ballads) and only serve to
describe character or situation rather than forwarding the action. And the
audience should go out with a song they can sing and dance to (like “Can’t Stop
the Beat” in Hairspray, which kept
folks boppin’ long past the lobby).
The show
needs to be pared down. But the vitality is awesome. And there are two
show-stopping songs, which not all new musicals can boast. The best song, by
far, is “Screw Loose,” in which the loony-tunes Lenora, who drools over
Cry-Baby and tries to sabotage his relationship with
The other
clever song is more about the moves and the lyrics than the music, but it’s a
keeper: “Can I Kiss You…” (the
ellipses masking the R-rated missing words “with tongue”). Hilarious lines, and
the most imaginative, making-out-behind-rocks moves you’ve ever/never seen.
Fantastic!
Catherine Zuber’s costumes have the era and characters down pat,
except for Mrs. Vernon-Williams,
Elizabeth
Stanley has that beautiful blonde bimbette look the
somewhat thankless role of
As Dupree,
Cry-Baby’s sidekick, the Little Richard/James Brown stand-in who wails and
splits and puts the rhythm in Rhythm ‘n’ Blues, Chester Gregory II is terrific.
And the backup girls are great: spunky fireplug Carly Jibson as preggo
Pepper; long-legged Lacey Kohl as sexy stunner Wanda; and forceful Cristen Paige as the knife-wielding Scar-face, Mona.
Christopher J. Hanke is as smarmy as the scheming
straight-arrow,
The ensemble is galvanic. The vitality is infectious. The choreography and
dancing are fantastic. The 13-piece band sounds brash, brassy and twice its
size (orchestrations by Christopher Jahnke;
additional arrangements by musical director Lynne Shankel).
Okay, so the story is ridiculous, and it’s way too similar to Grease. It doesn’t make much of a point.
There isn’t a moral or lesson; even “Hairspray” had racial integration. But
like many of Waters’ works, it celebrates the outsider, rejoices in freaks and weirdos, and shows that a Bad Boy can have a good heart. It
isn’t deep, but it’s a helluva lot of fun.
THE LOCATION:
BOTTOM LINE: BEST BET
Hustlers!
THE SHOW: Punks, a world premiere by local writer/actor/director
THE STORY: The true story of two domestics
murdering their mistress, which occurred in 1933,
inspired all kinds of adaptations, including the 2000 movie, “Murderous Maids.”
Genet, a petty criminal in his own right, was fascinated by the story.
Flagrantly gay, frequently degenerate, he spent most of his life in the seamy,
steamy underworld. One of the play’s themes, in addition to deception, artifice
and the defense of social outcasts and the oppressed, was the fluidity of
sexuality. Genet saw gender as just one more mask in a bourgeois world filled
with artifice. Masks, gender, deception – it’s all theater (there’s a
play-within-a-play-within-a-play in The
Maids and in Punks). Genet even
suggested that all three of his female characters be played by boys. So he’d
probably get a kick out of Raygoza’s twisted take on
his classic: the sibs are men, the power above them is a woman playing a man
dressing up as a woman. They’re Latino hustlers; s/he’s an Anglo actor turned
lounge lizard. There are games, rituals, fetishes. Cruelty,
seduction, self-loathing, sexual predation, jealousy and perversion. And in this version, nudity, drugs and very raw language.
It’s not for the linguistically or thematically squeamish. But there are some
bracingly wonderful turns of phrase, and terrific performances.
THE PLAYERS/THE PRODUCTION: The piece gets off to a glacially slow start. We see a disheveled,
crumbling room (design by Raygoza and Matt Scott). A bare lightbulb. Pictures of men on the
wall. Women’s shoes on the floor. A curtain blowing at the window. Another
curtain, diaphanous, center stage, barely masking two men sleeping in a bed.
The sounds of traffic. An extended lounge song plays,
from start to finish, all about life and loneliness. We wait. Nothing happens.
The man/woman, in a trenchcoat and fedora, enters
through the window. Silently, s/he turns on the TV, sets the digital clock to
1:10 and leaves. The alarm goes off and the action begins. It’s a long time
coming, but once it starts, we’re sucked into 90 minutes of intensity,
ruthlessness, torment, enigma. The brothers switch
names, identities, power positions. One is dressed in leather, the aggressor.
He’s the writer of the ‘play’ to come. He’s tough, has done a few things he
regrets. The other, the actor, is more subservient, but he can turn vicious on
a dime. They are low-lifes, Latinos on the bottom
rung (“When’s the last time La Raza got anything but
the short end of the stick?”). They’re hooked on drugs, and their dysfunctional
relationship with each other and with Marion, who returns to play out the drama
s/he ‘commissioned,’ dressing up in high period drag (including a foot-tall
Marie Antoinette wig). “Lurid fantasies,” one of the brothers says, “are a veil
of the world.” They play out a dangerous game, but what they’re all looking for
is salvation. The play, like its inspiration, shatters ideas about fantasy and
reality, power differentials (less class than racial, in this version) and the
need to be noticed, acknowledged, to succeed, in
whatever pathetic way possible.
Raygoza’s
muscular writing keeps us off guard, uncertain. Events unfold unpredictably,
but we know it won’t end well.
THE LOCATION: ion theatre at the
BOTTOM LINE: BEST BET
The Ice Age Returns
THE SHOW: The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
1942 play.
THE STORY: Written in the throes of the Second World War, the
absurdist piece was framed as a hilarious but foreboding romp through human
experience. Structurally, it was way ahead of its time. Ancient, Biblical and
literary characters co-exist with mammoths, dinosaurs and a 20th
century New Jersey Everyfamily. The husband and wife
have been married for 5000 years. They and their two off-beat offspring are
assaulted by a series of catastrophes: climate change, famine, floods,
Depression, a devastating war. There are refugees, unsavory politicians,
book-burnings, violent acts. The text is so topical it
could have been ripped from yesterday’s paper. And that’s just the point. These
disasters occur over and over. We pick ourselves up and rebuild. The play is a
tribute to the indomitable human spirit, and the will to survive both natural
and man-made disasters – even if we only do so by the skin of our teeth.
The three
acts vary wildly in tone. The play is simultaneously funny and tragic, gloomy
and hopeful. It begins and ends in the same way, just as time and catastrophes are
cyclical. History keeps repeating itself. Mankind has always been on the brink
of cataclysmic devastation, and probably always will be. We don’t learn from
our mistakes, but we soldier on, we regroup, we rebuild and renew. At the end
of the play, the actors acknowledge that there’s an “as yet unwritten fourth
act,” and they give the audience the responsibility of completing the work and
saving the human race.
THE PLAYERS/THE PRODUCTION: The UCSD production is often engaging and imaginative. It captures a sense
of the absurd at times, but not enough. The focus is more on the whimsy, but
there isn’t a sufficiently ominous undercurrent of disaster and despair.
There’s no real sense of danger. And the aggressive, sadistic son is more
playful bad boy than the very seeds of violence, which are sown not overseas
but in our own homes. Director Sarah Rasmussen creates some attractive stage
pictures particularly in the Fellini-esque second
act, which takes place on the
The colorful,
cockeyed set (Kristin Ellert) is aptly offbeat, and
the costumes (Rachel Shachar) are imaginative
(especially the housepet wooly mammoth). The sound
design (Christopher M. Luessmann) foretells and
underscores the various disasters. Local choreographer Liam Clancy has created
some fascinating, stylized moves, but they’re not always well integrated into
the action. With its huge cast of characters and wildly swinging tonal shifts,
the play is extremely difficult to get right and do well. Kudos to Rasmussen
and her 20-member cast for taking on this mammoth (oops!) task.
THE LOCATION: UCSD Theatre and Dance, in the Potiker Theatre, through December 1.
Note: UCSD closes the fall quarter with Medea, Nov. 26- Dec. 1, in the Mandell
Weiss Forum Studio.
Songs of Love
I caught one of the last performances of The
Swallow, the English version of a rarely performed work by Puccini,
originally La Rondine.
The contemporary English translation of the original libretto (Dr. A.M. Wilner, Heinz Reichert, Giuseppe Adami) was by Robert Hess. First performed in 1917, the
small opera was an attempt to mimic the sensibilities of the Viennese operetta
tradition. But it has loftier ambitions, too, including elements of its bigger
and better sisters, La Traviata, Madama Butterfly and La Bohème.
Set in 1870s
The Lyric Opera production was lovely to look at;
the smoothly changing, upper crust-to-demimonde sets came from the Des Moines
Metro Opera. The lush, colorful costumes were rented as well. The direction, by
J. Sherwood Montgomery, was especially strong in the second act crowd scenes in
the seamy Parisian nightclub, where a delightful array of stage business was
given to every member of the ensemble. The first act features elegant attire
and the beautiful aria, “Canzone di Doretta,” sung by Magda, the
flighty bird of the title. It’s the third act that felt unsatisfying here,
though it’s the most emotionally fraught. The singing was pleasant, if variable
throughout.
There are some wonderfully passionate and romantic
melodies, which were nicely handled by the chorus and the 34-member orchestra,
under the lively baton of James Lowe. The principals were less consistent. As Magda, Suzan Hanson appeared vocally and dramatically head
and shoulders above her castmates. Most of the time, she
seemed to be holding back her pure, powerhouse voice, to accommodate the
others. She connected well with handsome tenor Chad A. Johnson, who cut a
heroic and tragic figure as her doomed love, Ruggero.
Soprano Susan Holssonbake (wife of the conductor) was
delightful as Magda’s maid, Lisette,
an airy wannabe actress who willingly goes back to servitude when she fails
onstage. Egging her on and demeaning her at the same time is her surreptitious
lover, the pretentious poet Prunier (pleasant tenor
Enrique Torál). Baritone William Nolan, as Magda’s aging sugar-daddy, seemed to talk more than sing
his small but seminal role. The trio of giggling girlfriends, which included
Michelle Kei Ishuu and talented local twins Shelly
Hart Breneman and Shauna Ostrom, deftly took their
comic turns. The production as a whole proved a pleasant diversion, though it
fell short of being a heart-stopping operatic experience.
Lawyers in Love
Aspire Playwrights Collective, founded by Kristina
Meek in 1006, is dedicated to developing new works. And it was in that spirit
that they presented a staged reading of a play-in-progress,
NEWS AND VIEWS ….
… A Taste of Patté… The Date is set, the plans are made and it’s gonna be bigger and better than ever! The 11th Annual Patté Awards for
Theater Excellence will be held on Monday, January 14, in a brand-new
venue: the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre on the Jacobs Campus of the
Lawrence Family JCC in
…Ch-ch-ch-Changes… KUSI is
shifting its “Inside San Diego” show back to an all-news format. But they’re
expanding the arts coverage on their weekend show, “Good Morning,
… The “Musical Shakespeare Evening,”
hosted by the San Diego Shakespeare Society, featuring a stellar cast of
characters that spanned artforms (music, theater, dance) was, by all reports, a huge success. More than 200
people came to celebrate the musical brilliance of the Bard, guided by theater faves
… A Classical Music Workshop
for Teachers will be held at the
..CONGRATULATIONS to our own Craig
Noel, Father of San Diego Theater, who was just awarded a National Medal of Arts. I was glad to
do my little part, writing a letter on his behalf. Craig is a local and a
national treasure: he devoted his entire life to the Globe, along the way
helping to launch the regional theater movement and the careers of untold
actors, directors, donors and supporters of the theater. Bravo, Craig! You’re our
Hero!
…Free Day of Dance!... As a holiday gift to
the whole community, three resident companies at
'NOT TO BE
MISSED!' (Pat’s Picks)
Cry-Baby – feather-light but fantastic fun. The choreography and dancing steal
the show -- and
the lyrics are pitch-perfect, slightly wacky John Waters.
Punks – down-and-dirty, sexually explicit, strong writing and strong language;
a world premiere inspired by Jean Genet’s The
Maids
ion theatre, through
December 16
(For full text of all of
Pat’s past reviews, going back to 1990, use the Search engine at
www.patteproductions.com)
Don’t be a
Pat
© 2007 PATTÉ PRODUCTIONS, INC.
For more than 20 years,