'kül 2006

FILM - "Children of Men"

2006-12-30T03:11:00.000-05:00

From the naturalism of Y tu mamá también to the dark fantasy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakban, Alfonso Cuarón has always been a vivid director, with shots so tight they hug off the screen and angles so crisp they demand every ounce of tension from a scene. His latest film, Children of Men, is a science-fiction parable for hope and humanity that is no less gritty or visionary as his other work. It is a more deftly executed film than Babel, a more compelling work than the limited Tzameti 13, and every minute is an absolute pleasure to watch, even (or especially) at its most terrifying.

Never mind the social commentary about how a government uses terror as a weapon to police its populace, or the near-future notion of where our nations are heading. Children of Men’s catalyst is a sudden and inexplicable onset of infertility across the globe, but the premise looks more at class disparity and urban terror than at science fiction. (The few nods to the future include holographic advertising on buildings, one-handed integrated computer keyboards, and LED displays in the windshield – all things that exist already.) Our lens for the film is Theo (Clive Owen), a former activist who has been hollowed out just enough by the death of his son to pass the time as a journalist. He’s looking for hope, however, so he’s happy to help his ex (Julianne Moore) secretly transport a miraculously pregnant woman (Claire-Hope Ashitey, as the aptly named Kee) to a group of international scientists known as the Human Project. If only it were that easy: for every good-natured midwife like Miriam (Pam Ferris) there’s an ill-tempered cop like Syd (Peter Mullan) or an ideological radical like Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Clive Owen is the perfect choice for the role, a leather-skinned man with sunken eyes and a bitter voice. Because much of Children of Men is shot in action, or suspenseful quiet, Cuarón trusts the nuances of Owen’s craggy face to get across what there isn’t time to say. He also does wonders for the London atmosphere—the film looks much like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later—creating a washed-out desolation to every scene. However, whereas Boyle’s film was of an empty London, Cuarón’s shots are crammed with people, and scene after scene is filled with abrupt and gritty violence. In the first scene, Theo buys a cup of coffee and walks outside. He pauses a moment, considering the void in his life, perhaps, and all of a sudden the coffee shop explodes.

In Cuarón’s world, violence cannot be separated from life, and even a moment of messianic calm late in the film holds for just a few minutes before the uncontrollable bullets of man start flying again. A lesser director would overdo the violence, or would lose the message to the thrill-ride moments, but Cuarón makes it all one: the blood isn’t belabored, the politics aren’t precise—everything exists in its own precisely framed moment, and this tragic future rolls on. Somehow, in the midst of this, there are moments of comedy (thanks to the wise casting of Michael Caine as an aged hippy) and the faintest glimmers of hope in childbirth.

From idyllic forest retreats to cavernous art preservation rooms to the uncomfortable grime of an internment camp for refugees, Cuarón has captured the essence of humanity, and has made an effortlessly poignant masterpiece.

First posted at [Film Monthly]

MUSIC - One Ring Zero, "Wake Them Up"

2006-12-27T01:48:00.000-05:00

One Ring Zero’s latest, Wake Them Up, is a lot like The Arcade Fire’s Funeral, but without all the poetic lyrics: this is a distilled album more interested in experimenting with French-fusion than singing about it. When there are words, they’re half-spoken and half-sung; rarely do they shift out of a one-octave range. The result is a series of fifteen zippy songs, three minutes at most, that range from hopeful instrumental segues (“Happy New Year”) to melancholy string choruses (“Karen”) and experimental sounds, as with the eighteen seconds of vegetative percussion on “Johnny.” Other tracks are playful dirges: a low-fi tuba performance in “Lost,” depressed circus music on “The Sad Carousel.” Some songs are made up of their moods, like the eerie synthesized soundscape of “Robert Hunter’s Monster.” And then some are too good to be mistaken for the happy accident of a jam session: just listen to the melodious, surging pulse of “The Chinese Pavilion” or the haunting lyrics (those “Styrofoam eyes”) of “The Queen of Displays.”

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck"

2006-12-22T01:39:00.000-05:00

Tom Stoppard’s Voyage was a very heavy play: as the first part of an epic trilogy about Russian intellectuals and their revolutions (The Coast of Utopia), it bore the responsibility for establishing characters like the exuberantly radical Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke), the passionate literary critic Vissarion Belinksy (Billy Crudup), and the formidable thinker Alexander Herzen (Brían F. O’Byrne). By contrast, Shipwreck, the second part of the trilogy, is light and often comically witty—it sails on the good humor and fortune amassed by the initial installment and suffers little tragedy (or emotion) until deep in the second act. That’s a little ironic, considering that the first act comprises the French revolution, but the big events always seem to happen from afar (in fact, they’re often staged far in the hollow recesses of the gigantic Vivian Beaumont theater). Stoppard is more interested with the reactions of individual cogs than with the entire mechanism, which explains why the second act of Shipwreck focuses on the fomenting of Herzen’s philosophies on life after the tragic (and offstage) death of his deaf son.

Though Stoppard is technically correct when he claims that each part of The Coast of Utopia stands alone, Shipwreck doesn’t do much by itself: it starts off as a dry exchange of idealisms in Paris and then travels to Nice for a shallow tale of adulterous passion. The former is a shadow of Voyage, the latter is a spectral stab at Chekhov—both seem perfunctory. Herzen simply isn’t as interesting as Bakunin—even when he catches his wife, Natalie (Jennifer Ehle) having an affair with the poet George Herwegh (David Harbour) his stoicism drains the danger from the scene. Such internal mystery is fine for characters who are still on the periphery, like Ivan Turgenev (an excellent Jason Butler Harner) and Nicholas Ogarev (Josh Hamilton), and we don’t have time to delve into the souls of thirty characters, but there ought to be more for the protagonist. Stoppard defines Herzen by history rather than action; consequently, O’Byrne speaks to make the words big instead of allowing the words—those dim, desperately grasped-upon ideas—to make him big. A character defined by words alone is more golem than human.

However, within the context of the entire cycle, Shipwreck is a far more enjoyable evening. It’s not often that we get to see characters grow over several decades or to see talented actors like Richard Easton and Martha Plimpton making the most of small roles. The extra layers from play to play add dimensions to otherwise static scenes, and even at its most boring, director Jack O’Brien has made The Coast of Utopia beautiful to look at. Shipwreck winds up, fittingly, like Herzen: focused more on the technical marvels of O’Brien and company than the emotional range of O’Byrne and company. (Not to diminish the cast in whole: Bianca Amato and Amy Irving, among others, are stunning.)

Because there is less meat to Shipwreck, O’Brien has flavored his theatrical stew with vibrant staging and a transformative set. The deep recesses of the Vivian Beaumont Theater are used in full to play with perspective to show us the Place de la Concorde in Paris being sacked by revolutionaries. Giant chandeliers and oppressive skylights capture the attention and focus the mood better than complex, two-ton sets. Even the simplicity of a watercolor scrim is enough to make us feel at home in

Italy

. And with just the faintest touch of lighting, O’Brien can plunge us into prison or carry us across the ocean. During segues, characters sing, lending an operatic quality to an already epic cycle. It’s a pity the heart of the play doesn’t match the quality of the staging.

There are, however, high hopes for Salvage. Voyage set up believable characters and breathed the great revolutionary ideas into them. Shipwreck spends its two-and-a-half hours draining these characters of their hot air. Revolution is in the air, and even if it doesn’t reach us in Salvage, we’ll at least have one final opportunity to enjoy O’Brien’s marvelous direction.

THEATER - "Strings"

2006-12-18T18:53:00.000-05:00

Intellectual plays are only as good as they are clever, and although Strings is occasionally very smart, the majority of Carole Buggé’s text goes about reminding us of that fact. (Characters are constantly quoting poetry as if Brit-Lit were the intellectual equivalent of street cred.) The conversations about string theory are fascinating, but not when the actors have to break the fourth wall and use illustrative examples to explain it. That’s like admitting that the parallels between science and society aren’t clear enough. As for the affair at the heart of this play—June cheats on her cosmologist husband, George, with their best friend, Rory (a particle physicist)—it must not be interesting enough, because Buggé adds their scientific idols: there’s a very foppish Isaac Newton (Drew Dix), a dowdy Marie Curie (Andrea Gallo), and a very stolid Max Planck (Kurt Elftmann). Rather than fix the tedium of the train ride or the lulls in the conversation, Buggé uses fantasy to build intimate exposition. As a final element, there’s the raw emotion of June and Rory’s dead son—not just dead, by the way, but 9/11ed. (If playwrights are going to keep using 9/11 as a tragic catchall, then I can verb the tragedy.)

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - Rory, "We're Up To No Good, We're Up To No Good"

2006-12-15T01:14:00.000-05:00

We’re Up To No Good, We’re Up To No Good is a rock-by-numbers release that feels more like an exercise in historical knowledge than a performance worth noting. (It’s also worth noting that their title is an accurate description of their work on this album.) As if going down a checklist, Rory has the shrill punk of My Chemical Romance, the odd techno-paranoia of Radiohead, the myriad rock influences of decades of jamming, and a little bit of dabble here and there. But it never comes together to make an album: it’s the parts alone, not their sum. This actually makes Rory’s release more frustrating than the worthless exhortations of other raging bands. You'll undoubtedly find something you like on this wildly eclectic album, but you'll just as assuredly lose it again in a stream of non sequiturs.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "Heresy"

2006-12-12T01:10:00.000-05:00

Sabina Berman’s Heresy, playing at the HERE Arts Center, is an attempt both to represent the immigration of colonists to Mexico in the 16th century and the religious persecution of the Jews, even in the New World. The cast’s blunt speechifying makes the result more like a history lesson; the black boxes, hats, and masks left scattered across the empty emphasize this schoolhouse atmosphere. But it’s not a bad play, and as educational theater (based on autobiography), it’s surprisingly solid.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - The Scourge of the Sea, "Make Me Armored"

2006-12-11T00:46:00.000-05:00

The Scourge of the Sea is either playing against archetype on their new album, Make Me Armored, or exactly to it. Lo-fi alternative meets upbeat folk music, yoked tenuously to cynical love songs. There’s no politics here, just a lovelorn melancholy, but the folk roots (far from Simon & Garfunkel, regardless of the lyrics,( “Goodbye darkness, my old friend”) are what sell this act. Jaded, but not jagged, the album is surprisingly sweet, even though the poetics are often cliché (“your summer eyes were full of grace”), cryptic (“but I tied my love to the paper bag and I tied a jackal to my leg”), saccharine (“my sweet one hurts when she goes down my throat/my sweet one is a thirty-two ounce coke”), or all three at once. But hey, if the songs stay light even when the material gets dark, then so can I.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "The Vertical Hour"

2006-12-09T02:56:00.000-05:00

David Hare’s new play The Vertical Hour is too smart. Not that there aren’t stupid lines, but it’s a stuffy production, a lesser version of the straight-laced, upper-crust intellect of recent British imports like The History Boys and The Coast of Utopia. Bill Nighy’s character may be up to task with the dry wits and lively personalities of Simon Russell Beale and Richard Griffiths, and Dan Bittner is surprisingly charming in his role as a melancholy snob, but the show, which attempts to politicize the war in Iraq from the sidelines of a quiet lawn on the Welsh borders and the safety of a Yale University office, falls as flat as Sam Mendes’ monotonous direction. (He’s not the only one sleepwalking through this show: bring a pillow.)

If you’re paying attention, the show is impossible to like: Hare would have us cease our sideline percolations and get involved, but the only thing he does here is to use leftovers from Stuff Happens mixed with some half-drawn Relationships in Turmoil, in this case between a father and son (Nighy and Bittner) and a girl (Julianne Moore). Words are exchanged easily enough between Moore and her cohorts, but that’s only because Moore doesn’t seem to be taking them in: like a rag doll waiting to be posed, she brings a lifeless resignation to a character who talks constantly about the need to be up in arms.

The show’s also desperately in need of cuts: the bookending scenes add little to the plot and only slightly more to Moore’s character, and the scene-changing monologues serve only to blandly foreshadow a show that doesn’t have any suspense. It’s also worth considering that nothing cracks on the exterior (or even happens) until the end of the first act. Yes, it’s a character piece and yes, it’s setting things up—but that excuse is only valid if the characters are interesting, and if the story goes to another level later. There are two relationships that die in this play, and neither one of them happens onstage.

We have too little time in our real lives to waste it listening to people talking about their fake ones: give me something that I can take away from a performance… at least entertain me. This play, almost as static and sedentary as the large scene-stealing tree, doesn’t even do that.

THEATER - "Love: A Tragic Etude"

2006-12-08T00:46:00.000-05:00

Love was a battlefield long before they sung it that way. Love: A Tragic Etude is expressionist theater that merges the violence of Sarah Kane with the dystopian tragedy of Brecht. The individual pieces don’t always make sense, but they’re viscerally resonant and poetically raw. Taken together, the effect is an overwhelming study (set to live piano accompaniment, for those who don’t know what an etude is) in dismantling our values, punishing our heroes, and torturing our innocence. Love is not just blind—she is unflinching, too.

Written and directed by Juan Souki without a moment of respite or pity for the audience, love is dismantled at every turn. Even the gentle caresses of our two lovers, Fernando (Gil Bar-Sela) and Arena (Melinda Helfrich), are false: Fernando has already left the fictitious Red City for military service and Arena is reading his letter. Their unity is a mirage of Souki’s magnificent staging; a side effect of the short silent film we see that cites their celebration “five years of union.” Over the next ninety minutes, Souki carves time and space, using jagged physical techniques and delicately synchronized movement to make a brutally beautiful play.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "High Fidelity"

2006-12-07T23:15:00.000-05:00

High Fidelity is an adaptation of a movie’s rendition of a popular book, which sounds like a mess. But although the theatrical production is all over the place, eschewing the top five gimmicks and minimizing the ex-girlfriends, it manages to emphasizes some of the better portions, such as Rob’s revenge fantasies (“Now that you’ve sucked on my big black glock, how about you suck on my *** ***** ****”). Furthermore, Rob’s two friends, Dick and Barry, play their roles so similarly to their film counterparts that they manage to be cute and campy.

The plot, for those unfamiliar with this name-brand musical, involves Rob’s (Will Chase) attempts to come to terms with his unhappiness, something that’s made worse when his girlfriend of four years, Laura (Jenn Colella) leaves. His two music-geek friends and co-workers, Dick and Barry (Christian Anderson and Jay Klaitz) don’t provide much emotional support, as they’re both pretty stunted in their development (which makes them perfect for comic relief), and his one female friend, Liz (Rachel Stern) sides with Laura after she learns what caused the breakup. Things continue to get worse when his ex shacks up with Ian (Jeb Brown), an interventionist who’s into all things tantric, and hit rock bottom when T.M.P.M.I.T.W. (The Most Pathetic Man In The World) calls Rob a “kindred soul.” Oh, and Rob’s also haunted by his imagination, a powerful force that conjures up nightmares of Laura, Ian, and all of his former girlfriends getting it on.

There’s no shortage of things happening: Walter Bobbie’s direction keeps things moving forward, though the real trick is Anna Louizos’s set design, a shuffling series of backdrops that operate almost like a pop-up book and which, at one point, show the parallels between Rob and Laura, post-breakup. There’s no shortage of cleverness either, although this slickness tends to illustrate the shallowness of Tom Kitt’s music. Despite all the 80s influences, it’s not exactly catchy or repeatable stuff, and Amanda Green’s lyrics make even good songs seem generic (“As sure as the baby cries and the river flows/she goes”). Doesn’t change the fact that the show’s still fun to watch, and if the music misses a beat here and there, Christopher Gattelli’s choreography doesn’t (his work on Altar Boyz helps, High Fidelity is mostly 80s pop).

High Fidelity is a fun show, but it’s not the feel-good hit of the season – in fact, it’s not much of a feel anything show. So far as emotion goes, Jenn Colella doesn’t seem to have much, and Will Chase plays one side for so long (almost giddily) that his transformation is barely noticeable. The friends, Anderson and Klaitz, steal most of the attention, especially the former, whose Seymour-like graces make him instantly affable. No, High Fidelity is low comedy, and its success depends entirely on whether or not it can find an audience willing to pay for the next-to-best thing for rock musicals.

THEATER - "Never Missed a Day"

2006-12-06T21:30:00.000-05:00

I’d like to say that WorkShop Theater Company’s new show Never Missed a Day never misses a beat, because underneath the awkward pauses and “monolongs” (monologues that go on and on), Ken Jaworowski has written a decent show. And underneath their tics and too-rapt glares (where an actor tries too hard to let the audience know he’s listening), the actors have made a believable connection to their pathetic, self-deceiving office drones. It’s a testament to the truth of the material that even when the pace is so slow you can see a trail of slime, you’re still empathizing (even as your eyelids droop).

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

FEATURE - "DirectorFest 2006"

2006-12-05T00:18:00.000-05:00

Everybody remembers the actors, and if they don’t fall asleep, they’re aware of the playwright’s words, too. But outside of awards shows, how many people ever give credit to the directors? How many people recognize all the hard work that goes into pulling the disparate parts together, from scene work to scenery? Not enough, but perhaps more should: and if you’re looking for upcoming directorial talent, there’s no better place to turn than The Drama League’s DirectorFest 2006, its twenty-third festival of one-acts directed by members of The Drama League Directors Project.

Culled from a crop of young applicants, the fellows have an opportunity to network and learn from industrial professionals and get hands-on experience with NYC and regional assistant directing assignments. This year’s directors are Meredith McDonough, Alex Torra, and Jaime Castañeda, and below you can read how they view the industry, the process, and the importance of theater. Selected portions of their interview follows, but you can see the culmination of their vision Thursday, December 7 through Sunday, December 10 at the Abington Theater Center’s June Havoc Theater (312 West 36^th St.), an evening (or afternoon) of new one-acts like Itamar Moses’ Authorial Intent or Jonathan Ceniceroz’s The Blessing of the Animal, as well as an old Harold Pinter play, One for the Road.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Company"

2006-11-29T00:49:00.000-05:00

In spite of director John Doyle (and thanks to Raúl Esparza), Stephen Sondheim’s musical of vignettes, Company, has made a triumphant return to Broadway. From the set to the lighting, the show has everything going for it except Doyle's gimmick of doubling actors as musicians. Whereas Sweeny Todd forced Doyle to come up with creative combinations of character and instrument, Company rarely uses its entire cast at once, which renders the effect more an economic sidebar than a relevant or fresh medley... But beyond that first step--and it may be a doozy--Company is a triumph and Esparza is due a Tony for his commanding work as Robert, top dog of the glowing thirteen person ensemble one moment, depressed romantic the next.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

BRIEF: "Evil Dead" and "The Internationalist"

2006-11-28T00:16:00.000-05:00

Evil Dead: The Musical is all the proof you'll ever need that I don't hate campy musicals. I just hate poorly done campy musicals (as with How I Found True Love and Saved the World...). Granted, I'm a fan of the franchise, but even without that, there's something unabashedly fun about getting covered in gore at a late-night performance that both mocks and embraces the Rocky Horror spirit. Dancing, raping trees, dinky footbridge sight-gags, and an ensemble cast that can sing well even after being dismembered--it's fantastic, and, believe it or not, is a heck of a lot funnier (though perhaps not bloodier) than last year's so-called farce The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The cabin's creepy set design and animatronics also garner some points for the production, as do the quick makeup changes and goofy ballads; this is a show worth sawing your own arm off for.

The Internationalist is closed now, again, and with it goes another opportunity to see a talented ensemble cast outperforming the flaws of its script. We aren't supposed to understand what the characters in this ficticious foreign country are saying, but the inability to comprehend our visiting American protagonist's Lost in Translation plot makes Anne Washburn's script like a thin and gauzy dance of the seven veils: both translucent and opaque, both seductive and frustrating, it's hard to pass judgement on. I will say that the set design--a Morrocan stucco of sorts, recessed far enough back in the stage that a portable office can sit in the center--did not sit well with me, reducing the show more to an art piece than a comedy. The lighting managed to balance some of the notes and tones lost in the rest of the production, as did the superb and crisp acting of the cast, but the conclusion left me both in search of the punchline and the punch.

MUSIC - Roman Candle, "The Wee Hours Review"

2006-11-28T00:10:00.000-05:00

Too brash for country, too acoustic for rock, and too poetic for pop, Roman Candle is a perfect fit for the firework it is named for. There's a mellow outer shell, occasionally amplified by synthesizers (but never lost in them) but Skip Matheny's crooning is just casing for the subtle mechanics underneath. Words that slide within one another like gloves, twang-heavy chords that shuffle off the drum beats, and a powerful storytelling rhythm that should propel this vibrant musical explosion to the top of the charts.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

FILM - "Perfume"

2006-11-22T23:27:00.000-05:00

How did a 1985 German gothic horror novel gain attention enough to warrant a film? That story, one which would reveal how German auteur Tom Twyker (of Run Lola Run) got involved, would be more interesting than the overly stylized urban fantasy that is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Strictly as a period piece, Twyker gets some great shots of the good, bad, and ugly Renaissance France, but it is plagued by an inability to make us relate to anyone in the film, be it the vengeful father Richis (Alan Rickman), the doltish perfumer Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), or even our misunderstood serial killer, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw). (Then again, it’s hard to say “misunderstood”—he kills at least thirteen women in an effort to create a god-like perfume.)

Read on at [Film Monthly]

FILM - "The Fountain"

2006-11-22T00:35:00.000-05:00

You should know that I really wanted The Fountain to be good. Aronofsky’s previous two films, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, were what got me interested in cinema in the first place. And while Aronofsky still knows how to handle the camera, it seems like he’s lost control of what to actually film. His “epic” is a triptych spanning the lives of two lovers in the years 1500, 2000, and 2500. The jungle adventures of a Spanish conquistador looking for the Tree of Life atop an ancient Mayan temple could well have been directed by a lesser-budgeted Peter Jackson (lush, but without scope). The modern sequences of a doctor trying to find a cure for his wife’s brain tumor—it might as well be Sam Mendes filming, with his simple observations of life, love, and loss. And as for the future scenario, Kubrick is written all over it, from the silent and meditative sequences, to its ambiguous (though not as prolonged) visual landscaping. The only thing that’s pure Aronofsky is the beautiful editing, the bleeding of one time to another, and that’s just eye candy to distract from the all-too-confusing plot.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "Home Front"

2006-11-20T20:10:00.000-05:00

Yes, Home Front is a play about post-traumatic stress syndrome, and yes, it is a partially modernized version of Euripides's classic Greek drama, Herakles. But Daniel Algie's choice to set the show in 1972 makes the work both dated and formulaic, as out-of-touch with today as Herakles itself. Why set up one parallel to make another parallel? It seems that Algie just likes the road most traveled: his tragedy is tame and predictable, and his characters are the same.

Meg has spent the last seven years in and out of an insane asylum, too busy grieving for her MIA husband to care for her children. Fact. Her lonely father-in-law, Arthur, resents her for it, though he loves caring for his grandkids. Fact. (But we'll have to take the script's word for it -- Joseph Jamrog is so dispassionate as Arthur that he appears to be sleepwalking.) These two elements of the play are completely ignored in the second act. Fact. Heck, the only consistent thing is the scattered exposition, and while at least Fletcher McTaggert's delivery as the ex-MIA husband isn't bad, he's still delivering unflinchingly dull confessions. With such weak characters, there's no way to avoid listening to the dishpan dialogue: "This too shall pass. You're a tough old bird." I don't know if people once spoke like this, but doesn't the playwright have a license--no, a duty--to make it sound better?

As for E. Randahl Hoey's direction, save for an invigorating dream sequence early on in the first act that shows the promise of a more metaphorical play, the action is thick as cement, and about as exciting. There's so little happening that after chomping at the bit for two hours, the actors go overboard when the big moment hits, only to find that the play keeps going for another fifteen aimless minutes, just one more disconnected scene.

Home Front doesn't bring up any big questions; that's good, it doesn't seem capable of answering any. Instead, the play is a confessional: each character gets a lengthy monologue to encompass their sins. Arthur reveals that he's not actually Harrison's father. Meg reveals that she's not a good mother. And Harrison reveals that while being tortured for seven years, he had to do some things he's not very proud of. (Big shockers all, I know.) It seems to me that as long as Algie's written a play this long and overbearing, he might as well write himself in for the finale so that he too can confess or at least apologize for writing this play.

THEATER - "An Oak Tree"

2006-11-19T02:23:00.000-05:00

An Oak Tree is Gimmick Theater at it's not-so-finest. However, it's bankable cast makes it viable: every night, a new actor who has never read the script or seen the show will join Tim Crouch (who plays a hypnotist) for this two-hander. The play, written by Crouch, is an interesting short story that uses the metaphor and the mechanics of hypnotism to deal with the grief of memory. The actor plays the father of a little girl that Crouch's hypnotist has killed, a man so distraught by the accident that he's convinced he's turned his daughter into an oak tree. The delusion is well served by the poetic lines, but delivered cold by an actor who is coming to terms with the role piecemeal, it's more controlled and uneven than gripping. Maja Wampusyc, the actor for the 11/18 performance, may have been hypnotized: I, however, was not.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - Pony Up!, "Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes"

2006-11-15T08:12:00.000-05:00

Pony Up is a reduced, all-female version of The Arcade Fire: a cheery bunch, trapped in the slow cadences of their French Canadian roots, and their CD, Make Love to the Judges with Your Eyes is a trivial, repetitious attempt to be poignant: the guy in the room who always brings cheap flowers on a date. The musical choice to add a lo-fi, tinkertoy of a keyboard to the all-too familiar drums ‘n guitars is annoying, not pleasant, and they don’t take the hint: the whole album is a slow-moving variation on the same bad idea. That, by the way, doesn’t make them hopeless romantics—it just makes them bland.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes"

2006-11-14T01:39:00.000-05:00

When a musical manages to live up to its title and nothing else, you know there's a problem. The one true thing about How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes is that it's 90 minutes. That the creators, Jonathan Karp and Seth Weinstein, make fun of this in the program or that they'd call this an homage to Frank Loesser just shows how lost they are with this post-Fringe (but barely) show. Lately, there's been a little too much camp in the musical theater, especially at New World Stages (though Evil Dead justifies itself through a built-in fan base, a more stylized score, and far more talented performers), and How to Save the World... never manages to rise above its premise. The show's also incredibly dated, relying so heavily on current events for cheap jokes (Madonna's baby, the South Beach diet, &c.) that there's never any build, just a never-ending stream of superficiality. (Okay, some of it--like the insulting description of a "neo-feminist Buddhist Henry Higgins"--is a guilty pleasure. And there are a few moments of wit: "Everybody I know is a disgruntled employee. You ever hear of a gruntled employee?")

Save for those few spots of color, this is an otherwise monotone paint-by-numbers musical. Our shy and reluctant hero Miles Muldoon (Michael McEachran) gets a unique chance to get the girl he wants, only to find that he's really in love with his best friend. To distinguish this from the others just like it, Karp digs deep into a random pool of happenstance and decides that Miles will become telepathic. But telepathic by means of a freak accident...like, say, getting conked on the head by a flying melon. But not just any melon: a melon thrown by an angry Guatemalan farmer. Follow that logic a little further and it's only inevitable that Miles is beaned by fruit because he's trying to impress the girl of his dreams with his diplomatic prowess. (At this point, it should be noted that the show takes place in the UN.)

Assuming that Miles's ability to read minds can only lead to hilarity, Karp comes up with a grammatical twist, and tweaks the plot so that Miles's diplomatic crush, Violet Zipper (Nicole Ruth Snelson) turns out to be dating a terrorist who, for anonymity, she refers to as He. Hence the thought "I love it when He looks at me like that," only encourages Miles, and by the time he realizes there's a plot to infect the UN with a nausea-inducing virus, he's only got ten minutes left for a climactic showdown. (It should be mentioned that Mr. McEachran doubles as "He," an obvious device that sets up a gut-bustingly funny fight scene -- director Christopher Gattelli doesn't have much to work with, but at least he nails this part.)

Got your checklist out? There are meta jokes about a power ballad sung by the delightful Anika Larson (as the best-friend-who-saves-the-day, Julie Lemmon), random appearances by manic characters like a yogi, a gay therapist, and, of course, Condoleeza Rice, and, for some reason, a Greek chorus (who double as those three characters). How To Save the World is so strung out, it might as well be a junkie--it certainly isn't any good while sober.

THEATER - "Beckett Below"

2006-11-12T13:39:00.000-05:00

The problem with Samuel Beckett’s short plays is the same one you’ll find with his longer plays – for all the bleakly hopeful lyricism, it’s more often confusing than delightful. If you really go to the theater for existential minimalism and enjoy theatrical devices over theater itself, Beckett’s tightly wrapped plays will delight you; otherwise, there’s not much to do but appreciate the scenery and the craft. Disclaiming aside, the theater company known as ghostcrab has decided to carry on (I can’t go on, I’ll go on) with a compilation of four short Beckett plays. Performed in a small underground theater that gets too stuffy for comfort, the evening is titled Beckett Below, and consists of “Play,” “Act Without Words II,” “Footfalls,” and “That Time,” each showcasing a different director and set of actors. The result is a visually striking enterprise that slathers on a great deal of respect for Beckett while attempting to convert its audience.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - Guster, "Ganging Up On the Sun"

2006-11-11T20:51:00.000-05:00

Guster’s latest album, Ganging Up on the Sun is an amalgam of standard rock, clean-cut alternative beats, and up-tempo full-band medleys. It’s also an escape from the deadly “pop” moniker—these songs have bounce, particularly the delightful banjo-driven “The Captain,” and they’re slick, as with the perfectly produced and synthesized “Satellite,” but the whole album is far more alternative or straight-up rock than past releases. Part of this is due to the new member, Joe Pisapia, who adds that country-modern flair. For all that, this is still the same group that started as Gus back at Tufts: just listen to a song like “Hang On” and it’s 2003 all over again. Brian’s still playing the drums with his hands, tracks like “Ruby Falls” keep the same delightful falsetto, and the songs are still cozy, natural, and playful.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "Stanley (2006)"

2006-11-09T11:46:00.000-05:00

Stanley (2006), arguably the most accomplished theatrical event of the Off-Broadway season, begins by revisiting the seminal Stanley Kowalski (by way of Brando), and ends with a man drowning under the weight of a life wrecked beyond repair. This one-man show, conceived by the D’Amour siblings Lisa (writer/director) and Todd (actor), is a highly physical, often frantic story, which focuses on a man who believes he's Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire, and as such roams the streets of modern-day America in search of Blanche Dubois.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

THEATER - "The Sneeze"

2006-11-08T02:24:00.000-05:00

If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, what happens when you replace the spoonful with two glasses, and the sugar with liquor? Not that The Sneeze, a translation of Anton Chekhov’s early comic work by the talented Michael Frayn, is medicine—it’s more like ambrosia or manna, palatable as it is. Presented as part of Phoenix Theater Ensemble’s Play in a Pub series, The Sneeze is an intimate, lively bit of comedy. The theme connecting its six short scenes is a little unsteady—a wandering Russian trio walks into a bar (insert joke here)—and it isn’t served by the intermission (the break is more social than theatrical), but hey, have a drink. Stay a while.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "The Thugs"

2006-11-05T02:01:00.000-05:00

Adam Bock's The Thugs is dark comedy à la Seinfeld — a play about the sort of nothing that can reach out and bite you on the ass. The play centers on seven lifelong paralegal temps who are rife with behavioral tics after countless days of sitting under the throbbing glow of overhead light strips and listening to the hum of electric static. Their loss — time spent sniffing rainbow-colored highlighters and fighting over the electric pencil sharpener — is our gain. Even in the play's forcefully underdramatic moments, these quirky characters capture our rapt attention.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

THEATER - "The Imaginary Invalid" and "The Mail Order Bride"

2006-11-04T03:40:00.000-05:00

There’s an old saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So why then has Resonance Ensemble tampered with the near-perfect classic works of Molière? Two new takes on The Imaginary Invalid are playing in repertoire, a version by Rebecca Patterson that abridges the classic and translates away the beautiful rhyming couplets, and a world premiere of Charles L. Mee’s The Mail Order Bride, a crude Brooklyn approximation of comedy. Patterson, for all her misguided twists, has at least put together an energetic show—Chuck, on the other hand, chucks all the good bits until he’s left with nothing but zany characters and their annoying tics.

Patterson’s adaptation is satisfying, if only because there’s a dearth of Molière right now. Her all-female cast, gimmick or no, does well (particularly Virginia Baeta and Amy Driesler), but it adds nothing to the show, and while the addition of musical interludes manages to compress whole acts into minutes, did we need the cheesy lip synching to Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best” or Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”? Luckily, the show’s maintained the classic stock characters, and Carey Urban steals every scene she’s in (as a good Columbina should). Jenny Fulton’s costumes help to immediately establish character (great for actors playing dual roles), but then again, why doesn’t anybody wear shoes? Which doctor told the great hypochondriac Argan to do that? Despite this director’s meddling, Molière shines through the dull translation, and the performances carry the day.

A little Molière goes a long way, but for Charles L. Mee, not far enough. His production, shruggingly directed by Eric Parness, tries character after character to make something happen, but it’s not funny, and it’s not clever. (It’s a Chekhovian comedy—more tragic than funny.) Our show opens with Argan (John Henry Cox) working out at the behest of his two lesbian (why not?) trainers (Vivia Font and Lori McNally). This Argan isn’t sick: why, he’s just purchased a nice Asian mail-order bride named June (Sue Jean Kim). Pulling more from Tartuffe and School for Wives, Mee quickly reveals that June is in love with another man and then, as if out of ideas, decides to have June’s lover, Horner, sing about being a castrato, and then to have June get a bull-dyke makeover which involves her rapping and swinging around a nunchaku while in combat boots. Sure, whatever. Considering how rich even the subplot of The Imaginary Invalid is, it’s amazing that this play, which is all lackluster subplot, got produced.

If this play has a saving grace—a big if—it’s the actors playing the two squabbling daughters, Melissa Miller and Susan Louise O’Connor. These two manage to look like they enjoy being in this show and even show some depth. Some actors, like Jarel Davidow, have less time to establish themselves, but that’s hardly an excuse. (Booth Daniels manages to give his nerdy Cleante a little character.) Suffice to say that after enduring Horner’s awful song about being a castrato and watching the cast shuffle around to the canned music of a bad high school show, it’s hard to take pleasure in even the good parts of Mee’s work.

Molière wrote his play to be a polemic against the then-foolish medical profession. The Mail Order Bride is either the sort of kooky, half-cooked idea that one of these doctors would have come up with or an unintentionally successful cure for the common laugh: you won’t be chuckling. Bottom line: this isn’t Molière. The Imaginary Invalid is at least a passable romp, with lively, energetic actors, but it lacks the subtlety and the build of the unabridged, rhyming version: so please, don’t fix what ain’t broken.

FILM - "Saw III"

2006-11-02T11:29:00.000-05:00

This new Jigsaw is a real bitch. Literally. In Saw III, Amanda (Shawnee Smith), once a victim herself, has taken up the gruesome, game-playing mantle of Jigsaw, creating clever contraptions that test a person’s will to live through pain and suffering. But Amanda isn’t interested in the old Jigsaw’s (Tobin Bell) tests: in her world, just because you plunge your hand into a vat of acid so that you can unlock the harness that’s seconds away from ripping your spinal cord apart . . . that doesn’t mean you should live. And should you manage to rip all the thick ringlets out of your skin before the bomb in the room explodes, you’ll find that the door has been soldered shut. Sucks to be you.

After these establishing deaths (horror “street cred,” as it were), Saw III focuses on what makes a person work for the man who placed a reverse bear trap in their mouth and the key to its lock in the stomach of a drugged but otherwise very much alive person. A series of flashbacks (that include former cast members Leigh Whannell and Donnie Wahlberg) give closure to all the storylines and set up one final test. Luckily for us (and unluckily for everyone else), John is still alive, and this last game, played from his deathbed, is a killer. Fans—you won’t be disappointed. Saw III is as sick as it is slick.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

FILM - "Babel"

2006-10-29T17:06:00.000-05:00

Crash is to Babel as artificial flavoring is to the real thing. Alejandro González Iñárritu, who proved his artistic chops in the violently beautiful Amores Perros (only to dull his vision for the monotone 21 Grams) is back atop his game with a film that’s more interested in character than charting political undercurrents (Syriana), giving different perspectives on the same incident (Traffic), or demonstrating the human talent to uselessly connect random events (Magnolia). These characters, linked only by their humanity, anchor the globetrotting narratives (Japan, Morocco, and the thin line between Mexico and California).

Read on at [Film Monthly]

MUSIC - Carina Round, "Slow Motion Addict"

2006-10-27T20:16:00.000-04:00

Carina Round may be a talented singer, but when she acts like a petulant girl who wants to scream and show off her range in the same breath, she’s not a very pleasant one. For the majority of her album Slow Motion Addict, she’s stuck in a blend of dance, rock, and pop—a rather large niche these days—and none of them work for her. Her voice, even at its fleshiest and raspiest, can’t compete with the drums and guitar at full strength, and her beautiful falsetto is fragile enough that it could drown in an inch or two of water. When she gets to her titular roots and slows the action down, the mellow tracks are mellifluous, and it turns out that for all her catchy production techniques, she actually has stuff to say.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

FILM - "The Prestige"

2006-10-26T01:20:00.000-04:00

Forget the magic trick at the heart of The Prestige, “The Transported Man,” a trick that brings two rival London magicians to blows. Christopher Nolan’s new film—in which he is the great celluloid prestidigitator—pulls off a greater trick: “The Transported Audience.” For over two hours, Nolan sustains our imagination and curiosity: he makes his film into a magic trick. The first minute, a series of cryptic images voiced-over by Cutter (Michael Caine), explains the three-part trick, but the pledge still hooks us: what goes wrong in Rupert Angier’s final magic trick, and did Alfred Borden kill him? The subsequent act, the turn, is actually a series of turns, a feat accomplished through a clever narrative that uses the two rival magician’s journals to trace their fractious history. Even though we’re told to look for the secret, even though we know their magic isn’t—can’t be—real, we want so badly to be fooled, that the third part, the prestige, is smooth as silk.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

BOOK - "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

2006-10-25T02:52:00.000-04:00

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a roundabout novel that couples the Marisha Pessl’s (and hence the narrator’s) exquisite knowledge of the literary canon with a coming-of-age murder mystery. Whether or not that’s any good, it is a true or false question that should appear in the Final Exam (Pessl, p. 509). The playful use of citations and the references to popular films is a means of distancing the character from the emotion (L’Avventura meets Gone with the Wind meets Jude the Obscure), but it’s only as enjoyable as the reader wants it to be. Even then, the play on novels (not just words alone) grows routine: too clever by half and then half as clever as it was. Strive as it might for epic qualities, the plot itself never rises above that of a smarter-than-your-average-noir, and Pessl’s characters come across as either too mysterious or as an intellectual gloss of a real person.

There’s nothing wrong with Pessl’s technique: her story begins with a perfunctory hook, (one year after Blue van Meer’s finds her overly friendly teacher, Hannah Schneider, dead) and then galvanizes the audience with its rapid introduction to Blue’s Tragic Past and her educational but distant relationship with her father, Gareth. The pace doesn’t slow, though the passage of time does, and up through the first half of the book, it’s a dazzling smorgasbord of showboat smarts, a soupcon of stories. By the second half, the mystery is no longer as captivating, and its resolution—purposely frustrating—is, naturally, frustrating.

Now, I’m not against the use of so many sources—it gives the clever literary archeologist many a bone to find when reading between the lines—but does the canon need to be presented as if it were a canonball [sic]? The goal of fiction is, undoubtedly, to reveal as many inner truths as non-fiction, and is thus entitled to its clever appropriations:

“I wanted to take a fire poker to his too, too solid flesh (anything hard and pointy would do) so his hard-bitten face would deform in fear and out of his mouth, not that perfect piano sonata of words, but a strangled soul-ripped Ahhhhhhhhhh!, the kind of sob one hears reverberating through damp chronicles of medieval torture and the Old Testament. Hot tears had begun their exodus, making their slow, stupid way down my face.” But for all that run-on, not to mention the Shakespearean and Biblical styling, where’s the heart?

Pessl’s novel actually conveys the majority of its wisdom through the bonhomous lectures of her Father Figure, a man whose maxims populate the pages with originality and style. When the story segues into a violent scene, Blue quotes her father:

“All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence...Simply reflect for a moment on the utter horror of having something threatening lurking outside your front door, hearing it huff and puff and then, cruelly, callously, blowing your house down. It’s as horrifying as any story on CNN. And yet where would the ‘Three Little Pigs’ be without such brutality? No one would have heard of them, for happiness and placidity are not worth recounting by the fire, nor, for that matter, reporting by a news anchor wearing pancake makeup and more shimmer on her eyelids than a peacock feather.”

This is such an energized, rhapsodic character, that though he stands at the periphery of a story that mainly focuses on Blue’s relationship with a pack of kids known as the “Bluebloods” and their teacher, Hannah, he is the one who dominates the novel.

Ultimately, Pessl falls prey to a desire to be the next Nabokov, and while Special Topics in Calamity Physics may be an original presentation, if its glitter is all gold, some of it’s just pyrite. It’s also not that original—Pessl may be the only author to use the names of other novels as her chapters, and she may call her table of contents the “Required Reading,” but none of this actually ties into the story; at least not in any significant way. Jonathan Safran Foer’s delightfully loopy chapter headings and narrative tone fit the scope of his work in Everything is Illuminated, and if you’re looking for a young intellectual’s attempt to grasp the world around him, David Mitchell’s proven to be the go-to writer for bountiful prose, and Black Swan Green isn’t too far off from Calamity Physics.

If you’re a reader who favors inelegantly used elegance or an abundance of the mundane, Calamity Physics is a smart, wicked beach read. But if you’re looking for deep literature; something that goes beyond the surface of the text, you might want to read elsewhere, or just crib the answers to her Final Exam off someone else—there’s no need to read 500 pages for such an untidy ending.

THEATER - "The Fortune Teller"

2006-10-24T02:35:00.000-04:00

Just in time for Halloween, HERE Arts Center has put together the delightfully evil new show The Fortune Teller. It’s the equivalent of seeing several short episodes of Tales from the Crypt, only performed by marionettes—creepy in of itself—and scored by Danny Elfman, channeling the sinister mystery of Batman or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Though the show is performed in miniature, it is amplified by the marvelous gothic dollhouse of a set, and given substance by the creaking mechanical sound effects. These elements mask the triteness of the plot and the sloppiness of some of the puppetry, but considering that The Fortune Teller gets the majority of its laughs from one-liners, this simplicity helps to sustain the illusion.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Neglect"

2006-10-23T23:00:00.000-04:00

It’s often said that hell is a place on earth—if that’s true, then Neglect, a marvelous new play by Sharyn Rothstein, takes place there: Chicago, 1995, the height of record-setting mid-July heatwave. Like a good modern playwright, Rothstein isn’t interested with demons or clear-cut evil: in this level of hell, there are just two ordinary people who—we hope—might overcome their loneliness. The writer’s penchant for natural dialogue would carry this show even with poor actors: thankfully, Rose and Joseph find their perfect matches in Geany Masai and William Jackson Harper.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "The Great Conjurer"

2006-10-22T17:15:00.000-04:00

Writers make for good characters: they’re tortured, twisted, and vicariously fragmented people. Christine Simpson’s new play, The Great Conjurer takes one of our most irregular writers, Franz Kafka, and shows, under the expert, smooth direction of Kevin Bartlett, how to enhance a traditional play with the use of classic and contemporary flair. For example, masks are used to make Kafka’s family, S, M, and F (sister, mother, and father) seem like the fictions, and stylized movements (choreographed by Wendy Seyb) give life to the internal struggle between a man’s art and a man’s love. As for Kafka, he is split into three characters: K, the man; N, the narrator (who cites from Kafka’s fictions and letters); and G, the creative “bug”—or Mr. Samsa himself—sent to physically pull K away from the real world. Set loose simultaneously, they overlap one another, building momentum in a surge of creativity until K is no more than an amanuensis for his crazed thoughts.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Marisol"

2006-10-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

More poetically political theater than magnificent magical realism, Dreamscape Theater’s revival of Jose Rivera’s Marisol is a solid production of an insubstantial script. Rivera’s script bounces from a girl losing her guardian angel in a dystopic interpretation of the Bronx to a story about angels overthrowing God and the existence of hope in a world where Nazis go around lighting the homeless on fire. The real-world events that inspired such imaginative riffs are clear. But staged? They grow turgid due to Rivera’s need to justify. Oblique, Rivera’s work becomes hard to judge and can be taken as an experience; when it’s made transparent, it’s just piecemeal rambling. Beautiful as the language might sound—and Marisol is filled with great lines—a script that relies so much on happenstance and the recycling of characters cannot sustain itself for over two hours.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

FILM - "Kill the Poor"

2006-10-18T22:58:00.000-04:00

Kill the Poor is an excellent suspense movie with social substance and a great flair for 1982 New York style. The film begins with an act of meticulous arson meant to help convince a long-term squatter to move out; it then spins through a variety of short scenes set mostly before the fire that show the motives for any one of the tenants. While a fragmented narrative could be confusing, especially one spliced so roughly (scenes frequently interrupt one another), director Alan Taylor handles the work with ease. He seems intimately familiar with the characters (his TV experience) and enamored with the Lower East Side’s naughty-but-nice atmosphere (his HBO experience). As for his screenplay, it comes from Daniel “I’m Not Lemony Snicket” Handler, whose varied experience with storytelling comes into play. It at least explains the dark humor, levity which, along with the freewheeling pace, keeps the film from being melodramatic.

While Kill the Poor is too distracted by its characters to make the statement of similarly themed films (like In America), the characters themselves keep the film alive. Though the narrator, played by David Krumholtz, is unconvincing (a tough guy in a frail body), the other characters are a lively bunch. (For instance: Delilah, the colorful gay tenant; Negrito, the local Latin tough guy; Spike, the young, hip black artist; and Butch, a student writing a dissertation on their living situation.) None of them get enough face time to be fleshed out, but their interactions are as real as anything you might see on TV’s The Wire. The person we do wind up caring for is Carlos, the squatter that all the other tenants have banded together to evict. Carlos becomes a representative of the old blood being pushed out by the newly rich, and Paul Calderon plays him so straight that our empathy for him comes mixed with fear. Taylor is evenhanded with his presentation: each new scene makes us view the characters in a new light.

There are still a few weaknesses in the screenplay, most likely leftover adaptations from Joel Rose’s novel. Joe Peltz, our semi-hero, gets married at the beginning of the film to help a French woman better her circumstances—they wind up falling for each other, but we never find out why. They suddenly have a baby, and their history is dismissed. Though the film eventually circles back to explain the circumstances of the birth, there’s a lot left unsaid—which is fine for the film. Focus is a good thing, and stretching the narrative any further would break the fragile balance between plot and character.

Kill the Poor may not be the most provocative film, but it manages to be a very evocative one, conjuring up the feel of a dangerous urban neighborhood and illustrating the ties that band a community together. It’s a deft work by director and writer, and well worth watching for anybody looking for a less moody Scorsese.

FILM - "Land of Plenty"

2006-10-17T22:02:00.000-04:00

You can strap an American flag to the back of your dilapidated van, and you can drive it all across

America

, but that doesn’t make you more American. You can use your own Vietnam experience to stalk innocent yet suspicious looking Arabs, and you can use 9/11 as an excuse to hide from your own problems. Wim Wenders’ film, Land of Plenty, is all about things that you can do, but it does very little. The story of a girl trying to reconnect with her last surviving relative is drowned out by the themes of patriotic paranoia, and the story of a man trying to justify his post-war purpose comes across more as unintentional comedy than drama—the film’s choices don’t compliment the message it aims to send.

As a cast, Michelle Williams and John Diehl are fine, but Williams is fodder for the camera, and Diehl, until the final moments of the movie, isn’t more than his posturing. Once Wenders finds an excuse to stick the two together in a van—the investigation of a drive-by shooting—the two have aimless conversations that blend together as much as Land of Plenty’s landscaping does. The locations are interesting, but Wenders’ shaky, low-budget technique makes everything look artificial and his focus is too sporadic to even artistically justify the action. Even if we accept that Diehl’s character is unhinged, the film goes too far when he bursts into a funeral home, carrying a corpse, and tells the owner that he doesn’t like gurneys and is on a tight schedule. That’s the hokiest form of shock, and for a film that’s trying to be serious—a film that’s deliberately trying to make something of nothing—it’s just too much. Even the musical selections when our “hero” is hunting “suspects” could be straight out of an 80s cop show, and only serve to make the film less and less plausible. Realism and spoof don’t mix.

Perhaps it’s the dialogue, which possesses too many ‘off-the-deep-end’ monologues from Diehl, or the fact that the characters seem unconnected to what they say, but Land of Plenty just isn’t very compelling. Just as Diehl’s character ultimately discovers that the pieces of his elaborate conspiracy theory don’t add up, neither does the film, and while I’m glad he doesn’t find evidence of terrorism, I wish we’d found evidence of something substantial in Land of Plenty.

THEATER - "Modern Living"

2006-10-15T20:59:00.000-04:00

Richard Sheinmel seems like a splendid actor/playwright. He’s sincere and disarming, and his collection of plays, Modern Living, is an honest portrayal of the life of the artist as a young man. The intimate location of The Club at LaMaMa helps him connect with the audience, and the fabulous character actors of the ensemble convey even the most obvious one-liners with complete sincerity. But all three of the pieces, each a different genre, lack gravitas: they seem more like introductions to people the playwright knows than an expose on them. Furthermore, the lyrics to the musical interludes between each play, performed by Jordon Rothstein & the t.v. boys, were hard to decipher and didn’t really fit into the ouevre of Sheinmel’s storytelling. Modern Living is perhaps a bit too modern: it is so compartmentalized and scrubbed clean that for all its efficiency, it’s also a wee bit cold.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "True West"

2006-10-13T02:36:00.000-04:00

Sam Shepard’s True West is a play about two brothers, Lee and Austin, who are everything and nothing alike. Dreamscape Theater’s cartoonish production is, in turn, everything and nothing like True West—as much a riff as it is a faithful homage. Two separate plays happen simultaneously: a comic interpretation by Zack Calhoon, who plays the menacing Lee as a buffoon, and a serious one by Jordan Meadows, whose Austin is both bitter and adoring. Though I found myself put off at first by Calhoon’s antics, he sticks with it enough to present a dimension to Lee that other actors often gloss over with anger: petulant immaturity. At one point, Lee blithely remarks, “He must’ve been lying...to one of us.” He follows this with slapstick, sticking out his tongue and jabbing his finger at Austin—a needless expression of the subtext, perhaps, but also a charmingly satisfying one. I just wish it had more in common with the work director Kate Ross is doing, with her hyper-realistic kitchenette staging, her moonlit scenes, and the incessant sound of crickets.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Truce on Uranus"

2006-10-11T02:34:00.000-04:00

Mark Lindberg has written himself into a tough spot: he's trapped on Uranus, a planet so cold that it's "too cold to live" and "too cold to feel cold," admitted that he's written himself into a corner, and been subdued by an ambivalent transexual alien who goes by the name Titania (the vocally gifted David A. Ellis). Lucky for Mark, he's only directing and writing Truce on Uranus, even luckier, the actor who plays Mark, Ricardo Perez Gonzalez, has charisma-and-a-half: that natural theatrical grace that makes us want to follow him across the stage, even when the stage, script, and underlying emotions are threadbare. When "Mark" complains to the audience about how difficult it is to write a play or to be in The Theater, it's compelling and believable. This is grounded in the artist's fundamental truth, even if the show itself, set on Uranus, is not.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

BOOK - "The Fourth Bear"

2006-10-08T13:32:00.000-04:00

For the last five years, Jasper Fforde has made a living riffing on literary genres: his Thursday Next novels are detective novels that investigate from within other classic novels (like Jane Eyre), and his most recent series, of which The Fourth Bear is the latest, reinvents Jack “ate no fat” Sprat as a hard-boiled detective who runs the Nursery Crime Division. Like Douglas Adams for sci-fi and Terry Pratchett for fantasy, Fforde has a way of filling the page with clever references and perversions of the themes we grew up with, and he’s got a genuine penchant for humor. However, The Fourth Bear is an inconsistent novel, too long by half, kept aloft by so many hurtful puns and repetitive jokes that it winds up sounding like Piers Anthony: it degenerates into making fun of itself with metajokes which—by their nature—are not nearly as clever as they proclaim themselves to be.

This is not to say that Fforde isn’t inventive: the plot here involves cuclear energy made from genetically modified prize-winning cucumbers, a McGuffin (literally), and a Ginza assassin who happens to be a seven-foot tall cake (or cookie) known more familiarly as The Gingerbreadman. But when the characters continually refer to the type of plot device they’re going to use next (“So you’re suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?”), the charming wit starts to erode. And it only gets worse as the book goes on: Ashley, an alien who works for the NCP (Nursery Crime Police), never misses an opportunity to make a joke in binary (his native language), and the only thing repeated more often than these jokes are accounts of the plot (which is not nearly that convoluted).

Another flaw of The Fourth Bear is that Fforde has more or less squandered his characters to churn out more of the same. Detective Mary Mary goes on a date with Ashley, and it’s one of the more charming moments in the novel—I wish there were more like it; the book wouldn’t seem nearly as cheap. The best resolution in the novel is Jack Spratt’s confession to his wife that he is a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality), but the aftermath of that is glossed right over, solved by Punch and Judy’s intermediation. And the new characters we do meet—Caliban, Dorian Grey, David Copperfield—are completely subsumed by the plot: they exist merely to add subplots or, worse, contextual jokes. This is fine for the short term, but when you build a book entirely around context, it leaves the majority of the work to the reader.

What we’re left with are jokes that strain connections and wangle words to make us laugh. When they arrest the Red-Legg’d Scissor-man at the beginning of the novel, Fforde makes sure to have him cut himself so that Jack can make the “apt” comment that he’s been “nicked.” (Fforde is a distinctly British author—his colloquial writing is more charming than confusing, but there you have it.) Occasionally, Fforde manages to make a joke resonate with the plot, such as the brilliant “right to arm bears” controversy, but more likely, something like this: fellow officer Pippa (who is glossed over completely in this installment) is pregnant. But not just pregnant, pregnant by Peck. And not just Peck, but Peck “with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park.” See where this is going?

“Paul Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound in Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Procter from Pocklington."
There was a pause.
"It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?" mused Jack.
"Yes," agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. "I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”

He gets away with it because he’s Jasper Fforde, an author with a huge fanbase that will continue to read him without holding him to any standards. And while there are other fairy tale riffs out there (like Fables, a darker, comic-book approach), Fforde is the only funny one: funny Fforde freely fields and fulfills his fiction fans by focusing on family fables. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—but don’t let it run down either.

THEATER - "Lemkin's House"

2006-10-05T00:18:00.000-04:00

Real-life lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the subject of the excellent and politically resonant drama, Lemkin’s House, is remembered for having coined the word "genocide" in the 1940s. If we believe playwright Catherine Filloux, not much has changed since Lemkin passed away in the late '50s: we are as passive about genocide today as we were then. To polarize her polemic, Filloux imagines what would happen if Lemkin were to return from the grave as guilt-ridden, wry, and jovial as ever. Uttering lines like "There’s no reason why you can’t continue lobbying Congress when you’re dead," John Daggett, as Lemkin, finds not only these laughable eccentricities, but also the man’s humanity, passion, and frustration.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

MUSIC - Carey Ott, "Lucid Dream"

2006-10-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

Lucid Dream is the perfect name for Carey Ott's new album. Like psychedelic folk music, it’s intelligible poetry with an ethereal quality of sound. Sleep-inducing sound. Sound so calm that it brings up memories of sitting on a porch, maybe in the South somewhere, falling asleep in the lazy sun. Forgive the abundant imagery: at his best, Carey Ott pulls off the effect with succinctly breezy melodies like “It’s Only Love,” supported by xylophones and harmonicas. At his worst, which is the majority of the album, his light falsetto is washed out by the blasé guitar, a dulling throb that sounds the same alone on “Sunbathing” as it does with a band in “Virginia.” Ott’s warbling notes and short breaths might be attractive for musical purists, but it’s unexciting, sleepy time stuff.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

MOVIE - "I Am a Sex Addict"

2006-10-03T00:48:00.000-04:00

Presented as a tongue-in-cheek meta-documentary, I Am a Sex Addict chronicles the life of Caveh Zahedi (also the writer/director), a man who is poignantly described as "constantly falling in love at the drop of a hat" but is more realistically a fetishist for prostitutes. The film doesn't follow the poignant route—nor would we expect that of a film with such a brazen title—but it's remarkably stale with the actual sex, too. The comedy is flinchingly unfunny, and the bonus features are acutely uncomfortable, and the whole affair seems like Caveh Zahedi trying to achieve some sort of catharsis, first through comedy, then through pathos. Visually, the whole thing is so scattered, with such an on-and-off supporting cast of women, that it's hard to appreciate the film. (Ironically, the film's highlight is the editing, which smoothly splices scene after scene in synch with the narrative—more music video than movie.)

Read on at [Film Monthly]

MOVIE - "12 and Holding"

2006-10-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

12 and Holding is a tragic coming-of-age story that strips away the expectations of security and takes a trio of young friends into some shocking territory. The film starts with a familiar setup: the loner, picked on by bullies, is protected by his twin brother, who dumps a bucket of piss on the offenders from their idyllic tree house. But nothing stays safe for long: before the tree house can be torn down by construction, the bullies burn it down, not realizing that two of the kids are still inside. One, the athletic, good-looking brother, dies, and the other, an obese and depressed boy, loses his sense of taste. As for the twin's birthmark-scarred brother, Jacob, he is lost and confused, and finds his solace in plotting a sadistic revenge on the bullies who killed his brother. And these are just set pieces for darker times...

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "'nami"

2006-10-01T00:13:00.000-04:00

Why is Chad Beckim going back to school for an MFA in '07? He's already co-founder and co-artistic director of the intriguing theater company Partial Comfort Productions, and his new show with them, 'nami, is a substantive showcase of urban life and social struggles. Beckim's material is intellectual, but written with the authentic voices of the working class: 'nami is more immediate and dramatic than some of the stuffy, sterile scripts that other companies put out. While not yet an epic writer, Beckim is on his way towards becoming a modern Odett (or an urban Shepard), and director John Gould Rubin shows a masterful vision (and love) of theater.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MOVIE - "School for Scoundrels"

2006-09-30T00:37:00.000-04:00

Todd Phillips has sure come a long way since Road Trip.

No. Wait. No, he hasn't.

His latest, School for Scoundrels is a straightforward revenge comedy that lacks the charm of Starsky & Hutch's unadulterated chemistry and Old School's irrepressible spunk. Like Benchwarmers before it, Jon Heder rises up for the nerds of the world...but honestly, is there anybody who isn't sick of this kid yet? To the film's credit, it makes the supporting cast of hacks like Horatio Sanz look great, but the few talents actually in the movie (like David Cross and Sarah Silverman) are stuck playing shades of themselves. Only Billy Bob Thornton, as the self-professed "doctor" winds up looking good (unlike Michael Clarke Duncan, who must just be desperate for cash). Suave and with a real fire in his eyes, Thornton brings out shades of both Steve Martin and Michael Caine in that other Scoundrel movie, which, considering he's the only life to this film, is almost a prerequisite.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "The Man Himself"

2006-09-29T00:49:00.000-04:00

What good is a passive political play? The Man Himself, adapted and modernized by writer Alan Drury and director/performer Ami Dayan from Drury’s original 1975 monologue, is still apt for the socio-political problems of today's America, but it isn't likely to hold today's America rapt. The play unfolds with little plot or activity: a man named Michael sits in a chair, in a theatrical spotlight, and recounts his life. There is no shift in pace, and the tone only occasionally wavers as we leap from the technical (his job as a parts manager for Component and Supply Inc.) to the anecdotal (his encounter with a Mexican gang of teenagers) to the charmingly mundane (his living situation). Perhaps the weary disaffection is meant to portend character. More likely, Dayan finds it difficult to direct himself in what is already a very challenging role.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

BOOK - "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman"

2006-09-28T02:02:00.001-04:00

“Sometimes we don’t need words,” reads a line of dialogue in Haruki Murakami’s collection of enigmatic short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. “Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don’t you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.” This particular story is “Where I’m Likely to Find It,” an psychological detective story about a man who goes missing between the twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth floors of his condominium and the man hired to find him. It’s a good enough representation of all Murakami’s work: quixotic things happen in the truest sense, for they are both imagined and real at the same time, like the eponymous Quixote.

These stories aren’t trying to build new worlds so much as to look at the existing one in a new light, an induced jamis vu. Accordingly, more time is spent on the mundane than the tragic, and both melodrama and emotion are held back to keep the storytelling unbiased. Reading a work in which the author is not trying to smack you over the head with a message is a little disconcerting at first, but like his American doppelganger, Paul Auster, Murakami’s work is a rich exploration of humanity’s ever-surprising nature.

As for his prose, he writes with a mysterious frankness, a Zen author writing prose haikus: “A man’s death at twenty-eight is as sad as the winter rain.” Or, “One cold rainy night just before Christmas, she was flattened in the tragic yet quite ordinary space between a beer-delivery truck and a concrete telephone pole.” Both sentences are deliberately normal—he even uses the word “ordinary”—but the context, the pacing, and the overall Murakamian mood of metaphysical happenstance make the stories anything but ordinary.

The subject matter tends to be the same, too. The majority of the stories use a relationship between a man and a woman to launch into a surprising new direction. In the excellent “Crabs,” a bout with food poisoning pollutes true love, and in “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos,” the small talk, colorful anecdotes, and subtle routines reveal whole shades of character. Throw in an underlying metaphor about the longed-after security of a mother’s pouch, and you’ve got a ninja-like story, sneaking up where you least expect it. Subtext and character subsume the plot, like in the story “Man-Eating Cats”:

“I wonder if your child will think of you that way when he’s grown up,” Izumi said. “Like you were a cat who disappeared up a pine tree.”
I laughed. “Maybe so,” I said.
Izumi crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray and sighed. “Let’s go home and make love, all right?” she said.
“It’s still morning,” I said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.

Pithy, perhaps, or reflective of the fact that sometimes you really don’t need words. Murakami knows where and when to use them though. In “Tony Takitani,” a story that involves an obsession with buying clothes, he says little about the outfits; in “The Kidney-Shaped Stone,” he pauses the narrative to describe every inch of a woman’s appearance. Where appropriate, the author chooses to let introspection describe things: the inner self is what he's more interested in after all. “Why were people so different from one another? he wondered. He had been with any number of women, all of whom would cry, or get angry, each in her own special way.” All of a sudden, there’s perspective on the freakish crying of “Airplane: Or, How He Talked to Himself as if Reciting Poetry.”

Not that Murakami shies from the challenge of a creative sentence: his descriptions are fantastic, and always relevant to the plot. Have you ever heard something as absurdly appropriate as “[T]he parasols at each table all neatly folded up like slumbering pterodactyls”? This Japanese author makes no attempt to hide his literary fiction, but like Borges and Auster, he justifies it. The only weak stories in this one are allegorical; their overt thoughtfulness of “Dabchick” takes all the fun out of decoding what’s really happening to this man, trapped in a secret location, trying to riddle out a password from a dimwitted guard. “The Ice Man” is frigid with its own cleverness, and “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes” is a resounding illustration that satire is not his strong suit.

Murakami is a narrator first, so you’ll have to forgive the similarity in tones between stories. The casual treatment of tales like “The Mirror,” “A Folklore for My Generation,” or “The Year of Spaghetti,” makes them seem like long anecdotes, and “Chance Traveler” stretches our patience with the introductory sentence, “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of this story.” At least with this last story, there’s a nice little payoff:

“[M]aybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don’t catch our attention and we just let them go by. It’s like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can’t see a thing. But if we’re really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface.”

Like fireworks in daytime, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is filled with explosions that skim just below the surface of our consciousness. If we follow Murakami’s yellow brick road, we can start to make out the substance of this collection—and for what it’s worth, his short stories are far more accessible than novels like Kafka on the Shore. Just remember: there’s no wizard behind the curtain. Every sentence is upfront and clear, which ultimately only makes it all the more mysterious.

MOVIE - "Wordplay"

2006-09-27T00:03:00.000-04:00

It was inevitable that Will Shortz, the crossword editor of The New York Times (and uber-puzzler), would become the subject of a documentary. Not only is he the herald of what is called "the gold standard of crosswords" but he's a proud major in the little-studied field of enigmatology. If this funny looking man of the mustache is the "Errol Flynn of crossword puzzles, then this film, Wordplay, is his Captain Blood. It is a film studded with celebrity cameos (if you consider Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, and the Indigo Girls to be celebrities) and with the adult versions of those adorably quirky spellers from Spellbound.

It is a film as solidly constructed as any New York Times crossword, complete with a themed gimmick (in this case, a split-screen that lets you solve clues along with the "professionals" of the crossword championships). In fact, it is so solid that people like Jon Stewart, with their exuberant showmanship ("Bring it Shortz, bring it!") wind up being the crudest parts of the film. A good documentary gives you a glimpse into the lives of real people, like long-time puzzler Ellen Ripstein, or crossword whiz Trip Payne. And while the whole movie may only serve to stress a point about the accumulation of useless knowledge, it also shows a tightly knit community of people who find solace on a gridded, symmetrical page.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven"

2006-09-26T03:24:00.000-04:00

Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is a show born of confusion: a Korean-American narrator (Becky Yamamoto) is trying to come to terms with her culture, and winds up losing herself even more in a messy, experimental play. Given that the disconnect is purposeful and that Young Jean Lee succeeds in confusing the message and both discomforting and cracking up the audience, this is one of the few "wrecks" worth seeing. However, while hybrid theater is different from, say, a hybrid car, this show could've used a light tune-up: exploring artistic possibilities is nice, but improving on them is nice, too. The comedy works, but Yamamoto's dramatic confession isn't believable, nor is the final scene's test-tube emotion (i.e., emotion generated by the circumstance rather than the character).

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Perfect Harmony"

2006-09-25T00:07:00.000-04:00

At last, a show that recognizes a capella for what it is: "a cult of pressure and perfection." Just as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee took a cute, musical approach to a somewhat geeky field, Perfect Harmony has arrived to make high school a capella cool again. Or at least something that you can laugh with, not at. (Full disclosure: I was a high school a capella-ist.) The fact that this was a workshopped play means that it plays for the laughs, and riddles the characters with superficial problems that make them both easy to identify and full of easy humor. What's surprising are how good so many of those jokes are, and how the confessional monologues actually work their way into the show. What's more, beneath the cheesy songs (actually the weakest part of the show) and riotous humor, there's an actual plot that explores friendship, competition, and whether or not art has any place in music anymore. This is not a perfect play (much as that'd help my tagline) but it's close: a PG-rated, feel-good, semi-musical blast.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Billy the Mime"

2006-09-24T21:03:00.000-04:00

Pantomime is the closest thing to a universal language. At the essence of this art, the human body can bring out, through exaggeration, the invisible truths of the spirit. At its most commercial, which is what Billy the Mime strives for, it can bring out, through exaggeration, the societal flaws of a culture. In a series of five-minute-long acts, Billy (the Mime) covers the current (“A Day Called 9/11”), the historical (“World War II”), and the obscure (“A Night in San Francisco: 1979”). Most of these are recognizable, even to a 22-year-old anti-culturist like me.

You can’t call Billy’s material tasteless, though it prides itself on the same shock value as South Park (it’s no surprise that both appeared in the crass documentary The Aristocrats). It’s as hard not to laugh at the parodies of Anne Frank or a priest and altar boy as it is not to be offended by them. Cringe or not, it’s an innovative adaptation of high-profile issues.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Broken Hands"

2006-09-22T01:41:00.000-04:00

Shrouded in a darkness, a man with bandages around his hands stands on a bridge, peering off into the dark and unforgiving waters of the Thames. His brother, a well-groomed shyster, climbs up to join him, holding onto a gun as if for dear life. He appears out of the shadows like a ghost, and fades back into them like a ghost, which is for the best, for he is a ghost, and the man on the bridge, a boxer, is haunted. Moby Pomerance's striking drama, Broken Hands, is haunting, too: Cory Grant and Eric Miller have such a profound and nuanced relationship that we hate to see anything bad happen to it. And though Pomerance puts the end of the play at the beginning, he handles the theatrical jumps between past and present so effortlessly that one forgets, at times, where it's all going. The credit doesn't belong to anyone in particular: the actors make us forget that we're watching a play, the smooth writing helps the actors forget that they're acting, and Marc Weitz's smooth direction helps everybody forget that there's a world outside the theater. Jay Ryan also deserves credit for his elegant palette of lighting (and his efficiently simple one-piece set): after all, the play only won the Fringe awards for Best Actor (Grant) and Outstanding Playwriting (which it shares with The Catharsis of Pathos), and everybody involved in this show deserves a round of applause.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]
Photo Courtesy/Neilson Barnard

THEATER - "Intellectuals"

2006-09-20T22:10:00.000-04:00

Intellectuals is a strikingly conservative comedy about a strikingly liberal affair. The idea of a straight woman suddenly taking a sabbatical from her marriage of 22 years to explore her "untapped feminine potential" as a lesbian is a great device for exploring an untapped social dynamic, and when playwright Scott C. Sickles plays to the premise's inherent comedy, the show is a success. Unfortunately, when Sickles over-thinks the idea and panders for laughs, as he does with the farcical leanings of the show’s center, Intellectuals loses its appeal.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 Encore: "Open House"

2006-09-19T23:38:00.000-04:00

Open House is an over-the-top comedy that's a little too open. The gags are obvious, the scenes are ridiculous, and the characters go way beyond stereotype. What few laughs there are, are forced, and the meanness of characters (or the shallowness of others) keeps the play too dark to be charming. As a shell, it's decent, but until the house fills with substance--comedic or otherwise--you wouldn't want to live there, much less visit.

The problem starts with the characters: characters incapable of selling this show. Alistair is a passive "dude" who feels as if he's "stuck in the last ten pages of a fairy tale." When he was interesting, he was a Prince Charming; now, especially as Bill Dawes plays him, there's too little passion and too much pathos. This is what the other characters glom onto: his wife, Beverly, begs for him to get jealous as she grinds against his neighbor, Lewis; his daughter, Sylvia, aches for his attention and devotion; when Melanie, Lewis's wife, tries to seduce him, she has every right to be enraged with his apathy. Would that Alistair had an epiphany, or changed, or in some way justified the sluggish pace of Open House. Instead, Ross Maxwell gives Alistair a less-than-thrilling climax and then tacks on a lengthy coda that ruins even that. And this play has the nerve to talk about tacky displays of art?

Beyond characters, Maxwell's script also suffers from attention-deficit disorder, a problem that I suspect springs from a general disdain for characters. The play springs from low self-esteem to patriotism, from homophobia to terrorism, from imaginary friends to sex games. None of this is interesting: Maxwell hops from absurdity to absurdity, shuffling furniture around (as if to boost the play's feng shui), when what he needs is to invest in something. Of the characters, Bess Rous's portrayal of the socially stunted daughter is the most appealing. I don't want to take anything away from her dedicated performance, but in a boring play, isn't the weird character always the most interesting, simply by default?

Open House lives up to its title: it's a house in search of an owner. Unfortunately, all that's wrong with the structure and the casting far outweigh the cute little tchotchkes left behind, and even the best director (and hey, Josh Hecht isn't bad) should bulldoze rather than renovate.

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos"

2006-09-18T00:56:00.000-04:00

Ever see a high-brow fart joke before? Let The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos, for which Geoffrey Decas won the 2006 Fringe award for Outstanding Playwriting, show you some dancing zombies rip people to shreds. Though one could easily imagine an entire play dedicated to musical numbers involving zombies and the post-post-apocalypse of World War V, Decas's script goes way beyond easy laughs: it parodies Mother Courage, for one, on Brecht's intellectual level. If anything, the cheap laughs are there to make sure there's something for everyone: the play is so overwhelmingly full of meaning that if you blink, you'll miss something.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, "The Dust of Retreat"

2006-09-16T15:42:00.000-04:00

Right from the first track, "A Sea Chanty of Sorts," it's clear that Margot & the Nuclear So and So's have a flair for both the dramatic and the erratic. Their rich, textured sound is at times anciently instrumental and powerful, at others, mechanically rhythmic and synthetically modern. A pair of haunting, siren-like voices that hum through the reverberations anchor the piece. Transitioning into "Skeleton Key," it's suddenly anchors aweigh as the album shifts into kitsch rock. The mysterious playfulness of the rhythm remains throughout the many shifts, held together by Richard Edwards’ poetic lyrics: “Love is an inkless pen/it’s a tavern, it’s sin/it’s a horrible way to begin.” I find myself inescapably comparing this group to The Charlatans; these are storytelling singers who aren’t afraid to chart a path across unsullied waters.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable)"

2006-09-10T19:23:00.000-04:00

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable) is, in case you can't figure it out yet, a hypermodern work. What's less obvious from the title is that it is a multimedia adaptation of the Greek myth of Iphigenia (pronounced IFFY-IN-YA). Don't worry, that's even less obvious in the presentation: a ragtag bunch of scenes, solidly yet ambiguously performed by the One Year Lease company, a group determined to find ways to revitalize the classics. But this is shock therapy, and this production is almost too extreme to be likeable. It's easy to admire James Hunting's stunning set: televisions lie among cinderblock ruins and characters descend down metallic platforms and cross a dust-covered floor till they rest against a corroded steel fence that leans, like an abandoned anachronism, against another wall. It's a lot harder to extract anything from the text, drowned in metaphor and performance as they are. The word that best comes to mind is "abandon," both as in "the glory of reckless abandon" and as in "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "The Infliction of Cruelty"

2006-09-08T22:29:00.000-04:00

The Infliction of Cruelty is a smart play about secrets, big secrets. It's a glossy, sleek affair for the first act, filled with the kind of quote-lobbing games you'd expect of Tom Stoppard. In the more mature and plot-driven second act, the characters finish the games and unleash the drama. Too elegant for the harsh honesty of Neil Labute, the play could be Pinter's take on Cruel Intentions. The erudite yet emotional writing (Andrew Unterberg and Sean McManus), the natural direction (Joel Froomkin), and the outstanding ensemble: what more does it take to get off-Broadway?

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: I Was Tom Cruise"

2006-09-08T00:18:00.000-04:00

I Was Tom Cruise doesn't feature classy writing, and it doesn't attempt a potent plot. Why should it? It has a Tom Cruise lookalike (and a Kate Holmes, Joaquin Phoenix, and Oliver Platt). That's vehicle enough, right? Alexander Poe's script and well-intentioned direction (with Joseph Varca) is just there for the ride. But the play itself is a slow ride without Jeff Berg (Tom) onstage, and even then it's still pretty turgid. It points out the shallowness but doesn't poke fun at it; that makes I Was Tom Cruise little better than the real thing.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER: "FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: Diving Normal"

2006-09-07T01:40:00.000-04:00

Ashlin Halfnight's contribution to the 2006 Fringe Festival, Diving Normal, makes two things abundantly clear. First, that the playwright deserves his Fulbright Award. Second, that this playwright has just graduated Columbia's MFA Playwrighting program. Halfnight has an excellent command of character, and a distinctly theatrical sense--like Albee--of the heartwrenchingly compelling. However, he lacks an even temperament: some of his lines are playfully cheap and the narrative suffers from uneven pacing and focus. Diving Normal is a pleasure to watch, but it has too much splash to be a perfect dive.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

BOOK - "Talk Talk"

2006-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Be it the sublime adventure of Water Music or the historical misadventure of The Inner Circle, there is something improbably charismatic about T. C. Boyle’s writing. This x-factor makes him easy to get into, even when he shows off his eclectic vocabulary (“a hard irreducible bolus of hatred”); Boyle’s books have bounce. They roll, they lilt: there’s a bit of the whimsical Irish writers in them. In Talk Talk, words have to do even more—one of the three main characters, Dana Halter, is deaf, and though Boyle never deviates from his neo-classical narrative, he works the silence into images that remind the reader just how good he is.

“The yellow there darkened to gold, to honey, to a deep hungering sepia as the killer in his mask flailed the too-white blade at his victim, the heroine in her midnight-blue teddy, who could only run and crouch and hide, bare-legged, her painted toenails gathering in every particle of light as if to shut the camera down. Dog barking, the caption read.

Glass breaking.

A quick close-up of the victim, her makeup smeared, eyes dilated with terror.

Sobbing continues.”

Though this scene is from a TV that Dana focuses on to avoid the harsh accusations of her lover, Bridger Martin, the true plot of Talk Talk is more frightening than that of the film. In the frenzied first part, Dana is jailed for crimes she has not committed, jostled out of her normalcy by the actions of a man who has stolen her identity. What’s more horrifying than this violation is that William “Peck” Wilson, this cool-as-a-cucumber thief is an enjoyable, sometimes likeable character. It’s a harsher dichotomy between lives than in The Tortilla Curtain, and Boyle definitely chooses a side in Talk Talk, but aside from fits of anger, and the fact that he’s ruining people’s lives, Peck could just as easily be the protagonist.

This is a thriller though, so Boyle doesn’t wax too philosophic. When the police refuse to help (identity theft being a “victimless crime”), Bridger and Dana go cross-country to track down the villain. They’re a little too good at it, but the car chases, the narrow escapes, and the double-sided narrative justifies all the coincidence. This refusal to linger with digressions does wonders for the pacing (e.g., though Boyle has fleshed out Dana’s story, Wild Child, into a novel, he wisely chose to publish it separately).

As a result, Talk Talk is Boyle’s most accessible novel. Set in the suspenseful present and written in the beach-reader’s cadence, the novel has something for everyone: a high-speed car chase, prison melodrama, and the woes of the working class. Shifting through these hot themes, it’s hard to imagine a reader not relating to some aspect of this novel and harder still to imagine someone unbothered by the apparent ease of identity theft. And through all this, Boyle’s writing is still rich, still taut, and still exciting. Even plunging into the steady riggings of the thriller genre, the pages abound with unusual nuances and flourishes.

“She was at a disadvantage, because it took both hands to compress a twelve-inch submarine sandwich and keep it from disintegrating into its constituent parts, but she was game.”

However (though this is typical of Boyle), Talk Talk lacks a fitting resolution to its dramatic climax. This is the author’s style: to leave the audience hanging on the realization that life only ties itself up neatly in death, (and even then, there is always something left behind). This particular ending seems more appropriate for one of Boyle’s shorts: it doesn’t capture the gist of the novel; it says very little of the relationships between the characters, and less still for the changes in their lives. That is the sole disappointment of Talk Talk: that there is, in the end, nothing more to it than talk.

MUSIC - Persephone's Bees, "Notes from the Underground"

2006-08-30T01:33:00.000-04:00

Notes from the Underground is some damnably overzealous pop, slickly performed by Persephone’s Bees, but lacking the training necessary to balance such ambition. It’s all catchy, but since most of it’s slightly below average, this infection is more a plague than a blessing. Singer/songwriter Angelina Moysov shows plenty of promise—she uses enough of her Russian accent to make it a seductive tool, and her Russian folk-pop song “Muzika Dyla Fil’ma” is easily the best track on the album. Now if only someone could find a vaccine for her distractingly cloying pop….

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

MUSIC - The Lovely Feathers, "Hind Hind Legs"

2006-08-28T20:59:00.000-04:00

One-two stepping between the slow eccentricity of Modest Mouse and the enthusiastic backbeats of OK Go, The Lovely Feathers make for one hell of a dazzling peacock. Let them preen; let them gloat. Perched atop a throne of nonsense lyrics, carried by an always-warbling pitch, and squawked in an often-breathy daze, their CD, “Hind Hind Legs,” doesn’t have a dull moment. This is a dazzlingly silly band, but their feathers aren’t the only lovely things about them.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: The Burning Cities Project"

2006-08-27T21:05:00.000-04:00

The Dreamscape Theater has just landed on the "it" list for notable companies. Their contribution to the Fringe Festival is The Burning Cities Project, a dramatic ensemble piece conceived and assembled by Brad Raimondo. This is Play With a Mission: to define and understand tragedy. And not Hamlet-level tragedy: we're talking Holocausts and Hiroshimas, Dresdens and Pompeys (and, of course, 9/11). Director Jennifer McGrath has assembled a diverse cast to populate this fractured world, and she guides them expertly through spoken word, movement, fragments, modern dance, dark comedy, avant-garde, and a political rant. Between each piece, an actor speaks directly to the audience about the purpose of the show, as in The Laramie Project, and on the whole, it's a moving evening.

In "Vulcanalia," one of the serio-comic pieces, Mark Lindberg gives Laura Moss's presentation on Pompey a hard time.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Never Swim Alone"

2006-08-26T20:07:00.000-04:00

Bravo, Daniel MacIvor, and I don’t mean the military letter that comes after Alpha and before Charlie. Never Swim Alone is a technically perfect, dazzlingly verbal, low-budget show that solidifies the Fringe as a showcase of pure talent. While not a theatrically daring piece—it has a cast of three, no set, and two props—but by investing all of its energies in a story, a particularly moving story, it has all the thrills you can expect of the theater.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Absolute Flight"

2006-08-25T22:59:00.000-04:00

In a world that already has shows as hilariously full of self-loathing as Who Wants to Be a Superhero, do we really need parodies of reality TV like Absolute Flight? Sure, why not? "Reality" is a simple, painless device that brings disparate characters into close proximity, complete with pre-installed motivations--in this case, the right to be dropped from a plane while buckled into some wings, i.e., to fly. All the author needs is some playful banter and a twist or two and a play is born.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

<---- The women of Absolute Flight, Marishka Phillips, Effie Johnson, and Amy Landon, will make you soar.

Photo/Sam Rosen

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Garbage Boy"

2006-08-24T22:48:00.000-04:00

It's hard to distinguish Christopher Millis from all the garbage strewn across the stage. Given the lifeless delivery of his plotless piece, Garbage Boy, all that detritus of memory does about as much for the audience as the faintly sketched scenes (which is to say: not much). I don't mean to be overly harsh, but Millis, a hard-working poet, is out of his element, and his director, Ashley Lieberman, has done nothing to make him more comfortable in it. This one-man play fails at being personal and at being poetic; Millis has cut himself off from his strength. Onstage, he rambles, ambles, and fidgets. It's hard to watch. Given his soft voice, it's hard to hear, too.

It's a bit ironic that a man as solid as Millis winds up being so vapid onstage. The poet looks like a real tough guy, from chiseled arms to an intimidating baldness to his wisp of a goatee, a line that almost looks like a middle finger of hair across his chin. As the audience enters, Millis sits behind a typewriter, composing the poem that bookends the show. That piece is good, but, like the majority of scenes and narratives, it doesn't fit anything else. The central narrative is about Millis's search to uncover his family's secret history, but he draws only the dramatic thrust of a horrific accident--there's no feeling of resolution or connection.

To be fair, Lieberman is the theater professional. The dramatic failures lie with Millis, but given the lack of theatrical energy to compensate or balance out the evening . . . did Lieberman even show up for rehearsals? Was she counting on the author's natural eccentricities to make the night more "real"? Is it possible that she actually advised, condoned, and sanctioned the trivial bits of detail and poor blocking that only serve to illustrate how much Millis isn't an actor? Did she think that adding unnecessary sound effects would distract from those pressing problems? (In this, she was actually right. The sound effects are distracting. The sound effects are also now a pressing problem.)

For whatever reason Garbage Boy is still being performed--I can't imagine this as cathartic for anybody--I certainly hope they clean it up soon. Right now, it just stinks (pun intended).

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Americana Absurdum"

2006-08-24T01:04:00.000-04:00

God bless America, home of non-sequiturs and overzealous greed, and also, as we're reminded in Brian Parks' Americana Absurdum, rabid pursuits and hyperactive life. Parks' piece dials way past eleven, running on the fumes of an ever-elusive America. Split into two identically styled one-acts titled Vomit & Roses and Wolverine Dream, the evening is an explosive satire of America, as fast, furious, and inane as our culture.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MOVIE - "American Gun"

2006-08-22T23:02:00.000-04:00

Crash was the big Hollywood salute to the racial divide in America. American Gun is the small independent response to the gun crisis. Both films take a patchwork approach towards identifying the problem, coming at different perspectives from all angles—but whereas Crash needed closure, American Gun accepts the less satisfying but more realistic ending. Aric Avelino is to be respected for this choice; his film comes across at times as gritty as Soderburgh’s Traffic—at other times it seems as obtuse as Gus van Sant’s Elephant. These are both excellent qualities for his film, and the different scenarios allow Avelino to paint a disturbing picture of the real America.

There are three central stories, each of which breaks apart into a series of dramatic vignettes. The first, set in Ellisburgh, Oregon, looks at the aftermath of a school shooting at Columbine stand-in, Ridgeline. This is Avelino’s preferred medium: the prelude and coda of violence, and the pressure that an implied threat places on a community. We see, in the opening credits, snippets of the shooters from a video camera: after that, we see an interview with the mother of one of the two shooters, Janet Huttenson, in which she is accused of negligence (to put it politely). As Avelino pulls back, we also meet Janet’s other son, David, who is not exactly the most popular kid in the neighborhood. Much of the drama comes from the tension between mother and son, as both find themselves unable to communicate with the other. We also meet Frank, the first responder on the scene, a tough police officer who is struggling to keep his emotions under control. By the way, all of these events take three years after the initial shooting. It’s just one more reminder of Avelino of how long tragedy can linger and scar a nation.

The second, set in a tough public high school in Chicago, Illinois, looks at the dilemma of a smart student trying to make good without being killed, and also at the cost the principal of such an environment must pay. Led by outstanding performances from both Forest Whitaker and Arlen Escarpeta, these scenes force the conventional teachings of polite society to come to terms with the harsh realities of the unprotected streets. Avelino’s film is not meant to justify or condone gun culture, but these segments do cast an ugly shadow on the blindly adamant anti-gun enthusiasts who probably never worked the late shift at an inner-city gas and liquor store. At the least, American Gun is a conversation starter.

The final city, Charlottesville, Virginia, is the most subtle, but probably of most relevance to the type of person who might view this film. Nothing bad ever happens in White Suburbia, that being the point of White Suburbia, and under Avelino’s eye, nothing bad overtly happens. To the casual viewer, a girl is just thrown against a wall when trying to stop some frat boys from taking advantage of her drugged-out friend. But as the camera remains on her, we can see the crack below the surface, the ugly truth that comes from even the slightest brush with danger. Avelino spends the least amount of time here, but that’s because the implications are clear: we built a world where people need guns to sleep at night.

If some of the individual compartments seem sensationalized, like a confrontation on the front lawn between Janet and her accusatory neighbors, they are balanced by the subtle and often inexplicable moments of grief that penetrate the picture, most of which come from Whitaker’s shaky exterior and lingering gaze. The whole cast is outstanding, and it’s a real surprise that Marcia Gay Harden didn’t walk away with an award for this film.

American Gun isn’t trying to be clever, and it’s not trying to solve the problem. But by illustrating the myriad chambers, if you will, of this loaded gun of a topic, Avelino has put together a sleek and efficient way to deliver this film. Not with a whimper, but with that long foreshadowed bang—one hell of a bullet of a movie.

BOOK: "In Persuasion Nation"

2006-08-21T12:01:00.000-04:00

And the moral of the story is, don't write novellas. But I suppose I should backtrack a little bit first. Our tale begins earlier this year, when George Saunders published his brief and fabulist political satire, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. That book, while intriguing, carried on a joke so long that a metronomic pallor overtook Saunders' normally wicked wit. Thankfully, Saunders' new collection, In Persuasion Nation is a return to his sharp, trenchant form. For good or ill, Saunders is our generation's Jonathan Swift, and while his stories are more aimed at today's constant commercial consumerism rather than war or famine, Saunders has Americana cold.

"I CAN SPEAK!(TM)," the first such story, is a sharp barb at how our culture views babies--not for eating, mind you, but for using, as much a product and consumer as their parents. Written in the form of a letter from a product representative to an unsatisfied client, this short segment delivers a one-two punch when it confesses a blatant truth: America hates caring for babies. So wouldn't it be great, asks the story, wouldn't it be natural to want to put a mask over our children's faces that could make it seem as if they were talking, as if they could do more than "glub glub glub" and suck feces off their thumbs? Would that make us love them more? Blunt and subtle at the same time, most of Saunders' material will have you readers double-taking at the page in mirthful horror; really, what won't he say next?

Certainly he wouldn't dare to address cruelty to animals in drug testing ("93990"). Surely he wouldn't insult the crude yet efficient power of the dumb, dumb commercial ("In Persuasion Nation"). Well, there's no way he'd manage to show how reality TV and our fascination with the obscene has overtaken family values ("Brad Carrigan, American"). No, he wouldn't go there.

Among the many things George Saunders "won't" do, one thing that has eluded his past collections has been a genuine sense of connection with the characters. His work is so fixated on the satire and the story that the characters are usually all the same. While that's still very much the case here--Saunders has a very distinct narrative voice--two of his early stories, "My Flamboyant Grandson" and "Jon" manage to find that emotional drive, too. Set in the very near future (where all of Saunders' stories transpire), these are tales of characters who break through the trappings of culture and the cult of Capitalism to find love and acceptance of others. That may not be very American, I know, but it's nice to see that even a post-modern verbal pugilist has hope for us all.

Back on the writing front, Saunders is a very exciting verbalist. He has short, rapt sentences, and his grammatical inconsistencies are representative not of his own shortcomings, but of America's worsening hold on language. Everything is geared for the ADD-riddled audience, and everything is fast, fast, now. "He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook." That could be a story right there; instead, it's part of a larger piece on the rise of violence as a tool to sell products, and its saddening success.

Here again: "In the van I do a Bad Feelings Acknowledgement re the reburial. I visualize my Useless Guilt as a pack of black dogs. I open the gate, throw out the Acknowledgement Meat. Pursuing the Meat, the black dogs disappear over a cliff, turning into crows (i.e., Neutral/Non-Guilty Energy), which then fly away, feeling Assuaged." How inventive, how coy . . . how much you want to bet we see some new-age philosophy similar to this next year? And this line of thinking isn't even what the story "CommComm" is about, it's just a digression that reads like a meal.

The closest parallel I can find to George Saunders is the playwright, Greg Kotis, whose over-the-top antics drill the senselessness of America into even the most obtuse audiences. Saunders, working in a less-active medium, has the opportunity to be subtler, but both find a balance of slapstick and ghoulish urban fantasy. Though a few of George Saunders' stories in In Persuasion Nation seem a bit one-linerish ("93990" and "My Amendment"), they're still great reads, reads which take that one step beyond simple commentary along the lines of Dave Barry to actually subvert and convert our brain-dead America right back. The fight is on, and it's funny. So grab a banana peel for America: pick up a copy of In Persuasion Nation today.

MOVIE - "Lonesome Jim"

2006-08-21T01:56:00.000-04:00

A precarious anti-hero who's been beaten to a nervous breakdown by his older brother; an overly sweet heroine who doesn't match the hero; crazy drug-addled friends, medicated relatives; a precocious little boy – yup, Lonesome Jim is an art flick. Under the guidance of Steve Buscemi, who directs like he's making the unpretentious version of Garden State, this lo-fi love story strips the stigma from artsy films by relishing in the awkward moments of life itself. Buscemi knows what he's doing with his beautiful long, wide shots of Goshen, Indiana; his makes his work too real to be pretentious – these are not impressionistic swoops of landscaping; they're hard, grainy textures of the land itself. This style more than meshes with James C. Strouse's minimalist script and is a work that relies more on environment than text, one that allows much of life to be, as it always is, implied.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Only A Lad"

2006-08-20T20:26:00.000-04:00

Clockwise from L: Jenny Weaver, Joey Calveri, Eric Shelly & Barret Hall.

Photo/Andrew Loschert

As the story (or at least the author's note) goes, writer Andrew Loschert, fresh out of grad school, got the idea for Only a Lad while listening to the Oingo Boingo Greatest Hits CD. His idea was sound (no pun intended): use the narrative-driven eccentricities of Danny Elfman's '80s rock band and make a musical out of it. The concept was in the right key too: a good-at-heart gangster who just happens to be different from the "cool cats" gets framed for murder and must find a way to save himself and reconcile his spirit. The thematic nature was there too: if we've learned nothing else from VH1, it's that America Loves the 80s. So what went wrong?

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

[For more Fringe coverage, read the masterful musings of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Letter Purloined"

2006-08-20T11:55:00.000-04:00

The intricate elegance of Letter Purloined deserves a review written in twenty-six lines which can be read in any order. It should be a metacritical review, one that constantly refers to the structure of the piece itself, using wonderfully oblique metaphors like golf. It should also serve as a form of psychotherapy, drawing on the sex dreams of Freud, the language of Derrida, and the works of both Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare. Of course, this would require a lot of work on my part -- and a near-genius capacity for post-modernism. For this reason, I prefer to just highly recommend David Isaccson's Letter Purloined and to extol the talent of Theater Oobleck, the group that performs it, sans director.

The plot applies the mash-up philosophy of albums like "The Gray Album" and runs two concurrent beats: Poe's detective story about a stolen letter and Shakespeare's classic tragedy of a certain Moor (and we don't mean a dock). In this version, a sinister minister named Ogai frames General Cassio by stealing a letter sent from him to King Navodar's wife, Queen Diri. It's best if you're familiar with the conceit: the show is performed in a random order every night, and figuring out the twists and deviations is great fun for the bohemian surveyor. The one annoyance is that Cassio speaks as if he's a Casio keyboard. Get it? The joke doesn't stretch for the two-plus hours of the show, even though Colm O'Reilly is a good imitator; thankfully, characters and transitions clarify his subtext often enough for story to still work.

There's so much other stuff to praise though: Isaccson (who also plays the insecure, soft-spoken king) manages to make difficult literary theory not only comprehensible but funny, and just wait until you see how he incorporates psychoanalysis into Queen Diri's manic and overwhelming personality. The actors also deliver this purposely convoluted story with full bravura and intonations of significance.

Aside from being a novelty, a show that can boast of cramming Kofi Annan and Lacan into the same breath, Letter Purloined is also a rich, deep metadrama. It's intellectual, it's not very sexual, and it's not full of over-the-top action: it is the anti-Fringe Fringe show. It's also a must-see, and I certainly hope this play finds producers willing to take it to the next level.

[For more Fringe coverage, read the calligraphic criticisms of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Minimum Wage"

2006-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Minimum Wage: Blue Code Ringo is an infinitely catchy, abundantly energetic, absolutely ridiculous, half-musical half-improv Frankenstein's monster of a show. It's great fun, but for a show that's four years old, it's remarkably unpolished. The music, co-composed by Jeff & Charlie LaGreca with Sean Altman (the witty a capella punster, formerly of Rockapella), is so crisp and delightful that it seems unfair to match it with poorly staged multimedia presentations (interruptions, really). Or maybe it's just that Jeff LaGreca's beatboxing talent is so good that it actually makes everything else less interesting (in particular, a scene about the uses of the spatula that devolves into a D&D-inspired "swordfight").

But you know what? They've got the heart, and the darkly comic wit, to succeed. They've also got an utter disregard for inhibition; this brings the sometimes mediocre staging to a simmering temper. Suzanne Slade goes all out when shaking her booty with danger, Tony Dassaunt's deadpan "Kooky, the Happy Burger Clown" is fantastic, and William Caleo, who plays the slapsticky-Altman role, pulls faces like no other. Charlie LaGreca, who plays the diminutive nerd Orwell, is tremendous in his own right: he plays his character so seriously that when he departs from the norm, as in "Connecticut," you can't help but giggle.

The plot, by far the least important thing, involves the cast training you, the audience, to become new employees of the Happy Burger franchise (where you can rise to the middle), and serves as little more than an excuse to impart anecdotal wisdom (through songs) about love affairs with grills, or what to do when you start hallucinating about psychopathic french fries. It works to get through the show, though the real justification is in the way the cast interacts WITH the audience, most notably in their innovative finale, "Balls!!"

The playful simplicity of the project is reminiscent of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but the lack of character development keeps the production too reliant on sheer energy. This is fast food theater that happens to be about fast food--but unless drinking Red Bull causes you to hallucinate a really good vocal a capella group, Minimum Wage is still worth watching.

-------------------------------------------------------
Players Theater (115 MacDougal Street)
Performances: FRI, AUG 18 @ 7:30; WED, AUG 23 @ 4:30

[For more Fringe coverage, read the right-on writings of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: The October Sapphire"

2006-08-15T23:10:00.000-04:00

A depressed genie, three furies, a male nurse with a "lithsp," an overly cheerful and hyperactive social dunce, a murderous nephew with a penchant for arsenic and chocolate, a crazed old maid who pleasures and is pleasured by the lovesick monster in her closet, and yeah, the monster in the closet. Throw enough things at the wall, and something's bound to stick: welcome to the Fringe. Welcome also to The October Sapphire, a play by Nick Coyle that tries so hard to be eccentric that it forgets to be anything else (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).

If you believe that going to the theater is first and foremost supposed to be shocking, that is, if you're of the camp that loves raunchy puppet humor, forced or not, this is a good start for you. If you're, say, a suicidal transvestite midget child actor who succumbs to the more is more philosophy, The October Sapphire has enough laughs and indomitable spirits to rise to the occasion. But as for that smidgen of meaning, that deeper sense that justifies the madness: I'm afraid this "gem," on closer inspection, is roughly the same kind you'd find in one of those twenty-five cent toy-vending machines.

There are some standout performances from Hetty Marriott-Brittan, who plays the hallucinating matriarch of the house. While her character may be oblivious to everyone around her, the actress has such keen rhythm that she seems literally animated, as if she might, at any moment, burst out with an "Eh, what's up, Doc?" type moment. Simon Greiner, who provides the voice and mannerisms of his puppet, Pesto, could easily be in Avenue Q, and it's his irrepressible charm that gives the "real" actors such leeway. But the actors stuck playing the genie and his posse of Furies have nothing to use that leeway for and simply suck up stage time, and other actors, like Ben Harrison and Claudia O'Doherty grow more and more annoying as their caricatures balloon up and overwhelm them. Nick Coyle's script peters out too, caving in completely to over-the-top shock which is more like under-the-radar schlock.

Here's where the dialogue ultimately winds up: "I'll bet you've never woken up to think: have I just killed someone, or is this just another miscarriage?" No, I haven't. My question after the shock of The October Sapphire wears off: should I have?

--------------------------------------------------
The Harry DuJour Playhouse (466 Grand Street)
Two Performances Left: THUR 17 @ 6:45, FRI 18 @ 4:15

[For more Fringe coverage, read the crisp scrivenings of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "Marco Million$ (based on lies)"

2006-08-12T23:01:00.000-04:00

PICTURED:
(Clockwise from top left ) Rodney Gardiner, Tom Ridgely,
Hanna Cheek, Kevin Townley and Arian Moayed.
Photo courtesy of Andy Criss.

Marco Million$ (based on lies), Waterwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s little-known play, is a drama wrapped in slapstick surrounded by vaudeville drowned in cabaret. It is also an excellent example of how to refurbish and contemporize a stolid piece for a hipster crowd.

The plot hews closely to O’Neill’s, but the emphasis is now laugh-a-minute humor, a point occasionally taken too “seriously” by the troupe. Some jokes go a little too far, like in a poetry slam inspired by the far-more cultured II.iii of O’Neill’s play. (Black Jack the Vicious recounts his love for a bunkmate who “uncorks my scuppers/and pierces my billowing jib/8½ fathoms with his yardarm/I can feel it in my rib.”) Some don’t go far enough: two mock-1930s-film newscasts serve as summary of I.ii (Marco receives a papal commission to seek out Kublai Khan) and II.ii (Marco’s party prepares to escort Khan’s daughter, Kukachin, back to their Italy). Neither is particularly funny, and they serve only to point out how much of O’Neill’s work is riddled by exposition and superfluity. It’s not the sort of reminder you want in an otherwise-upbeat modernization.

Luckily, the players of Marco Million$ are hit-and-rarely-miss. Wallowing in flamboyance (especially Kevin Townley), they wend their way through so many accents, characters, and scenes that it’s hard to be less than impressed. Though the production is at heart quite sophomoric, it has such indefatigable energy that the show remains constantly captivating. Any unevenness can be attributed to the fact that all five cast members contributed to the script, and more so to the unevenness of O’Neill’s own script, which, in epic tedium, spans twenty years. In Waterwell’s hands, the play becomes such fun that we don’t mind that these good ol’ boys can’t sing in harmony, or that their waltz is a bit clumsy. Their instinct and rhythm is spot on (so is their tango). The scope is ambitious enough to make scenes good even when they’re not, and shining stars like Rodney Gardner, who plays a Mafioso Kublai Khan, eclipse the rough spots with their brilliance.

As for stars, director/actor/writer Tom Ridgley is a supernova. The troupe jests about the difficulty of transitions, but under Mr. Ridgley’s eye, they’re just another opportunity for a jest. Stale blocking? Now you jest. From Matrix-styled shifts in camera aboard a merchant ship to umbrella-fashioned boats to the piquant, zesty lighting (Stacey Boggs’s design), Mr. Ridgley keeps us rapt for a hundred minutes straight.

Marco Million$ also ends up a surprisingly faithful staging of O’Neill’s work. For all the clever emendations and boffo riffs, the closing minutes get to the heart of the story: greed wins and love suffers when the powerful face the emotionless. With the bluesy gospel finale’s condemnation of “the avaricious [who] relish in good fortune” we are reminded one final time not to applaud for Mr. Polo: “just throw money.” That cool critique of capitalism’s emotionless glamour is no joke.

MOVIE - "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby"

2006-08-09T00:05:00.000-04:00

Stupid is as stupid does, and in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, stupid does 200 m.p.h. And in that driver’s seat, looking comfortable and even—at times—suave, is Will Ferrell (as Ricky Bobby), a picture-perfect model of stupid. Alongside him is John C. Reilly (as Cal Naughton, Jr.), who plays the dumber (but just as talented) version of Ferrell. The only person who doesn’t look comfortable is Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the villanous French Formula 1 racer, Jean Girard, recruited to take Ricky Bobby out. Trapped in a preponderance of over-the-top negatives, Girard’s accent is mangled worse than Inspector Clouseu’s, his mannerisms are rigid and monotonous, and the fact that he’s gay just seems more like an acknowledgement of America’s own homophobic tendencies than a joke: it doesn’t work. Writer/director Adam McKay (of Anchorman legend) stretches these French-related jokes too far: they’re as repetitive as, say, racing a car around an ovoid track 500 times.

[Read on] at Just Press Play

MOVIE - "13 Tzameti"

2006-08-08T02:09:00.000-04:00

First-time director Gela Babulani has created the cinematic equivalent of the shot not heard round the world in "13 Tzameti" – a chillingly taut drama where the empty click of a gun is just as potent as the shot itself. Once Babulani gets beyond his initially teasing camerawork and transforms his protagonist, Sebastien, from a financially-strapped immigrant in rural France to an accidental contestant in the illegal world of a high-stakes Russian-roulette tournament, we have an effective bit of suspenseful noir on our hands.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

THEATER - Anais Nin: One of her Lives

2006-08-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

As is too often the case, fact is rarely as fanciful as fantasy. Most of playwright/director Wendy Beckett’s drama Anaïs Nin: One of her Lives is imagined or extrapolated from Nin’s erotic diaries, Anaïs’s character is filled with understanding, not passion, and seems unable to live off the page. One of her Lives is not a bad play, but it is an awkward one, a series of loose, drifting encounters in 1930s Paris between Nin and the far-more interesting Henry and June Miller. The presentation of this material isn’t original: the 1990 film Henry & June used similar details, and Beckett doesn’t bring enough theatricality or insight to Nin to justify the work on that level. Where it shines is as a literary passion play, climaxing in a slow, sexy seduction between Henry and Anaïs's recitations from their journals. But words only get you so far . . .

In this case, Beckett paints herself into a corner with the sub-plot she’s erected (perhaps to distinguish this work from other adaptations). Nin’s abortive sessions with the psychologist Dr. Rank (not the Chekhovian one) abound in cryptic and meaningless riddles and the dreamlike encounters between Anaïs and her parents remain dreamy and without substance. Though we learn that one sequence beween Anaïs and her long-gone father is real, there’s nothing to draw from the scene itself, which is the real problem with the play itself: a lack of resolution.

Why focus on Anaïs Nin? She may be an erotic woman in her diaries (and certainly has a fully encompassing sexual history), but the character that Beckett constructs is a little girl prone to giggling uncontrollably or weeping tragically, without any real sense of self or being. Alysia Reiner and David Bishins, who excellently portray the Millers, upstage her without even saying a word. This fits in June’s case, as she’s an explosive personality who sucks in and destroys the people around her, but for Henry, presented here as a gruff yet gentle skirt-chaser, their physical relationship never smolders, only their words.

Angela Christian, who plays Anaïs, is cheated by a flimsy and quieting French accent that minimizes her at every turn. She has a great command of her body (which probably comes from her experience in musical theater), but nowhere to take it—hence all the spurts of pacing back and forth. There’s drama at the heart of this love triangle, but Beckett’s play doesn’t capture it: the whole construct, from the calligraphic walls to the book-stacked set, is too chaste and Anaïs Nin sorely needs of some vulgarity.

BOOK - "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

2006-08-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

While discussing the industrial organic (an oxymoron realistically, but not legally), Michael Pollan, in his new book The Omnivore's Dilemma, connects browsing Whole Foods to Barnes and Nobles. Both sell attractive products that hook you in with clever designs and jacket quotes—the ones from Whole Foods just tell a different type of story, a story of happy farms and happy animals. Pollan calls this sales pitch Supermarket Pastoral, but then wonders, as he looks at how people manage these farms, at the rather lax standards on the governmentally owned word "organic," and at the battle between Big and Small Organic, whether their brand of "cutting edge grocery-lit" is more fact or fiction.

Well, as anyone who has ever read a non-fiction expose on the food industry before, most of what you believe about food turns out to be as fabricated as the synthetic (and sometimes "natural") ingredients. As it turns out, Pollan has invented a type of grocery-lit, one that likes to perambulate across aisles on historical fact, innovation, and digression. Unlike these corporate food writers, as much manipulators of the sentence as of meat, Pollan's heart really is in the right place, and though his book has a lot of repetition, it's surrounded by solid fact and enjoyable—often mellifluous—writing. I haven't been so thoroughly disgusted yet entertained since reading excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Pollan, who is prone to extending metaphors, is also a fantastic imagist, and his combination of the two is what makes him a thrilling journalist, one of the few people who can make nonfiction crackle. For instance, take his first impression (albeit fifth or sixth draft) of a farm he visits in the industrial chapter:

"A sloping subdivision of cattle pens stretches to the horizon, each one home to a hundred or so animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that, it eventually dawns on you, isn't mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedyard's thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of a teeming metropolis of meat."

Is that Americana or what?

It's a pleasure following Pollan as he dissects the origins of four distinct American meals, from McDonald's "nuggets" (a food group all to itself) to Whole Foods to Polyface farm to physically hunting and preparing each item himself. (Pollan calls this last one “the perfect meal.”) This enjoyment makes his actual findings easier to digest: for example, we have not only transformed grass-eating ruminants into a bunch of corn-munching pieces of steak, but this process has increased the risk of our meat carrying a disease that our acid-riddled stomachs can't break down. “The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.” We recklessly use cheap corn at the cost of our soil, our increasingly indebted (and subsidized) farmers, and ultimately, our health. I take it back: it's plenty hard to digest; it's just not hard to swallow (and that, in a nutshell, is the problem with America's eating).

Pollan’s a reliable and knowledgeable journalist when it comes to all this data. He’s been covering food-related trends for years now, and his “grassroots” experience allows him to easily convey complicated facts about biomechanics or the benefits of a perennial ecology (not to mention what, exactly, that is). He’s also quick with a metaphor or parallel for every situation; rather than rely solely on quotes, he works as much from a storyteller’s perspective as from his characters, and his embellishments are light and sculptorly. Who else would compare the evolution of plant pesticides to how European nations acted during the cold war? Who’d describe bits of deadly nightshade, avoided by the natural intelligence of ruminants, as “forlorn florets of cauliflower languishing on a picky child’s plate”?

When it comes to conclusions, Pollan occasionally leaps beyond his facts. His simple questions (e.g., is organic food better? Worth the extra cost?) ramble to digressions (“better for what?”) and eventually conclude that while the industrial-organic food of Whole Foods is usually tastier and healthier, it is no more sustainable—the whole point of going organic—than a conventional TV dinner. (It is, however, a contradiction that is “possible to live with” and “sometimes...necessary or worthwhile” to hold.)

This is a flaw of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and other tell-alls): a lack of solutions, an abundance of critiques. (It’s easy to talk about our efficient inefficiency.) After exploring the beauty of a sustainable farm that practices polyculture and true organic practices, Pollan pinpoints what led to the favoring of “a biologically ruinous meal based on corn,” but doesn’t offer an economic recourse. Then again, that’s not really his job: you wouldn’t expect a author of a cookbook to make the dish for you; you can’t expect Pollan to reorganize agribusiness for the government. (I’d be willing to let him try.)

In the third and final segment of his book, Pollan forgoes making conclusions, and instead illustrates the trials and tribulations (and satisfactions) of hunting wild Sonoman pig and foraging through back forests for mushrooms (which includes a short digression on the “lunar energy” and so-called mystical properties of the fungi). Here, the prose flows away from facts to observation, to “hunter porn.” But these segments—which relate a more-primal experience that most of us are unfamiliar with—are as engrossing as they are irrelevant, since it’s a given that most people don’t have the resources, leisure, or ability to hunt and forage their own food anymore. (Even the author’s no expert, and relies on the expert opinions of his entertaining guide, Angelo, to overcome his crippling mycophobia and his lack of familiarity with rifles.)

We live vicariously through Pollan’s pictures instead:

“With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a rounded bloack form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge black pearls.”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a thoroughly engrossing and exciting read, the type of non-fiction that has social relevance that doesn’t come at the expense of personal exuberance. And wherever the book might linger too often in stark fact, the narration is driven by the underlying conceit: “It is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price.” This book is a rich literary meal that you can’t afford not to finish.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
[Note to the publisher: I don’t recall ever reading a book with so many typographical errors. Granted, I spend a portion of my days proofreading—I’m more disposed to notice these things than the average gadabout—but consider placing more care in your editing so as to avoid things like: “...though it may be that animals like us that eat morels do help them disperse their spores as we move then [sic] around on the way to our plates.”]

CONCERT - Muse at the Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC, 8/3/06

2006-08-05T15:45:00.000-04:00

Think of the Rapture. Think huge piercing walls of light, think stereotropic shimmers careening off fans, think of a multimedia kaleidoscope revolving around four giant, baroque test tubes, then think again. A chord, a slow ebb, a beat, a rhythm, a pulse . . . and then a wail. Matthew Bellamy, howling just a little louder than his guitar, trying to get the images into our eyes even as he pumps the music—loud reverberant chunks—up our soles, through our spines, into our souls. There’s Chris Wolstenholme, stage right, holding everything down with a bass guitar and an occasional chorus. Dominic Howard, center, seated on a monolithic throne of drums and poised to strike. And bonus performer, Morgan Nichols, lurking behind Matt, but not with the sinister vibe that some of the Muse songs convey; he’s there to maintain the samples and to play the keyboard. And then there’s you, bathed in this radiant light, this luxuriant sound – yes, think of the Rapture.

This particular miracle comes with a name – “Butterflies and Hurricanes” – and if you’re not adequately prepared, has the potency of a curse to boot. Until you’ve seen this song live, you haven’t heard Muse. And once you’ve been cowed by the brilliance, it’s hard to go back to the processed sound of a monochrome CD, spinning silently in its little shrine. Following the overall Muse formula, “Butterflies and Hurricanes” begins with a soft, foreboding lull, a slow sinking that, after a minute, you suddenly realize has started, impossibly, to rise. The CD its from, Absolution, can’t adequately capture the surge in energy, but it's even worse at translating the song’s unusual bridge. After reversing into a neo-classical instrumental section, it fades out in a twinkle of staccato keystrokes, only to return, seconds of silence later, with Matt on the piano. In the midst of a rock concert, amidst sweaty, crowd-surfing fans, an instrumental homage to classical music has taken center stage; what’s more, it’s crawled under your skin, and the nuances tickle your body like a sudden, delightfully delusional fit.

It’s 10:00 in the Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC. I don’t have children, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t know where they were. Muse has been playing for an hour (long enough to blot out all but the knowledge that the openers, The Cloud Room, were terrible), and they’ll play for another forty minutes. There have been ballads, there’s been fight music, there’s been their darkly fantastical alternative rock, and there’s been a lot of Matt, working the guitar as much as the stage, scrooning (screaming + crooning) a slick, solid sound from a world born of synthetic harmony and angry guitars. I’m blown away by the lush, vibrant feeling rising once more through my bones as we segue into “Feeling Good,” a sultry mix of lo-fi jazz and hard rock, and yes, I think, I am feeling good. How could I not?

(The next day, listening to my Muse collection, the recordings seem tame. “Hysteria,” which brought the whole audience at least three feet into the air with its rocketing line of guitar shreds, now seems once removed, more intellectual than emotional. “Stockholm Syndrome,” which erupted through my body, seems quiet even after I turn the knob on my stereo to the max. Live, I remember the trippy electronic chorus actually tripping people up, the guitar’s jagged lead back in to the meat of the song made the comatose wake up. Give me a few days—let me wash the raw feedback from my brain—and I’ll be fine with this silvery imitation. But let me think of the concert instead.)

The point of this tour is presumably to help bolster sales of the new Muse CD, Black Holes and Revelations, which hasn’t gotten overwhelmingly favorable reviews. Well, I didn’t like the CD at first either, but as I said earlier, they weren’t listening to Muse properly. Performed live, crackling across that fourth wall with the intensity of stagecraft and the wit of their songsmithery, it’s a great album. “Take a Bow,” an opening number for the album and this tour, builds from an oscillating series of synthesized notes to at last proclaim, in breathy tones hurdling over a wall of guitar strokes, “Burn/you will burn/you will burn in hell/yeah you’ll burn in hell/burn in hell/burn in hell/burn in hell for your sins.” In concert, it’s like watching Muse summon the devil himself to punish an unnamed but corrupt, charismatic leader of a free country who brings death and destruction to all he touches.

With the exception of “Starlight,” the album’s title track, all of the new songs on this tour are great to watch. “Starlight,” incidentally, isn’t bad—it’s just outclassed by the rest of the concert on account of being too cute, and being too similar of a ballad to their older work. Their best new song, “City of Delusion,” which counterposes a sterling trumpeter against a swooping violinist, was unfortunately not performed, and this exposes the one flaw of the set list: an overemphasis on high-octane established hits, and not enough time with their more exotic and experimental work, or slow songs, like “Ruled by Secrecy.” Instead, they performed tracks like “Supermassive Black Hole”—their first single, which is close to being a progressive pop-rock song, and owes much of its beauty to Gorillaz—and an adapted version of “Knights of Cydonia,” their fight-music finale. With the use of the projector screens, the audience rose to their feet, screaming the chorus: “No one’s gonna take me alive/the time has come to make things right/you and I must fight for our rights/you and I must fight to survive.” (As opposed to their performance of fan-favorite “Time is Running Out,” which had us belting the chorus anyway.)

Muse has reached a point where it has amassed enough certified hits to make their tours a preview of their eventual “Greatest Hits.” It’s a little stunning to realize that, solid as this show was, it still left out plenty of great hits, like “Hypermusic” (a perfect eponym for both the song and what Muse performs) and “Space Dementia.” One only hopes that future tours will not be needlessly reliant on their new CD (though it’s hard to say that a song like “Invincible” is a crutch so much as a blessing) and that some of the popularly bland hits like “Plug in Baby” will be excised in favor of more varied songs like “Screenager.”

But hey, I understand the desire to fill a large space with energy, only energy, and nothing but energy, so help them God. And Muse has a sterling bankroll of older hits like “New Born” and “Tsp” that could carry them for the next seven years, even if they never released a new CD. But if this concert is any indication of Muse’s strength and solidarity—how Matt keeps his throat from exploding is a mystery—this Liverpool trio will keep producing their eclectic and increasingly ambient music for fans for years to come. But why wait years? See them now, and then mail your moot CDs to me.

THEATER - "Everythings Turning Into Beautiful"

2006-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Meet the next genre of theater: the jukebox drama. In The New Group’s new production Everythings Turning Into Beautiful, it’s Seth Zvi Rosenfeld’s dialogue that seems cheesy and the songs by Jimmie James that get to the heart of things. The two actors—Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba—also seem more at ease when singing. That comes as no surprise, considering that Rubin-Vega’s claim to fame was originating the role of Mimi in Rent and that Yoba’s attempts to tone down his character mask his talent, something he doesn’t have to worry about when “performing.” Without the music, this would just be an average play about average life—with the music, it is able to liven the tedium long enough to reach the more engrossing second act.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "The Maternal Instinct"

2006-08-03T08:07:00.000-04:00

Though prone to excess and flaky exposition, Monica Bauer’s play, The Maternal Instinct, is beautiful more often than not: a bittersweet story for anyone who’s ever wanted a baby, and anyone who’s ever been afraid of them. Sarah is the former, her wife Lillian is the latter, and Fred...well, Fred’s the only friend of the family with sperm. Their desires and frustrations are the subject of the next ninety minutes, and with the exception of the comedic sections (played too much for laughs), it’s an interesting hour and a half.

Even the play’s two cumbersome subplots manage to entertain, one intellectually, the other emotionally. The brainier of the two is about Lillian and Fred’s science experiment, an attempt to reprogram (i.e., remove) the maternal instinct. It’s a success—mice are tearing their children apart—except that Mother Courage, a lab mouse, is, by force of will, protecting its young. Dramatically, the scenes are flat, but they do re-enforce Lillian and Sarah’s situation: animals (of which people are a subset) often behave in unpredictable ways. As for the visceral subplot, Lillian, Fred, and Sarah all encounter Terry, a drunk, pregnant, semi-mute superfluity (no matter how well Elise Audrey Manning manages to portray her). These scenes are as repetitive as Terry’s one-word vocabulary, but they end up being cloyingly charming.

The Maternal Instinct rises above these tangents: the cast cushions the rocky portions of the script, and the shining moments of the text compensate for the clumsy simplicity of director Melissa J. Wentworth. Karen Woodward Massey’s performance as the conflicted Lillian makes up for any other flaws, like the lack of a real set or a faulty lighting design—substance trumps appearance any day of the week. Bauer’s play, trapped in the midst of a fringe Fringe Festival at WorkShop Theater, is proof that a good play can overcome adversity. If it makes some necessary revisions to pacing and plot, it can overcome competition, too. The Maternal Instinct deserves to come to term; now it just needs a little help from a qualified midwife.

TV - SciFi Channel

2006-07-27T23:46:00.000-04:00

Intro: Dr. StrangeFi or How I Learned to Love the Bombs
SciFi Channel has four new shows. This is dangerous, considering that the only successful SciFi Channel shows seem to be ones transplanted from other channels (like the Stargate franchise) or remakes of previously established hits (Battlestar Galactica). Farscape couldn't grow beyond a cult following, and neither could First Wave, Invisible Man, or the myriad other attempts made at original cable programming. But these new programs--one drama, one reality show, and two comedies--are worth checking out. And if you don't now, you won't get the opportunity later. So here's the rundown.

Eureka
Handled properly, this could be the next, great X-Files. Handled improperly, we could skip straight to the last season of The X-Files. Eureka is a show about a seemingly innocuous town that harbors a big secret: it is the secret testing ground of all major scientific advances in the last fifty years. Everyone who lives there is a mad scientist waiting to happen; week after week, we get to watch as things go terribly wrong. (That, as you all know, is when things get terribly entertaining.) In the most recent episode, "Many Happy Returns," the cast contends with not just a clone of the woman they just buried, but also with the time-displaced ghost of her husband. These are fresh twists with fun (if a little too wry) dialogue and decent acting.

Where the show trip up is with the script and cast; right now, Eureka is pandering to the audience with joke after obvious joke, and the actors are hamming it up just as much. Science-fiction actors are, theoretically, actors first -- I'd like to think that as Eureka matures, we'll actually see growth in the details of each scene. As for the plot, so long as they don't sacrifice their single-episode format to the plot-arc gods, these writers can make anything happen on the show. I say, let them. And about damn time.

Who Wants to Be a Superhero?
Full disclosure? I went to college with one of the contestants, Nitro G. (I use his secret identity for no other reason than that it amuses me to do so.) Fuller disclosure? So what? That's reality TV; anybody can be a contestant. It's both a good and bad thing that he's the second hero eliminated: the show is easily nerds on parade, and the only place these "heroes" are going is on a panel at the next mid-level comic-book or sci-fi convention. It's a bad thing because Who Wants to Be a Superhero is actually a well-written reality show; Nitro G is now a loser on a show that people might watch.

Flamboyant costumes, improbable characters, and simply silly stunts--Who Wants to Be a Superhero flaunts every nuance of why people like reality TV: laughing at other people. (And who can't laugh at Cell Phone Girl, or how seriously Major Victory and Monkey Girl take this?) This is a new low, which, in reality lingo, should be a major high. The one flaw of the show, but an admitted draw for the comic book fans, is that Stan Lee hosts the programming and controls the votes. However, he never actually speaks to the contestants in person, which gives him the feel of a megalomaniacal, hermetically sealed villain: the anti-Donald Trump.

Though the series has the predictable commercial-friendly twists (with big revelations teased right before the break) and all-too reliable confessionals, the challenges--in other words, the scripted portion--are where this reality show excel. In the first episode, one contestant is eliminated before even entering the heroes' lair...by another contestant, Rotiart, who turns out to be a plant. (His name, when read backwards, is Traitor.) Hidden challenges, like this initial morality test, keep things fresh; the question of how serious some of these contestants are provides the rest of the sinful entertainment.

Later in the episode, I get more guilty pleasure at watching all-too-focused superheroes dash right by a crying little girl [another plant]; the real test, of course, is finding out which heroes think "saving" a civilian is more important than the mission itself. And this is the meat of Who Wants to Be a Superhero: as Stan Lee acknowledges, the show really can't test the outer superhero (that would be funny in another--painful--way), and each episode is a little lesson in morality. And who knows? The winner, who will be the superhuman punch line of many jokes, may even get a chuckle out of Nietzsche.

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace
A documentary by a fictional Stephen King-like character about a fictional show he supposedly wrote, directed, and starred in, in the late 80s for British television couldn't possibly work, could it? Pretentious doesn't begin to cover the bases, but weirdness and originality work in its favor--and there's some invigorating audacity, too.

Unfortunately, the showiness of the format currently overwhelms the humor. The clips from this faux-TV series are flush with enough parody of the genre and era to work solo (in the same way that Soap encompassed its time); the documentary portions, which often interrupt the show-within-a-show's already shaky narrative, are mostly devoid of laughs and don't fit nearly as well. They simply don't need to mine two distinct styles: tacky acting, intentionally awful editing, and painfully funny voice dubbing is where Garth Marenghi's Darkplace triumphs. And that's in the spoof itself, not the analysis of it.

After all, when you've got a hospital called Darkplace built on the bowels of hell, do you really need anything else cluttering the story? The gimmicks--enough blood to make Sam Raimi proud, or low-budget special effects (like throwing a cat into a scene)--are good; the conceit is not.

Amazing Screw On Head
Full disclosure (again)? I'm a huge Mike Mignola fan. His artwork for Hellboy is dark and mysterious, with ominous mythology crammed into every jagged line. The strength of his Dark Horse-published series was enough to make me invest in Amazing Screw On Head, a one-shot that used the same art and supernatural crime-fighting concept for shits and giggles. Not only is the television show drawn in a style similar to Mignolia's own, but the voice-actors (headlined by Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce) understand that it's just for fun.

And really, who doesn't get it? The year is 1868, the country is America, and Screw On Head is a lively head that can screw into various mechanical contraptions. Oh, and he works for Abraham Lincoln. Ah, and he's assisted by his manservant, Mr. Groin. Er, and he's facing the undead army of the gleefully insane Emperor Zombie. Any critic taking this show seriously is seriously in over his or her head.

Suffice to say, Amazing Screw On Head will find its audience in the same devout, cultish fans who loved Duckman and The Tick, two other similarly implausible cartoons. Those who call shenanigans need not watch; the rest of you: hop onboard.

Stargates (SG-1, Atlantis)
Oh, I couldn't resist saying a few words on these returning fan favorites. The only way that a show becomes a fan favorite is by catering to the every whim of a mostly idiotic viewership. After enough seasons, viewers have fallen for the characters, not the plot, and are content to waste hour after hour watching the same (or similar) scenario unfold so long as their "heroes" are killing time with witty banter.

So how does a show survive losing one its main draws? In the case of Stargate SG-1, they transplant characters from another franchise. In this case, it's Ben Browder and Claudia Black from the frakked carcass of Farscape. In order to keep the fan base, Browder and Black play pretty much the same characters as before, but that's fine: all these popular, long-running hits tend to have the same characters anyway.

How else to explain Atlantis? This spin-off basically duplicated every character from SG-1 and placed them in a slightly different location. Last year, the Atlantis team fought the Wraith, and the SG-1 team fought the Ori. To do so, both looked for archaic weapons that had been lost to them and had to deal with the political manipulations of the sinister humans that surrounded them. This year, the battle continues. Big deal. The original seasons felt fresh; each week the SG-1 team would face unique challenges as science itself turned against the protagonists. Now, each year, the Stargate teams face the same stubborn challenges, and science has very little to do with it. (Unless, that is, you count the science performed by the CG artists who litter episode after episode with space battles.)

No wonder I'm so enamored by this new slate of programming; it's different.

Conclusion: It's The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
This is a hip slate of programming which should provide the solid devotees of Friday's two Stargate series and the new quirky drama Eureka with some great alternative programming. But though it panders to the right demographic, MTV’s Aeon Flux tried (and failed at) the same thing. (The show has belatedly grown into a hit now that the original audience has grown-up and looked through their past for memorabilia.)

There's also the sad truth that of all SciFi Channel's current series, only Battlestar Galactica is a real drama. The rest are sarcastic action meets science shows, and that might lead to some redundancy or resentment among viewers looking for the next Quantum Leap. With the exception of Eureka, these shows have nowhere to grow. They are niche programs, best served as mini-series: future installments promise more of the same, more of the same, and more of the same. Lexx, the most boundary pushing SciFi Channel show yet, had a whole universe to explore; I worry that we've already seen everything these new ones have to offer.

ESSAY - On Writing [I]: The Modern Library Writer's Workshop

2006-07-24T02:31:00.000-04:00

Can anyone tell you how to write? No. At least, they shouldn’t; then you're not writing so much as dictating or channeling the voice of another author. The minute someone prescribes advice for you, be it in showy cliché—“show don’t tell”—or precise instruction—“In media res is the best way to start your story”—you’re in trouble. What then, is the point slash role slash need of the literary lessons of books like Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop?

Sparks, my friend. Not the overburdened and one-dimensional sparks of Spark Notes (as if there could be a crib sheet for writing), but for insightful quotes from successful authors on how they’ve managed to write. When Koch leaves it to them (and his own experience), clarifying thoughts without proselytizing the necessity of them, his book is a charming and edifying read. When he plays the role of the headmaster, explaining such niceties (I refuse the word “necessities”) as the ten-percent rule—“Second draft equals first draft minus ten percent”—he grows insultingly dull.

Or maybe it’s just me, holding on to the vain notion that writing is grown and cultivated—a gut instinct—rather than a planned, sculpted, and constantly revised process. (For what it’s worth, Koch does mention authors like Sommerset Maugham who wrote single-draft stories.) But for the most part, it shouldn’t be necessary to read (or write) a chapter on revision: to say that there is a formula or process for correctly explaining the story is just fallacious, and unfortunately misleading. The one anecdote Koch uses that sticks with me is of one of his students putting together a final project. She keeps coming up with crap, and at last Koch advises her to forget her last revision, and to simply tell the story. She does, working through a painful deadline to produce a slim but brilliant story. What inevitably worked for her? The deadline? The advice? The time she’d spent writing and learning to identify her worthless sections? Perhaps none of these, perhaps some weird amalgam of them all. The point is, something different works for all of us and only experimentation can unlock your potential.

That said, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop rocks when Koch debunks popular schoolhouse mythos, like “write what you know” or the need for research. To the former, he retorts that we know a lot more than we think¬—including of course, the things we have read about, which creates a secondhand narrative that is the very essence of fiction. As for the latter, Koch dismisses it: why bog ourselves down in fact when we can invent first, and check the substance later? (Or as I see it, why limit ourselves to specifics if the story itself is good? Koch would agree, to some extent, with this: he is a climber of Mount Probability; he acknowledges that some things require the improbable to occur.)

Of course, Koch also has rules—many of are irreconcilable with his own text. For instance, his first line—“The only way to begin is to begin, and begin right now”—forces you to stop reading. In fact, if this guideline were followed to the bitter end, one would never read, though Koch later confesses that we become better writers by first becoming better readers. (In some cases, Koch even uses the familiar anecdote of authors beginning their daily writing by transcribing their favorite authors to get the juices and rhythms flowing, so to speak.) This is also where we run into the steadfast scholar, a man who dictates that there are rules for the first draft, among which are the rather obvious “Do it” (right up there with “only you can prevent forest fires”) and “Do it quickly” (which he then contradicts by explaining that some authors are more prone to writing slow first drafts). His heart is in the “write” place, but why not think about perfection the first time through? Yes, it’s good to get it all out on paper, but must that be a sedentary way of doing things?

Then again, it’s probably good for some people to hear what I consider obvious staples of the writer’s craft: keeping a notebook of thoughts and ideas, for instance, or arming oneself with a pen (the idea can strike at any time). And you can’t go wrong with Koch’s use of quotes. Take, for instance, James Baldwin’s assurance that “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” These are things that perhaps we need to hear on a regular basis, basic truths that we need to be reminded of—that genius means nothing if it is devoted to sloth. I’d say that justifies a book like this—that a phrase may uproot your laziness and make you write again—but if you’re reading, you aren’t lazy.

Mock as I do the idea of reading your way through a writing workshop, Koch’s “class” is very organized, and has enough italicized or fully capped sentences to make skimming for inspiration a breeze. I also gloss over a lot of the interesting points that Koch makes, such as the difference between plot and story, or—so long as you take his words as suggestions and not commandments—how to go about cultivating a voice. I also make it seem, at times, as if Koch is not aware of his own contradictions—he is. He’s simply ignoring them to better facilitate you, the reader, who will inevitably vulturize (as I have) the parts that you find tastiest. That said, pick away.

Those paying attention may have realized that there is no actual review of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop; how can I possibly stand on a pedestal and write whether or not a book on writing is good? It has encouraged me to write some vaguely expressed opinions on the craft of writing itself, so I cannot call it uninspiring, and I must acknowledge that writing is a realization of the phrase “to each his own.” You sir, must decide what best serves your craft, so now you, sir, must do just that.

Go.

THEATER - "Crazy for the Dog"

2006-07-22T00:26:00.000-04:00

The title of this play is Crazy for the Dog, but it’s anybody who goes and sees this Off-Broadway run that is crazy (and not in the obsessed, lovesick way of one character, Paul, toward his dog). Rather than being a dark comedy, director Eric Parness keeps every character in such proximity to one another that it becomes a stupid drama—not cheesy enough for melodramatic laughs and not serious enough for nervous ones. This is a sophomoric attempt at The Goat, and if playwright Christopher Boal wants to salvage the good moments of the second act, he needs to do away with the first.

Granted, I’m the wrong audience for this show. I don’t have a pet—in fact, I’m allergic to most of them—and on that note, I’ve never seen the appeal of enslaving a filthy animal and drawing sustenance from the way it grows to depend on you. That said, I don’t understand why the characters get so worked up over a dog, or, as we find out later, the drowning of two “innocent” kittens. Even if you accept that this entire play is about the emotionally stunted Paul coming to terms with his love object, a kidnapped dog, having characters scream about it for ninety minutes is hardly necessary. Better to just get to the cathartic confession and allow the drama to build from there, rather than to eke out what is, to the audience, a transparent observation from minute one.

Those still struggling to be entertained by Crazy for the Dog will be further stymied by the acting. Patrick Melville plays Paul so passively that the obsession is absent and emotionless. This explains why Melville’s only action in the show is to walk really close to other actors and then to coolly explain the situation to them--but it doesn't justify it. You can’t play repression. Of course, if the negative choices ended with Melville, there might still be a show; unfortunately, the female lead, Wrenn Schmidt, plays the crazy younger sister as someone who is crazy, which isn’t an action so much as a state of being. The reason Act II works so much better than the first is that Ryan Tramont, as dog-napper Kevin, is at least trying to get something from Paul—the fault with his character is that Mr. Boal has forgotten to include what that is in his play.

It’s a shame that Crazy for the Dog impressed enough of the right people to garner an extension. It’s just a doggone shame.

BOOK - "Everyman"

2006-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Do old people do anything after they get old, except get older? Philip Roth’s last novel, The Plot Against America, convinced me that they could grow as authors, shaking off shades of Zuckerman to tap into new genres (like alternative history) that would explore isolation on a broader scheme. Perhaps that was a fluke: Roth’s new novel, Everyman, ambles too politely towards death, belaying the inevitable by discussing the advance of death, observing the death of others, and mulling the death of one’s livelier (and more promiscuous) youth. In many ways, it is like Gilead or The Sea, only sans the invigorating reflections of the active first person. Trapped in the third person, Everyman remains excessively broad and rarely emotional: a stagnant, perfunctory read. Nothing exciting happens, and the language is dull as death.

Where Roth salvages his narrative, and where more time and attention should have been focused, are in his descriptions of family. He begins Everyman by shattering the illusion of a happy ending: the family members are attending the main character’s funeral. We see, in some splendid pages, how much this man has left behind, and then, as the book progresses, how dead he already was to these people. That’s something we can empathize with: the death of love while we are still living to acknowledge it. “He [his younger son, Lonny,] was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release. When he opened his mouth, nothing emerged except a series of grotesque gasps, making it appear likely that whatever had him in its grip would never be finished with him.”

Other passages fall into the trap of deprecatory humor: “An oncologist, a urologist, an internist, a hospice nurse, and a hypnotist”—already it sounds like a joke¬—“to help me overcome the nausea.” “The nausea from what, from therapy?” “Yeah, and the cancer gives you nausea too. I throw up liberally.” “Is that the worst of it?” “Sometimes my prostate feels like I’m trying to excrete it.” Ha, ha. Funny. But not.

Still other passages seem like recycled Roth anecdotes about foolish faith—“Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life”—or overabundant descriptions that are closer to fodder than anything poignant: “On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime.” Ha, ha. Funny. But not.

Roth quotes Chuck Close within his novel: “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” If this sad, small, uninspired novel is the mark of a professional, then turn to the amateurs. There’s nothing new or interesting here.

THEATER - "Altar Boyz"

2006-07-16T22:17:00.000-04:00

Though both the boy band and Christian rock are already pretty much parodies of themselves, Altar Boyz finds enough mileage in playing stereotypes to come across as a cult musical sensation and one of the few true “guilty” pleasures. Though the substance is as flimsy as Godspell, the up-tempo, modern groove makes it more than bearable—pleasant, even—and the cast is talented enough to make certain songs and gags (the two are interchangeable) infectious.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Food for Fish"

2006-07-13T00:45:00.000-04:00

With his manic juggling of a one-note joke for the sixty minutes of Nerve, playwright Adam Szymkowicz seemed to be modeling himself after Christopher Durang. With his new play, Food for Fish, Szymkowicz is both more polished and less manic, but he’s still modeling his scripts: this time it’s Anton Chekhov. The urbanized result tries a little too hard, and Szymkowicz is still struggling to flesh out his characters, but two (Bobbie and Sylvia) come across as genuine, and the play itself is eerily entertaining.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

FILM - "Superman Returns"

2006-07-09T02:05:00.000-04:00

Can anybody say that Bryan Singer doesn't give the fans what they want? Save for a shortage of action, this is a modernized classic: the natural fifth film in the Superman franchise. It's not a reinvention--it's too chock full of nostalgia and anachronism--and to its credit, Superman Returns is marvelously entertaining in that regard. But much as Singer is a great caterer, he's not that great of a chef, and the majority of scenes come across as too bland, too scripted, and too silly to rise above the "comic book" moniker that haunts so many new movies. (Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is still one of the few good adaptations out there, Tim Burton's Batman is perhaps the other.)

Singer's done a great job casting the film though: Brandon Routh is (so I'm told) both a heartthrob and an adorable klutz, and he does manage to uphold the awkward grace of a god among men. On the reverse of the coin, Kevin Spacey exudes his own brand of charm: he hasn't been this delightfully sinister since Seven. But whereas Seven was a dark film, here, Spacey lets words like "kryptonite" roll off his tongue; he teases out the insanity of Lex Luthor ala Gene Hackman, but gives the man a real spine too. Kate Bosworth is the one questionable cast member: she seems far too young to be a mother, and far too ditzy to be a Pulitzer-winner reporter. (Her son, by the way, is another problem with the film: his true father's identity is all-too obvious, but also completely against the mythos, and ultimately tangental to the plot.)

Superman's back, and he's believable, but it's hard to give him a villain to fight. As the mad scientist, Luthor only throws things at him, and watching him "fight" a giant landmass (think crystal tumor) isn't much of a climactic showdown. His five-year absence isn't really much of a plot device either--it's used only to give Lois a child (what writers call "an obstacle"), and contributes nothing towards what's essentially another go-around on the same damn ride. Comic books adapted to this by giving Superman equally powerful and often more intelligent villains; movies are still hobbled by budgets or, in Singer's case, too much allegience to the Golden Age of comics, and not enough to the darker, and more entertaining, modern ones.

When you take action out of a comic-book movie, you cripple it; what else is there? In the case of Superman Returns: a whole lot of villanous comic relief, lush backdrops, and ambiguous romance. Homage or not, as a film it's certainly not super, man.

FILM - "Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest"

2006-07-08T15:50:00.000-04:00

It is unfair to call Dead Man’s Chest a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. This is a Pirate of the Carribean film, based less on the Disneyworld ride, and even less on pirates, so much as on one specific pirate, Captain Jack Sparrow, the most gleeful anti-hero since Harrison Ford’s Han Solo or Indiana Jones. (It’s also funny to see Johnny Depp playing the lead in another movie that has “Dead Man” in the title: those of you still not convinced that Depp is the greatest actor ever need only watch Jim Jarmusch’s similarly titled feature to see Depp’s range.) Though this role is no stretch from Depp’s last outing as Sparrow, he manages to keep it fresh—buoyant, in fact—and it would be fair to say that he carries the whole movie on his shoulders. From his flamboyant movements while bound to a giant pole to his constant pratfalls and facial mannerisms, it's clear that Depp enjoys being Sparrow, and that joy does more to keep the film afloat than the marvelous digital gimmickry.

Is Bill Nighy, as the carbuncled Davy Jones, not an entertaining villain? Of course he is: but he’s so computer generated, and so on the periphery that it’s hard to see him as part of the film, and not just an effect (whereas Geoffrey Rush, as Barbossa, was a real foil for Depp.) Another effect is Orlando Bloom’s "heroic" Will Turner, who is now even more of a “bootstrap”--just tagging along for the ride--than ever. And though it’s expected of them, the crew of the Black Pearl is still just comic relief or fodder for the various aquatic monsters (like the Kraken) that populate this film. Only Keira Knightly is provided with a bit of development, growing more badass, more the ravishing beauty. Oh, there are some good moments shared between two of the formerly skeletal pirates from the first film (one of them’s Mackenzie Crook, from BBC’s The Office), but these are trimmings, not the main course.

The course itself is problematic too: just as Jack’s compass now points in various directions, so does the film, which stresses the arrogant (yet well-dressed) British sea empire as much as it does the villainous squid-crew of Jones’s Flying Dutchman. It makes little sense for certain characters like Norrington to be allowed into this sequel (though Jack Davenport plays him well) and the main narrative thrust—Jack’s search for a means to renegotiate his debt with Davy Jones (his soul)—is constantly being thwarted by writers trying to cram all the characters from the first film into the sequel. As a result, the action is not as relentless or charismatic as the first film, though once the ball gets rolling (or in this case, a giant waterwheel) it’s impossible not to get swept away.

The problem with Dead Man’s Chest is not Gore Verbinski’s direction—he is just as solid and proficient here as in the first, and still has a marvelous sense of lighting. The problem is that this is the first part of a longer film (the final chapter, At World’s End, is filming now) and lacks a resolution. The only real difference between Dead Man’s Chest’s ending and that of The Empire Strikes Back is that for Star Wars, that was the best film in the series, and the darkest point of the franchise. For Pirates, this was just more or less of the same, and while you’ll be hard pressed to find people who honestly didn’t enjoy the antics and japes of Depp and company, it’ll be harder to find people who didn’t enjoy the first one a lot more.

MUSIC - The Weepies, "Say I Am You"

2006-07-07T01:53:00.000-04:00

You expect that Deb Talan and Steve Tannen, otherwise known as The Weepies, would be lyrically inclined to write about what’s depressing and melodramatic. And yes, sometimes they do (“Woke up and wished that I was dead/with an aching in my head/I lay motionless in bed”). But people with great voices and a folksy sheen to their acoustic deftness aren’t very good at melodrama. So at worst, a couple of the tracks on their album Say I Am You come across as old and familiar anthems but not saddening -- unless, of course, you're depressed by getting a song instantly stuck in your head.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "Levittown"

2006-06-30T00:38:00.000-04:00

After World War II, the architect William Levett built a series of model homes out of spare parts in order to provide GIs with cheap housing and a homey place to house their traumatic pasts. Playwright Marc Palmieri has done much the same, so much so that it would be just as fair to call this play Palmieritown as Levittown. Like Levett, Palmieri has built a series of scenes out of scraps from a greater work, and he’s provided his characters with a place to house trauma, but not to grow beyond it. Director George Demas struggles to express these ghosts, silhouetting them through the wall like skeletons in a closet, and it’s a good effect—but then we’re off on another tangent, and it turns out to be just an effect after all.

Palmieri’s writing is blissfully simple, and he’s endowed this family drama with a bunch of lively, entertaining characters. But these, like the literal tricks of light that allow for ghosts to rise from the dead, are fragile house-of-card moments, often blown over by the next in a series of scenes that can’t really settle on a central narrative. It’s just one dysfunction to another, from the son’s attempt to resolve the rift between his father and soon-to-be-wed sister, to the grandfather’s poignant (but aimless) encounters with the dead. You can’t make one a focal point without the other seeming irrelevant and when placed together it becomes an overlap of good ideas competing for space.

Furthermore, Levittown’s choice of exposition is ill scripted: obvious things are over-analyzed while the real hearts of these characters are left in a muddle. Yes, the mother’s obsession with meditation makes sense—but is cousin Joe nothing more than blue-collar comic relief? If we accept the son’s blind faith, how do we explain the father’s one-dimensional malice? Why must good old Uncle Jack come back, clad in firefighter gear, simply to spout some exposition about the “terrible” secret upstairs? More importantly, how does the sister’s fiancée go from being a reclusive nerd in one scene to being a take-no-shit jock in the next?

At least the acting is lends an air of solidity to all this bouncing about. As far as comic relief goes, Michael Laurence is a pleasure to watch as Joe, and Joe Viviani (who plays the war-veteran grandfather) has a masterful command over the silences that come with a good, clean haunting. Less astounding are actors Brian Barnhart (son) and Curzon Dobell (father) who exude meekness or intensity, but never learn anything from the other. The rest of the cast is good, and Palmieri’s script picks up as the number of people onstage grows. In these moments, Levittown seems lived in and well imbued with energy. But then come the ghosts, and cool as they seem, they’re such a drag.

THEATER - "Tommy Tiernan: Loose"

2006-06-29T01:09:00.000-04:00

Cracked, the name of Tommy Tiernan’s last stand-up tour in the US, doesn’t really capture the aggressive joke-telling of this Irish comic. Loose, the name of this year’s tour, is much more appropriate. It’s wrong for the right reasons when Tommy’s at his best (tightly wound on a sensitive subject, like God as a selfish fucker, or the following knock-knock joke: “Who’s there?” “Not Mickey’s fucking dad!”). It’s right for the wrong reasons when Tommy ambles between highlights, leaving the audience to chew the cud through some unfortunate dead space. Luckily, there’s very little downtime, and there is a lot of laughter (hyena-like guffaws, up from the root of your soul).

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Macbeth"

2006-06-28T22:27:00.000-04:00

Macbeth, when produced in scope and with a full ensemble, is a bloody Shakespearian play. Soldiers die en masse, chaos reigns, and power corrupts, absolutely. The Public Theater’s outdoor version, at the Delacourt Theater, is not only well served by the enormity of the space and the backdrop of mighty nature itself, but by Moisés Kaufman’s highly aesthetic approach. Here, corpses parade across the stage like a stricter version of Sweeny Todd, and 1940s sound effects collide with harsh modern lighting to rapidly contrast Macbeth’s guilt-ridden psychosis with the all-too-cruel world itself.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Pig Farm"

2006-06-27T19:44:00.000-04:00

Pig Farm is a ridiculous comedy. That’s not exaggeration: Greg Kotis writes like a man freefalling through the sky while being devoured on the inside by piranhas even as his fingers spontaneously combust like fireworks on the fourth. And that’s ignoring both the surreal ending (pigs may not fly, but they might as well) and the farcical shifts in plot. Pig Farm isn’t near as good as Urinetown—much as director John Rando tries to carry that tune through to a straight show, with a bunch of lyrical blocking. But what it misses in cleverness, it makes up for in crudeness (and really, it’s a filthy, filthy play)--the most lascivious, delightful kind. The kind that makes you wonder how you ever watched a political satire without such "hams" before.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

'kül 2006

FILM - "Children of Men"

MUSIC - One Ring Zero, "Wake Them Up"

THEATER - "The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck"

THEATER - "Strings"

MUSIC - Rory, "We're Up To No Good, We're Up To No Good"

THEATER - "Heresy"

MUSIC - The Scourge of the Sea, "Make Me Armored"

THEATER - "The Vertical Hour"

THEATER - "Love: A Tragic Etude"

THEATER - "High Fidelity"

THEATER - "Never Missed a Day"

FEATURE - "DirectorFest 2006"

ARCHIVE

THEATER - "Company"

BRIEF: "Evil Dead" and "The Internationalist"

MUSIC - Roman Candle, "The Wee Hours Review"

FILM - "Perfume"

FILM - "The Fountain"

THEATER - "Home Front"

THEATER - "An Oak Tree"

MUSIC - Pony Up!, "Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes"

THEATER - "How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes"

THEATER - "Beckett Below"

MUSIC - Guster, "Ganging Up On the Sun"

THEATER - "Stanley (2006)"

THEATER - "The Sneeze"

THEATER - "The Thugs"

THEATER - "The Imaginary Invalid" and "The Mail Order Bride"

FILM - "Saw III"

FILM - "Babel"

MUSIC - Carina Round, "Slow Motion Addict"

FILM - "The Prestige"

BOOK - "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

THEATER - "The Fortune Teller"

THEATER - "Neglect"

THEATER - "The Great Conjurer"

THEATER - "Marisol"

FILM - "Kill the Poor"

FILM - "Land of Plenty"

THEATER - "Modern Living"

THEATER - "True West"

THEATER - "Truce on Uranus"

BOOK - "The Fourth Bear"

THEATER - "Lemkin's House"

MUSIC - Carey Ott, "Lucid Dream"

MOVIE - "I Am a Sex Addict"

MOVIE - "12 and Holding"

THEATER - "'nami"

MOVIE - "School for Scoundrels"

THEATER - "The Man Himself"

BOOK - "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman"

MOVIE - "Wordplay"

THEATER - "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven"

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Perfect Harmony"

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Billy the Mime"

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Broken Hands"

THEATER - "Intellectuals"

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 Encore: "Open House"

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos"

MUSIC - Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, "The Dust of Retreat"

THEATER - "Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable)"

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "The Infliction of Cruelty"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: I Was Tom Cruise"

THEATER: "FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: Diving Normal"

BOOK - "Talk Talk"

MUSIC - Persephone's Bees, "Notes from the Underground"

MUSIC - The Lovely Feathers, "Hind Hind Legs"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: The Burning Cities Project"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Never Swim Alone"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Absolute Flight"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Garbage Boy"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Americana Absurdum"

MOVIE - "American Gun"

BOOK: "In Persuasion Nation"

MOVIE - "Lonesome Jim"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Only A Lad"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Letter Purloined"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Minimum Wage"

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: The October Sapphire"