THEATER - "Devil Land"

There are many good things about Devil Land. Unfortunately, there are also a lot bad things. Given that the play (which deals with the abduction of a young girl by a religious fanatic and her abiding husband) presents the sometimes violent story in the guise of a Seussian narrative interrupted by some disturbing and haunting scenes, let’s go through the first few highlights and problems in rhyme. If I’ve learned anything from Devil Land, it’s that an innovative presentation is like a spoonful of sugar: it helps the medicine go down.

The set is quite impressive; it’s a boiler-room from Hell,

The use of tricky lighting just accentuates the spell.

Dark shadows become thicker and the lights let in the grime,

It makes the presentation like some Freddy Kruger crime.

Down here in hot, hot Devil Land (where the bad kids go to burn)

Does crazy Beatriz (her kidnapper) simply wish to help her learn?

Can it really be a crime, goes the plot, to sin for good old God?

The bible warns us, after all, to save the child, spare not the rod.

Of course, these simple rhymes and tricks can only say so much

And when indulged or used too much, they come off like a crutch.

By the second act—I swear it’s true—the narrative works no more,

And the vicious, vicious dénouement is too mystical at its core.

Ahem. That is to say, Devil Land loses itself in the second act trying to be overly creative despite still having plenty of realism left. The pivotal revelation may be obvious to the audience, but it forces enough of a character shift to render the need for metaphorical lunacy unnecessary. Furthermore, Beatriz (played perfectly by the playwright, Desi Moreno-Penson) is already crazy enough in the physical: the play’s own regression gives her too much humanity back. It also changes Destiny (the on-again-off-again Paula Ehrenberg) from being an innocent girl to a world-weary spiritualist, and suggests too strongly that her imaginary friend, the Grinch, is more than a figment of her imagination.

Whereas we could relate to her precarious situation in the first act—chained to a bed, stuck between a burgeoning pedophile (Miguel Sierra) and his crazy wife—she seems overconfident and snide in the second, as if she were never in any danger at all. The voice of the narrator (DJ Thacker) reassures us that it’s all just a harmless story, and that it will all work itself out in the end, as good stories do, and even as it gives Devil Land a unique spin, it also takes away some of the surprise.

Thanks to the set, lighting, direction, and generally convincing performances, Devil Land manages to exude a grim mood and an unsettling realm of possibilities. It’s just a shame that it chooses to eschew those gifts for an easy copout in the meaningless world of magical (un)realism.

THEATER - "Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?"

It’s true: Zarathustra said some things. In fact, I believe he even spake, if we’re going to split hairs about it. But Nietzsche’s philosophical opus is hardly digestible, and Trevor Ferguson’s obfuscating drama, Zarathustra Said Some Things, No? is hardly lucid. The play opens, mid-afternoon, with all the normalcy of heavy binging the night before. Ricky (Brett Watson) is passed out underneath the bed, and Adrienne (Lina Roessler) wakes up mid-scream (that we never learn why is the first of many disappointments). Once they’ve gone through the motions of breakfast (Fruit Loops and coffee), Ricky goes out on the balcony and announces that there is not a cloud in the sky. Today is perfect.

Now, unless you’ve read a plot synopsis, the two characters spend the rest of the play avoiding saying outright what they’re planning to do on this perfect day. When finally announced, a climax of fear and loathing in Paris, the effect is minimal; the audience thinks, well finally, at last, good, get on with it. It’s a death pact: Ricky and Adrienne, in addition to being half-siblings who first met (and fucked) across opposite ends of their mother’s coffin, are planning to leap from their balcony, any day now, really . . . maybe.

It’s hard to know, really, what is going on, because these two are twisted people who happen to be in a sadomasochistic relationship, former drug (and sex) addicts both, and rather than speaking lucidly, they like indulging in power plays and word games. Oh, and to tie things back to Nietzsche, Adrienne has the power to climax when Ricky quotes from Zarathustra. Given the level of fucked-up-ness here, it’s not surprising that Zarathustra Said Some Things, No? doesn’t make much sense, and if you’re looking for a deviant theatrical experience, these two actors are certainly committed enough to deliver. But wading through malicious and unexplained behavior for ninety minutes before reaching any sort of climax isn’t for the ordinary theatergoer, and in all honesty, the climax is a bit of a let down. It’s just one more sick game for the sadomasochists, and that means ultimately that nothing has happened.

Of all the things Zarathustra Said Some Things, No? wastes (talent and time), it’s also a misuse of Katka Hubacek’s brilliant set, a snug little apartment that at least forces the two actors to interact on a physical level, not to just mince words. The biggest risk is placing the balcony center-stage, so that the audience must look through a physical window to watch the action (some of which is occasionally obscured). It succeeds, making us voyeurs, and gives the show an ominous presence, one that director Robin A. Paterson does not shy away from during the play’s final act. Unfortunately, the problem with the set’s brilliance is that it exposes even further the shallowness of the script: all we see through that window is a lot of hyperactive, hyperbolic bullshit, and all we think is, keep the damn blinds down next time.

THEATER - "Love is in the Air"

As the saying goes, “Everybody loves a clown.” Even though parts of Love is in the Air are still rough around the edges and occasionally hard to follow (perhaps due to some technical gaffes with subtitles), the majority of this sixty-minute comedy succeeds. Even if you really don’t love a clown, you at least have to respect the man who flings himself across the stage and then dances his way back off again. Thankfully, the Kiek in the de Kök players are an affable group, and the silent film they are pantomiming has some great physical poetry, even if the plot is merely a device to abuse the aptly named Hapless Henry (Dustin Helmer, who also created the show).

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

BOOK - "The Good Life"

If there's such a thing as the 9/11 novel, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life isn’t it. While the events in this book occur around that fateful day (which McInerney coyly labels nine/eleven), the narrative proceeds more or less as dinner party, dinner party, infidelity, dinner party. McInerney has a talent for that rich hipster lingo, but his momentum gets tangled in pointless dialogue and misplaced scenery, not to mention more than a few unfulfilled sub-plots and characters that get swept away by that most basic of plots: lust. Trapped in the limited perspectives of his socialite characters, McInerney can be neither lyric nor epic, and his attempts to do so come across as stilted and underwhelming. His poetic statement of ash and terror is a near miss to the characters, but far from a hit for the readers.

Of course, it’s hard to be poetic when your grand story is so damned ordinary. Even after going through every Rich White American stereotype in the book, McInerney still comes up short of anything interesting to say. Beneath the woefully overdone romance, there’s a delinquent, drug-addicted child (starving for attention), a mother addicted to all the “P” drugs (Paxil, Prilosec, &c.), two failing marriages (for the price of one), and tragic monetary problems (like figuring out how to get over losing that third house in the Berkshires). Nothing we haven’t seen a million times before.

As it turns out, nine/eleven is just a convenient excuse for McInerney to publish glorified Chick Lit, just as it’s a convenient excuse for his characters to have midlife crises. None of it comes across as tragic, either: the two protagonists, Corrine and Luke, are cuckolds even before they meet, and that they fall in love in the light of falling ashes, or build their relationship on the carcass of a mass grave, under the thin guise of volunteering to help the rescue workers . . . it’s almost disrespectful.

If McInerney’s goal was to paint a picture of undaunted normalcy, or to chronicle the attempt to maintain its cracking veneer, he has failed at that, too. His prose is filled with designer labels, “keen” observations that laugh at themselves (so that you don’t have to), and uneven lines that consistently find the wrong synonym. “"Hilary was preserved, in Corrine's mind, semifrozen at the age of fifteen, the last year they'd shared a domicile, so that it was always a surprise to see her as a woman, and a pretty convincing one at that." Domicile? Come on. Or as McInerney writes later, "This barely articulate accolade flummoxed its recipient." Showmanship, perhaps, in a greater work; here it exudes the slimy charm of the used-car salesman and his five-dollar words.

We may perhaps attribute the unevenness of this book to McInerney’s rush to get The Good Life out before the whole nine/eleven thing becomes too passé. (If that’s a jarring statement: good. People out there are commercializing on it, and if they’re going to do it so obviously, they should be called out.) "From the window, Luke looked out over the water towers of Fifth Avenue to the park, studying the senescence of the daylight, which seemed almost viscous, ready to coagulate--trying to register that perfect moment of transition from day to evening, that instant when the light, in dying, was most nearly itself." This is an unfinished book, and while beautiful moments like that exist, they seem forced, rather than joyously stumbled upon, ala Bright Lights, Big City.

Worse still, when McInerney does stumble upon a truth (“the night was never long enough when you were falling in love”), or one of his vivid, believable memories, he writes a justification for it a few lines later. Rather than rolling with it, pulling us along with his electric charm, we get summary: “‘You know, when you gave me that sandwich,’ he told her later, ‘if I acted strange, it was because it took me back thirty years.’” Good for the reader who is blissfully skimming along, but to any other reader, it’s slap in the face, as if to say, “Why are you taking me seriously?”

At one point in the novel, Corrine’s husband, Russell, "saddled with gloom," (and perpetually so, since he’s one-dimensionally portrayed) hears a lewd joke about sushi, and how the joker only eats it once a year, "'On the wife's birthday.'" He goes two blocks before he registers the joke, and it's a perfect parallel for the ineffective charms of The Good Life. We're so preoccupied with the social life of these characters and so distracted by all the heavy interstitial images, that if there's anything good about this life, we don't notice it. Unlike Russell, though, we don't even notice it two blocks down. It just sits there, lifeless on the page, doing nothing for the reader, and—if one can be truly honest—nothing for the author either.

MUSIC - Richard Cheese, "Sunny Side of the Moon"

The Sunny Side of the Moon: The Best of Richard Cheese isn’t so much the best of Cheese as it is a re-recording of his original (and out of print) Lounge Against the Machine along with a few smash hits like Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby’s Got Back” and Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness,” and a few new songs, like the Ying Yang Twins’ “Badd.” However, those revamped songs from Lounge include songs like Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie,” the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right,” and “Badd” is worth the CD’s price alone.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

FILM - Tribeca Film Festival 2006: An Introduction

Has it really only been five years since the Tribeca Film Festival first began in response to the post-9/11 decrease in downtown arts-related activity? Whether it’s the street cred of founding fathers like Robert DeNiro or the high quality of premiers screened at the festival or just the paucity of other high-profile venues for an avid movie-going public, 2006 looks to be a huge year for the festival. They’ve expanded their screenings almost as far uptown as 14th Street in order to accommodate the high demand and the 150+ films (not counting the shorts, the panels, the retrospectives, and enough other features to give even the hardened moviegoer a filmgasm).

[Read on] at Film Monthly

THEATER - "Awake and Sing!"

Oh, Clifford Odets’ piece on an extended family in the 1930s has not aged well. The romantic, Ralph (Pablo Schreiber) has been exposed as hopeless, the grandfather’s suicide has become meaningless, and all the bits in between seem melodramatic and sensationalized. The script is well intentioned, but all the compression leaves it filled with holes and its dreams of a better tomorrow are just that—dreams. That everything seems so shallow is the fault of the director, Bartlett Sher, whose idea of architectural beauty and openness doesn’t work nearly as well here as it did in his last production for Lincoln Center Theater, The Light in the Piazza.

Piazza was a romantic fantasy, set in a foreign land of possibilities, where anything might happen. Odets’ only fantasy is that America might become a better place, less obsessed with capitalism and more consumed with the soul. It seems a bit hollow and theatrical when Sher has the set itself gradually dissolve (the walls of the adjoining rooms raise in the second act, the windows fade before the third, and the doorways sink through the floor right before what’s supposed to be Ralph’s triumphant and uplifting final speech). Are we supposed to believe that possibilities are opening up to this family or that they are free of the superficial and material?

That’s a pretty optimistic reading of Odets’ work, and it clashes with all the misery left behind onstage in the final act. The script itself glosses over a lot: Hennie’s decision to leave her husband with a child that isn’t his¬—even if it is for the love of her life¬—comes across as brutal and callous, not as an act of at-long-last freedom. And there’s something about Schreiber’s voice and mannerisms (he’s acted pretty much the same way in the last two shows I saw him in, Manuscript and Mr. Marmalade) that makes me doubt his sincerity and his so-called happiness.

I personally don't understand what makes Awake and Sing worthy of revival; it reminds me a lot of Raisin in the Sun (in that there's a dominating mother, a dreaming man, and a rebellious daughter, though in all fairness, those are archetypal characters). Granted, I prefer modern plays that allow actions to speak louder than words, or older classics that don't shroud those words in everyday prose (not that realism is bad). Awake and Sing! gets stuck in the middle somewhere, sluggish and safe, and for a character piece, we don't learn nearly enough about the characters to care (not even about their dreams).

The notes ring false (even if the accents sound nice), the environment belies the mood, and the dramatic tension is off-kilter and in need of a less meandering pace. Odets had a message when he wrote Awake and Sing!, but in revival, it lacks reason and focus and only allows the ensemble cast to show their period chops (which they do, and how). And that, sir and madam, is nothing to awake and sing about.

THEATER - "The Amulet"

The Amulet, an incredibly difficult and too-poetic play by Peretz Hirshbein, starts simply enough by detailing the relationship between a girl, Mirel, and her blind grandfather, Menashe. This terse yet tender relationship, ambiguous and unexplained, is quickly washed away by the mystic, in fact, by a literal deluge. No sooner does Mirel forgo her heritage, a strange protective amulet, than the house is suddenly flooded and washed away. The two evacuate to a hill, the literally blind leading the metaphorically blind, and if you want to read into it, this exodus could be construed as a spiritual crossing.

For further abstract allegory, a stranger then washes up on the hill, and practically rapes Mirel in an effort to share enough body warmth to survive the freezing night. He then offers to lead her to a palace and riches if she will follow him to “the other side” of the river, but she refuses to leave her dead grandfather behind who, by this point (thanks to the inventive staging) is no more than a jacket sitting atop a raked platform. The final duet in this trilogy of short scenes finds Mirel recovering some days later, with a woman named Yachne, but you’ll just have to make what you will of all this: explanations are not on the menu.

If you accept that “you don’t always have to understand, it’s better to feel,” then the plot doesn’t matter. That assumes, of course, that there’s something to feel. Hanna Cheek does a suitable job as Mirel, but her frenzy and logic skews to the point where we, baffled, hear only screeching. The Stranger, played by Daryl Lathon, is a moment of sanity, but he’s also a one-dimension figment, and once he exits, we forget he ever existed. As for David Little, the production’s Menashe—he doesn’t seem to have his lines down, which makes one wonder if even he understands them, or if he’s just standing there proselytizing.

However, if we ignore the acting and the script and just focus on the mood, then director Isaac Butler manages to intrigue us for this eccentric hour. His choices are ambitious but, more importantly, lucid—the one thing in the show we who are being swept away by all the imagery can hold onto. For example, having an onstage percussionist creates an insistent throb of angry water, and the first impression of the stage—a dark, smoky room filled with candles—is the stereotype of mystery. As for the stage itself, by creating a small wooden platform in the center, and restricting all the action to it, Butler makes a prison of an already small space, and that tension, if nothing else, is palpable throughout.

I don’t think a play like The Amulet, isolated from emotion and engaged in illusion, can really hope to be anything more than an effect (to his credit, Butler has that fire stoked). However, because the acting never sweeps us away, body and soul, he must still deal with the inevitable questions of “What was he trying to say?” and “What did it all mean?”

MUSIC - Lying in States, "Wildfire on the Lake"

There’s a simple rule about independent punk—if you demonstrate that you can do more than rage against the whatever, feel free to get your screech on. Lying in States, with their second album, Wildfire on the Lake, has only one frustratingly aggressive piece (“Both Sides”), but cushioned as it is by such accurately disconnected instrumentals, even this track merits multiple plays.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "Little Willy"

Early in the play Little Willy, Adolph Hitler’s nephew, William Patrick Hitler, says of the German people that “they were good . . . just misled.” I’d like to believe it, just as I’d like to believe that Little Willy is a good show that somehow went awry. After all, Mark Kassen (who also wrote the show) is a dynamic, engaging actor, and the plot—an examination of how Willy came to live in New York—is a gold mine of possibility. Of course, even surrounded by gold, you may still dig up lead, and if Little Willy occasionally glitters, it’s only pyrite—fool’s gold.

The script follows a strict formula, though it is far from formulaic: each of the three “acts” begins with the voice of the real William Patrick Hitler reading from his letter to the US and then follows a cyclical progress through six short scenes. These vignettes portray Willy's morally-depraved standards as he doubletalks his way from Germany (where Hitler's good for business) to the US (where he goes on a political lecture circuit, bashing Hitler). The scenes segue into one another by use of projected images on the background and the different characters of Roxanna Hope, who plays “et al.”—that is, everybody else. The problem is, the more Hope changes, the more Kassen stays the same. No matter what she throws at him (each time a “scene” repeats during the next cycle, or "act," she grows more distorted), Willy remains a smug, unsympathetic man. If the audio tapes are any indication (and word to the wise: if you’re going to play source material, you’d better be really good at mimicry), Willy felt shame and humility; he wasn’t just an unctuous automobile salesman; he couldn’t have just been another womanizing Irish scoundrel.

By playing a caricature, Kassen prevents his own show from being a story of redemption or forgiveness, and if anything, advocates sleaziness so long as you can get away with it. (In this case, Willy blackmails Adolph and then uses that same information to secure citizenship in the US.) The script is already thin enough (just over an hour long): it doesn’t work for such a shallow person either. The writing itself is solid, and most of the speeches are entertaining, but was that really the point? All that material on William Patrick Hitler played just for laughs? If so, it’s fair to say that the epilogue, a PowerPoint-like presentation on Willy’s three sons, really was more informative and heartfelt than most of Little Willy. Then at least the set seem appropriate: with just two chairs, the huge space seems as wasted and empty as the show itself.

For all that, it’s hard to give Little Willy a negative review: the man, the play, and the actor all beg so much to be loved. But without substance backing it, this begging grows tiresome, pathetic, and ultimately embarrassing: one more thing Willy can’t talk his way out of.

MUSIC - Fivespeed, "Morning Over Midnight"

What is this, follow the leader? Fivespeed’s CD Morning over Midnight sounds like any other kind of commercial-friendly hard rock. We’re talking about simple and repeatable chords, a generic and throaty “singing,” and redundant songs. There’s so little originality on the album that it might as well be elevator music. (Even that’s too lenient - Ensure that nobody ever rides the elevator, and just in case, mute the CD.)

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "A Jew Grows in Brooklyn"

A Jew Grows in Brooklyn is billed as a "true story" musical comedy. I don't know why true story is in quotes, since that's about the only thing this lower-than-average autobiography is. Jake Ehrenreich's had an interesting career, among which include his international tour as Ringo in Beatlemania, but what he focuses on here are lounge renditions of 60s rock, slideshow presentations of kitschy achievements, and a lot of in-jokes on Brooklyn, the Catskills, and everything Jewish in-between. What it lacks, save for when Jake gets carried away playing the drums late in Act II, is any originality. Due to the way the stage is built, audience members have to cross it to get to their seats on the other side, but while I watched these people crossing, I couldn't help but think that any one of them could've told this same story (and probably have). Jake's one asset is that he's a performer, he looks good onstage, and he at least looks like he's having a good time.

All that charisma should make A Jew Grows in Brooklyn a great lounge act. Then Ehrenreich's call-and-response won't seem so hokey, and it won't look like he's pleading for people to like him not for what he is, but for what he represents (a nice Jewish boy come to terms with his history). I don't get the references, I don't know why we're playing Simon Says, and Jake's right when he tells people (half-jokingly) who don't remember when phone numbers had names to "get the heck out of here." A Jew Grows in Brooklyn has a very focused demographic, and there's no attempt to appeal to anyone who isn't a Jewish senior. Art attempts to transcend such shallow things as race; that makes this show pure, smarmy commercialism.

At the end of the show, Jake closes by asking the audience to look at something white onstage, and then at something brown. He points out what what we see in life is what we choose to focus on, be it good or bad. But in all honesty, I tried to focus on the good things of A Jew Grows in Brooklyn and still came up empty. I'm sure Mr. Ehrenreich's a good person, and he seems like a great father and husband, but this show is far too limited in scope, audience, and depth to run for more than a week, and billing a lounge act as musical comedy is just false advertising. If you fit the demographic, you'll no doubt kvell for this trip down memory lane, plotz at the cheap humor, and maybe even get ver clempt at the shallow examination of family, but for the rest of you wondering what those words mean, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn might as well be Greek.

THEATER - "Iron Curtain"

While Iron Curtain may have a steely, menacing title, this new musical premiering at Prospect Theater Company is actually a warm, friendly comedy. If it forgets to be funny in the second act, it’s just a momentary (and necessary) break to indulge in some sweet romance and a welcome pause that lets the audience catch its breath after all the laughing. The endgame still needs some work, and the pacing is a little too reliant on stream-of-consciousness punning (enough to beat a dead horse), but the casting is terrific and carries the day.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

MUSIC - The Mars Volta, "Scabdates"

Scabdates, a mostly live recording of The Mars Volta, is the opposite of white noise: Painful chunks of discordant sound that make noise for noise’s sake. With the lack of studio polish, the improvisation spins out of control, and as soon as the electric orchestration finds beauty, it loses it again, a sacrifice to some unknown god of artifice. These are far from the “A” sides of Deloused in the Comatorium and even further from the “B” sides of Frances the Mute. These “C” sides—impossible as that sounds—are more a nightmarish warm-up than anything productive. Some fans will no doubt love the creepy dubs of babies wailing and overlapping voices on “Abrasions Mount the Timpani.” Hopefully, they and The Mars Volta will then wake up and realize that this, more than a distortion of sound, is a defilement of music.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "In Delirium"

So imagine a Hamlet character comes onto the stage—in this case, a sparse, gray-walled asylum with a metaphorical chandelier collapsed in one corner and a chair leaning against another—to give the suicidal "To be or not to be" speech. This is already either immensely exciting or incredibly dull.

If we assume you are one of the former, then at first you think, "Oho, is this not fine? Here is a splendid actor, with such enunciation, taking us on a metaphysical journey of pain, loss, and sorrow." The actor concludes the speech, but something snaps in him, and rather than leaving the stage, he continues to rail against his misfortune at being out of love (so he is now Romeo, as well) and the monologue continues. Now you think, "Well, it's impressive, how he goes on." Ten minutes later, you think, "My, how he goes on." Twenty minutes later: "Is he still on?" This is the curious circumstance of "In Delirium: after the sorrows of young werther," a play based on—you guessed it—Goethe's seminal book on a young man's love-borne suicide, "The Sorrows of Young Werther." Whereas the book was revolutionary in 1774, it's more than passé today, although the so called "Werther effect" may come back into vogue if audience members, bored out of their minds, contemplate a little suicide themselves to pass the time. In that, at least, "In Delirium" has succeeded.

It has also succeeded, surprisingly, in all the technical aspects of a production. Lucrecia Briceno has done a startling job of using dramatic lighting to emphasis Werther's growing madness and discontent. These are cinematic moments: Joshua Randall (Werther) impaled upon the asylum wall by a beam of light, or imprisoned in the center of the stage by a sinister halo. Likewise, John Ivy's sound design throbs in pitch with Randall's temperament, the difference being that while Randall is somewhat limited in his vocal palette, Ivy is able to traverse the whole set of ambient sounds, which only heightens the unsettling mood. If this proves anything, it's that simple is best, which is probably why Gisela Cardenas' direction, which has Randall constantly in motion and always fiddling with something, is so wearisome. Why not just let the lunatic speak his piece in peace, as he goes to pieces?

All this would be excused—or at least not so noticeable—if Randall were up to the task of playing Werther. While the length and difficulty of the script makes his memorization of it impressive, I can't say that he's mastered it, which is more than half the battle. What good are reversals if you stay in the middle, never fully hitting the romantic highs, and certainly failing to reach the dramatic lows? The ambience is there, but Randall's tenor voice seems frightened of the frenzy that the text demands. Playing madness safely, from a distance, makes it cool, clinical, and boring.

Nor is the script safe from blame, though that should come as no surprise since I've already blamed its adaptors, Cardenas and Randall, of missing the point. This is a long winding treatise, and it's dense, oh so very dense. Such a presentation needs to be far livelier, and just a bit more playful (like say, "Thom Pain"), if it's to keep us intrigued; the sad truth is that nobody cares what Randall-as-Werther is going to do next. It's all pretty much the same, which makes "In Delirium" nothing more than a sad display of technical prowess.

MUSIC - Portgual, The Man, "Waiter: You Vultures!"

Portugal. The Man has a solid foundation for their model home of a CD, Waiter: You Vultures!. But all the rooms look very similar, and after a while, the homey yet homely voices (shrill one second, cooing the next) are claustrophobic and tiresome. It’s seems quite lively and livable, and Portugal. The Man gets the most out of the acoustics with some creative floor design, but the next minute, the wiring short-circuits again, and the toilet backs up. I want to like this CD, and I have no trouble listening to it, but I can’t find something good to say about it. Solid, but empty, this is a doll’s house—all exteriors, with fragile fillings.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "Freak Winds"

Freak Winds is a clever thriller-cum-comedy that keeps the audience excited and guessing, and demonstrates that actor-writer-directors (e.g., Marshall Napier) aren’t all bad. Freak Winds isn’t very deep—it’s not even shallow—but while it may not be much of a pool, it twists enough to be a wicked fun slip-‘n-slide. The superficial is superb, and the lightning-fast lines are like fuel for the propellant plot.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Well"

Well, Lisa Kron’s semi-autobiographical "exploration" ("a one person show with other people") of illness and social dysfunction, is not just "well," it’s positively healthy. In fact, Well looks so good, that it makes other recent Broadway productions look anemic.

This cure for modern theater is, at heart, a play about a daughter dealing with her mother. This is, let’s face it, inevitable when you bring your vivacious, yet perpetually sick mother onstage with you (stage left, supine in the La-Z-Boy), especially if you plan on secretly using her as Example A.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

THEATER - "Walk the Mountain"

Walk the Mountain, Jude Narita’s one-woman show about the effects of war on Vietnamese women, is a dull and encyclopedic restatement of facts. Occasionally, Narita finds some poetry and passion, but for the majority of the time, her characters are lifelessly matter-of-fact. Between scenes, a slideshow splatters horrific (and obligatory) images of war, along with the now-clichéd quotes of men like Ho Chi Minh; this scenery is more alive than the show.

Walk the Mountain never finds a way to excite the audience: most of the text is dry and factual, and presented as such. Too many of Narita’s characters are repressed, which creates a dulling inaction on stage, no matter how horrible the effects of Agent Orange and napalm are (“Destiny”). Words are just words here, and because they never seem to hurt Narita’s characters, they never hurt us, either. Children fall from the sky, she explains in the short vignette “For the Children,” and audience members, twice removed, don’t care. Narita shakes incense in “Prayer for Three Sons” until she is worked up enough to mourn her dead sons, charred somewhere in the infinite jungle, and then quickly scurries off, as if she is embarrassed to hold us in the moment. Her scenes are more fragments than pieces, and they spend so much time getting to the point that by the time each ends, we remember only the faintest semblance of grief.

Narita seems uncomfortable with her own show. She trips over words a lot, and her inflections are troublesome, too. The accent she affects may be genuine, but the way she pauses mid-sentence makes her seem like a Vietnamese William Shatner. Thankfully, by the final two scenes, Narita recomposes herself, and both “Dream Mountain” and “Long Journey” are examples of how potent this play might be. These characters, both so alive, remind the audience of how dead so many others who suffered in Vietnam are.

The effect of war on women (or vice-versa) is often overlooked, but all Walk the Mountain manages is to under-look at history, across an emotionally barren gulf.

THEATER - "The Lieutenant of Inishmore"

Bottom line for all the blokes: "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is feckin’ stupid. For those who didn't already know, violence--at least according to the playwright, Martin McDonagh--is pretty stupid. For everyone else, "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is pretty stupid, a play that has buckets of blood to its name and nothing else (although, to its credit, it has many, many gallons worth).

There are better bloody farces, (like "The Revenger's Tragedy") and stronger sanguine satires (like McDonagh's own "The Pillowman"). "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," once it has exhausted a rather restrained mockery of an alternately titled "cat-braining" Irish terrorist organization, has nowhere to go but down, and it does--comedy for the lowest common denominator. The performances are decent, but the characters have few reversals, are all fairly bloodless, and are ultimately overwhelmed by the inevitable whirlwind of death (read: an all too-long climax).

The premise itself isn't half-bad: Padraic (David Wilmot) is both a terrorist and a lunatic (McDonagh suggests that to be one, is to be the other), and he threatens to become grossly unhinged after his only friend dies. His father, Donny (Peter Gerety) quickly realizes that the only way to save his life, and that of Davey (Domhnall Gleeson), the innocent bystander who found the body, is to cover up the death of poor Wee Thomas, who is, by the way, a cat.

There's a great friendship of circumstance (think Laurel and Hardy) in the works here, and for all the crude cursing and dark humor, there are some very fine, bright moments. Somewhere during the intermission (and periodically before that), all that delightful sin is corrupted, and what returns to the stage for the second act is nothing more than a one-dimensional feat of stagecraft. The cartoon violence that follows--enough blood on the floor to be a slip-'n'-slide--is just laughter for shock's sake. We erudite theatergoers laugh because we, of course, would never be so boorish, so ill-mannered.

“Lieutenant of Inishmore" made me sick: not from the violence (though it's not for the queasy) but from feeling so cheated. All the superficial jokes and killer sight gags (if you consider decapitated body parts a sight gag) make for an ultimately empty show. This play, like many of the characters, becomes a bloody mess. With all the winking asides and coy jokes to the audience that this is all just a bit too much (and ultimately, all for naught) I think McDonagh knows this, too. “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” serves only as a momentary catharsis, and once the lights go up, it will leave you cold as a corpse.

THEATER - "The Cataract"

For a stylized drama, “The Cataract” is mostly down to earth. Save for some metaphor running rampant in Act II, this play about the deep and mysterious bond between people is a fecund production that stretches the minimalism of both the stage and language to its most affecting high.

“The Cataract” is the story of two families in Minnesota, circa the late 19th century, who have come together through the necessity of circumstance. Dan and Dinah are free-spirited travelers from the South, come to board with the puritanical Cyrus and Lottie. Lottie is unhappy with having to share their home with these “commoners” (especially Dinah, who may very well be the first Hippie), whereas Cyrus seems thrilled by Dan’s electric energy, and for his assistance on the bridge that he is helping to build across the Mississippi. As it turns out, the explanation for all this unrest is simple: both Cyrus and Lottie love Dan, and no matter how they cling to routine, they can’t escape the constant hammering of their thoughts. Katie Pearl, the director, and Lisa D’Amour, the author, have found a perfect expression for this in the sequential storytelling: every “day” begins with a cock’s crow and then layers scenes atop one another as the day wends through breakfast, work, and dinner, culminating in an often-revelatory dream sequence.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Mercy on the Doorstep"

Dispense with stereotype, and make with the realism! Gip Hoppe’s “Mercy on the Doorstep” mixes gentle storytelling and harsh reality to make for a compelling and vibrant drama, the first in many years to allow "fair and balanced" to be seen with "religious." Sure, the first glimpse of Rena and Mark screams out “bible thumper,” but Hoppe spends the rest of the show dispelling these initial perceptions, all while avoiding any one proselytizing view. It’s a neat trick, deftly executed by three marvelous performers and one very experienced director.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

FILM - "V for Vendetta"

V for Vendetta oozes preposterousness, more so than the original comic, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining. V is so entertaining, in fact, that one quickly forgets he's a terrorist . . . or perhaps the film reminds us that terrorism is not quite as black and white as we believe. Then again, there's never been such a charming terrorist: this Don Juan with a vengeance, this symbolic Guy Fawkes revolutionary (he's got the mask to prove it!), this alliterative-speaking, Shakespeare-quoting, domino-playing, and classical-music loving character is an adorable anti-hero. And as Hugo Weaving plays him, with a sly and graceful wit, he's all the more charming: a prince among terrorists, the gentleman bomber.

[Read on] at Film Monthly

THEATER - "Not Clown"

Tomfoolery is back, and if you don’t like it, it will cut your throat. Last year, “The Pillowman” separated fantasy from reality; now “Not Clown” adds a red nose to it. There’s physical comedy, a twisted homage to classic clowning, and some bona fide acting, too. Just one warning: if you weren’t frightened of clowns before, you might be now. This allegorical play (substitute clowns for any mistreated and misunderstood race) puts the laughter back in slaughter.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Baby Girl"

Life is just a matter of perception: no better or worse than what we make of it. “Baby Girl,” a new play by Edith Freni, is just a matter of life, a young single mother’s, but it is far better than what we initially make of it. Don’t get thrown by the convoluted plot—it’s a necessity to throw our perceptions for a loop. What we see isn’t necessarily reality—the protagonist is far from reliable, and trust is a huge issue in this play—but the emotional truth beneath the gritty surface sucks the audience in like quicksand, and the swift pacing, urban soundtrack, forceful acting, and realist direction by Padraic Lillis keeps us there.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Savages"

Who exactly are the savages in Anne Nelson’s new play, “Savages”? Nelson doesn’t answer this question in her somewhat fact-based account of the Philippines-American War (1899-1914) because she doesn’t know. Instead, she lets her lively text ramble, with the hope that intelligent discussion will stumble over subconscious truth. It doesn’t. It just rambles.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Phenomenon"

The day before Mt. St. Helens erupts, a reporter, a waiter, a geologist, a wannabe punk, and a guitar-slinging cowboy meet, briefly, in a diner. Then, with cinematic grace and occasionally to a live choral score, they separate and have brief and momentary encounters that are somehow more than the sum of their parts. Oh, and the volcano is represented by a dancer who tap-dances tremors and performs a molten modern dance.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Hard Right"

Hard Right is like a horrible car crash. You don’t want to keep watching, but you can’t take your eyes away. The entire play, all seventy minutes of it, may be nothing more than a log-flume ride of violence, verbal and physical, but it’s oddly compelling, too: an entertaining, satirical, nightmarish “what-if” on just how close our government may be to totalitarianism. Unfortunately, David Barth, the playwright, is all statement and very little substance: the whole show is trigger-happy for effect, and therefore a one-sided, one-dimensional, sloppy wreck. I can’t stop watching.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

MUSIC - Magnet, "The Torniquet"

Music and marriage are pretty much the only places where opposites can merge, find harmony, and become something greater than their separate parts. Today, many people are finding that they can go at it better alone, and they've got a distinct sound too. Even Johansen, better known as Magnet, comes replete with his bipolar north and south, and, thanks to the miracles of studio production, is pretty good backing himself up.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "Defiance"

It’s hard to say playwright John Patrick Shanley’s newest play, Defiance, has a crystal-clear point. This show, about two military officers confronting issues of race and loyalty, spreads itself across so many aspects of 1970s Americana that at times the whip-smart writing and spot-on actors are the only things holding the plot together. Despite that, it’s even harder to find anything negative to say about Defiance itself.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

MUSIC - Devics, "Push The Heart"

You go your whole life without tasting the real thing, fooled by the saccharine preservatives or the fancy packaging, and then one day, if you’re lucky, you bite into the real thing. I’m not suggesting that you run out and become a vegan, but there’s something to be said for the Devics’ organic, homebrewed sound. Push the Heart is better without modulation and auditory slight-of-hand. And while it might not be rock rock (slow, elegant, and drum-less as it is), it’s music music: Pure and with no strings (save the guitar’s and your heart’s) attached.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

FILM - Funny Money

Trying to write a summary of a good farce can easily take over a thousand words. Thing is, Funny Money is a good farce. And I don't have a thousand words. So here's the plot: risk-averse wax fruit salesman ("odd"-jective, wacky job) accidentally switches briefcases with a Russian Mafioso (affectionately called Mr. Nasty) and winds up with $5,000,000. A food-obsessed corrupt cop (see the pattern?) shows up to blackmail the salesman, whom he believes was soliciting sexual favors in a bathroom. See how complicated it's getting? Folks, we haven't even reached the end of Act I.

[Read on] at Film Monthly

FILM - London

People break up all the time. However, they don’t usually sniff cocaine off Van Gogh paintings in an upscale New York loft while speaking the most intellectually dense dialogue this side of “Dawson’s Creek.” They do in “London,” which, despite trying to be a very realistic and grittily shot film, winds up looking more like an urban fantasy than anything plausible or remotely emotional.

Syd, played a little too well by Chris Evans, is trying to woo back London, played by Jessica Biel, although her body double could’ve handled the “acting.” His plan involves going, uninvited, to her going-away party and holing up in a bathroom, shooting coke and getting philosophical with Bateman, a friend-of-a-friend and his supplier. Jason Statham, who plays Bateman, goes way over the top, but he’s still so suave and cool that he makes it work. Syd’s plan, on the other hand, works about as well as the movie: poorly. If writer/director Hunter Richards wanted to make a philosophical film like “Waking Life,” he should’ve stayed away from the coke himself.

If you get rid of the hokey romance-gone-bad plot, there are some great scenes in the bathroom, most of which use snappy flashbacks and a few quirky camera angles to relate humorous anecdotes. That’s right: the anecdotal asides are more cinematically impressive and memorable than the plot itself. “London” is such a pretentious thinking film that the visual aids, funny on their own, help the mind’s medicine go down. Of course, none of that helps to alleviate the bigger symptom: all the preachy overtones. Yes, “I’d rather regret something I have done than something I was too scared to do,” is a great line; when characters keep rephrasing it, it becomes as cheesy as a catchphrase. That may work for the way in which Hunter Richards neatly resolves his plot, an inconclusively solid “Lost in Translation”-type affair, but it just makes “London” into an artsy, angst-y breakup film. If that’s what you’re into—stick with cocaine and stare at a wall; that’s liable to have an equal effect.

THEATER - "Nora"

The problem with Nora is that it makes the superior, natural A Doll’s House into a technical, surreal production. It’s Ingmar Bergman literally doing Henrik Ibsen, and is about what you’d expect. And even after all the clever cuts and additions, the lengthy, proselytizing ending (long enough to be an honorary opera death scene) is still there, almost word for word. Plays today are too often about telling people off and explaining everything; A Doll’s House balanced that with the rich character growth that Nora so easily shrugs off.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

BOOK - The Wisdom of Crowds and the Wisdom of Comics: "The Wisdom of Crowds" and "The ACME Novelty Library"

Don’t read just this review, or you’ll piss off James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.” After all, one of the major points of the socio-economic study is that an individual is almost never as accurate as a group. Instead, you should take all of the individual reviews and find the aggregate score, through www.metacritic.com, perhaps, or some other compiling device. Much as I might enjoy you placing all your trust in me, Surowiecki is correct in his assertion that no one, be they the sharpest of CEOs or most intelligent of scientists, is going to be right all the time.

Then again, if you base your purchase of this magnificent book solely on the amount of positive press it receives, Surowiecki may grow wealthier, but he’ll still be pissed at you. After all, another of his points—supported by the most appealingly bite-sized of anecdotes and studies—is that simply going with the flow won’t always be correct. This is far from contradictory, as “The Wisdom of Crowds” will show, but merely a statement towards the intricate structure of society. Knowing how to best utilize the group, or for what types of problems it will be most efficient (there are three, cognition, coordination, and cooperation) is part of what you’ll learn. True to his message, Surowiecki supports the whole agglomerate of work with case studies taken from—where else?—the crowd. Those delightfully well-summarized issues span the second half of the book, ranging from what really went wrong with Space Shuttle Columbia, to the machinery of investment bubbles, and even to the mundane problems of traffic jams, a day-to-day failure to communicate.

It’s all extremely digestible and written so suavely that it’s barely like reading nonfiction. Conversational and relatable for both the white- and blue-collar, “The Wisdom of Crowds” is a fantastic, intelligent read—like “Freakonomics,” only more relevant.

On the other hand, Chris Ware’s omnibus of assorted cartoons and depressingly solipsistic ruminations, “The ACME Novelty Library” is wholly irrelevant. Which just goes to show that a book—or comic book, though Ware is hardly kid-friendly—doesn’t need to have a point to be enjoyable or enlightening, so long as it is exceedingly well-written, aesthetically playful, and above all, different. If you can’t tell from the packaging (hint: the world’s smallest comic strip is on the ridge of the book, another strip accompanies the author’s information), Ware’s collection is unlike anything you’ve seen before (unless you’ve seen his other work before, in which case, you’ve probably already picked this up).

Ware has been taking risks like these for years, perfecting a uniquely geometric form of cartooning that eschews realism in favor of a more cubist expressionism. Though the characters may not be anything more that three loosely connected spheres, their situations, expressions, and dialogue more than convey the intensity of emotion—mostly sadness, though there’s abundant humor in that, too—and allow Ware to be intensely affecting, even as the author himself attempts to distance himself through more and more obscure metafiction.

For all his tricks (and his bag is just as inexhaustible as Felix the Cat’s), Ware manages to cram more onto one page than any other author does, even when he’s using just a few panels. Each strip is a wholly self-contained story, and each is immensely satisfying. Ware uses still panels of inaction to show desolate loneliness, and skips years at a time using symbolic conjunctions (and, but, so, then) to get right to the essential of what is really a life story. Even in small doses, “Big Tex,” “Rocket Sam,” and “Rusty Brown” (to a name a few) are emotionally devastating—examples, allegories, or reminders, depending on the reader.

My personal favorite, “Big Tex,” follows the adventures of a somewhat retarded southerner whose father hates him. While other writers might play up the comic aspect of a father trying to kill his son, Ware doesn’t joke around at all. On one page, his father simply finds himself unable to pull the trigger of the gun (Tex, of course, is oblivious); on another, Tex is driven by his father out into a clearing and left with the most brusque and definitive dialogue I’ve ever seen written:

“Okay Tex, you git out and go over there by the big tree cuz there aint gone be no goddamn icet cream for you today and there aint gone be any no more ever and then you don’t never come back or try to find me or the house again because you aint welcum there anymore at all, unnerstand?”

As the car pulls away, Ware’s cinematic camera (he could easily direct film, instead of drawing still comics, but the effect is somehow stronger when static) focuses on Tex’s confused expression.

There are jokes, too, mostly self-referential ones to the “doomed” art of cartooning, and some historical homage is made to the classic adverts of the 1930’s. But all that is just kid’s stuff, the icing on a rich and multi-tiered cake. Ware, an intelligent revolutionary, doesn’t need to be overt: he simply lays the cards on the table and lets the world take it as they may. As they say, it’s “Something for everyone, a comedy tonight!”

THEATER - "Paradise Lost"

Apparently, Death wears heels and suspenders and looks like Cabaret’s emcee. A snake didn’t tempt Eve, Lucifer’s hand puppet did, and all the trees in Eden danced and sang along. Angels and demons never fought, they modern danced­—oh, and they were all metrosexuals, too. Clearly, Paradise Lost is the biggest piece of religious camp since Godspell. The problem is, while one of the writers (and the director), Rob Seitelman, understands this, the other one, Benjamin Birney, seems to be making a serious play. No matter how they dress up the actors or stage the action, their lyrics never fit Birney’s swinging piano score: his music never fits the mood. It’s not bad enough to be funny, and it’s not funny enough to be good. Is Paradise Lost supposed to be over-the-top or straight? It’s not even gay: it’s as ambiguous as an angel’s sex (though not in Paradise Lost; sexual tension is rampant, and there used to be orgies in Heaven all the time).

The plot, as you may have guessed, loosely follows the novel, which in turn followed the Bible. There’s not much room for imagination, nor is this adaptation very creative, despite creating a female counterpart for Lucifer, named Sophia. No; everyone plays their parts as one-dimensionally as possible, like Beelzebub, who cackles and crawls across the floor, spitting and hissing. Adam and Eve remain wide-eyed and curious (even if Darryl Calmese, who plays Adam, has a lovely high baritone voice), even after they’ve eaten the forbidden fruit, and Lucifer, the richest character in the text, is apparently nothing more than “the Adversary” after all. Paul A. Schaefer, who plays this juicy part, is content just to vamp as the suave embodiment of evil, though it’s at least better than Patrick Ludt’s ridiculous portrayal of Death as a sadistic sideshow attraction. Then again, most of the actors play to the freak show; what else can they do in this mishmash of a show?

Well, they can sing. In fact, most of these actors can sing. It doesn’t do them much good when the music is out of synch with the lyrics, or when their voices pile on top of each other like an unappetizing pupu platter. What does it say for this pop opera musical that, despite hearing close to thirty “original” songs, I left the theater humming “Seasons of Love” under my breath? Again, they try to dress the whole thing up, but the songs are just text in a very strained harmony. I got excited when they stopped singing and Lucifer molested Eve in a dream set to a techno beat: at least that was something different.

An agnostic like me may just see things differently, but I can only say this next bit in a review of a religious play: please, for God’s sake, don’t see Paradise Lost.

Producer’s Club II (616 9th Avenue)
Tickets: $18.00 (212-868-4444)
Performances: Thursday-Saturday @ 8:00; Sunday @ 2:30

THEATER - "Acts of Mercy"

Acts of Mercy is about an abusive father at his deathbed who pleads for love from his emotionally stunted and disturbed children. Though billed as a play about reconciliation, nothing from the plot is resolved or clarified, and is instead just a simple exercise in the endless frustrations of humanity. Playwright Michael John Garcés’s scenes are equally endless, not to mention boring, and because of the poorly-imitated (and worse-acted) Mamet-speak, hard to follow and even harder to care about.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

BOOK - Paul Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies"

Paul Auster's tenth book, "The Brooklyn Follies," rolls out all the usual Austerian tricks—you really can't teach an old dog new ones—but those tricks have never felt so funny or lucid before. Don't let the ominous opening ("I was looking for a quiet place to die") fool you; the whole novel is a joke, and the punch line ("Someone recommended Brooklyn") is a long and happy life. It's that ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Auster's protagonist-by-proxy is Nathan Glass, a former life-insurance salesman, who, like all of Auster's characters, starts off totally alone. While Auster is a master of solipsism, he quickly surrounds Glass with a handful of interesting characters, including his nephew, Tom Glass, and his grandniece, a precocious and peculiar nine-and-a-half-year-old named Lucy. That's the whole brilliant plot: a man lives his life, and interesting things happen. There's no overall mystery, no bad guy or obstacle, so the novel is completely unpredictable, as if each moment has been left to chance. In Auster's educated yet simple prose, this is more human than highbrow—a character study, filled with quirky anecdotes and short stories. Don't misunderstand: "The Brooklyn Follies" works as a novel, too, it just doesn't rely upon cheap suspense to keep the audience reading.

Instead of plot, Auster fixates on character: swift, sharp descriptions, believable dialogue, and all the nuances of subtext in their actions. The only sure thing is their eccentricity and roguish behavior. Nathan Glass is the only straight man, the rest are filled to the brim with stories that he leaks with the skill of a master pourer. They are told as succinct summaries, covering a whole life in a couple of pages, but every page is rich with entertaining history, everything from Harry Brightman's scheme to sell a forgery of "The Scarlet Letter" to Aurora's conversion from stripper to cultist.

If this seems like rambling, it's actually quite meticulously swept up by Auster's electric prose. He writes in an ever-widening spiral, beginning at the solitary center, and then circling out in swift swoops until his narrative has encompassed the entire fantastic world. Nor does Auster shy from the mundane: he just wraps it up in his storytelling and makes it beautiful too. Take for example Tom's description of "the indelible moments of grace" he found working as a cabbie: "Gliding through Times Square at three-thirty in the morning, all the traffic is gone, and suddenly you're alone in the center of the world, with neon raining down on you from every corner of the sky." Even as he continues by saying, "you have to pay for it," this "moment or two of genuine, unqualified bliss," Auster is illustrating the opposite: a book of pure bliss, a book where the pages practically turn themselves.

Even Auster’s well-known philosophical asides come across as glossy entertainment. Discourses on Chaplin's "Modern Times" or on letters that Kafka wrote to a girl "from" her missing doll fit perfectly into this well-constructed world, and Auster continues with the story without missing a beat. One exception is a chapter written as a play (replete with a meta-fictional disclaimer) that is perhaps too obvious a discussion of the book's theme (all of Auster’s books, really): a search for the "Hotel Existence," our mind's perception of perfect happiness. But even here, the intellectual conversation is in such vernacular everyman that it's still compulsively readable.

"The Brooklyn Follies,” a perfection of the pseudo-novel that Auster
has been working on since "The New York Trilogy," is a delight to read, full of real wit and character, along with unpredictable events and surprising stories. It’s not what you expect—and that’s half the fun.

MUSIC - Rusty Anderson, "Undressing Underwater"

Practice does make perfect. And Rusty Anderson’s been practicing for a long time, in a wide variety of styles, with the best of influences (like Paul McCartney). Of course, that’s not really practice, nor does Undressing Underwater, his first CD, come across as the result of experimentation. It’s more like the result of a long period of percolation, with ideas bottling up until finally exploding in a spasm of long overdue excellence. Anderson covers all the bases from the psychedelic (“Electric Trains”) to the shred-heavy hard rock of “Devil’s Spaceship” (a song as pleasing to listen to as it is inane) all the way to the slow contemporary rock of today (“Damaged Goods”). This isn't just a well-produced album, it's a testament to rock.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

BOOK - Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories"

What’s most surprising about “Case Histories,” a spry and whimsical mystery novel, is that it’s surprising at all. The mystery novel is one of the most conventional and stable genres, where things plod ominously forward. The threads are sometimes too elaborate to notice, but we know how the whole thing is going to end: a chase, or perhaps a shoot-out, and, of course, the “whodunit” revelation. Kate Atkinson not only defies these expectations, she surpasses them, all while playfully making fun of those classic and oh-so-outdated staples. She’s not as satirical as Jasper Fforde, but she’s also not as obvious, and this affords “Case Histories” some depth. After all, a book about missing and/or dead children can’t be all fun and games.

Of course, dead children are a blithe cover for “Case Histories”: the real mystery is, and always has been, life itself. That’s a puzzle with no clues, like Atkinson’s narrative. Rather than doling out evidence, she relates character tics and neuroses; she lets them live, and she lets them ramble, and she lets the smaller mysteries work themselves out to a natural, almost graceful, finale.

The story begins with three innocuous case histories (the crimes), which occur in 1970, 1994, and 1979. The narrative then jumps forward to today, as Jackson Brodie, a private investigator, takes on two cold cases. The Land sisters want him to find their abducted sister (1970) and Theo Wyre wants the name of the man who killed his daughter (1994). These characters alternate as narrators (Amelia speaking for both sisters), along with Caroline, easily recognizable as the so-called axe-murderer from 1979. These characters often run into the same people or offer different perspectives on identical events, and Atkinson wisely uses parenthetical asides to color her third-person narrative. It’s clever, but it eventually grows tiring and, due to the similarities in voice, is outdone by its own cleverness. So too, the strained connection of Caroline’s story to the rest of the book: she’s connected to Brodie by tangent only, and her case history never really meshes with the others—mainly because hers is obvious, plot-twist or no.

But the case histories aren’t the focus of Atkinson’s novel: they serve more as a launching point for sarcastic social commentary (the narrators have every class covered). It’s also ironic, given Atkinson’s educated voice, how easily she delves into the most deviant discourses. “Amelia had followed Julia inside under the misapprehension that [the store] sold bath products and was stunned when Julia picked up an object that looked like a pink horse’s tail and declared admiringly, ‘Oh, look, a butt plug—how cute!’”

These dissonances, between the expected and the un-, keep surprising the reader, and these nuanced jokes are a modern response to the classicists’ jolly abundance of description. These details also endow “Case Histories” with a sad little gaiety that stresses the underlying sadness¬: dead people can’t laugh. We, however, not only can, we should. So go: it should be no mystery where to start. (Hint: it starts with a “C” and ends in “ase Histories.”)

THEATER - "I Love You Because"

The new Off-Broadway musical I Love You Because is clever, cute, and well-sung, and loveable not despite the generic substance, but because of it. Forget the flaws in pacing and musical composition and take this show for what it is: an entertaining, no-strings-attached fling.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

MUSIC - Paul Duncan, "Be Careful What You Call Home"

You call it post-modern music. I call it laziness. It’s very easy to experiment, but by the time you put together a professional compilation, it had better be good. Mucking around belongs on a B-side because without a structure, the only thing you can hope for is to convince (by which I mean confuse) enough critics that you’ve actually put together music and not just sound.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

MUSIC - The Fully Down, "Don't Get Lost in a Movement"

Some people make for better addicts than me; they have a limitless capacity for shooting up, often using the same vein, even after its long dried up. They call that commitment; I call it masochism—in any case, The Fully Down have a nice enthused and infused beat, but the way they jam that needle, only the most thick-skinned of rock addicts (the musical kind now) will survive.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "Buried Child"

Sam Shepard’s Buried Child is a portrait of a slightly deranged family in the American Heartland that unravels and deteriorates when an unknown relative arrives to reveal secrets that tear everyone apart. The psychological equivalent of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," only far more frightening. This family might not wield chainsaws (on the surface), but emotionally, they hack away at each other. Much of this production is Hollywood-ish, in that it’s obvious and overstressed, but Buried Child is still terrifyingly sad; you cannot bury your secrets without burying yourself as well.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

FILM - "Go For Zucker!"

Any movie that bills itself as "an unorthodox comedy" just because it has orthodox Jews is bound to be terrible, right? Wrong. "Go for Zucker!," a German film whose very title is infused with delightful glee, just happens to be in good fun. The comedy, in fact, is straightforward, directed with such simplicity and honesty that it’s impossible not to laugh. Even the opening scene, in which Zucker, a salacious pool-shark, gets beaten up by his mark, is funny, full of playful freeze-frames and sly asides to the audience.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

THEATER - "What Women Talk About"

“I don’t want to know that you carry something in your bag for taint rippage!” Talk about your non sequiturs, and welcome to the world of What Women Talk About, a unscripted comedy that might not have a point, but certainly makes “the dish” (i.e. gossip, for the un-hip) look (and sound) really good.

Each week, the cast (four women, each a disparate “type”) make the minimalist stage (black cubes for settees) whatever they need, and then wax (sans poetry) about the men in their lives, much as you might expect four regular Jills to do. Think Sex in the City, but brusquer, since these women lack the crucial, terse pacing of a well-revised script. Think Curb Your Enthusiasm, but with more heart, less sarcasm.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

BOOK - Funny Things and Not-So-Funny Things: "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" and "The Sea"

If you’ve never read George Saunders before, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a delightful political satire, filled with Big Ideas and Bigger Jokes. If you have read George Saunders, this is more of the same, and you won’t be surprised to find that the Jokes™, while Bigger, aren’t any more substantiated, and the more familiar you become with this one-dimensional pony, the less you’ll be laughing. (A quick note on Capitalization: Saunders likes this postmodern emphasis, one of the many things he overuses in his efforts to re-brand the ordinary as the Not-So-Ordinary.) No, the comic “car,” so to speak, is low on wit and heavy on circuitous dialogue. It’s fine for a while, but once the book starts to lap itself—impressive, since it’s barely a novella at 120 small pages, not counting illustrations—the repetition is more than a little painful. Ha-ha-ow.

In the case of Phil, it’s a shame the storytelling is impotent, because the story itself is pretty good: a trenchant parallel of modern imperialism, a.k.a. protectionism, a.k.a. Kill-Them-Before-They-Kill-Us-ism. Set on a weird planet, akin in size perhaps to The Little Prince’s abode, there are the residents of Inner Horner—a country so small that only one resident can actually fit at a time, the rest having to reside in a Short-Term Occupancy Zone—and the citizens of Outer Horner, a place so large that huge tracts o’ land are completely undeveloped (although prone, in typical Saundersian exuberance, to have disembodied argumentative cow heads poking up through the soil). The Inner inhabitants are intelligent and thoughtful and spend all day solving mathematical proofs. The Outer Hornerites (like the titular Phil) are ignorant freeloaders, who do nothing but preen and swoon over their own supposed self-importance.

If you can’t see the parallels yet, consider the main gist of the plot. Inner Horner suddenly shrinks, causing the accidental invasion of Outer Horner, and Phil—whose brain keeps sliding out of his rack, causing him to speak in a stentorian voice—comes up with a Final Solution (yes, that one). He puts the residents in a ghetto (“Peace-Encouraging Enclosure”) and proceeds to disassemble them all, right before God, the greatest deus ex machina of them all, shows up to set things right.

If Saunders were able to steer this narrative, it would all be rich and satisfying: Political Satire Gone Wild. Instead, these bitterly funny passages are followed by much much much much much more of the same, which tends to make the humor masochistic.

No, if you want to get away with repetition and doubletalk, you need a first-person narrator, preferable someone reflective and somewhat progressed in years. Someone like that, distanced from the world, a ghost of himself—they, and only they, have a natural way of flickering back and forth from first loves and bright happy summer days to last loves, now dead of cancer, and the permanent autumnal shroud left behind. The Sea, for which John Banville just won the Man Booker, is such a book, which, in conjunction with Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning Gilead, shows that awards tend to go to deeply meditative novels. Banville is more focused than Robinson, though, and his meandering never seems aimless; his lengthily descriptive, difficult passages are what one might simply call painfully beautiful.

Is every passage necessary? No, probably not. There’s too much description, but it’s hard to criticize it when it sounds like this: “The autumn sun felt slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.” Yes, it’s a bit prolix, but doesn’t his keen sense for beauty justify the need to slug through these verbal trenches with dictionary in hand? And the wordy façade is really just an emphasis for the worlds own deceptive clarity and all the language just an attempt to reflexively dig beneath the visual, to uncover the truth.

“That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold past and colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet."

What is the world, ultimately, but memory and vision? What is literature, really, but a criticism of life? (Or so says Matthew Arnold.) Walking through The Sea is like letting paint lick at your feet, each recession of the tide leaving a different picture, each new wave another image, another palette of color. Of course, the downside to walking through water for so long—even such picturesque waves—is that the skin dries up, prunes. So too, the brain. The Sea is an immensely difficult book, one that requires strict attention and frequent rereading, and breaks, lots and lots of breaks. So take a mental towel with you, spread out and relax on the beach: this book, especially the beautiful tragic ending, is a masterpiece.