Stumped. Thoroughly, brain-drainingly stumped.
There I sat at the intersection of 42nd Street and the Strip at the Aladdin last week. Dumbstruck. And desperate for answers.
So primed for pleasure was I that when the curtain inched up only enough to tantalizingly reveal those tap-dancin' tootsies on the A-Ve-Nue they were takin' me to, I was roarin' to rain praise on one of the best Broadway musicals ever—EVAH!—based solely on feet, ankles and a hint of calves.
The curtain eventually rose. My spirits rapidly fell.
It was grand, I tell you, GRAND! ... at first. Spectacle and dazzling dance overwhelmed my senses, and my first page of notes sang with little arias of ecstasy—"transported to a glorious era," "dazzling sets," "a classic musical score nonpareil" (a special word I normally reserve for those yummy chocolate lumps sprinkled with sugar pellets when I can't remember "Sno Caps")—until, on page two, I noticed unthinkable words dribbling out of my pen: "For all the aural and visual bells and whistles ... where's the oomph? Where's 42nd Street?"
How could a show so frenetic on its face be so inert at its core?
Talk about being less—astonishingly less—than the sum of your mighty parts. The cast? The choreography? The direction? The sets? The lighting (performers dancing with their shadows!)? The score? The retro-kitschy kid-you're-going-out-there-a-nobody-but-coming-back-a-star! story? Fan-Damn-Tastic!
It's a critic's mission to tell you not only what a show was like, but why. And I would. If I knew. 42nd Street played like a gorgeous museum piece under glass. Breathtaking to see, impossible to touch.
We should have burned rubber in a top-down, wind-blown joyride through its dandy, candy-colored production. Instead, we were left only to admire the individual parts of its exquisite engine—like flawlessly engineered piston rods—grinding in sync.
It was as if the moment a spark threatened to leap off the stage and ignite the audience, some diabolical force sucked it back in and caged it. It was like watching a theoretically thrilling football game on television with the mute button on.
Audience members were overheard complaining—correctly—that the magic was AWOL. Rather than the pageantry of prestidigitation, 42nd Street felt like a game of three-card monte—42nd Cheat. And I'll be damned if I know why.
Maintaining my theme of abject critical cluelessness, we turn toward ...
ACT II
Absurdist, experimental theater is a vibrant component of any local stage scene.
There. I said it. No hidebound traditionalist, I.
Which brings me to Test Market's Lions Lost in Translation, by Erik Ramsey.
It is, ostensibly, about a literature professor (Ernest Hemmings) coping with his wife's (Francine Gordon) illness, and fearing he is transforming into a metaphor of himself. Meanwhile, a translator (funny, full-throated Ronn Williams) attempts, ineptly, to interpret the play in an unspecified language, and then back into English again—based on the translated text. I suppose this work is somehow about human communication, or lack thereof, or how life is one big game of telephone.
Along the way, I think I caught references to ringing phones, blue blazers, crutches, snow peas, rectal exams, butterscotch pudding, green tea, the sexual proclivities of robots, a sphinx, a clown priest and a Jesus sock puppet.
This is as close to a review as I dare attempt. If anyone can explain it to me further, please e-mail me. I'm dying to know.
Be advised, however, that I am not a metaphor. But I might become an allegory, if I decide to go through with the surgery.
ACT III
Recognizable names—as in recognizable beyond the cult of theater, always a heart-gladdening development—pepper this season's list of Tony Award nominees. When not attempting to slay demons and lay Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing, Hugh Jackman was on the Great White Way, portraying late Aussie showman Peter "I Go to Rio" Allen in The Boy From Oz, and netting a nod for lead actor in a musical, while the play is up for best musical.
Though P. Diddy—reaping lukewarm reviews for his acting but genuine raves for his career gamble, tackling a role immortalized by Sidney Poitier—failed to nail a nom for A Raisin in the Sun, Cosby Show matriarch Phylicia Rashad, leaving Gotham critics slack-jawed with admiration, grabbed one for lead actress in a play. And Raisin is up for best revival of a play.
The easiest way to recall extraordinary character actor Alfred Molina may be his insane turn as the bathrobed, drug-fueled nut-job who fired off guns to "Jessie's Girl" in Boogie Nights. Molina's surprise casting as Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof paid off in rhapsodic reviews and a nomination as lead actor in a musical, while the play competes for best revival of a musical.
Alleged alien Anne Heche gets a nod as lead actress in a play for Twentieth Century (co-star Alec Baldwin, Oscar nominee for The Cooler, was bypassed). Heche is up against Rashad, as well as frequent Law & Order guest star Tovah Feldshuh for Golda's Balcony and ex-Sisters star Swoosie Kurtz for Frozen. And Kevin Kline, soon on screen again as Cole Porter in De-Lovely, is up for lead actor in a play in Henry IV, against, among others, Frank Langella in Match and Christopher Plummer in King Lear.
Despite chronically awful ratings, CBS will again broadcast the Tonys on June 6, with Jackman returning as host, hopefully spiking the Nielsen numbers. ... Jumpin' Jehoshaphat! We forgot a famous "face"! Do we really want to hurt him? Nominated for best original score for Taboo is ... Boy George. Let's hear it for the Boy.
CURTAIN CALL
As we speak—more or less—students from UNLV's MFA acting program are performing in Los Angeles. On May 13, local production vets Steve Booth, Sean Boyd, Ben Campbell, Maggie Chapin, Paul Finocchiaro, Michela Goodman, Julie Heaton, Louisa Lawson, Kris Pruett, Jonathan Shultz, Tywayne Wheatt and Darcy Wright present An Actor's Dozen: An Evening of Showcase Scenes at LA's El Portal Theatre. Broadway director Glenn Casale is at the helm ...
Back home, UNLV's resident Nevada Conservatory Theatre revealed its '04-'05 lineup: Proof, Annie, A Man For All Seasons, Love's Labor's Lost, Wit, You Can't Take It With You, original play Harlequin Brill and the Sarett National Playwrighting Competition winner ...
One performance remains—Friday at 8 at the Winchester Center Theatre—of Cockroach Theatre's Counting the Rain, a trilogy of short plays by Shawn Overton: Warm (about a lonely banker and a dead cat under his couch); The Battle of Musca Domesticus (a bad poet tries to kill a fly); and Fibonacci Ascending (a physicist is obsessed over trapping light in a cage) ...
Over at Las Vegas Little Theatre, The Philadelphia Story plays on through May 23, followed this weekend and next by the Insomniac Project's Midnight Oil. It's a collection of five original short plays by Richard Timothy, Shawn Overton, Frank Shaw, E.G. Stoddard and the hack who scribbles this column.
About that last one, here's a preview: It is NOT about a Metaphor who, disguised as a Simile, infiltrates an army of Acronyms in search of his long-lost Punctuation, but is captured by a Homonym, then tortured by a ragtag band of Synonyms before he's handed over to the peace-keeping Euphemisms; but, alas, too late, when he's diagnosed with a fatal case of Idioms and dies in the arms of his bereaved lover, Onomatopoeia.
No. It's about a putz.