Garnier Opera, Paris
This quite literally took my breath away. Sometimes I miss theater. And theaters. And theaters with actual proscenium arches, which most of my theater experience (from an acting/stage manager/company manager standpoint, not a viewing one) sadly lacked.
Read here.
Mitra: I personally think this is rather cool.
The “Sleep No More” people doing Doctor Who? DO WANT.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS.
Last week I had the opportunity to see Johnny Baseball over at ART (running through June 27th at Loeb Drama Center). I was…apprehensive. For several reasons. Last year, ART gave me the best theater experience of my life with Sleep No More. I saw it several times and could not say enough great things about it to anyone who would stand still long enough. I wish it could have run forever. A few months later, I saw their production of Paradise Lost, which became the first show I have ever walked out of in my life. I then spent the next two weeks sputtering and throwing up my hands in the air in confusion so much that I couldn’t even put together a coherent review.
So there I was, faced with these experiences in my back pocket and the chance to see a musical, something I usually love, about baseball, which I hate. WHAT? HATE BASEBALL? Sacrilege! I know! Deal with it! I deal with your drunk Red Sox fan behinds on the train at 5pm when I’m just trying to get home from work, so you can deal with my disinterest and disdain.
Ahem. Where was I?
Johnny Baseball has a lot going on in its two hour running time. It’s the story of the origins of the famed Red Sox curse that plagued the team for 86 years. It’s the story of racism and the early years of integration in baseball (and posits that this is the reason for the curse). But at its simplest, it’s the story of Johnny O’Brien (Colin Donnell), that ubiquitous orphan always found in musicals who outshines everyone else and rises through the ranks. In Johnny’s case, he can out pitch practically anyone and quickly makes his way onto the Red Sox, where he plays alongside Babe Ruth (Burke Moses) and falls in love with Daisy Wyatt (Stephanie Umoh), a young African-American blues singer he meets in a bordello. Unfortunately, this is a story we’ve all seen before.
Still, Johnny Baseball is cute, even though it never seems to quite hit the emotional notes it’s aiming for. The show is strongest in its comedic moments. I was constantly won over by the framing story of a stand of fans at Fenway for Game 4 in 2004 bemoaning the curse that plagues their beloved team and promising to give up drinking/gambling/masturbation/what have you if the Sox can score just one more hit. You know these people. They are your dad, your coworker, your best friend. That guy who promises he’ll finally propose to his girlfriend of seven years once the Sox win the series. Those darn Pink Hat Girls. That twelve year old kid who knows every player, every stat, and every score of every game and is just waiting for this team to finally win.
I hate them on my trains. I wanted to hug them all in this show. And not only because they were a welcome break from Johnny and Daisy’s predictably doomed love story.
In the show, these fans also play a number of ensemble roles, including a hilarious trio of cheerleaders who stomp out cheers that proudly come up with rhymes along the lines of “This team must be on barbiturates/Come on, Worcester! Beat Scituate!” I might be slightly misquoting. I was too busy giggling like mad to write it down.
There’s just something dragging and predictable in the story of Johnny and Daisy (and eventually after a disorienting jump thirty years into the future after intermission, their son Tim). Despite fantastic vocal performances from everyone in the cast, the songs are the same songs we’ve heard in musicals for years. Rather than letting the songs tell the story, Johnny Baseball often puts the story on pause to allow for a song that repeats what the audience already understands, dwelling too long in a moment just for the sake of a musical number.
Johnny Baseball got plenty of laughs out of me, and the wonderful performances by absolutely everyone in the cast is enough for me to encourage you to check it out (after all, there’s a reason love stories like this keep popping up in musicals/books/movies. Audiences still eat them up). If Johnny Baseball can get even an anti-baseball gal like me to choke up a bit when the Red Sox finally win the series, it must be doing something right.
Froghoppin’ with Gatsby
In which John discusses the deified eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, other facets of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the unfathomably horrible earthquake in Haiti, theology, the liberal arts, and a few other things. Oh, and he takes on the froghopper.
I love John and all discussions about The Great Gatsby.
ART in Boston is doing a production of The Great Gatsby that is six hours long and includes every word in the book. I’d see it, but I can’t handle that much theater in one go.
If you live in the Boston area, or hell, even in the New England area, get your behinds to Brookline and go see ART’s production of Sleep No More (running through 1/3/10) and then go see it again. And again. And again. You are never going to experience it the same way twice.
This production places the audience as far from the passive eyes-ahead-stay-in-your-seat role as they can get. It’s one part dinner theater, one part haunted house, one part Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one part Hitchcock, and one part rifling through your grandparents’ old belongings in their dimly lit attic. This is not a show you sit back and accept, that you let unfold upon you. This is a show you must seek out for yourself, sixteen or so actors moving through some 44 rooms, and the audience is free to wander as it pleases, to follow those actors or to simply explore those rooms. And they are all worth exploring.
Upon a rather disorienting entry through the back of the Old Lincoln School in Brookline, you eventually find yourself pushing back heavy curtains to enter the Manderley Bar, a 1929 cocktail bar filled with audience members sipping drinks and awaiting their turn to enter the labyrinth of rooms that lay beyond. You are handed a mask, which you are told to wear at all times. You are put on an elevator with about fifteen other people, and you are split up and deposited on different floors to begin your journeys.
And it is a journey. We completely lost track of time and space. We knew we were in a school: lockers lining the long hallways, the doors to classrooms so familiar and universal, one of us found a pencil sharpener still attached to a cupboard. And yet in the dark, with the music playing, fog rolling, and other masked audience members wandering around, we were transported. And what lay beyond those seemingly familiar doors was something else entirely. Rooms full of towering pine trees, dirt covered floors strewn with branches, a bare room with only a single rotary phone lit by a spotlight (and yes, it rings, but I was not fast enough to be the one to answer it, and the woman who was did not share what it revealed), bedrooms and dining rooms and sitting rooms all done up in beautiful 1920s furnishings, a series of rooms filled with stuffed birds and squirrels, a private investigator’s office stacked high with papers and files, the front desk of a hotel complete with bellhop. It seems endless. We thought we had found all the rooms in our exploring, only to be led down a corridor we hadn’t seen before by one of the actors to another bar, where we witnessed one of our more unforgettable moments of the night.
You will not find the story of Macbeth in any linear fashion. I am only mildly familiar with the original Shakespeare myself (uhhh, there are multiple murders and witches telling Macbeth he will be King and Lady Macbeth goes crazy), and honestly, I didn’t know who half the people I saw were supposed to be in terms of their Shakespearean counterparts. It didn’t matter. Those who know the story will understand most of what they see immediately. I recognized certain scenes, such as when we happened upon Lady Macbeth in her bedroom, frantically murmuring to herself, twisting and leaping around the room before plunging her hands into her bathtub and attempting to wash the blood off. And the witches are rather unmistakable. But I often found myself following actors with no idea who they were supposed to be, and having just as much fun without trying to relate it to the source material. The tale is told with minimal dialogue, relying on dance and movement. Most of the time the actors don’t acknowledge the audience; other times they do. Lady Macbeth will grab an audience member in a hallway and start whispering crazed nonsense into her ear. Hecate will stop to caress a cheek or run her fingers through someone’s hair. I happened into what I think was a stable and found myself alone with two other audience members and an actor. The actor drew one of the pair into a game of cards and shot me slow, steely looks as I watched.
Wear sneakers; this is essentially three hours of walking/running through a four story building. Go with friends or go alone. Be prepared to break off and find each other again. My group was partially separated in the very beginning only to find each other about twenty minutes later, and I eventually ran off on my own, following an actor toward the end of the night. Once again, I crossed paths with my group. The audience is somewhat corralled together for the finale, and there is always the Manderley Bar with its jazz trio (and eventually a liquor license) if you need a break or a place to meet up to discuss all you’ve seen. Sometimes you get pulled in different directions. That’s okay. One of my friends admitted that she would not have wanted to have been on her own in the very beginning, and I felt the same. It’s a hard thing to adjust to: the dark, the doors, the music, sticking your nose in where you’ve always been told it doesn’t belong. But then you get used to it, trying every door, not knowing what or who is on the other side. Open drawers. Pick things up. Read the notes and letters. Afterward, you won’t know how you’ll return to normal stuck-in-your-seat theater again.
Go. Go now. And then go back and travel through it again. Follow a different actor. Explore a different room. Pick up the pieces of paper you find on desks, read the books, stop and smell the pine. You won’t be disappointed.
So last night I had a production meeting for the theater company I work for in which it was decided that I would Stage Manage the next show, which should make for an interesting spring. I’ve done ASM duty for this company multiple times, but always under the most amazing SM ever. It was very much a ‘tell me what to do, and I’ll do it’ situation, which works well for both of us as she usually has too many things in her head and not enough time to do it all, and I’m still learning what needs to be done from a backstage mindset as I’m used to being on the other side of the curtain, but I can do something if someone points it out, no problem. Granted, it’s a two man show, and all I would be doing is overseeing rehearsals. But I’ve never called a show before, and I’m not sure if I’m going to have to do that. Kinda makes me nervous.
On top of that, it seems we may be inheriting SLAMBoston sometime in the near future. And our artistic director wants to do four SLAMs a year. Which means we would essentially ALWAYS be working on one, whether it be picking shows and directors, running auditions, going through rehearsals, or putting up the show. This on top of adding a third show to our season. And it would be pretty much me and the Assistant Artistic Director producing the whole thing; the AD is kind of washing her hands of it since she’s working on her Master’s at the moment.
In conclusion, last night I learned that life is going to possibly get a little out of control in the next two years.
