...or to be accurate: as co-produced by Theatre 7 and Mercury Theatre Productions.
Let me come out and say from the get-go that I really love David Yazbek's work in general, so I was already well inclined to love this show, as I loved the original British film about a bunch of out of work men in an industrial town who band together to make money doing one night of see-all stripping and end up changing their lives in really positive ways.
Which is why I am so torn about this production.
Without banging the drum, it basically came off to me like really solid community theatre: all the energy and earnestness(and all the obvious self-appreciation) a group of humans can harness, but not all the talent necessary to tell a story on a stage.
Let me start with the stuff I liked: Lauren Blair's choreography was simply terrific. Deceptively simple, but really effective, and it always seemed to fit in with the characters. And some of the performances were great fun. In spots. Which describes the show as a whole: pretty much everyone had their moments. And the band was tight, if poorly mixed.
But what really sunk this production was Kristie Rutledge's utterly inadequate direction. Her staging of the action was good, but she--like so many directors of musicals--seem to think that that's all you need: tell the actors where to stand. What they forget is that ultimately the ONLY thing the audience wants to care about is the characters. The cast of this production all seem to be in different shows. Some were talking out to the audience with every line, some were performing for a camera, some were performing for a 800-seat house. But few of them were doing anything approaching playing the scenes they were in. They were playing emotions, they were playing moments, they were playing jokes. But none of them were actually attached to the story--the single most important job of the director. So there were lots of wonderful moments, but without being integrated emotionally into the story there was no story arc and the result is that the moments in between the great moments were all pretty painful to watch.
Add to this the lesser sin of Bill Wolfe's not nearly as poor--but problematically very similar--musical direction. A couple of the lead actors just couldn't sing their roles effectively. And by this I mean they either didn't have the voices or they didn't cover their inability to sing with stronger acting choices. A really good music director knows how to get those almost-singers to the place where what you THINK you're hearing is great singing, when in fact it's really just great performing. (Rex Harrison is the uber-obvious example of this.) Like with the rest of the show, there are moments when the singing just clicks and all of a sudden it's BANG! POW! exciting. But then the rest of the show takes over and you're back to mediocreville. And sadly that's MOST of the show.
The technical elements here all worked well: lighting by Chris Singelton, costumes and set by committee (I guess, since there was no credits I could find) all worked quite well, which for better or worse did not distract from the cast.
The story is such fun, the music and lyrics just NEAT, and they certainly came at it with great energy, so it was hard to not be at least entertained. But all-in-all it was a cotton-candy night. In other words: simply not a full enough Monty.
Bottom line: B- (A- for effort, C for execution).
'Til next time!
--HDSQ
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
"Love Loves a Pornographer" at Circle X
I'm not sure what is more offensive to me as an active theatre-goer in Los Angeles: the fact that this play is intolerable tripe or the fact that it is *exactly* the specific kind of pseudo-intellectual crap that LA critics adore.
But let's start from the top: as produced at the lovely Inside the Ford space, it is a show that is lovely to look at. From the moment you walk in there are literally wall-to-wall reproductions of 19th-Century paintings all over the house -- both the one where the audience sits and the one as created on stage: a lovely old English manse of that era. It is a lovely touch, and the set with its details and a scrim for a back wall, enabling you to look out onto the upstage drop of an expansive lawn, are impressive. Or at least expensive-looking. So upon entering you think "OK--good production values. Good start."
But then the play begins...and basically if you have a respectable college education you're screwed. "Love Loves a Pornographer" by Circle-X regular Jeff Goode is set in the 19th century in the home of (what else do weak writers write about?) a writer-- here, receiving his neighbors as guests--but the writer has a proposition for his guest, a highly-placed literary critic. What follows is roughly 45 minutes of sheer boredom as Mr. Goode rolls out a painfully tedious and woefully over-written exposition, which is finally broken by the arrival of the rest of the cast. Which is as good a time as any to mention that I actually really enjoyed the performances in this piece, with the exception of Jim Azide as the uptight LONDON TIMES critic Reverend Miles Monger, whose shrill, one-note queen-on-a-bitchfest performance felt incredibly out of place as the (straight) sexual aggressor he ends up to be.
And this really gets to the heart of my problem with this play, at least as directed by Jillian Armenante: on the surface everything seems pretty and well-accomplished, but once the surface is just barely scratched you realize quickly that very little here makes sense. There's lots of oh-so-witty banter in an Oscar Wilde fashion, but Mr Goode seems to demand we see how witty it is by adding ENDLESS, cloying alliteration whenever possible. From every character. In just about every scene. Also, there are a few words I noticed that he used incorrectly. At one point, for example, the youngest character refers to something as "frippery", offending the others, causing her to repeat it over and over in order to cause more offense, the implication being that it is a word she chose because of its indecency. Go look up the word, meaning "a shallow display, especially in dress" and you'll see that it is not--nor has it ever been--an offensive word. Not even in the Victorian Era.
Further, the writer throws in a lot of jokes he clearly felt were very smart. The cast wisely flying through some of them as to make sure we didn't really notice how poor they were, landing on the few that work and were deserving of a laugh in this "comedy" of manners (incorrectly called by some critics a "parody of drawing-room comedies"). All in all I just felt Mr Goode must have written this play in a state of pique after someone called him "a dummy", desperate to prove Them wrong. Sadly, I think they might have been more on the mark than he would prefer, if this play is an example.
Moving on, there's much ado made of the daughter's American fiance having brought some home-land tobacco to the house, which they all dig into with relish, claiming that it is something new and exciting. Only on planet Earth, it isn't -- the British had been importing the stuff for close to 200 years at the time this play is set. All you need to do is look at a few Hogarth prints from 100 years before to know that it wasn't "new" to the English. Likewise, there's a lot of needless blocking around the lighting of the electric table lamps as the day -- and the play -- moves on. No dialog -- just blocking. Which then begs the question: was it in the script? And this question: was the electric lamp this common in a household at this time (I believe it was not until several decades later)? And THIS question: as this rigmarole with the lights begins after tea time (always 4p, as is the tradition) late in a play performed in real-time, and everyone is dressed for Spring (as the backdrop also tells us it is), why is the freaking sun going down so early in a country so far north of the equator?????
This might seem like needless nit-picking on my part, but it is not: in a piece in which the time and place are clearly so crucial it goes to show an utter lack of respect for the audience. The poor word-choices, the poor research -- it all says that the director and possibly the writer are claiming "none of this matters -- it's just a play!" But in doing so, it is nothing short of a slap in the face of an educated audience.
The rest of it, in which we are lead to see that porn is harmless, prurient fun--especially when compared to real-life, hypocritical manipulation of human feelings--made me feel that that was a WHOLE lot of time spent to tell me that the world is round. Or in other words: a lot of frippery.
Bottom line: C for effort.
Til next time,
--HDSQ, Jr
But let's start from the top: as produced at the lovely Inside the Ford space, it is a show that is lovely to look at. From the moment you walk in there are literally wall-to-wall reproductions of 19th-Century paintings all over the house -- both the one where the audience sits and the one as created on stage: a lovely old English manse of that era. It is a lovely touch, and the set with its details and a scrim for a back wall, enabling you to look out onto the upstage drop of an expansive lawn, are impressive. Or at least expensive-looking. So upon entering you think "OK--good production values. Good start."
But then the play begins...and basically if you have a respectable college education you're screwed. "Love Loves a Pornographer" by Circle-X regular Jeff Goode is set in the 19th century in the home of (what else do weak writers write about?) a writer-- here, receiving his neighbors as guests--but the writer has a proposition for his guest, a highly-placed literary critic. What follows is roughly 45 minutes of sheer boredom as Mr. Goode rolls out a painfully tedious and woefully over-written exposition, which is finally broken by the arrival of the rest of the cast. Which is as good a time as any to mention that I actually really enjoyed the performances in this piece, with the exception of Jim Azide as the uptight LONDON TIMES critic Reverend Miles Monger, whose shrill, one-note queen-on-a-bitchfest performance felt incredibly out of place as the (straight) sexual aggressor he ends up to be.
And this really gets to the heart of my problem with this play, at least as directed by Jillian Armenante: on the surface everything seems pretty and well-accomplished, but once the surface is just barely scratched you realize quickly that very little here makes sense. There's lots of oh-so-witty banter in an Oscar Wilde fashion, but Mr Goode seems to demand we see how witty it is by adding ENDLESS, cloying alliteration whenever possible. From every character. In just about every scene. Also, there are a few words I noticed that he used incorrectly. At one point, for example, the youngest character refers to something as "frippery", offending the others, causing her to repeat it over and over in order to cause more offense, the implication being that it is a word she chose because of its indecency. Go look up the word, meaning "a shallow display, especially in dress" and you'll see that it is not--nor has it ever been--an offensive word. Not even in the Victorian Era.
Further, the writer throws in a lot of jokes he clearly felt were very smart. The cast wisely flying through some of them as to make sure we didn't really notice how poor they were, landing on the few that work and were deserving of a laugh in this "comedy" of manners (incorrectly called by some critics a "parody of drawing-room comedies"). All in all I just felt Mr Goode must have written this play in a state of pique after someone called him "a dummy", desperate to prove Them wrong. Sadly, I think they might have been more on the mark than he would prefer, if this play is an example.
Moving on, there's much ado made of the daughter's American fiance having brought some home-land tobacco to the house, which they all dig into with relish, claiming that it is something new and exciting. Only on planet Earth, it isn't -- the British had been importing the stuff for close to 200 years at the time this play is set. All you need to do is look at a few Hogarth prints from 100 years before to know that it wasn't "new" to the English. Likewise, there's a lot of needless blocking around the lighting of the electric table lamps as the day -- and the play -- moves on. No dialog -- just blocking. Which then begs the question: was it in the script? And this question: was the electric lamp this common in a household at this time (I believe it was not until several decades later)? And THIS question: as this rigmarole with the lights begins after tea time (always 4p, as is the tradition) late in a play performed in real-time, and everyone is dressed for Spring (as the backdrop also tells us it is), why is the freaking sun going down so early in a country so far north of the equator?????
This might seem like needless nit-picking on my part, but it is not: in a piece in which the time and place are clearly so crucial it goes to show an utter lack of respect for the audience. The poor word-choices, the poor research -- it all says that the director and possibly the writer are claiming "none of this matters -- it's just a play!" But in doing so, it is nothing short of a slap in the face of an educated audience.
The rest of it, in which we are lead to see that porn is harmless, prurient fun--especially when compared to real-life, hypocritical manipulation of human feelings--made me feel that that was a WHOLE lot of time spent to tell me that the world is round. Or in other words: a lot of frippery.
Bottom line: C for effort.
Til next time,
--HDSQ, Jr
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)