Category Archives: The Play’s the Thing

10. X. Ten. Dix. Diez.

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Last month this blog celebrated its 10th anniversary. 10 years! The totality of my 11-year old’s life. Most of my 16-year old’s. Half my marriage. I didn’t notice the blessed event. It passed by like a rainy Tuesday. I can only surmise that it didn’t matter to me. If it had, I’d have seen it coming and made a big deal out of it.

10 years ago I suppose I had some vague notions of minor fame and financial gain but they were crushed pretty quickly. At one point, I gathered my journal entries into a “book.” 75,000 words! I paid to have it professionally edited. The editor said the good news is that I might have some raw talent. The bad news is that there’s no narrative. She said I needed a plot thread to tie all the entries together. I’ve always been cursed with a fatal lack of ambition and an anemic work ethic, so I made her grammatical edits and sent the thing out to a dozen agents. The response was a deafening silence. Glad I got that out of my system.

Once I started posting I couldn’t stop. I’ve tried to quit several times, fearful that my daughters would stumble upon the dark and embarrassing secrets in my journals, but I can’t. It’s the only creative outlet I have. And I use the term ‘creative’ in its most broad sense. I crawl the theaters, galleries and museums as an audience member. That’s all I’ve ever been. The audience. But this idiot blog allows me to be a participant.

I guess this is a genuine addiction. It could be worse. It could be whiskey and whores. And gambling. Some guys go that route. But anniversaries? They don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that swing. Doo wah. Doo wah.

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Taken from my office, Friday, April 20, 7:30 a.m. The Lincoln Tunnel bus conga line.

Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race

That tiny hole in the upper left corner of the pic is the Lincoln Tunnel entrance. It spits out into New Jersey. These are Thoreau’s men (and women) who lead lives of quiet desperation.

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There are some agonizingly long plays this season on Broadway. Where is the line that separates artistic vision from overindulgence? For instance, Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane headline in a revival of Angels in America. It’s one story, but two plays. Part 1: Millennium Approaches is 3:30. Part 2: Perestroika is 4:00 From entry, through intermissions, to the end you’re in the theater for eight solid hours.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened last night and it, too, is one play in two parts. Part 1 is 2:40. Part 2 is 2:35. I took my daughter and we were there for six hours. It was super but, honestly, it didn’t need to be that long.

You can see Angels and Potter on consecutive evenings or see both parts in one day on Wednesdays and Saturdays. You can’t see Part 1 of either and not see Part 2. Part 1 of both ends with a cracker of a cliffhanger. In this way, they charge you DOUBLE because you have to buy a separate ticket to each part. Clever. Insidious.

Denzel Washington is starring in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. 4:00. Four hours! At least it’s one shot. You don’t have to purchase two tickets. In a NY Times fluff piece, they asked Washington about the grueling demands of a four hour play.

“Listen, this is what I love: acting on stage. And I don’t have to do anything else. Just be in this play. So, don’t feel sorry for me compared to most workers in America.”

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Feline pin-ups of the week. I make no apologies for posting cat photos. I’m going to continue to insist they have genuine artistic merit. Like reality TV. Or overstuffed theater.

Everyone’s a little bit racist. Apparently, even me.

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Everyone’s a little bit
Racist, sometimes.
Look around and
You will find,
No one’s really
Color-blind.

My bride and I were having a discussion and to an opinion I expressed she said, “You’d better keep that to yourself. It’s racist.” I thought I had progressive attitudes about race but she might have a point.

So, naturally, I need to tell everyone.

I took my daughter to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. I found a discount for the first preview and it’s good thing I did. I couldn’t afford to take her otherwise. She’s crazy about those books and when she asked to see it I had to say no, which broke my heart. It worked out in the end but my inability to afford tickets makes me feel wholly inadequate as a father. But that’s for another post.

It’s an extraordinary piece of theater but it helps if you’re a die-hard Potter enthusiast (my daughter) or interested in the mechanics of theater and acting (me). Your ass is in a chair for about six hours. Plus, the aforementioned cost.

You can look elsewhere for reviews. They’re all glowing. My problem—the one that landed the accusation—lies with their decision to employ color-blind casting.

The principle actors playing Harry, Ron, Draco and Ginny all look very much like adult versions of their movie selves. It’s easy to imagine these fictional characters transitioned into adulthood. Hermione Granger is played by a black actor. She’s more than capable and an extraordinary actor. I’ve been attending theater for 25+ years and know talent when I see it. She can command the stage and has a genuine presence. I just never saw her as Hermione. Throughout the play I had to occasionally stop and remind myself, “Oh, that’s Hermione.” My brain simply refused to make that leap. It proved to be a distraction. I respect their intentions but the plot flow was interrupted for want of a progressive agenda.

Perhaps it’s the indelible image of Hermione Granger as a young white girl. Or perhaps I have dormant racist attitudes that were inflamed. The wrong kind of woke.

I can’t tell you how alarming this is. It’s heartbreaking. I thought I was more evolved than that. I hope this doesn’t rub off on my daughters.

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Prior to the play I took her on a gallery hop in Chelsea. At Dia: Chelsea is Rita McBride’s Particulates, a fetching and photogenic industrial laser installation.

The gates keep you at bay because you can really hurt yourself if you try to break the beam, which I desperately wanted to do.

The room is kept cool and clammy. The air is misted so the beams are visible. It might be fun after a few bong hits. I imagine. I wouldn’t know.

There’s a low hum and the beams reflect off the wet floor. Best of all, free admission! Thank you, Dia Chelsea.

I liked this one as well although it was more stark. Dan Flavin’s in daylight or cool white at the David Zwirner gallery.

Flavin construct geometric shapes with neon tubes. Neon on a ceiling reminds me of cold, dreary office lighting. I find it a wholly acceptable medium for art, though.

Unfortunately with these gallery hops, you have to take the sublime with the ridiculous. These were fruits and vegetables nailed to a wall.

I thought they were plaster sculptures but, no, it’s real food. I chatted with the gallery rep and he is charged with replacing the food when it starts to rot. This is why some people laugh at contemporary art.

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Sorry, everyone, but there are going to be cat pics. There just are.

Bruce Gets Paid

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Bruce Springsteen is playing a one-man show on Broadway and people are fuming over the price of a ticket. The initial face value was $75-$850. The $75 tickets are two rows in a converted balcony. It used to be where the lighting rigs were mounted. The seats are so high up that there could be an imposter on stage and you’d never know the difference. The entire run, through February, sold out instantaneously. Only secondary market tix are available at inflated prices.

Last week’s Broadway earnings report contained a wild aberration. Bruce earned $2.3 million for FIVE SHOWS. Hamilton earned $2.9 million for the week, but that was for EIGHT performances and that show has a huge cast and an orchestra. Bruce’s overhead is nonexistent. It’s him, a microphone, a guitar and a piano. He doesn’t have to share his lucre with anyone.

His base isn’t happy. Fans are incredulous. “Man of the people, my ass!,” they wail. Each night, the theater, an elegant, intimate, 900-seat Broadway house built in 1921, is stuffed to the rafters with wealthy, Caucasian, geezers.

As far as I’m concerned, Bruce gets a pass. That man spent his entire career in the service of his fans. You get your money’s worth and then some when you see him perform. He gives back. Many of his charitable deeds go unreported. He’s in the sunset of his career. If he wants to take a victory lap on Broadway and charge a lot of money, that’s his due.

My wife and I saw the show last Friday. I can’t afford a ticket and wouldn’t pay $850 even if could. I got tickets via the only option available to the hoi polloi; I won the daily ticket lottery. And when I say ‘won,’ I don’t me we got free tickets. Winning the daily lottery entitles you to buy a pair of tickets for $75 each. They were nice seats! Mezzanine! The gentleman sitting next to us paid $400 for his tickets from StubHub, so $75 is a bargain.

It’s billed as ‘written and directed’ by Bruce, but I’m pretty sure he had help from someone who knows a thing or two about theater. The pacing was good, the blocking was smart and the transitions were well-placed. He’d move from guitar to piano when he needed to change a scene or move the story forward. There were equal parts story-telling and singing. The songs were stripped bare. If Born in the U.S.A. had been originally sung the way it is in this show–mournful and slow with a slide and a 12-string guitar–it never would’ve been mistaken for a jingoistic anthem.

End up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

The crowd initially mistook it for a concert. They were whooping and making a ruckus. It’s not that kind of show. It’s a quiet show. There’s a lot of dialogue. Bruce can deliver a line and has surprisingly adroit comedic timing. As soon as the show settled into a groove, people quieted down.

His wife came out and sang two songs with him. That section felt superfluous and wedged-in. It interrupted the flow. He could easily cut her out, streamline the show and keep more of the till for himself. But then, he couldn’t go home at night.

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I took my daughters to the local botanical garden. These were taken with my iPhone. It has a duel lens that allows for close-ups. I took about 80 shots to get these eight that I like. You couldn’t do that before the digital age. Remember when you had 16 shots and you had to make each one count?

Does anyone know what kind of beetle this is?

Deep Cut Gardens was once the home of New York mob boss Vito Genovese. He bought the house and surrounding property as a quiet respite from his busy business affairs in the city. He ran afoul of the law and the property was taken by the government. The house is now a welcoming center and the grounds are meticulously maintained. One wonders how they arrived at the name ‘deep cut.’ Vito’s favorite negotiating tool?

Everyone’s a little bit racist. Including me.

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Everyone’s a little bit racist –
All right!
Bigotry has never been
Exclusively white

Avenue Q

I’m a quasi-lefty from way back. Growing up economically challenged and spending two decades in the racial bouillabaisse of New York City inoculated me from the ravages of economic, racial or cultural insensitivity.

Or, so I thought.

Here’s a synopsis of “Smart People,” the new drama by Lydia Diamond about to open off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theater. I hope you’re sitting down.

“Four Harvard intellectuals, a medical intern angered at being underestimated by his white colleagues; a white Harvard professor whose neurological studies, he says, show that white people have a “predisposition to hate” people of other races; an African-American actress frustrated at her lack of opportunities…”

Stop right there. I’m a big supporter of the arts, especially theater (+/- 50 plays annually), but I’m not wasting a dime or my time on a play that puts forth the notion that white people are naturally predisposed to racial hatred. Additionally, all the conflicts are caused by white people. It’s a flat, one dimensional, ugly piece of bigotry. A shit premise and I reject it.

The playwright is a black female. Imagine if a white male wrote a play that concluded black men abandon their families because it’s coded in their DNA. I wouldn’t support crap like that, either. (Which is irrelevant because it’d never be produced.) This playwright isn’t some fringe crackpot. She has bona fides. She had a play produced on Broadway (which I saw and enjoyed) and the Second Stage is a major off-Broadway house.

You can argue that she’s trying to stimulate a dialogue on race but I don’t buy it. There’s nothing high-minded going on here. Setting the story in Harvard is just putting lipstick on a pig. She’s going for low-hanging fruit. Clearly, we need to have a discussion about race but I’m confident this isn’t the way to go about it. Wait until Fox News gets hold of this.

This story thread hardened my heart and blinded me to the legitimate grievances of the other characters. I couldn’t care less what their struggles were. I find this idea so odious that I give no weight to anything else she’s written.

Right on the heels of reading this, I heard Spike Lee announce that he’s boycotting the Oscars because he found the nominations too Caucasian for his liking. Jada Pinkett Smith quickly followed suit. Why would anyone care if those two clowns didn’t attend the Oscars? So stay home. I’ll take your seats. Jada named her son Jaden. Her husband Will named their daughter Willow. What a couple of narcissists. Those kids are condemned to spending the rest of their lives in a shadow.

See that? Just typing this out got me all riled up again. I’m a speeding locomotive without any brakes.

This is Jamie Dimon. He’s the CEO of firm that manages $1.7 trillion (not a typo) in assets. He came down off Wealth Mountain to share this piece of sage wisdom with the commoners at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:

dimon

Thank you, Capt. Obvious.

How is that breaking news? Breaking News: It May or May Not Rain Tomorrow. Talk about hedging your bets. This man’s salary was just raised 35% to $27 million annually. You’d think he’d have something with a little more gravitas to impart.

Goldman Sachs just paid a $5 billion dollar fine for bundling subprime mortgages that they knew were worthless and selling them to their clients as viable investments. They knew their clients were going to lose their money but they didn’t give a damn. No one was held accountable. If someone perpetuated a fraud on that scale outside of the asset management industry, there’d be some prison time involved.

Lost sleep at Goldman Sachs: 0.0 hours.

The Asset Management industry is peopled by amoral, thieving, windbags. If my daughters go into investment banking, I’ll consider myself a failure as a parent.

Oh, it snowed, alright. 21 inches worth. I never shoveled so much snow in such a short period of time. I was a ball of hurt.

snow

Bowie good. Pacino bad. Pacino bad. Bowie good. Depends who you ask.

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All these decades of theater-going haven’t taught me a damn thing.

About two weeks ago I saw Lazarus while it was still in previews at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village. It’s written by David Bowie and Enda Walsh. Walsh adapted Once for the stage. You know who Bowie is. It’s a musical that uses Bowie’s back catalog and a few new songs he wrote for the play. The show is being treated like the second coming of Mashiach. It is exciting. Bowie is a recluse.

lazarus

The story is a continuation of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie’s film from 1976, itself an adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel from 1963. [This town has adaptation-itis.] Spoiler alert. Thomas Newton (this time, played by Dexter’s Michael C. Hall, not Bowie) never made it back to his home planet. In fact, he’s stranded in the East Village. How appropriate. That’s pretty much all I understood because I found the entire affair to be a slow, dull, befuddled mess. I can’t say the plot meandered because in order for a plot to meander, there has to be a plot. There were characters on stage who seemed to be in a different play entirely. I surmised it was two intermissionless hours because had they given the audience an opportunity to flee, they would’ve.

Or so say I.

The reviews came out a few days ago. The Guardian gave it four stars. The New York Times said the play contained, “Ice cold bolts of ecstasy…”. Rolling Stone made a liar out of me, saying it ‘…never drags.” Tickets are impossible to get.

They’re all just saying that because it’s Bowie. I don’t know how the New York Theater Workshop manages to land these big names. This spring, Daniel Craig is playing Iago and David Oyelowo is playing Othello. That theater is only 199 seats. They could fill up a medium-sized concert hall for that show.

I think it’s safe to assume that David Mamet and Al Pacino’s best work is behind them. But, c’mon! It’s Pacino and Mamet! Attention must be paid. I saw China Doll, like Lazarus, while it was still in previews. The rumors were rampant that Pacino kept dropping lines and rewrites were being made daily. The critics smelled blood in the water. But I had a very fine evening. Some of the dialog was vintage crisp Mamet and Pacino didn’t go-up on any of his lines (that I’m aware of). It had quite a few laughs. It looked like any problems were either ironed out or never existed in the first place. Broadway chat rooms are full of jealous, gossipy, theater queens.

Then the reviews came out. There’s bad and then there’s scathing.

Variety implored Mamet to, “…quit jerking us around on non-plays like China Doll.” The New York Times said, “…extracting [the plot] from Mr. Pacino’s mumbling is really hard work.” The headline in the New York Post review was: “Al Pacino’s Broadway show is even worse than you think.”

I don’t know about all that. I kind of enjoyed myself. In the end, it hardly matters. The run sold out before previews began.

China_Misery

Same thing with the stage adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery.

They all said Bruce Willis’ performance as writer Paul Sheldon was lethargic and laid back. What’d they expect? The curtain opens and both of his legs are in casts and his arm in a sling. He spends 90% of the show in a bed and the other 10% a wheelchair. It probably helps if you have really great seats because it’s such an intimate story. As usual, I had really terrible seats but I had my binoculars so I was fine.

Laurie Metcalf received universal and well-deserved praise as the demented Annie Wilks. Yes, there’s a cobbling scene and it’s horrifying to watch, even though you know Bruce’s ankles aren’t actually being broken with a sledgehammer. There are more laughs than you’d expect. The critics can bite me. I liked it just fine.

They weren’t very nice to Keira Knightley in Thérèse Raquin, either.

ThereseRaquin

The Times said it was monotonous and her performance had a joyless intensity. I’m going to have to agree with them this time, although my problem was exacerbated terrible seats in the cavernous Studio 54. Every time I see a show in that dump, I swear it’s my last. That’s why good seats are so bloody expensive. They make for a better evening.

Currently at the Kate Werble Gallery down on Vandam Street is Christpher Chiappa’s Livestrong. Chiappa’s medium is:

EGGS!

eggs

Hell, yeah! EGGS!

eggs2

7,000 of them, in fact.

eggs3

eggs6

Each one is unique and hand-made from plaster and resin.

eggs1

I like that the ones on the walls obey gravity and are a bit droopy.

eggs4

eggs5

Good thing we blasted a gaping hole in the ozone layer. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have this interesting weather. Two weeks before Christmas and it’s balmy enough for a stroll on the beach and boardwalk in Asbury Park. Nothing unusual about that. Nothing at all.

cornerstone

bike

wreathdog