Backlog: NYTHEATRE Review - According to Goldman

I walked out of According to Goldman, a new work playing at Theatre Row by Bruce Graham, very torn in my opinion of it.

The show follows a retired screenwriter, Gavin Miller (Nicholas Viselli), who’s partially settled into life as a college professor while he ignores his wife’s (Pamela Sabaugh) comfort.  Gavin is disgusted at the students in his class, so he finally acquiesces to Jeremiah (Stephen Drabicki), an enthusiastic Religion major, requesting to be added to the class.  Finding out further about Jeremiah’s past as the child of missionaries growing up in Africa, Gavin advises him to develop a screenplay based on his life experiences rather than aping the old style musicals that he grew up watching.  After seeing some promise, Gavin suggests teaming up with Jeremiah to get the script into producer’s hands.  At first it looks like Gavin is manipulating the seemingly simple Jeremiah, but twists abound as the story races to the conclusion.  On the one hand, the basic premise of a film professor bonding with a student should be right in my wheelhouse and the depiction of a film class was accurate enough, but I couldn’t shake the feeling the whole time that I was watching a student theater piece where someone took “write what you know” too literally.  I wish I could say that this felt intentionally ironic, but I doubt that it is or the show has the driest meta-humor that I’ve ever seen.

The show has plenty of strong points, however. The transitions between scenes are handled fluidly with amazing grace and I very much enjoyed the set and lighting design. Conversations between cast and unseen characters were juxtaposed in clever ways, helping to develop the story quickly. I also liked the way that the main plot developments were set against lessons about structural pacing.  It was something that could have been a little too on the nose, but it was effective here.  Most importantly, I was quite impressed with the theme of impotence that developed over the course of the show.  Professor Miller stares at the end of his career and dwells on past triumphs, while Mrs. Miller contemplates all the dreams that she chose not to chase.

There is a sense of bitterness that permeates the show.  Professor Miller was a sell out as a screenwriter and was still cast aside by the movie industry.  Jeremiah is continually more rewarded for misanthropic behavior by that same industry.  Modern movies are referenced and universally treated with scorn, while older films are treated as works of art that modernity has chosen to disregard out of foolishness.  The fact that Professor Miller is vindicated for his dislike of modern Hollywood only serves to cement this view as the stance taken by the playwright.  Likewise, the set, adorned with vintage movie posters, is a testament to the virtues of classic movies, failing to appreciate the works of modern filmmakers.

While I found a great deal to enjoy in “According to Goldman”, there was too much cynicism present.  Coupled with a flawed casting choice in Stephen Drabicki, who looks far too old for the part, the show, while not painful by any means, never lived up to its potential.

Backlog: NYTHEATRE Review - Slipping on Black Ice

Slipping On Black Ice

nytheatre.com review by Case Aiken
March 7, 2013

Publicity image for Slipping on Black Ice

Slipping on Black Ice is a new one act play just wrapping up as part of the Strawberry Festival at the Hudson Guild Theatre.  It tells the story of two sisters as they grow up together, jumping through time along the seasons. Written by Kara Rosella, with direction by Colleen Britt, Slipping on Black Ice is an interesting and impassioned exploration of sisterhood, albeit a somewhat vague one.

Micheala (Deanna McGovern) is Maddy’s (Leslie Fray) older sister.  She’s protective but strict, bossy because that’s how she thinks she’s supposed to behave. She likes to play as a teacher to her little sister as an English school boy, pretending that they’re in a stuffy prep school as a distraction from… something… going on in the next room.  From there we skip forward an undisclosed number of years to them practicing either gymnastics or possibly dance.  Here, we begin to explore a touched upon concept from the first time period that Maddy sees herself as “the pretty one” and her older sister as “the smart one”. We jump forward again (and maybe backwards, more on that later) and the story of Maddy’s life takes shape.  She has defined herself narrowly within stereotypes and refuses to escape them no matter what her sister tells her. 

It’s certainly a complex issue that confronts women in particular, preconceived notions of types that are used to both empower and restrict the individual at the same time. Accepting a role that people perceive you as can enable potential advantages in specific circumstances, particularly when it comes to sexuality, but it of course removes a layer of dimensionality that a person has.  I’ve certainly discussed this matter at great lengths and have to admit to participating on both sides of the argument. Ultimately, the point made is that failing to present oneself in total complexity, and worse losing sight of it completely, is a path wrought with sacrifice.  I’m torn about some of the presentation here.  Maddy seems to be burdened with a vast array of emotional problems and, while I’ve known people who carried similar burdens, it comes off as forced since we’re effectively only seeing the highlight reel here. Each time we come back to her new awful things have happened and it comes off as overwhelming and over the top. Again, the restrictions of the format make what I know can be entirely plausible issues into ones that come off as forced. The time jumps don’t help it either, since the shifts were often unclear as to when each scene was set.  This isn’t to say that the time jumps were a negative element, since I found the epilogue that called back to an earlier idle bit of chatter from early in the play to be quite satisfying. I would have either liked more scenes like that with the manipulation of chronology serving a greater purpose or, conversely, would want a more consistent temporal structure in place to ground the drama better.

The show is a really nice discussion between two people, with a few structural issues that I would like to see resolved in future productions.  In general, more information (not exposition, mind you) would serve this play well.  Too often, there are chunks of dialogue that seem to just explain the history that we missed since the last time jump, but I felt that character motivation was often unclear.  Furthermore, as something of a nitpick, it seemed that the titular metaphor of black ice, eloquently explained in the program, wasn’t properly used in the show itself.  Black ice, as is noted, is dangerous because it’s an invisible coating of ice that you don’t know is there until it’s under your feet and you’re already slipping.  The way it was phrased instead seemed to indicate the concept was rather thin ice, where you fall through and find yourself trapped in the freezing waters below.  As a result, there were a couple of clunky lines that tried to shoehorn the title into the show, that were slightly distracting. None of these are deal breakers, though.  Both the leading ladies did well and the show was enjoyable with a thoughtful concept behind it.  I’d like to see it developed further down the line and I guess there are worse criticisms than wanting more.

Backlog: NYTheatre Review - The Sandman's Coming

“It is a rare occasion that I walk out of a show and have no idea what I just saw, and that may be the case here. The Sandman’s Coming is a new work brought to us by the Brain Melt Consortium as part of the Frigid Festival at Under St. Marks. A multimedia infused movement piece, the show depicts the struggles of heroine addiction through projections, dance, and nursery rhymes.  Now I’ll admit, I’m neither a dancer nor a heroin addict (yay?), so there might be some crucial elements in play here that passed right by me.  Ultimately I’m giving the show the benefit of the doubt, as the choreography was very good and the projections used were suitably abstract to invoke the nihilistic nature of the substance, but I took much of the performance to circle around the same point without really providing new insight or information. Everything in the presentation is well done, but I couldn’t identify much development in the admittedly non-continuous narrative presented through most of the show. I took it as the show emphasizing how seductive and over-powering the nature of addiction can be, but I might have missed some of the more nuanced elements of that.

Lantine Tom plays the personification of Heroin as “The Heroine”, an enrapturing seductress that has make up like Bizarro Superman and spouts children’s rhymes as she enthralls Nelson Patino JR’s “User” and pulls him away from Anya Gibian’s “Watcher”. The Watcher asks us to reflect on the person who fell into addiction but we never see much of the man before, so it becomes more of a thought exercise rather than an experience. The Heroine always pulls us back into the world of addiction here, so we never break through the mists of the past to see the User’s roots.  The way this plays out certainly highlights the way addiction colors our perception of people and is very satisfying to watch.

In doing a little research on the group, I found that the Brain Melt Consortium is the same one responsible for The Daughters of Lot which is a show that I very much enjoyed and had a similar non-linear story with abstract elements, but I feel that The Sandman’s Coming was over reaching a bit by dwelling a great deal of time on the central premise without overtly introducing other elements to draw focus. Creator/Director, Molly Ballerstein, and choreographer, Dana Boll, have made an interesting show which has some really strong elements (performance, media, choreography, etc.) but it spends too much time reveling in those things. A tighter production with brisker running time would make this show work a great deal better and make it far easier for this reviewer to avoid making puns about the Sandman coming for him.”

Backlog: NYTheatre Review - My Pussy Is Purrin' Again

“‘Boys play guitars; Girls play ukuleles,’ D’yan Forest relates at one point, noting the numerous small string instruments strewn about the stage.    D’yan is the narrator and creator of My Pussy Is Purrin’ Again, a one woman show playing at Under St. Marks as part of the Frigid festival, where in she recounts her atypical life and the hurdles she had to overcome along the way as a product of a foreign era. D’yan dealt with discrimination of all kinds while growing up in Boston before making an expatriate of herself and departing for Paris.

A Bi-Sexual Jewish woman who wanted to express herself through music had quite the uphill climb during her youth sixty years ago and all those pieces of cultural resistance are brought to light here.  Her musical passions were curtailed by her gender and her heritage, leaving a strange half-acceptance and half-defiance of the social norms that have shaped her. It certainly can be an eye opener.  Her collection of ukuleles is vast and impressive and they play into her discussion of identity although truth be told I have never heard that a ukulele was considered particularly gendered. However, I also didn’t realize that there were no less than five completely different types of ukulele (one was a banjo-hybrid!), so what do I know about the cultural history of the ukulele. Clearly, this instrument means something beyond just forced lessons in lieu of an instrument that she would have preferred. Her musical history thus serves as a representation of the greater life that she struggled through.  

Beyond the music, sexuality is a heavy component of the show (which should come as no surprise given the title), coupled with themes of honesty versus deception. D’yan (not the name she was born with, shockingly) identifies herself as bi-sexual and goes into great lengths to note here varied romances throughout her years, positing that the majority of the populace chooses to embrace a self-deception of their own identity in order to fit into societal norms.  At times those deceptions can be empowering, like when D’yan took to calling herself a minx, but other times they merely are comforting, and never are they honest.

There was a really great line delivery midway in the show where D’yan is holding an open set of old rusted tongs for measuring the size of a person’s skull in determining one’s race and comments on how awful discrimination is before snapping them shut. That was a fantastic moment!  It was clear and effective and was sadly unique to the rest of the show. D’yan has a potentially fascinating life story with great issues to address, but the execution gets a bit muddled.  Tangential points are brought up left and right. Most of the show comes across as a ramble with a fair bit of interpretation required to make sense of it all.

Weirdly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the show should have been a cabaret or concert piece. D’yan’s love of music was apparent, but she seemed to transition into it abruptly and her use of instruments outside her signature ukulele all came off a bit more haphazard.  Perhaps a more focused approach to tying her musical nature and her life story could help create a more coherent piece.  As it stands, My Pussy Is Purrin’ Again comes off as a ramble that has a lot of good things that are hard to see.”

So, they’re making an Entourage movie. When I heard the news, my reaction was “neat, let’s see how it is” but since then I’ve been hearing a lot of very negative feedback.  No surprise that Jezebel decided that they were against it.But others have expressed some opposition as well, including my boy, MovieBob. This was an odd reaction to me since: a) I’d heard this was in the works ever since they finished the divided third season. b) I thought it had been confirmed when they announced the series was ending. c) This is the male Sex and the City here, so why wouldn’t they do the same exact thing? and d) I thought most people nothing-ed the show, not really hated it.

I’ll admit that I watched through each season pretty regularly since they first came out with all of the ups and downs that accompany them.  The movie honestly won’t do much to change my perception of the series any more than the middle of the road final season did, which is a mixed bag with some real fun bits here and there.  As a side note: I started throwing old seasons on as background noise while I’ve been working and realized that a lot of references went right over my head at the time but paid off on re-watching, showing that they at least were talking the talk when it came to upcoming Hollywood Buzz.  For a show about comfort, the best moments were the ones where they took risks and I’m curious how that will translate to the big screen. Here’s what I’m worried about:

-Continuity - the show made some choices at the end and I’d hate to just have them all dissolved off-screen between then and the movie. It was something they did a lot between one season and the next, so I’ve been burned before.

-Flanderizing - Over the run of the show, very three dimensional characters became pretty one note. Not uncommon for a long running TV show, but Drama, E, and Ari definitely suffered from this. Turtle and Mrs. Ari (I will never acknowledge a first name) are the reverse of this, so I’ll allow the potential that we might actually see some character growth here.

-Cameo Overload - Bigger budgets can mean more stars.  In the past we’ve had some really fun ones who’ve been characters unto their own right (Bob Saget and Jeffrey Tambor for example), but we’ve had just as many super random pop in and say hi moments that were so random that they came off as canned (Rachel Zoe showing up to give fashion advice). The biggest drawback to the show format was that you could only really do one or the other, so hopefully this will let them make the world the guys live in and the circles they travel in better fleshed out.

Admittedly, the show mostly followed a very set path where Vince would have some big project wrap, he’d stumble getting his next one, and then they’d pull it off at the end.  I’ve often thought that they should have just wrapped the series when they took the mid-season hiatus in Season 3 since that was a great cliffhanger and then picked up the movie there.  In some regards I’m glad, because some truly great stuff came later.

Here are my thoughts on the highlights:

All of Season 5: Arguably the best season in the run. Season 5 flips the formula on it’s head by having Vince’s career completely crash and burn.  The tension works far better than the similar but less comprehensive opening of Season 2 and we finally get to see Vince almost take up his pledge to abandon his life of glamor and return to a Queens. This season also finally fulfills the promise of seeing the process of making a blockbuster for real.  Prior to this, we’d only seen snippets of Vince’s work, but here we’re treated to many episodes showcasing what a budget can provide.

Season 4’s Premiere: The same idea of what I was saying about Season 5’s look into movie making, but more condensed. A definite homage to “Hearts of Darkness”, this was the first time we got to see more than just a few seconds of any of Vince’s movies. The plot for Season 4 hinged on a great movie that a stubborn director wouldn’t properly edit out of pride, which was a great idea but the execution wasn’t up to snuff. The season’s plot would have made a great movie plot, but the decompression didn’t suit it well here.

Season 1 and the first half of 2: The best example of the top dog lifestyle that Vince leads.  This is the status quo that the show kept referencing back to. Later seasons tried to get there but were never as much fun.

Season 7: Vince’s real fall. It walks the very fine line of illustrating Vince’s flaws in a real way for once without losing the audience’s appreciation of his life.

As long as we can keep it away from the snooze fest plots like Seasons 3, 6, or 8, I think we’ll have at least something enjoyable.  Entourage was a show where not a lot necessarily happened, which both served to illustrate how drawn out the process of making movies can be but also hurt it’s abilities to create real tension and drama. In a shorter time frame, any of the various season plots could make for an interesting movie.  Key word is “could”, though.

I got a chance to see “A Good Day to Die Hard”, the latest movie in the Die Hard franchise, last night. I have a bit of a rant brewing about the series as a whole and the modern state of action movies after the break, but I’ll give my quick thoughts first:

Way too short, but nothing particularly awful about it. I would have liked a few moments to catch my breath, but some may like the non-stop action.  No one will ever equal Hans Gruber as a villain. This is definitely the Die Harder follow up to Live Free and Die Hard’s Die Hard, for what that’s worth.

Deeper analysis and spoilers after the break.

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In light of the recent storm of outrage regarding gun control, I’ve been pondering a plausible solution.  Actually, I was doing so before some of the more recent bouts of crazy made headlines go nuts and caused Democrats to blame guns, Republicans to blame video games, and Classicists to blame Euripides.  It finally hit me the other night:

Mandatory DRAFT for everyone.

Sounds crazy? Totally.  Am I serious? Maybe. Not entirely, but there is a certain bent appeal. Hear me out after the break.

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I awoke today to discover that the new Star Trek movies that we’ve been seeing stills from over the past couple months finally has a trailer out (and a slightly longer version with Japanese subtitles). Thoughts after the break.

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Backlog: NYTheatre Review - The Chekhov Dreams

“The concept of novelty is perhaps over emphasized in the modern culture, in part because our creative works are often preserved for later generations to see such as movies or television, while the ability to reference back to those works increases as the databases of the internet become increasingly comprehensive.  It was once assumed that a story about Superman’s pal Jimmy Olson transforming into a werewolf could be redrawn seven years later and no one would notice, but if that were attempted in today’s world, all the forces of the interwebs would rise up and voice their outrage. People forget that great works of our culture are often built on taking concepts and styles and showing off a mastery of them in writings that are both referential while being compelling on their own.  The Aeneid is such a work, as is The Metamorphoses.  I note this to preface my description of The Chekhov Dreams, a show by John McKinney showing at The Jewel Box Theater, which I really enjoyed but can’t say that I found particularly original.  This is a play with ghosts or perhaps hallucinations haunting aspiring writer, Jeremy (Jake Robard), as he finds himself drawn to his acting scene partner and deals with the death of his fiancé. I feel like I’ve seen shows with this basic premise a hundred times already, but that’s not a bad thing because there’s more going on here than just that basic synopsis.

The inclusion of Anton Chekhov as a specter haunting Jeremy and the title of the play, for that matter, are not so subtle hints at the deeper references. The play is simultaneously a love letter and a critique of Chekhov’s plays, specifically The Seagull.  It’s a smart discussion of an important figure in the history of theater, done with overt points in the aforementioned phantasmal Anton figure, as well as in the actual discussion of theater and scene-work of Jeremy and his scene partner turned object of affection, Chrissy (Sutton Crawford). The notes in the program describes the show as an attempt to “scream to the heavens about how ridiculous it is to scream to the heavens!” which is actually pretty apt. I’ve seen people talk to ghosts of their dead fiancés enough times, but this is one that does so with a purpose.  It’s not just venting about how hard it was to get over loss or how loneliness can overtake you so powerfully that no one can pull you out of it.  This is a strong piece, a bit long winded maybe (albeit fittingly), that understands the tropes it utilizes to make a larger point or at least to engender discussion.

I should also note that this show would not work without excellent performances by the cast. Michael Gnat is the easy stand out as Anton Chekhov due to the complete absurdity of the role, but Jake Robard’s  Jeremy is a great emotional center that holds the show together.  Sutton Crawford and Carmit Levite’ both do a fine job representing Jeremy’s present and his past respectively and Matt Faucher does an admirable job as the abrasive Eddie, who has a point despite his personality flaws.  Also of note is that the Jewel Box Theater is a small space and not particularly great for extensive scenic work (speaking from experience), but Jennifer Varbalow does a fantastic job dressing it.

I left having really enjoyed The Chekhov Dreams.  Smart subtext, good performances, and a solid execution make this a worthwhile show to go see. I note that this has been developed in past workshops and readings and I would like to encourage further productions as it is definitely worth it.”

Backlog: NYTheatre Review - The Autobiography Of A Guy Who Knew Me Part One