go to the theatre more often

I had to see Latkes and Applesauce on DVD, having been unable to attend either performance. But the video recording is clean and not at all TV’d-up; it’s a single camera affair made for archival purposes, and I’m glad to have seen it finally.

It’s a Hanukkah revue, written by many of my colleagues (and me!), and as with any multi-writer revue, the style and tone changes with every scene, every song. But you know what? It all holds together. If the deck is somewhat stacked toward the Jews who know more about Christmas than the Christians do about the festival of lights in Buck and Acquisto’s “No Matter How You Spell It,” I can live with that. If Hartley and Davis’s “A Hanukkah Hymn” seems disproportionately long to the rest of the material, I’m okay with that too. Is the opening number a little too reminiscent for my taste of Barry Manilow’s “It’s a Miracle”? (Maybe it would have been better to license that song and write new lyrics for it than to write a new song that sounds a lot like the old one – or maybe I’m the only one who cares.)

The “Hanukkah Idol” sketches are WILDLY funny. The “Postcards to Grandpa” monologues are funny, and touching. Hubbard and Oler’s “One Little Hanukkah Candle” is lovely and simple, and my own “Ballad of Thomas the Shammus” holds up very well in such company as my talented writer colleagues. The five adult actors and music-director Jihwan Kim show amazing range. The Kaufman Kids children’s chorus are sweet as can be.

Were I to draw some comparison between this family show and Shrek, all I’d want to say is that Latkes is funny to kids and grown-ups without ever making adults uncomfortable. Latkes is done on a shoestring budget, with a cast of five and a band of one. And you know what? It feels like more. Its oil never runs out.

It’ll be back next year. Take your friends.

Man, I hope I’ve missed something along the way. Getting to the theatre less than once a week – when one is, ostensibly, in the business of the theatre – is shameful.

I said I’d say more about Shrek: the Musical and never did.

Shrek is going to make it whether or not it got good reviews. I’ve only read the Times’s, and I was thoroughly befuddled by it: Brantley liked best in the show the first thing I’d’ve cut: the tap-dancing rat number might as well have a show-curtain that reads, “This number exists because Sutton can tap dance.” I mean, Sutton Foster is one of the seven marvels of the world, but this number is thoroughly unnecessary.

The show’s too long – or, at least, it takes too long getting started. I don’t feel the need for as much backstory as we get about Fiona’s and Shrek’s childhoods. The score is a little of this, a little of that – Celtic-pop-rock-soul-showtune (and I’m sure I’m leaving something out). Either the lyrics strain against the musical form or the composer uses the music to rein in formless lyrics, but my ear kept getting slapped around by rhyme schemes. The book and lyrics are chock full of in-jokes and lines that would bump the piece out of a G rating, lines that made me pray, over and over, “Please don’t let my 7-year-old niece ask me why the grown-ups are laughing.”

That said, wow. You see every penny you spend: the entire design team scores. The cast is terrifically talented. You hear every penny you spend. It’s a big orchestra, and it sounds great.

Would I go again, at full price? Hell, no.

Was it a really good first Broadway experience for my 14- and 7-year-old nieces? Ay-yup.

I collaborated with Marc Castle on a Raw Impressions show a few years ago, and was astonished at his speed, wit, and craft.

He’s written music as well as book and lyrics for Love, Incorporated , which was given a first-act reading at a theatre in Stamford Monday night. Of course, he didn’t have to write the whole show in 36 hours, but it was an impressive body of work: witty, tuneful, extremely energetic. I oughtn’t comment much further since the second act wasn’t presented, but the actors were terrific – three of them from the recent cast of Buck and Acquisto’s Like You Like It – and music-director Jeffrey Lodin was the hardest working guy in show business for the night: I’ve seldom seen such energetic piano playing.

If I’d known my Greenbrier collaborator was presenting a scene in our workshop in NYC on Monday, I would have skipped this to be at her side, but I didn’t get the message in time. And it was very nice to see good work done close to home.

From the “I won’t be taking my wife to see this one” collection:
Noah Haidle’s Saturn Returns had some touching moments, but by and large it left me wondering why Haidle wrote it. Of course, the same question can be asked of any play.

One actress plays three different women (who, apparently, share a physical resemblance) while three actors play the same man at three different points in his life. While the play has a joyful ending, the joy is diffused by the structure of the play: it’s a memory piece, and we’ve already seen how that happy “ending” goes terribly wrong thirty years later, and more wrong still thirty years after that.

So, really: what’s the point? Is it to make a meditation on happiness versus loneliness? Is it to question memory and time? Was it just to create a great role for one actress and several relatively good roles for three actors?

No qualms with the performances or design, just the writing.

Broadway Close-up: Maltby and Shire

Oh, the joy.

Although I am a big honkin’ Stephen Sondheim fan, I will admit that when it comes to stand-alone songs, the work of Maltby and Shire is somewhat higher on my playlist. I hadn’t thought about it much until a student in my cabaret class asked if I’d enjoyed this concert and I went spontaneously incoherent in my praise. I knew – I’ve said for years – that the cast album of Closer Than Ever was the soundtrack to Herself’s and my courtship, but it hadn’t so strongly occurred to me that Starting Here, Starting Now contained the “song-songs” I most enjoyed in college; that Baby was a show I saw on my first post-college trip to NYC; and I saw Big the night before my BMI audition. They’re pretty high on my playlist.

Now, the cast this concert: Loni Ackerman from the original cast of SH, SN; Martin Vidnovic from Baby; Lynne Wintersteller, Sally Mayes, Patrick Brady, and Bob Rubino from CTE; and Maltby and Shire themselves. (And to that terrific mix we add some talented newcomers for the ingenue stuff, and the casts of a new M&S revue and a touring production of Ain’t Misbehavin’.) Was there nothing more I could ask for?

Well, there were some sound issues. The interview segments weren’t particularly enlightening. And Sally Mayes got the evening off to a slightly rocky start when the top notes of “Autumn” seemed a little yell-y.

But heavens. “It’s Never That Easy/I’ve Been Here Before,” as sung by the pair who originated the arrangement and have been singing it long enough that their performance could vote: there was a richness, a warmth, a familiarity to that performance that had me in tears of joy. So too Maltby singing, to Shire’s accompaniment, “If I Sing,” the song about their fathers. And the lovely ensemble joy of “Travel” and the evening’s finale, “One Step.”

I thought, as I left, that there were songs I’d’ve liked to hear, but nothing I would have given up to make room. This was as full and lovely an evening as I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

I’ll write more about Like You Like It after I’ve had a chance to speak with Dan and Sammy, but let’s just leave it here for now.

You know how much I like this show? I’d put money into it.

Congratulations, guys!

I was late arriving. A day and a few minutes late. I bought a TDF ticket for the Wednesday matinee of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.

Except I’d really bought one for Tuesday night.

It took a phone call to the TDF customer service line to discover the problem, and a phone call from TDF to the box office to convince them to honor my ticket, but I made it into the auditorium for late seating – and, thanks to a friendly usher, I’d been able to stand in the back and watch the first couple scenes while standing, waiting to be seated.

I haven’t watched the movie on which the show is based. (I don’t think I’ve watched any Hitchcock movie all the way through, come to think of it.) So I probably missed a joke or ten along the way. Even so, I found this four-actor comedy version of Hitchcock’s movie very, very funny indeed. Maybe even moreso for the relief I felt at being allowed to watch it at all after my temporal-shift gaffe. If Mark Garcia and I can make “Four Pedros” (our four-actor, multi-character musical) half this funny, we’ll be in very good shape.

Broadway Close-Up: Jones and Schmidt

Or, as host Sean Hartley put it, since the evening’s subjects have had as much success off- as on-Broadway, “Off-Broadway Close-Up.”

The songs of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt are a blessing of melody, of rich harmony, and, by turns, of simple and over-ripe poetry. I have an particular fondness for “Try to Remember,” as it is the first piece of music I remember hearing (in my parents car, on my fifth birthday, on the way to a tv studio for the local knock-off of “Romper Room.” But I like their 110 in the Shade, too, and if I find I Do, I Do somewhat less musically sophisticated than the others, it’s clearly still a tour-de-force for two actors (one I know well, having rehearsed it as an actor in a production I wasn’t able to finish, and as a music director for a long run in Pittsburgh).

I particularly looked forward to the second half of the concert, full of songs from their lesser-known shows: “Celebration,” “Grover’s Corners,” “Colette Collage,” and others. Did I hear anything in that second half that deserves the same sort of popularity The Fantasticks achieved? Maybe not. Maybe Jones and Schmidt spent a little too much time thinking about aging as they aged; that’s not something for which they can be faulted – and I’m glad Tom Jones shared these non-hit songs, and stories about them, with us as well as their big winners.

The cast was a winning bunch, particularly Martin Vidnovic and Karen Ziemba (who has never sounded better, and never looked better. Oh, please let me write a show for you!). And just when the evening seemed as full of “Joy” as it could be came the premiere of a new dance piece choreographed to Harry Belafonte’s sweet recording of “Try To Remember” and performed very touchingly by Marge Champion and Donald Saddler. We laughed before we cried – just the way it’s supposed to work.

Wild About Harry

An all-danced, hour-long choreobiography of the life of Leona Helmsley? A piece that went from first production meeting to closing night in six weeks?

To be perfectly honest, if Dan Acquisto weren’t writing the music, I’d’ve taken a pass on this one.

But he did, and I went, and the music is GLORIOUS. Yes, it was pre-recorded. Yes, it was a virtual orchestra. Yes, a virtual orchestra doesn’t sound like the real thing. Yes, writing an hour’s worth of music is a full-time job, and orchestrating it is a full-time job, and recording it perfectly using a virtual orchestra is a full-time job and did we mention that Dan was doing all three? Damn right he was set up to fail. But he didn’t. This is music I’d very much like to hear again.

It’s a show I’d like to see again, too, not because I thought it was so remarkably well done but because I’m not sure I got a lot of it. I don’t know the Helmsley story terribly well, and dance is by nature an abstract art, and not the one with which I am most comfortable. Were these same dances to be dance-breaks amidst songs in a musical, or even following dialogue scenes, I might have had a better sense of their narrative function. But they weren’t, so I can only say that it was an amazing achievement for a dozen dancers, five choreographers, a bookwriter (whose book comprised the scenario for the evening), a director who assembled the piece, and clearly the hardest-working composer I know.

In other words, 13.

It’s like the world’s best high school musical: a cast of 13 very talented 13-year-olds, an amazing band (5 members of which are kids), a funny if somewhat sitcommy book, and a strong poppy score (with some very witty lyrics). On the other hand, does this need to be on Broadway? It’s sort of off-Broadway sized and feeling.

It’s the story of a 13-year-old NYC kid who finds himself, after his parents break up, living in a small town in Indiana. Will Evan make friends with the cool kids in order to populate his Bar Mitzvah, even if it means betraying the “crip and the geek” who are his first real friends in the town? Or will he, along the way, grow up, start “becoming a man,” and learning the meaning of true friendship?

Well, you can write this one yourself – but if you do, I wager your songs won’t be as clever, tuneful, and poppy as Jason Robert Brown’s. (And, yeah, I’m talking to me when I type that.)

90 minutes, no intermission. Actually, 95 minutes; there’s a “bonus track” after the curtain call that I hope they’ll cut. And clearly the one-act format is a new thing; the Playbill listing has it in two acts, but there’s an insert musical-numbers list that they followed last night. A lot of empty seats, but it’s early previews.

You gotta hand it to Jason Robert Brown: like The Last Five Years, with whatever flaws it might have, this is a show that will get done and done and done and done. And get a lot of kids involved in the theatre. And that’s not a bad thing.