87. Review of FOUND (October 16, 2014)

87. FOUND

 

 

As I walked to the subway from the Linda Gross Theater, home to the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of the new musical FOUND, I had to restrain myself from picking up the stray pieces of paper spilling from the trash cans along Eighth Avenue. After all, I’d just seen a show whose raison d’être is the jottings on such detritus, be they napkins, postcards, notebook pages, Post-its, envelopes, letterheads, or even barf bags—that is, anything onto which pen, pencil, crayon, magic marker, lipstick, typewriter, computer printer, or whatever can leave a written impression.

FOUND is based on the experiences of Davy Rothbart, a Chicagoan who, in 2001, founded (no pun intended) a magazine called Found devoted to publishing just such found trash. These experiences have been turned by book writers Hunter Bell and Lee Overtree (who also directed, wonderfully)—with additional material provided by Story Pirates—into a semibiographical tale  about the magazine’s birth and growing pains, as well Davy’s personal dilemmas. Someone else will have to explain how much is truth, how much fiction.

From left: Andrew Call, Nick Blaemire. Photo: Kevin Thomas Garcia.

It all starts on a day during which Davy (Nick Blaemire, appealing) not only is fired from his job at an alternative newspaper but is also mugged and can’t start his car; then, thinking the paper on his windshield is a ticket, he sees that it’s actually a mistakenly placed note to and from total strangers:

MARIO, I FUCKING HATE YOU,

YOU SAID YOU HAD TO WORK—

THEN WHY’S YOUR CAR HERE AT HER PLACE?

YOU’RE A FUCKING LIAR I HATE YOU

I FUCKING HATE YOU. AMBER

PS PAGE ME LATER

 

Davy, unable to find a job, finds more discarded notes and he and his friends/roommates, Mikey D (Daniel Everidge, so good in FALLING, impressive), a bearish, bearded, gay guy, and Denise (Barrett Wilbert Weed, recently of HEATHERS: THE MUSICAL, memorable), a hip bartender, decide to self-publish a magazine devoted to their growing trove. Davy’s mantra is to find a job he loves doing, with people he loves, so the magazine fills a big hole in his heart and psyche, and provides a theme—hackneyed as it is—for all other unconventional strivers. Davy also discovers that reading other people’s most intimate thoughts makes him feel less alone in the world.

 

From left: Daniel Everidge, Andrew Call, Nick Blaemire, Orville Mendoza. Photo: Kevin Thomas Garcia.

A public reading of their discarded literary remains at Denise’s bar leads to the unlikely meeting between Davy and Kate (Betsy Morgan, spot on), an attractive wannabe TV producer who just happens to have been the writer of one of the notes Davy reads; the note, about her wish to bequeath her skull to a boy she loves, is something he found in a thrift shop book. Kate placed it there when she was in the seventh grade. (Hey, this is musical comedy, not Arthur Miller.)

 

From left: Daniel Everidge, Nick Blaemire, Betsy Morgan, Barrett Wilbert Weed. Photo: Kevin Thomas Garcia.

The readings grow into a tour organized by Denise, and soon there are radio interviews and, through the ambitious Kate’s machinations, a shot at a reality TV series—a la “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” But, as in so many plays, movies, and books about friends creating a mutual enterprise, disagreements arise, the air is fouled, and disappointment follows. Not to worry, things in musical comedy always work out for the best. As per the dramatic situations textbook, the play follows the formula of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl (or at least seems likely to), with the conventional inclusion of a femme fatale to make it even more familiar. Again, this is comfort theatre, not DEATH OF A SALESMAN.

 

The plot’s predictability, however, isn’t as important as the exceedingly clever way in which everything has been stitched together to create an evening’s divertissement. As Davy, Denise, Mickey D, and Kate move through their tale of triumph, betrayal, idealism, disenchantment, and redemption the many characters they encounter are splendidly incarnated by a perfectly coordinated ensemble of actor-singer-dancers in the versatile persons of Christina Anthony, Andrew Call, Orville Mendoza, Molly Pope, Danny Pudi, and Sandy Rustin.

 

The notes that form the show’s premise become subtextual messages that different members of the ensemble introduce by constantly popping in from the wings to speak them as the original scraps are projected just as they looked when discovered—bad spelling, garbled handwriting, quirky typography, and soiled paper notwitstanding. Notes that are often non sequiturs take on specific meanings when placed in the proper dramatic context; some are funny, some mildly amusing, and others little more than filler. Without the brilliantly imaginative, award-worthy projections of Darrel Maloney, which are often as animated as the performers, this show would lose half its charm.  

 

Not all the notes are used as commentaries on the action, by the way; one, mentioning a fifth-grade class’s misbehavior at a school performance of “Johnny Tremain,” about the Revolutionary War, is used as an excuse for a farcical reimagining of what that misbehavior might have been. A cassette tape with each number having something to do with “booties” gives rise to a funny, rap-influenced sequence.

 

Mr. Overtree’s seamlessly inventive and briskly-paced staging (not to mention the witty interpretations of the notes he elicits from the ensemble), combined with Monica Bill Barnes’s engaging and inventive choreography, make FOUND a constant pleasure to watch; still, in two acts running two hours and 15 minutes, the show stretches its thin material to the point of breaking.

 

Fortunately, the music and original lyrics by Eli Bolin are consistently listenable and likable, ranging in style through all the pop genres, from country to rock to hip-hop to standard ballad. Around half the 28 songs’ lyrics are original, the others taken directly from their sources. Mr. Bolin succeeds in taking words never meant to be sung and adding music to them in a way that makes them remarkably effective.

 

David Korins’s neutral set—a curving wall covered in scraps of paper, and separated into discrete sections for entrances and exits—provides the needed flexibility for an episodic story that ranges freely from locale to locale. Chairs and tables are quickly brought on and off as needed; the dark wooden floor has small pits—two at either side—for the musicians. Justin Townsend's terrific lighting marks him as someone to watch. 

 

Like all those notes it memorializes, it may not be perfect, but many will be glad they found FOUND.