152. Review of AFTER MIDNIGHT (November 20, 2013)

152. AFTER MIDNIGHT

 

If your tastes run to theatrical filet mignon, I advise DOMESTICATED at Lincoln Center or the Shakespeare plays in rep at the Belasco, but if what you’re looking for is the indulgence of a hot fudge sundae, with all the works, you could do worse than swinging on over to the Brooks Atkinson for AFTER MIDNIGHT, an hour and a half revue providing uninterrupted musical whipped cream. The show, developed from an earlier work called COTTON CLUB PARADE, seen in the City Center Encores! Series, is getting the full Broadway treatment.

From left: Daniel J. Watts, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Phillip Attmore. Photo: Matthew Murphy.

            AFTER MIDNIGHT has a very simple concept. It intends to recapture the kind of singing and dancing entertainment once associated with Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club, a nightclub whose entertainers were black and its audience white. But the show completely avoids any such historical/racial context, preferring instead to tie all the acts together with some poetic bits and pieces from Langston Hughes delivered by Dulé Hill as a smooth MC who also sings and dances. If you recall him from TV’s “The West Wing,” you’ll be happy to know that he has decent musical theatre skills, although he gets to use them only sporadically here.
 

 

Center: Virgil "Lil'O" Gadson; right: Karine Plantadit. Photo: Matthew Murphy.

 

            The show is little more than a succession of acts, any one of which could easily be moved around from one slot to the other, with the music selected from the songs of Duke Ellington, Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen, Sippie Wallace, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, Cab Calloway, and others, with the majority coming from the great Mr. Ellington. The Jazz at Lincoln Center All Stars, a 16-piece orchestra, sits upstage on a sliding platform while the acts are performed in front of it. An act comes on, finishes, walks off as the lights dim, and another act comes on as the lights come up. Continuity is provided by the Cotton Club aura, not by any narrative thread. So there’s not much to chew on, but there’s plenty of singing and dancing to ingest.

            Headlining the show is “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino, who already has earned Broadway laurels for THE COLOR PURPLE; she has the audience in the palm of her hands whenever she appears, singing  such standards as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Stormy Weather,” “Zaz Zuh Zaz,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Ms. Barrino has great stage presence, knows how to relish a lyric, has a terrific voice, and moves with sensual authority. She’s scheduled to remain in the show for several months, after which she’ll be replaced by k.d. lang (in an all-black revue?), and then Toni Braxton and Babyface, with others to follow down the line.

            Among the featured players making a big impression are Adriane Lenox, singing “Women Be Wise” and “Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night”; dancer Karine Plantadit in several numbers, especially “Black and Tan Fantasy”; and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards doing “The Skrontch,” “Raisin’ the Rent” and “Get Yourself a New Broom.” Two male dancers, the diminutive terpsichorean acrobat Virgil “Lil’o” Gadson, and the unforgettably loose-limbed, double-jointed Julius “iGlide” Chisholm, are sensational, both singly and when paired, while Jared Grimes earns his niche on the roster of great tap dancers. A sizable ensemble of gifted performers helps fill out many of the acts, and gives the audience a rousing send-off in the final number, when the entire company appears.

            But as many others have noted, despite the array of talented singers and dancers, the performers who make the event truly memorable are the members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center All Star, an orchestra of woodwinds, trumpets, trombones, tuba, piano, guitar, bass, and drums that is simply fantastic; when the show has seemingly ended, and the curtain calls are over, their  platform stage glides forward for a mini-concert that lifts you out of the theatre with music in your heart.

            John Lee Beatty’s relatively simple set is a series of false prosceniums to which appropriate elements are added as necessary, and Howell Binkley’s lights do a great job of creating the colorful revue atmosphere. Isabel Toledo’s costumes are knockouts, recreating old Harlem’s nightclub world, from the women’s sequined gowns to the men’s tails and top hats.

            As I’ve said, there’s not much food for thought in AFTER MIDNIGHT, but if music be the food of love, play on.  

           

150. Review of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (November 17, 2013)

150. LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

 

 

The decrepit old VW minivan that plays so prominent a role in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, Second Stage’s new musical version of the 2006 road movie comedy hit, is a perfect metaphor for this clunky jalopy of a show. Despite being the creation of the ultra-talented William Finn (music and lyrics) and James Lapine (book and direction), who collaborated on the hits FALSETTO and THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE, it put-put-putters along on its 800-mile journey from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Redondo Beach, California, which is not easy to do when you’re practically out of gas from the get-go. The show, which originated at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, was sent to the theatrical garage for a thorough overhaul before traveling to the Big Apple; its sluggish two and half hours was stripped down to a zippier hour and 45 minutes, but even at that speed you’ll be asking, “Are we there yet?”

 

From left: Stephanie J. Block, Rory O'Malley, Hannah Nordberg, David Rasche, Will Swenson. Photo: Joan Marcus.

            The conventionally dysfunctional Hoover family, beautifully cast in the movie, includes Richard (Will Swenson), an unemployed dad who hopes to land a book contract; his long-suffering wife, Sheryl (Stephanie J. Block), who tries her best to hold her family weirdoes together; her brother, Frank (Rory O’Malley), a gay Proust scholar whose bandaged wrists reveal his recent attempt to off himself after his lover left him; Dwayne (Logan Rowland), an angry teenager who has refused to talk, preferring to have his nose buried in Nietzsche; Grandpa (David Rasche), a crusty buzzard into drugs and sex; and Olive (Hannah Nordberg), the adorable seven-year-old (Ms. Nordberg is nine) whose dream of entering the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant in Redondo Beach inspires the family to board their broken down minivan to get her there. No one in this troupe of usually reliable performers makes much of an impression; they’re actors, after all, not magicians.

 

 

From left: Stephanie J. Block, Rory O'Malley, Hannah Nordberg, Logan Rowland, David Rasche, Will Swenson. Photo: Joan Marcus.

            Much of the movie occurs in the confined space of the minivan, which is helpful in creating a pressure cooker environment with so much quirkiness lumped together, but on stage we get instead seven yellow kitchen chairs on wheels. Under Mr. Lapine’s direction and Michele Lynch’s choreography (I’m assuming she was partly responsible), the chairs roll around in various, carefully controlled configurations, but the idea soon palls; even with Beowulf Boritt’s projections on several smalls screens at the rear, the sense of traveling through the American southwest, which formed so essential an ingredient in the film, is rarely present. Mr. Boritt’s set itself, when first seen, is actually quite impressive, being an off-white roadmap construction that winds from the stage floor proper up the rear wall and continues to snake on like a highway over the auditorium. An area up center is also capable of being used for smaller scenes, including a rest stop men’s room where two urinals fly in (did someone think this witty?) for a chance encounter between Frank and his recent ex, Josh (Wesley Taylor).

From left: Wesley Taylor, Josh Lamon, Rory O'Malley. Photo: Joan Marcus.

 

            Serving as something of a deus ex navigator is a Siri-like voice that offers occasional commentary. This is not a bad idea, except it makes no sense when the vehicle the family is traveling in is so decrepit its clutch fails and everybody has to get out and push it to the top of a hill so it can roll downhill on its own volition. Would this family, financially strapped as it is, have gone out and gotten a navigation system for its clunker?

            Because of the film’s visual realism and the believable performances of a stellar cast (Alan Arkin won an Academy Award as Grandpa and Abigail Breslin was nominated for one as Olive), it allowed us to accept (more than less) the oddball experiences the family has along the way. On stage, however, nothing seems real, everything seems forced and overdone, and the story’s most outrageous device comes off as ridiculous. I’m referring to the decision of the family, after Grandpa dies en route, to steal his corpse and take it along with them in the van because there’s no time for the formalities involved in dealing with his death. Seeing that corpse, sealed in its white bag, sitting on one of those rolling kitchen chairs as the van moves relentlessly toward its goal, needs a far greater willingness to suspend one’s disbelief than I was capable of providing.

            LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE reaches its apogee in the children’s kiddy pageant, with young girls dolled up in makeup and costume to look far sexier than they should (remember Jon Benet Ramsey?); in fact, we’ve already gotten used to seeing the girls because they pop up (literally) at several junctions as a chorus of prepubescent mean girls to poke fun at the less glamorous Olive’s pretensions. But even this scene is an uphill climb, and the gears never properly mesh. The highlight, of course, is Olive’s big number, a raucous bump and grind routine taught her by her irresponsible Grandpa that no one else in the family appears ever to have seen. Maybe if I went back and saw it again in the movie, I’d find it similarly inane; if you find the kiddy beauty pageant distasteful for its exploitation of children’s sexuality, Olive’s routine may make you squirm. (And is it really necessary to get a cheap laugh by having her react, earlier in the show, to a crisis by saying: "We're fucked"?)   

 

   

 

Hannah Nordberg. Photo: Joan Marcus.

             Of course, the dysfunctional family becomes functional again by the time the show ends, but I’m afraid I can’t say the same for the show. Back to the garage?

149. Review of THE LAST SAINT ON SUGAR HILL (November 17, 2013)

149. THE LAST SAINT ON SUGAR HILL

 

 

 

 

The National Black Theatre.

Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, housed in a handsome building on Fifth Avenue between 125th and 126th Streets in Harlem, is celebrating its 45th year, a record deserving of considerable appreciation. Their performance space, located on the third floor, provides a spacious lobby where there is currently an exhibit of Paul Rocheleau’s lovely photos of the neighborhood, “Harlem: Lost and Found,” taken from a book (text by Michael Henry Adames) of that name. The play on view is Keith Josef Adkins’s THE LAST SAINT ON SUGAR HILL, as Harlem-oriented a work as you could wish for, but which had its world premiere in Chicago. The many references to local places and attitudes give the play and performance a resonance that makes this a perfect venue for it.

            A central issue is gentrification, the conversion, in this case, of a working-class black neighborhood into expensive housing for well-heeled residents, mainly white, and the consequent damage to Harlem's cultural and ethnic sensibilities this entails,. Napoleon (Danny Johnson) is a middle-aged Harlem landlord who has been offered $10 million by a developer interested in purchasing an old building he owns; part of its value comes from Billie Holiday and Billy Strayhorn having lived there. The offer is six times the value of the property and Napoleon is obsessively determined to close the deal, but there’s someone standing in his way, a tenant who must be evicted, even though he has lived there for years and has close ties to Napoleon’s family. He also, it turns out, has legal standing to remain; when he refuses to move, Napoleon has no qualms about using violence, even ordering the more pliable of his two sons, Z (Terrell Wheeler), to murder the squatter.

            While Z is a party boy, preoccupied with women and having a good time, the other son, the bookish Dexter (Jaime Lincoln Smith), who briefly studied medicine in college, is struggling to do good for the community. He runs a sub rosa, middle-of-the-night clinic for the homeless in the basement of the building his father wants to sell. He’s helped by Joseph (Yaegel T. Welch), a friend from Africa in his third year of residency, who encourages Dexter to seek a grant that will allow the clinic to go legit. But Dexter is in the grip of his ruthless father’s power, making it hard to fulfill his personal aspirations. Complicating things is a family secret about a shooting that took place when Dexter was only five. The presence of a homeless man (Chinaza Uche) with whom Dexter starts up a relationship brings to light the truth about what actually happened in that incident.

            The wide but shallow stage area has been filled by designer Harlan Penn with a small room at stage right for the basement clinic, while the remainder of the setting shows an exterior door to Napoleon’s house at right center, and its living room interior occupying most of the remaining space. It’s a relatively naturalistic environment that also allows for street scenes to be played downstage. The lighting, by Marika Kent, and costumes, by Gail Cooper-Hecht, are functional, while Bill Toles’s sound design provides both musical standards (like “Take the A Train”) and effective suspense-generating instrumentals.

THE LAST SAINT ON SUGAR HILL works mainly because of the strong performances of its all-male cast under Seret Scott’s capable direction, but the play strains for credibility. Napoleon, given a dynamic portrayal by Mr. Johnson, is a two-dimensional, profanity-spewing monster; barely a sentence goes by without him saying “nigger” this and “nigger” that. (The audience laughed at this language and, for some reason, even at some dramatic scenes.) His name alone is enough to indicate the playwright's purposes, although Napoleon prefers to think of himself as a latter-day Toussaint Louverture. Dexter, well acted by Jaime Lincoln Smith, seems too smart to be in such thrall to his father’s megalomania and brutality. The homeless man is a too-obvious mechanical device and not a person, and only contributes to making the action seem formulaic. And it's not clear why it takes so long before anyone suggests that offering the squatter some form of monetary compensation might be a better idea than murdering him.

            Mr. Adkins’s dialogue is rich in black street talk and wisecracks and his plot setups provide conflict and action, but there always remains the feeling that we’re watching an artificial construction. Still, this two-act melodrama, which runs about two hours, has several gripping scenes and it lands some telling blows about the dangers of gentrifying a place like Harlem. It also argues well for the importance of community activism. The National Black Theatre is an exemplar of such activism: may it continue for at least another 45 years.     

 

         

148. Review of NOTHING TO HIDE (November 17, 2013)

148. NOTHING TO HIDE

 

 

So you don’t believe in magic? Maybe your mind might be changed (or even blown) if you pay a visit to NOTHING TO HIDE, an astonishing display of playing card prestidigitation running at the Signature Theatre and directed by the ubiquitous Neil Patrick Harris. It arrives here after a successful run at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles. The show stars two average-looking young guys in suits, a moon-faced American named Derek DelGaudio, who also wrote the often hilarious chatter, and Helder Guimarães, an unassuming, bespectacled Portuguese chap who vaguely reminds one of Teller, the silent partner in the great Penn and Teller act. In a little more than an hour, these fellows do a series of truly astonishing tricks that will have you scratching your head for days and trying to describe to others what proved so discombobulating.

 

 

 

 Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio. Photo: Michael Lamont.

            The stage consists of a simple green card table with two chairs placed on a highly polished black floor. The upstage wall is completely covered with a bookcase on which sit well over 700 identical bottles. In each is a deck of cards, inserted in much the same painstaking manner as a ship is inserted into a bottle. This will be explained in one of the remarkable routines these deadpan comedian-illusionists perform, when an audience member is randomly chosen and asked to select a bottle. How do I know her choice was random? Because to find her, a stuffed monkey was tossed in the air backwards over the head of the thrower and, when a spectator caught it, it was tossed by him backwards again, so that the person catching it some rows to the rear couldn't have been a plant. The lady was told to imagine that the routine was a dream and asked to call someone she knows well the next day. She agreed to do so, saying it would be her dad, named Joe, and she promised, as instructed, to tell him of the dream she had. To cut to the chase, after declaring a card by number and suit, she was asked to pick any bottle on the shelves. The bottle was duly retrieved, placed in a plastic bag, and smashed open with a hammer. The cards were removed and fanned open, with one card facing in the opposite direction from the others. That opposing card, of course, was the one she had announced. Moreover, when it was turned around it had a name on its back. Do I need to tell you the name?

 

 

 Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio. Photo: Michael Lamont.

            Or how about when Mr. DelGaudio stood there looking down as Mr. Guimarães raced through the audience, randomly distributing cards to various spectators, perhaps 15 or more. These cards, of course, had been shuffled and reshuffled before our eyes. (I received one and my son, Justin, another.) Card holders were then instructed to shout out their cards on the count of three. On the count, then, there was a single loud shout identifying all the cards, after which Mr. DelGaudio looked up and proceeded to point to each card holder and identify the card he or she had shouted in that single blast of sound.

            Card magic may not be as visually spectacular as making tigers disappear or sawing people in half, but it’s magic nonetheless. If you’re in the mood for a wonderfully engaging hour of it, performed by two offbeat card sharks with wit (some of it using naughty words at the hapless audience's expense) and charm, NOTHING TO HIDE will do the trick.

147. Review of NORWAY PLAYS: DRAMA BEYOND IBSEN (November 16, 2013)

147. NORWAY PLAYS: DRAMA BEYOND IBSEN

 

Apart from Jon Fosse, whose A SUMMER DAY was seen earlier this year starring Karen Allen at the Cherry Lane Theatre, contemporary Norwegian dramatists are virtually unknown in this country. In fact, it seems increasingly rare that any European play in a language other than English is given a noteworthy production here. While all other aspects of contemporary life and culture have been vastly influenced by globalization, the American theatre seems to be going backward. New York no longer experiences regular productions of works by current European dramatists of world stature, as it did in the postwar years when writers like Genet, Anouilh, Ionesco, Giraudoux, Brecht, Dürenmatt, and even the French-writing Beckett filled our stages. In a valiant attempt to offer some relief from this drought of new European drama, Ego Actus and Scandinavian Theatre Company are presenting a pair of one-acts, each by a leading Norwegian dramatist, THE RETURNING, by Fredrik Brattburg, directed and translated by Henning Hegland, and MORE, by Maria Trtyi, directed by Joan Kane. The program is almost defiantly titled NORWAY PLAYS: BEYOND IBSEN, as if to demonstrate that one of the world’s greatest playwrights is ready to be challenged by a generation unwilling to continue languishing in his giant shadow.

            No one expects a program like this, being shown at the Theatre for a New City, to suddenly reveal talent that comes anywhere near to that of the great Norwegian master, but, sad to say, the plays on display here don't seem likely to stir much interest in further work from Ibsen's homeland. Both plays blend surrealism with realism, with one focused on satirizing the platitudes of family life and the other on modern journalism's circus-like emphasis on sensationalism. 

            In THE RETURNING, winner of Norway's Ibsen Award, the black box space has been arranged to suggest a spanking clean home, its furniture covered in off-white, wooly fabric. Even the props, including foodstuffs, are encased in cloth, and Mother (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz) does nothing but knit obsessively, although she admits she doesn’t even know why she’s knitting, since their teenage son, Gustav (Kristoffer Tonning) has been missing for months. Father (Andrew Langton) spends most of his time, when not at work, standing at the window and complaining about how a neighbor family's neglecting to leash their “pooch” allows it to constantly wander off. Before long, Gustav returns, having come back from the dead. Something similar will happen several times in the play. At first, each disappearance and assumed death is followed by a funeral that requests the contribution of mementoes by friends and relatives to be buried in the empty coffin. Gustav always manages to come home, though, dirty and disheveled, having either been buried in an avalanche, drowned in a rowboat, or otherwise demolished in some serious accident whose aftermath he's unable to remember. His returns are accepted as fortunate survivals, at first, and life returns to normal, with Father off to work and Gustav off to school, until the time between Gustav’s deaths and resurrections grows increasingly rapid, even as fast as the speed of light. His presence, in fact, at one point becomes so annoying to his parents that Mother, aided by Father, strangles him to death.  

 

 

Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz and Andrew Langton. Photo: Yann Bean.

 

            Gustav’s existence has become an intrusion on the comfort of his parents; whereas his first deaths may have affected them deeply, his presence increasingly has become an impediment to the empty nesting they’ve come to enjoy. Parental love has its limits, and the dead should learn to stay dead. The piece is reminiscent of the absurdism of 60 years ago, and neither its superficial performances nor its uninspired direction do much to make it especially interesting. Ionesco and his fellow absurdists, regardless of their philosophy, were at least very funny. The laughs here are few and far between, although the tone of the acting seems to be going after them. A serious distraction is the use of the cloth-covered food, which the mother cooks (like a child playing house), and which Kristoffer gnaws at hungrily. Just watching almost made me retch. 

In the much better directed MORE, translated by Nick Norris, the acting area’s black walls and its floor are covered by aqua-colored satin. At stage right is a sliding pond near (or in?) a pool or other body of water. On the left are a couple of chairs and a table, this area being for the interrogation room of a police station.

 

Ioan Ardelean and Alexandra Cohen Spiegler. Photo: Yann Bean.

            We see two teenage girls in shorts, Ida Samuelson (Christina Toth) and Benedikte (Skyler Volpe), playing on and around the slide, their pseudo-poetic dialogue being riddled with violent words, like steal, murder, fever, whore, and pillage. A slow-mo fight (implying that they're under water) evolves as they alternately play at drowning one another, until Ida takes Benedikte’s head and holds it down, killing her. As played, there's nothing ambiguous about this murder; Ida's expression as she drowns her friend conveys pure malice, although her motive is not clear. A pair of clowns, Linn (Alexandra Cohen Spiegler, using a Southern accent) and Tormod (Ioan Ardelean, Romanian accented), appear, wearing red jackets with silver accoutrements, one in checkerboard-patterned pants, the other in stripes. Their faces are white with glitter, rouged cheeks, and red lips. As in CHICAGO, they represent the sensationalistic media, which turns any newsworthy incident, especially juicy crimes of violence, into a show. This pair flits into and out of the ensuing action, commenting with theatricalist mannerisms (including masks and dance routines, choreographed by Shannon Stowe) on what they see, which is the interrogation of Ida by two detectives, Kristian (Chevy Kaeo Martinez) and Rune (Erik Schjerven). Kristian and Rune do the good cop, bad cop routine as they try to make Ida confess and offer a motive, but she says she can’t remember and just wants to go home. The crime is somehow linked by the public to the nation’s immigration policies, but this is never clarified, although the real motive turns out to be the height of innocuousness, and the playwright seeks at the end to say that “we’re all guilty.” Really? Of what? Of encouraging sensationalistic journalism? Is that what killed poor Benedikte?

 

Despite my disappointment with MORE and RETURNING, I'd be interested in seeing more Norwegian drama, and would definitely consider returning when the opportunity arose.

 

 

 

146. Review of THE GREATEST PIRATE STORY (N)EVER TOLD (November 16, 2013)

146. THE GREATEST PIRATE STORY (N)EVER TOLD

 

 

Shiver me timbers, mateys! A band of rascally pirates are walking the scurvy planks of the Snapple Theatre Center, where they’re trying hard to avoid a trip to Davey Jones’s locker. It’s a right smart band these knaves are, and they’re having a grand old time telling the tale of how a witch rises up and makes them act out a story that’s their only chance of returning safely home. But the story they have to enact, written on a scroll, has had its key words blacked out by the ink of a squid, so the land lubbers in the audience have to supply the missing words to fill out this tale of adventure on the high seas; no, my lads and lassies, this arrr-en’t no CAPTAIN PHILLIPS. Even the name of the captain of the Goode Shippe Dinglehop needs to be supplied at each performance; at the one I sailed on, we had a Capt. Bloomberg, while a saint mentioned in the tale was Saint Fluffy.

 

 From left: David Anthony, Rebeca Diaz, Christopher Leidenfrost, Kevin Maphis, Risa Petrone. Photo: Lars Lunde.

  

From left: David Anthony, Kevin Maphus, Risa Petrone, Rebeca Diaz.

            Christopher Leidenfrost has written this part-improvised, part-scripted adventure, a surprisingly charming musical tale of life on the high seas, in which the ensemble of five (Mr. Leidenfrost, David Anthony, Rebeca Diaz, Risa Petrone, and Kevin Maphis) gives no quarter when composing rhyming lyrics on the spot, while also engaging in multiple role playing, sword fighting, hearty kissing of buxom wenches, and all the other things expected of deck-swabbing buccaneers. Under the captaincy of director Rick Leidenfrost-Wilson, Mr. Leidenfrost’s husband, the show has a sprightly, rum-soaked humor that makes you want to growl “Arrr!”

 

 

David Anthony. Photo: Lars Lunde.

 

            Played against Katy Roberts’s simple but effective set, mainly a backdrop of a ship’s rope netting, with a hanging story scroll for all to see, the one-hour play moves swiftly, until all is happily resolved. Kids get a chance to participate, but the material is aimed as much at their parents as at the young’uns, and much of the clever humor surely flies well above the head of the average child.
 

David Anthony, Rebeca Diaz, Kevin Maphis. Photo: Lars Lunde.

            Scott McNeal’s pirate costumes look precisely right (although no one wears an eye patch), Christopher Weston’s lights create the feel of life at sea, and everything holds together without a touch of mal de mer. The family-oriented performances are on Saturday mornings, but there’s an adult version done on Thursday nights by the same crew of rogue, and I can imagine how these appealing scoundrels can convert this booty into something down and dirty. So batten down the hatches, blow the man down, and yo ho ho, it’s a pirate’s life for me and you.

 

         Christopher Leidenfrost. Photo: Lars Lunde   

        Rebeca Diaz. Photo: Lars Lunde.

145. Review of BAYSIDE! THE MUSICAL! (November 15, 2013)

145. BAYSIDE! THE MUSICAL!

 

 

Full disclosure:  I never watched a single episode of the Saturday morning kids' TV series “Saved by the Bell” (1989-1993), which seems to have been popular enough to have inspired this lively parody, BAYSIDE! THE MUSICAL!, playing on St. Marks Place at the venerable Theatre 80. Two of the TV show’s young actors who eventually went on to some degree of later fame are Elizabeth Berkley and Mario Lopez. “Saved by the Bell” was a comedy show about a small cadre of colorful students, their principal, and the kinds of conventional problems, comically exaggerated, that teenagers face, with the occasional inclusion of serious social issues. My granddaughter, Briar, had occasionally watched the TV series, so she went along as my guide, even going so far as to view the entire series again in preparation for seeing it spoofed.  

 

 

 

From left: April Kidwell, John Duff, Maribeth Theroux, Sam Harvey, Shamira Clark. Photo: Bayside! The Musical!

            The show’s program also pokes fun at the show, with faux ads, including one for the Max, the students’ hangout restaurant (there’s an offer of a free burger and fries that expires 5/22/93), and hilarious  actor bios.  Despite my not picking up on all this printed humor, I couldn’t help chuckling at some of it. They could have called it BAYSIDE! THE PROGRAM! although the playbill’s actual name, PLAYSIDE, is probably good enough.

            Watching a parody of a beloved show as part of an audience laughing uproariously at every in-joke reminded me of going to see Yiddish theatre with my mother when I was a kid. Enough was spoken in English so I could follow the plot and even laugh now and then, but when the biggest punch lines came, they were always in Yiddish, and I had to ask my mother for a translation. Similarly, I didn’t get a lot of the references in BAYSIDE!, but Briar was there to fill me in. For the first act, at any rate. For some reason, the producers decided to expand what originally had been done Off-Off Broadway as an 80-minute show into one running nearly two hours; despite a lot of additional laughs, it eventually grows heavy-handed, like an SNL skit that starts off brilliantly but overstays its welcome. Once the parody has made its point, there’s no need to keep hammering at it.

            Fans of the TV show, even semi-fans, like Briar, will have a great time seeing their favorite characters taken to extremes, with actors who, in some cases, are very reminiscent of the ones they’re making fun of. The audience is actually encouraged to whoop with enthusiasm for the upbeat moments and moan for the sad parts. This, too, is in the spirit of “Saved by the Bell,” where (if you check it out on YouTube) the audience screams noisily at each plot turn.

The entire ensemble offers marvelously spirited burlesques of the originals. Any hint of some personal characteristic that can be exploited for yucks is fair game to writer-directors, Bob and Tobly McSmith; thus Slater (John Duff), the class jock played on TV by Mario Lopez, who dresses most of the time in a spandex wrestling uniform, turns out to be gay, which the show milks for all its worth.

Jessie, the role created by Elizabeth Berkley (of later SHOWGIRLS notoriety), is shown as a caffeine-addict with a gigantic pill-popping jones. The side-splitting comedienne who plays Jessie is April Kidwell, a dead ringer for Ms. Berkley; in a cast of highly proficient clowns, she has the comedy chops that make her the show’s real highlight. It’s rare to see such an attractive comedienne go as overboard for laughs as the uninhibited Ms. Kidwell; at one point, she does an interpretive dance that, while it goes on too long, had me in stitches. Whenever she’s on stage, she lights up the theatre, and, like everyone else in the show, her commitment to the nonstop nuttiness never lets up for a second. (Ms. Kidwell also starred in the company's recent movie parody, SHOWGIRLS! THE MUSICAL!, where she also played the Elizabeth Berkley role.)

 

 

April Kidwell.

According to Briar, everyone in the cast is a decent, if cartoonish replication of the characters they’re playing (except for one I’ll keep to myself). When I afterward checked out moments from the TV series for myself I realized everyone on it was already a cartoon; BAYSIDE! is essentially a cartoon of a cartoon.

There's no need to go over the plot details, which are based on multiple ways the students come up with to raise $500 to save the Max from closing down; each new effort involves musical numbers that cash in on the comic possibilities the various schemes suggest. The language is often rough and raunchy, sexual references and behavior abound, the singing and dancing (choreography by Jason Wise) are bright and brassy, Bryan Hartlett’s set is cheap and cheesy, and Marcus Desion’s costumes capture that 90's sitcom look.

You don’t have to have been a fan of the TV show to enjoy BAYSIDE! THE MUSICAL!, but, judging from Briar’s reaction, it certainly will help.