A Tale of Two Cities!

Just kidding actually, it is just A Tale of Two Cities, though I don't doubt that everyone concerned would like to catch the same lightning in a bottle that hit Oliver! It is a musical, it is based on the Charles Dickens novel, and it just started previews at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on 45th. I watched it from what is surely the worst seat I have ever sat in (first row, last seat on the right), in a fairly distinguished history of bad rush seats. It's not just because I'm getting older that I don't feel like rushing anymore.

So that with my partial view and wildly craned neck, when I tell you that the show firmly held my attention (I won't say enthralled, but quite reasonably close) for its entire 2h45min, you know it means something. Really good music and really good orchestration, wonderful cast, gorgeous costumes, you know the drill. It's Broadway, after all; what show, especially a risky new one, is going to have an awful cast? Music, on the other hand, with a new show, not always a given. I was impressed by the book; it's really quite well adapted, with a couple of plot holes showing where they made changes and then never fixed continuity. The lyrics are not all memorable. But I think it's going to play.

It's not going to escape the comparisons to Les Miserables. Bad enough that it's set largely in Paris during a revolution (this one the real French Revolution), both feature love triangles centered on curly-haired blondes and an ex-con father figure. Throw in the fact that the show uses Cockney accents (for Englishmen at least, not the Thenardiers) and that the musical numbers heavily rely on big, belting ensembles, and you're pretty much doomed. They might as well have thrown in a rotating stage while they were at it.

But they didn't. Tony Walton instead provided two-story scaffolds that get wheeled on and off and combined in creative ways. No glitches there, and they're not loud when moved, either. They work beautifully for creating small spaces within the Hirschfeld's pretty sizable stage and for scattering the ensemble for the big company numbers, like Darnay's trials. Those trials, by the way, are some of the longer numbers in the show, which often feels like a lot of very short songs pasted together. If it's Les Mis, it's Les Mis without "Castle on a Cloud" and "On My Own" and all those other torch songs. Oh yes, "Stars," "I Dreamed a Dream," oh god, it's all coming back.

Really, though, you want a big torch song when you have a male lead as compelling as James Barbour, whose charisma pretty much shone out from his first entrance being wheeled on in a drunken haze behind a desk. It's a good thing, too, since Sydney Carton, the dissolute antihero, is the heart of the novel and here even more critically so with the sentimental pandering to the audience by having him kiss Lucie and become a favorite uncle of little Lucie, etc. (Look, it's a musical.) I freely confess I am not familiar with his work, but he was very funny when he needed to be, and he has a really beautiful voice. So do the other two of the love triangle, with a former Miss New York, Brandi Burkhardt, making her Broadway debut as Lucie. I have a feeling it will be a long-running one. Go help them out.


ETA: Forgot to add that Barbour is blogging the preview process. That's interesting in and of itself. It did show tonight -- big lighting miscue, several sound level issues, and most sadly for me, a fallen hat right in my face for the last scene.

I hardly knew ye

The Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan is closed. All right, those of you in the know will say; that's hardly news. Well, it's news to me. The shock waves of its closing, liquidation auction, etc. in 2007 did not reach me in my cozy Chicago home. while the aura of its storied past and, especially, that famous photo of about thirty famous authors posing there which I encountered numerous times while working on the Gore Vidal papers at Harvard, kept it alive in my heart. Last August, I tried to take my uncle there on a broiling hot day, and a little sign on the door merely said that it was closed for inventory. Some inventory--like counting the bones on a corpse. Well, I guess I can go to the Strand if I have to.

Record-setting

Not Michael Phelps, but Laurence Fishburne. I went to see him in the Broadway one-man show Thurgood on Wednesday night, and it was possibly the fastest standing ovation I've ever seen. People didn't even wait for him to walk out.

As you might have guessed, the show is about Thurgood Marshall, who narrates as if giving a lecture on his life and career, from childhood to retirement, at Howard University. It was written by George Stevens, Jr., who also wrote the miniseries about Marshall that I saw when I was very young. It's not an exaggeration to say that that miniseries changed my life. It gave words to a lot of issues, not only about race, that I probably couldn't have articulated myself at this point.

Fishburne is completely convincing as Marshall, salty, scrappy, passionate, and powerful, having fun with plenty of hilarious lines mixed in with the gravity of the landmark cases he tried. The staging was fine; the backdrop, an all-white embossed American flag, serves as a transparency screen. Projection switches from photographs relevant to what he's talking about to the Supreme Court building facade and interior, and there are sometimes even relevant sounds played. The only other speaker, however, is Earl Warren reading the decision in Brown v. Board.

I greatly enjoyed it, much more than the frankly rather over-artful Year of Magical Thinking last year, which was also a one-woman show (Vanessa Redgrave) at the same theater and similar staging. If you're in NYC, get thee to see it before it closes, which is very soon.

TDS live!

I went to a taping of the Daily Show today! Long story on how I got the ticket, but I did, and it was a "VIP" ticket, which means that you are on a separate line and get seated first. Of course, this doesn't matter a ton in the long run, because you are put in seats by the interns, and have about as good a chance of getting a front row seat by chance if you're on the long line. The first section is closer to Stewart himself; the others probably have better views. I'd say the audience size is around 400, maybe less.

After waiting on line outside forever (you're supposed to be on line by 4:10pm), you go through security (metal detector; guard digs thoroughly around in your purse) and get penned up in a tiny lobby, which is probably great if the weather's bad. There you wait even longer, till we actually got let into the studio well after 5:30pm. Then, of course, you wait for everyone else to be seated, which takes a while because once the lobby is clear, they have to let people through security and then into the studio. A producer comes out to warm you up, which sounds idiotic but the cheering really does get louder as he exhorts the crowd. Then Jon Stewart came out and took a very few questions before taping started.

These questions ranged from the dumb (What's your favorite diner in NJ?) to the weirdly funny. One woman asked about Berlin's longitude on the wall, which reads W rather than E. She thought maybe it was on purpose. Stewart grumbled, "I hate it when the audience is smarter than me," and then deadpanned, "Yeah, it was on purpose. It's a really funny joke we put in for... cartographers."

Great show today, but you can see that just from watching it on TV (Rob Riggle's last Beijing report, Ben Stiller). What you can't see is that before the check-in with the Colbert Report, Jon and Stephen kind of screw around over the satellite link. Today's conversation was mostly about Stephen's little boy, who is coming back from his first summer camp. It's one of those fancy camps where they can look at photos of the kids online, but no cell phones. They are allowed to write home, though "apparently he hasn't," Colbert observed.

Last highlight: one older lady shouted at the end, after the show, "Just elect Obama!" Stewart looked at her and said, "Ma'am, I don't elect people. How would that work? 'I elect you,'" and mimed a magic wand or knighting ceremony gesture.

Taping was very quick, not quite real-time but almost. We were out before 7pm, after Stewart thanked us sincerely for standing outside for "like eleven hours. Really, we should just beat you with clubs when you come in here. Wouldn't that be great?"

Lots of steel rods

I'm in NYC and enjoying the Olympics on TV. Even if you're quite immune to Olympics fever, the stadium and "water cube" (aquatics center) are more than worth checking out from an architectural point of view. The NY Times had pretty good articles on them here and here. Definitely some of the most interesting Olympic (or other) architecture I've seen in a while. The stadium might be the bigger achievement, but the water cube has my heart. But that might just be because I love swimming.

Not the Hendrix song

Though it does use the Hendrix song, and mentions him by name.

I went to see a play last night by a scrappy startup theater workshop, A-Squared, which is a brand-new Asian American group in Chicago. A welcome addition, though I get copious emails from the East-West theater company all the time. A-Squared's production of The Wind Cries Mary runs through Aug. 24, and I highly recommend it if you're in the area. The A-Squared link will give you info; it's in City Lit Theatre's space in the Edgewater Presbyterian church on Bryn Mawr (a small actual theater on the second floor of the church's massive building). You can get discounted tickets on Goldstar Events, too.

Philip Kan Gotanda is a pretty well-known Asian American playwright whose work I'm totally unfamiliar with, but I'm quite curious about him now. The Wind Cries Mary takes place all in a home in San Francisco or somewhere close (originally San Jose) in 1968 or so, and dramatizes what is happening outside the home: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, the rapidly changing ethnic activism of the time, the Vietnam War, and all the unrest that it brings to campus. Strongwilled, stifled Eiko (a Hedda Gabler type) has just married a bland white academic, Raymond Penberthy, and in comes trouble in the shape of the smarmy Dr. Nakata, a business professor and her father's nemesis, and the trippin', brilliant, erratic Miles Katayama, who could take Raymond's promised teaching post away from him. It has a somewhat predictable plot arc, especially if you've read Hedda Gabler! but some excellent dialogue (and some cringeworthy lines, I'm not going to lie), and great use of music (which might be scripted or original to this production, I couldn't be sure).

This production is really impressive for a small workshop. Pretty solid acting all around, with the standout performances from Joe Yau (who teaches at Second City) as Nakata and Allen Sermonia as Miles. Those are perhaps the flashiest parts, since Nakata's suppressed anger stemming from his internment in WWII and Miles' crazy hippie mannerisms give them a lot to build on. A very nicely dressed little set -- I loved all the late sixties touches. Don't sit in the front row, by the way, because they work pretty close to the edge of the floor. No doubt it'll get smoother as the run goes on, since this was only the second night, but it went quite well, with only a couple of sound hiccups or misspoken words. Definitely worth checking out.

See to believe

I just read Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov, more than partly because Kenneth Branagh will be playing the title role at the Donmar Warehouse this fall (and then directing Jude Law as Hamlet later in the season; I can hear the critics sharpening their knives now, though they mostly respect Branagh's theatrical skills). I... couldn't get into it. Or out of it. A very odd play about a rather despicable central character with an ailing Jewish wife and failing estate he ignores, and an over-earnest doctor and other characters of varying degrees of virtue, trying to make him wake up again. At the end, after his wife dies and a year passes between acts 3 and 4, it's his wedding day as he is going to marry the neighbor's beautiful young daughter. And he apparently can't bring himself to wreck her life when his is so obviously a wreck already, so he shoots himself. Curtain.

I was driven to read the preface of the edition I was reading, and the author suggests the obvious, that Ivanov, for all his awfulness, is the hero, and the doctor, Lvov, the one whose steps to hell are paved with good intentions. Such an anti-hero is perfect for Branagh, who seems drawn to those lately; he had quite a triumph onstage a few years ago as Edmond in David Mamet's play of the same name. Rumor was that he was working up to Macbeth, but financing has fallen through (and given the level of success of As You Like It, I'm not surprised).

Chekhov is one of those 'great' playwrights who I just can't get into on the very talky page. I really need to see something of his staged sometime, or at least rent a video. Never had this problem with Shakespeare, but it does happen sometimes with plays. Pinter's not that easy to read. Some of Stoppard just looks insane--and it's not that it doesn't also sound insane when you see it, but that the staging can draw it together in interesting ways.