Theatre

A

A thoroughly engaging take on a beautifully tone-balanced play featuring absolutely breathtaking scenic design: the Hudson Valley.

Hoo-rah!

• An outdoor theater experience unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. When I think ‘traditional Shakespeare’, yes I think outdoors and yes I think minimalist set design, but I also tend to think intimate (some would say cramped) quarters. This was quite the opposite. Where else can you have characters make their entrances from hundreds of feet away?? (besides the Park Avenue Armory of course)
• I really loved the play! I’m glad that I had forgotten the arc of it since the last time I saw it at Syracuse (2007 I think?). The tragic then comic nature of the different acts counterpoint each other so well, and yet because it fits so well with the story there’s no sense of disconnect. After all, why would the people of Bohemia be sad (especially sixteen years later) just because the people of Sicilia are? And I have to admit, that whole ‘statue’ thing at the end? I genuinely didn’t catch on to what was happening until about thirty seconds before the reveal.
• Generally very strong acting. A wonderful mix of comic and tragic performances, and the actors who were called upon to do both thoroughly pulled it off.
• I followed the narrative far better than in some of Shakespeare’s other shows, and that’s just as much a function of the acting as the writing. I can always tell when someone performing Shakespeare has no idea what they’re saying.
• I have to call out Mark Bedard as Autolycus as my favorite performance of the night. From his singing to his comic timing (verbal and physical) I quickly learned to be prepared for something enormously entertaining any time I saw him entering the stage.
• Having almost no set design but doing a lot with the lighting worked wonders for providing a sense of changes in scene, focus, or tone. A particularly beautiful effect was had at the end of the show when everyone exits. The stage goes dark, the outside lights come up, and then we have a final moment with a departed character.
• Music! Fantastically catchy music throughout the second act. Can’t praise it enough. Very much contributed to the decidedly more-lighthearted tone of the back half of the show.
• Sometimes a show affects me on an even deeper level than I can consciously comprehend. When the show ended, I was weeping, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Blech…

• More than once, potent lines that could have been played with a quiet power but simply shout-spoken, which always feels like the lazy way to handle Shakespeare’s more vitriolic lines.
• Spoiler territory, though come on, this is Shakespeare: it seems like such a missed opportunity (acting and writing) to have the reunion of the King of Sicilia with his daughter happen offstage. My wife suggested maybe that’s to give the reunion between the king and his wife more potency, but hey, who says you can’t question the Bard’s choices here and there?
• What the heck was Hermione doing for sixteen years?? Hiding up in the rafters of the church pulling a Tom Sawyer and watching her husband grieve every freakin’ day? Yikes.

Tales from before and after show:

I live here now! It’s amazing to think this theater, this glorious outdoor theater with one of the greatest views I’ve ever seen is only ten minutes away nestled in the beautiful Boscobel gardens. Methinks that we’ll be buying season tickets in the future. During the July 4th parade in Cold Spring, there were a bunch of preteen girls advertising The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and thus I assumed it was a pretty amateur endeavor. A couple weeks ago, I was very excited to hear my boss say he ventured all the way from the city to the show and that he loved it. As such, even if I didn’t live so close, it still would have been worth the trip.

A-

Grand opera at its most intimate, OnSite Opera’s Barber of Seville is a stunningly fresh take on an often-stale art form.

Hoo-rah!

• Opera in a beautiful NYC mansion courtyard and library. Epic.
• Fantastic acting well-suited to these levels of intimacy. Subtle changes in facial expression sold the character beats just as well as the operatic notes. Also very cool to have opera singers come right up to the audience and direct lines at them/touch them/etc.
• Gorgeous singing. With that proximity to the performers, I felt their voices resonating in my very soul.
• Very cool lighting effects in the library where all the objects and people were able to swell with color in a way unlike anything I’ve seen in a theater.
• Andrew Wilkowske as Figaro was a fantastic guitar player and endlessly charismatic.

Blech…

• While entirely an act of god, it was very hot both in the courtyard and in the library. Thankfully the lights were LED which meant they didn’t add any heat to the room. And bonus points to OSO for giving us all water before the show.
• Uncomfortable seats, but even that can be argued as a positive because it kept everyone present in the moment.
• On the writing side: while I certainly appreciate the universality of this farce, I found Figaro to be far and away the most interesting character (and most hilarious), so his absence was very much felt during the second half of the show.

Tales from before and after show:

Full disclosure: I was given two comp tickets to this show through one of the producers, whom I met recently at the Opera America conference in Washington DC. OnSite Opera is interested in pursuing new technologies, so naturally my passion for all things theater and all things technology (particularly virtual reality) meant that we hit it off. There’s a good chance I’ll take part in one of their future productions, which is thrilling!

Also, I was supposed to go with my wife, but she had to work. Instead I ended up going with a friend of a friend who’s studying acting at The New School. She grew up in Romania and enjoyed trying to translate the Italian (which is ever-so-slightly similar). Also interesting coincidence: the opera is a partnership with the New School’s music department, which is soon to merge with the acting department to create the School of Performing Arts.

A

 The most fun I’ve had in the theater in a long time. Period.

Hoo-rah!

• Straightforward, snappy, hour-long storyline expertly executed with a game-for-anything cast and crew.
• Projections were a well-incorporated absolute joy to look at. A perfect blend of 8-bit video games with a retro-comic book overlay.
• Not only were the projections a blast to look at, but they had such fine-details as becoming a genuine audience-interactive game at one point, as well as featuring moving mouths for the 8-bit versions of the characters that were talking in real life.
• Music was catchy, well-sung, and another wonderfully-retro device. I never thought I’d end up with a chorus line stuck in my head with the lyrics ‘The nearest chemo center in a fifty-mile radius!’
• Amazingly, the very well-established through-line of ‘modify a plant virus to fight cancer cells’ is based on real science being put out by Nicole F. Steinmetz, Ph D.
• The Nanoman as a character was gloriously poorly-acted, and I was rooting for him hard to work up the courage to take on the evil macro-phages. I also loved his costume.

Blech…

• Dr. X’s German accent, while genuinely hilarious, was inconsistent enough to be distracting at times.
• Venue was not ideal– a bar doesn’t real feel like a conference center, and because the production is so short and so sharp, it’s better if drink orders are not being taken and distracting from the show.

Tales from Backstage:

I was here on invitation from someone I met when I gave my VR lecture at the Microsoft building. After establishing that we both loved theater but often didn’t have anyone to go with, we became theater buddies! Her friend from San Francisco, Danielle was flown in to do the show.

Most every aspect of the production was created (and even performed) by Krista Knight and Barry Brinegar, a writing partnership calling themselves Knight and Brinegar. I will be following their work with interest for a very long time.

I was there on opening night and found Dr. X’s limp and need for a cane to be entirely convincing. Turns out Krista had fallen down in the subway that morning and actually needed the cane!

B+

Seeing Neil LaBute shows has become a pseudo-regular thing for me, not so much because I know that I’ll enjoy it, but because I know I’ll have a strong opinion about it.

Hoo-rah!

• An all-and-all good time at the theater.
• Strong character and context reveals that reframe the story. Without spoiling anything, think ‘Superbad’ meets ‘Cruel Intentions’
• A short play!
• With only two characters and one set, my attention was held.
• Scintillating stage debut by Amanda Seyfried who manages to subvert the ‘girlfriend prize’ archetype with some strongly-written monologues that she nails.
• Refreshingly upbeat ending. ‘Making a fuss’ has never been quite that fun and romantic without feeling overly-cheesy.

Blech…

• Most generic title ever. Every time I try to tell someone the name of the play I have to look it up again. It’s up there with ‘The Shape of Things’ and ‘This is How It Goes’ for totally bland, could-be-about-anything titles.
• 80 minutes was about 50 minutes too long. If there is an 80-minute version of this story, it’s one that doesn’t keep hitting the same beats over and over and actually delves more into the deeper implications of this relationship. But really, it should be a one act.
• The lighting design was confusing– the window curtains were lit to look just like daylight was hitting them, but then when they’re pulled back we see nothing but blackness. I thought ‘fine, it’s before sunrise’, but then I would have expected a rising sun or blue-ing sky as the play progressed, but no, nothing. Also the apartment hall light was off. I’ve never been in an apartment where the hall light was ever off.
• Not a huge fan of the character Thomas Sadoski was playing, or the performance. I think we were supposed to find him endearingly indecisive, but he just came off as obnoxious and obstinate. Which now that I think about it, seems to be a common trend for male leads in LaBute plays (I’m looking at you, male lead in ‘Fat Pig’). Also, here’s the characterization of him: a muscle-ripped Star Wars nerd who can’t articulate any of his thoughts but is a super man slut dating multiple women at a time. What? Does that occur in nature?
• While I did enjoy the reveals, I wish more seeds had been planted for them earlier in the show. It should always be theoretically possible for an audience to figure these things out before they’re told to us, but without any clues, that’s impossible.
• There’s a lot of small changes to dialogue and story progression that I felt would make the play stronger, but hey, now I’m inspired to write my own take on the material. I do wonder though how many refinement passes a Neil LaBute play tends to receive, because while I generally like the ideas in them, they always seem to have a slapdash quality to them.

Tales from before the show…

Other Neil LaBute shows I’ve seen: Fat Pig, The Mercy Seat, The Break of Noon, and Reasons to be Happy (I know he doesn’t capitalize it but screw that). I didn’t love any of them, but they all provoked a strong reaction from me, and even a negative reaction is better than a ‘meh’ one. If nothing else, I find that if I hate something about his shows, it causes me to think critically about why exactly I hated it and then I learn something about myself. Hooray!

I decided to go to this show because I had a 10:30 flight out of JFK and wanted to see a play or movie after work. I felt confident this would be short enough to get out of there in time. An hour before the show I was able to get a ’30-under-30′ ticket, saving me significant cash vs. the 90+ dollar standard ticket price. I hung out in the 2econd stage cafe and a woman struck up a conversation with me. We talked about theater shows in NY vs. London, our respective professions, and some of the VR work I’m doing. She also invests in theater shows. That was cool, because then I was able to bring up her arts interest to the folks at the New Moran during my business meeting the next day in Burlington. Also, Neil LaBute was at the show (oh right, opening night!) and I pointed him out to the woman I was speaking with. Without missing a beat she went to introduce herself. I admire that kind of forthrightness– I should feel more comfortable saying hi by now.

Oh yeah, and the timing of the play was perfect– I arrived at my gate in JFK right as boarding began!

B

At the Opera America conference I was fortunate enough to be invited to a dress rehearsal of Cinderella at the Kennedy Performing Arts Center. It was one of the more hilarious operas I’ve ever seen, but it should have been half the length.

Hoo-rah!

• Nice twist on the traditional Cinderella storyline I’m familiar with, and by ‘twist’ I mean I think this was written before Disney, and even before the Grimm’s fairytale version. Here it’s an evil stepfather instead of stepmother, a merlin-esque wizard instead of a fairy godmother, and a cool extra subplot with the prince swapping places with his valet. Also no glass slipper or Cinderella running away.
• The rats were hilarious.
• The valet/prince switcheroo was hilarious.
• In fact, all the actors had great comic timing and had fantastic physicality in their performances.
• Solid set design.
• The plotline really kicked into gear when we got to the castle.
• Pretty music. One of the songs that worked as a kind of round has been stuck in my head for days (and I don’t really mind!)

Blech…

• It took a long time for the show to get going. I was struggling to stay awake for a lot of act 1.
• Even when things did take off, there were scenes that would reach their ‘point’ 2 minutes in, but then there’d be another 10 minutes of vamping on the emotions that were already established. There were times when we were shown a line of supertitles (the opera is in Italian), then would not see the next line for over a minute.
• That’s really it. Just edit it down!