Weekly Margin 2024, W4: Pride House, Harmony, Our Class, Once Upon a Mattress, Dear England

1/24/24: Pride House

What: TOSOS presents Chris Weikels' new play, about Beatrice Farrar's collection of friends at Fire Island during the summer of 1938, right before a hurricane hits.

And? full review here.

Jake Mendes, Patrick Porter, Jamie Heinlein, Alex Herrera, Aaron Kaplan,
and Tom Souhrada as Stephen, Thomas Farrar, Beatrice Farrar, Brad, John
Mosher, and Arthur Brill. Photo by Richard Rivera.

1/25/24: Harmony

What: The Broadway transfer of Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman's musical about real life music group The Comedian Harmonists, performing amid the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin.

And? It's better than it was downtown. They trimmed a lot of the excess (though I'm astonished Chip Zien let them cut his Marlene drag number). It's still not a great show, but it's a better show than it was. And like Pride House, it's attempting to bring new attention to a piece of culture that larger society tried to erase from memory. I do wish Zien had more colors in his paint box. Every time he wants to emphasize something or intensify the emotion, he yells/belts. Quiet intensity is also potent, when used. It is nice to see the six young men who originated the roles of the singing troupe downtown return with the show to make their Broadway debuts (except Zal Owen, who has one prior Bway credit), and Sierra Boggess and Julie Benko are great in somewhat thankless parts. 

And, well. I wish some of the subject matter didn't feel so bitterly current as it does, but here we are.

Blake Roman, Steven Telsey, Zal Owen, Danny Kornfeld, Eric Peters, and
Sean Bell as Chopin, Lesh, Harry, Young Rabbi, Erich, and Bobby.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes/Adam Riemer.

Margin Notes: Pride House

Pride House

Seen on: Wednesday, 1/24/24.

Gail Dennison, Jamie Heinlein, Calvin Knegten, and Raquel
Sciacca as Irene Gerard, Beatrice Farrar, Hugo Franc, and
Maxine Franc. Photo by Richard Rivera.

Plot and Background

The Other Side of Silence presents a world premiere of Chris Weikel's new play about Beatrice Farrar and her friends in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, right before the 1938 hurricane that devastated the vacation homes there and led to a fundamental shift in the demographic of vacationers on the island. Beatrice Farrar, her cottage Pride House, and her friends are among the barely-remembered but worth-retrieving pockets of Queer history, and nearly all the characters in this play are real people who were there in her house during the storm.

What I Knew Beforehand

Very nearly nothing, except that it took place on Fire Island before a hurricane.

Thoughts:

The walls of Pride House--so named for Beatrice Farrar's love of Jane Austen, but also granting the audience a knowing nod toward the future of Cherry Grove's population--are painted as a mural: a beautiful endless horizon of a gentle wave cresting toward a sandy shore, with benign puffs of white cloud overhead. They match the back wall of Evan Frank's evocative and poetic scenic design, the "actual" outdoors, as if there is no barrier between the island paradise outside and the haven inside. The glassless windows perched on slender frames--no actual protection from the outside--reinforce this impression. When the first act closes amid the rising storm, the sounds of a tree falling and window glass shattering pierce the air. But the glass was never there. The protection was never there, and we have been always outside and exposed, waiting for a storm to rip everything away.

Weekly Margin 2024, W3: The Connector

1/16/23: The Connector

What: MCC presents a new Jason Robert Brown musical with book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, about a monthly news journal with a fifty year legacy of accurate and compelling stories. When a young journalist who idolizes the magazine joins and quickly advances to stardom, questions of truth, integrity, and long-held biases come under focus.

And? It's still in previews, so I want to grain-of-salt this, but at the performance I saw the first third of the musical felt like the cast was encountering Sherman's script for the first time: stiff, stilted pauses and a complete lack of momentum to every book scene (the script itself failed to sparkle here as well). The end third is much stronger: tightly done, with tension and stakes. So hopefully the first third can catch up to this. Right now Sherman's script under Daisy Prince's direction feels unfocused. It's unclear who our main character is, and it's ultimately unclear why Dobson does what he does.

Still, there are things worth our time here. Jason Robert Brown has a particular knack for piercing emotional storytelling over the course of a song, and he gives some beautiful gifts to the cast in that way. The song where Dobson works his way through to find the perfect structure of an opening sentence is a beautiful study of what it is to be a writer. And the editor's admonishment, "Truth isn't just what you say it is," feels particularly relevant in this era of misinformation. And the show hits on the question of which is the more damaging block to marginalized voices being heard: the casually dismissive cruelty, or the genial myopia and latent misogyny and racism? (answer: both. it's both.)

Also, and this is for my sister: there's an entire song about Scrabble.

Weekly Margin 2024, W2: Back To The Future: The Musical, Appropriate

1/10/23: Back To the Future: The Musical

What: Exactly what it says on the tin.

And? It's like an AI tried to write a musical and then gave up. Most of the songs are incoherent (not only from an "I can't understand the lyrics because they're drowned out by the orchestra" perspective but also from an "Is this a song? Is this the same song? Did the last song end or do they not end until we hit a choreographic button? What is this? Why does Marty keep repeating the last sentence spoken to him in an angsty belt? Does someone think that's a song hook? Why are we here?" perspective). I don't think there are any actual characters up on stage. There are so many moments that have the shape of jokes without actually being jokes (or being, you know, funny). The jokes that are there are mostly from the original screenplay, and the production somehow manages to either misunderstand them or overplay them. Some of the car stuff is cool. The dancing is good. The act one finale song, "Something About That Boy," is the only good new song in the whole score: it's competent pastiche, it actually functions like a song, and more importantly it functions like a musical theater song: story moves forward, we've got ironic juxtaposition, humor. It didn't feel like an act one finale, but I guess we can't have everything. But major MAJOR snaps to Biff understudy Marc Heitzman, who stepped into the role in the middle of act one, with no chance for a fight call, and dove into the complicated dance and fight choreo of the act one finale. That's some good Broadway.

Roger Bart, Casey Likes, and the Delorean as Doc Brown, Marty McFly,
and the Delorean. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

1/11/23: Appropriate

What: 2nd Stage presents playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's much-anticipated Broadway debut. Appropriate had its first New York run in 2014 at Signature with a different cast and production team. Three adult siblings and their families gather at their recently deceased father's decrepit Arkansas plantation to manage the estate sale and unearth some alarming relics, as well as old grudges.

And? A consummate production. The structure and unfolding ugly truths are perfectly built, the dialog is sharp and bitter, the cast is expertly directed by Lila Neugebauer, and the sound design by Bray Poor and Will Pickens is especially powerful and foreboding. And the audience is led on a delicate tightrope of empathizing with a character before getting knocked to the nets below, on the reminder that everyone here is one kind of monster or another.

Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin, Corey
Stoll, and Sarah Paulson as Franz, River, Rachael, Cassidy, Bo, and Toni.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Weekly Margin 2024, W1: Mind Mangler, Fat Ham

1/05/23: Mind Mangler

What: From the folk behind The Play That Goes Wrong (Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields), a two-hander (starring Lewis and Sayer), about a mentalist's show going wrong.

And? Delightful. A nice start to the new year.

Streaming Theater Related Content I Watched

• Wilma Theater's stream of their stage production of Fat Ham.