A work unfinishing: 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.

1/26/24: Our Class

What: BAM presents Norman Allen's adaptation of Tadeusz Słobodzianek's play, based on a true story, about a class of ten people, some Jewish, some Catholic, leading up to a 1941 pogrom in a small village in Poland. The play spans eighty years, tracking the characters from their youth to the early 21st century deaths of those who survived.

And? Recently a group of my friends was talking about some kind of heist story, either a game or a movie, I forget. Someone asked what is being heisted and the reply was "Nazi gold." Everyone was okay with that, because fuck the Nazis, steal their stuff. I wanted to say--but I bit my tongue--there's no such thing as Nazi gold. The Nazis weren't magically dripping in wealth. They froze Jewish bank accounts. They seized Jewish property, art, businesses, jewelry. They ripped gold teeth out of corpses. There is no Nazi gold. You call it Nazi gold so you can take it from the people who stole it and not have to think about who they stole it from. So you don't have to give it back. (citation: surviving Jews spending decades trying to reclaim literally any of their property, including valuable works of art, in the aftermath)

Watching Our Class recalled this conversation to me, as--in the wake of a pogrom in which all Jewish citizens of a village are locked in a barn and burned to death, save one woman who was hidden in a barn then hurriedly converted and married to a Catholic man--a pile of wedding gifts is deposited around the newlyweds, menorahs and silver trays and linens. Every last piece of it stolen from the homes of dead Jews.

What makes it all uglier, of course, is the Nazis have nothing to do with it. This pogrom is conducted by the Poles themselves, blaming the Jews for their misfortunes: raping them, burning them alive, and then moving into their homes without a wince of guilt. In a class of ten friends who grew up together, that classmate loyalty, that ride-or-die mentality, applies only if it's between fellow non-Jews. Three of the Catholics from that class beat Jakub to death, rape Dora, and then set the barn on fire.

This is a hard play to watch. When Abram, safely in New York, hears of the pogrom years later, he begins to list all his relatives who are now suddenly dead. It's a devastatingly long list. And he's the only one left who can name them. It's hard, and it's horrifying. We talk about the Holocaust because it was the largest network of organized slaughter and inhuman torture, and the biggest devastation to the Jewish global population. We talk about the Holocaust because its end goal was the total extermination of the Jews. But what we don't talk about enough is, it was merely the biggest version of a hatred and an extermination and expulsion that has been perpetrated on Jews repeatedly and viciously, throughout our entire existence. The villagers in Poland did this--killed all their Jewish neighbors--without the help of the Nazis. They erased all traces that there ever was a Jew there, and then they blamed it on the Nazis so that they could be absolved of consequences.

This is what it is to be Jewish. We are all the descendants of survivors of pogroms. We are all descendants of the ones who didn't survive. Even convert Jews pick up this mantle of descendancy.

I'm writing this part of the blog on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I'm writing this in the wake of a modern-day pogrom this past October. This is what it is to be Jewish.

The cast of Our Class. Photo by Pavel Antonov.

1/27/24: Once Upon a Mattress

What: NY City Center Encores! presents Mary Rodgers, Marshall Barer, Jay Thompson, and Dean Fuller's musical adaptation of "The Princess and the Pea," with a new script by Amy Sherman-Palladino.

And? It's always a bit disconcerting to watch a musical you've performed in. It's perhaps more so, when they've cut the character you played and assigned their scenes and songs to someone else. That being said, this was a delightful escape to silliness and humor, performed with the irrepressible and brilliant clowning of Sutton Foster, Michael Urie, and Harriet Harris (and Cheyenne Jackson as a loveable dope). The rewrites weren't corrupting the show's integrity like a lot of what I've been complaining about lately; they were just more silliness. Good silly fun.