Curtains the Musical Whodunnit is a Bloated But Fun Rompby Randi / January 7, 2020It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Fairview, playing at London’s Young Vic until January 23.
I really hate when writers include spoilers in reviews, like they can’t write about the show without ruining it for everyone. I’ll do my best to avoid them here, but it’s kind of impossible to talk about the power of Fairview, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, without spoilers, so gird your loins/stop reading if you are going to see it. Now making its London debut, the play by Jackie Sibblies Drury ends in a way I can’t say any other theatrical work ever has. Even aside from that ending, it’s hard to talk about the play in general because it’s about that incredibly difficult thing to talk about as a white person: race and how terrible white people are. Okay that second part might not be the point, but if you are a white audience member who walks away from the show not feeling completely shitty then you maybe weren’t paying attention (like to the world either). I’ll try to not say anything ignorant, but I am a whitey, so, WE’LL SEE.
Fairview tells of a middle-class black family preparing for Grandma’s big birthday dinner: You have the mom trying to do everything perfectly, the feisty (and hilarious) aunt with the strong opinions, the husband who actually remembered to buy the root vegetables!, the daughter who is nervous about graduating high school. You have the set of a very large, plush home, very beigey-pinks and grays, very Miami in the 1980s that felt a little sitcommy at first and then, as the play progresses, a lot sitcommy. The first section of the play, as the family prepares dinner and argues and jokes with each other, is – like a sitcom – extremely pleasant, very funny, and opens a lot of doors to what kind of action could come next for the family.
And then, no further action comes. Instead of showing what happens with the big birthday dinner, or if the uncle’s plane will take off, or what the daughter will decide about college, instead the rug is pulled out from under you and the sitcommy feel is substantiated. The actors restart, and they go through the entirety of the first section blocking again, but silently. We see the movements and spills and gestures and little dances for the second time, but now the audio is the voiceover conversation of four white people watching this program, talking about the characters, talking about race. It’s a shock, and it’s awkward, interesting, and disturbing the whole time. The four viewers are the kind of people who will proclaim nicely “I’m definitely not racist!” but then in the same breath say a lot of racist things that aren’t obviously mean or cruel but are still wrong, the kind of people who, as we hear, casually converse about ‘what race you’d pick if you could change’. It is a bold gear change into a provocative flat-out conversation about race, except without a knowledgeable or culturally sensitive voice in the bunch.
And that’s the bit that’s slightly disappointing. It’s not the play’s fault but that of its marketing/other reviews, for saying that this is ‘the play that will make ‘woke’ white liberals realize their mistakes’ or whatever. As a white liberal, I was, as I am with all things purporting to show me how wrong I am, eager to learn what I’m doing wrong and try to improve. But these four white people are blatantly terrible people. They are not ‘woke’ and they are nothing like the people who would be described as or would describe themselves as being ‘woke’, at least if the people had any idea what that (annoying) word was supposed to mean. And liberal? I’m sure at least some of them would be Trump voters. They say clearly racist things and treat race like it’s a fashion choice. It’s worthwhile to show that the things they say and think and eventually do are problematic, but anyone who didn’t already know how problematic these ideas were already miiiiiiight be racist! Or living under a rock.
The third section dives even more into the surreal, with the two worlds mixing into eventual chaos, perhaps representing the kinds of conversations we try to have without better guidance, and perhaps representing the problems we face when white people ‘want to help’ but also don’t want to acknowledge, or give up, their privilege. That reluctance to give up your privilege comes to a head at the end, when the tables turn and the white audience members literally become the object of stage-lit scrutiny, and their (our) hesitance to listen to the cast’s urgings become the subject of this wider, provocative discussion on privilege, entitlement, and expectations. I can’t imagine any white person seeing this, experiencing this ending especially, and not feeling exposed, guilty, uncomfortable at the very least, so that’s good, I guess, for self-reflection. But who knows how many people who needed to feel that momentary guilt and shame took it into their actual lives? And it’s not up to me to say that that momentary guilt and shame was worth making the people of color in the audience feel even more like the objects of white gaze, under scrutiny as well.
So I was left afterwards with a kind of numbed sensation, embarrassed (in part because of stage fright). The play is the definition of provocative, leaving your mind a blur of jumbled thoughts and emotions, which can be the mark of a successful dramatic work. It’s confrontational, it’s fascinating, and you feel uncomfortable the whole time. Now, after trying to write something the least bit coherent (I failed didn’t I) I feel even more ignorant and needing to do and be better, which might after all be what Drury had in mind.
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HABIBI!!!!!! Broadway’s The Band’s Visit is a Tiny Little Heartbreaking Beautiful Epic
When I told people I was seeing The Band’s Visit on Broadway, they asked what it’s about, and I’d say “remember that little Israeli film from like 9 years ago about a group of musicians that gets stuck in a nothing town in the middle of nowhere and then, like, they have to leave?” The answers would invariably be ‘no’ or ‘um…what, no’. Then they’d ask me what else happens in the movie, maybe to jog their memory, and I would say, ‘um…I don’t remember…I don’t think anything.” Having seen the final preview (the last performance before official opening night) of the new musical version of this work, I am pretty sure the same conversation will happen for it too. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, this show so unbelievably makes ‘pretty much nothing’ seem like the most beautiful thing about life that it’s going to win Best Musical this year. And so far, it should. The Band’s Visit can sometimes be a bit boring – some people near me were sleeping – but like, in a glorious, magical way.
Based on the 2007 Israeli movie of the same name, TBV is about Israelis and Egyptians with boring lives but it will resonate with most people today about their own lives and whether or not they are also boring. Even non-boring people with non-boring lives will have experienced at least some light anguish or fun-sized depression at some point, and so will connect with what’s happening on the stage. And what’s happening is a kind of special, fragile magic that is rare on Broadway. It’s about normal people in the 1990s, living quiet lives, just everyday people, no one special like in any other show. These everyday people are Israelis living in a little town, it’s a quiet village, called Beit Hatikva in the middle of the Negev desert. Beit Hatikva is not to be confused with Petah Tikva, a town with an Arab Cultural Center where a group of Egyptian military band musicians were supposed to perform, but, considering there’s no ‘p’ sound in Arabic and they naturally substitute the ‘b’, you can see how the musicians did indeed confuse the two and ended up getting bus tickets to Beit Hatikva by accident. In the middle of the dusty Negev, in a village with maybe dozens of people, instead of at an official performance, the musicians are stuck for the night until they can catch a rare bus out of town the next day. While there, they befriend the locals and connect deeply with some despite the hindrance of time.
We meet the Israelis, kind of dawdling through their long, humdrum days, when the sing the opener literally about how they are waiting, just waiting, whether for something new and strange (they all want some strange) to come along, or just for the sky to go about changing its color. About how they stare into the distance expecting what they see to change but knowing that it never will. Luckily, the something new they dream about does come around to jolt their routine, and they are happy to feed and house the lost Egyptian musicians in their homes. Were people still nice and hospitable in the ‘90s? Maybe Israelis were? This show is so good it will make everyone love Jews! Anyway the villagers sing a few funny-sad-sarcastic songs about how nothing happens there and how time just passes and isn’t that sooo great. I love the line “Sometimes time is an ocean/This sofa is my boat and I’m just drifting right along.” I mean sure this might be happening in the Negev but show me one person in America who hasn’t had that exact thought, albeit much less poetic I’m sure, at some point? That’s why this show is so good and so beloved already – it doesn’t matter that it’s about specific people in a specific place; it’s genuinely just reflecting basic humanity, as most theatre tries to do but rarely so poignantly.
And that basic humanity includes the yearning to connect with others, in any way – romantically, with friends, with family, as a parent, everything. The visitors want to find this connection, the villagers want to find this connection. John Cariani, that lovable nerd from Something Rotten, plays an unhappy husband and new father who wants his marriage to be happier so they can raise their child better. He is adorably goofy, like with his parts in “Welcome to Nowhere”, but also brings such sad hope in “Itzik’s Lullaby”. Adam Kantor plays a guy who literally spends the entire show standing at a payphone, pathetically and pitifully waiting for his girlfriend to call. He finally gets to show off with the closer “Answer Me”, which is one of the songs that will stay with you probably forever. I love both these guys and though they have a small amount to do (it’s a 90 minute show! and nothing happens!) they manage to do it so well it breaks your heart. So will Ari’el Stachel as one of the musicians, making friends with the yoots in the town and teaching one hapless one in particular, Papi (the adorbs Etai Benson), about love. His song “Haled’s Song About Love” had me absolutely riveted, because his voice is out of this world. (It’s unfortunate that his is the only song on the cast recording that doesn’t show just how wonderful he is, but he still sounds great.)
But no one will break your heart like Tony Shalhoub and Katrina Lenk. I know, SHALHOUB! Monk! He plays the king of the Egyptians, okay that’s not really a thing, he’s the band leader and a general I think but king of the Egyptians is a bonkers amazing title. His name is Tewfiq, which has replaced ‘toe-pick!’ as a fun thing my brother and I like to shout now. He’s polite enough, and reserved, which is hard to maintain when faced with the unabashed, relentless flowing energy of Katrina Lenk as the local café owner Dina. Lenk is spellbinding in this role, where she doesn’t have much to do in a traditional musical theatre sense but she makes every moment feel like it’s a universe condensed into a movement or a sound. One of the most mesmerizing performers in every aspect, she moves like a dancer while she sings, and sometimes you are more riveted by how she gestures with one graceful arm moving like a ribbon than by what she’s saying. But what she’s saying also feels like the most vital words ever put to music, like you need them in order to breathe. It’s a revelatory performance, completely mesmerizing. If you don’t believe me, go below and listen to ‘Omar Sharif’ and try not to repeat it 50 times in a row.
Dina and Tewfiq both recognize what the other presents – a complete stranger, sure, but someone they didn’t think they’d have the opportunity to meet. It’s not like it’s love at first sight or something, it’s literally just like ‘hey you are…of age…and seem nice…and I have zero options.’ But it’s a beautiful kind of forlorn hope you feel arise. Dina, the unstoppable energy force, takes Tewfiq out to dinner and they eat and then they sit in a park and that’s the extent of what they do for most of the show, just sit and talk and it’s not right how moving it is, it doesn’t make any sense that it can be so heartbreaking and exquisite but it is. They’re all trying to get through life, get through their day, and maybe find someone who cares that they’re getting through it. It’s all kind of sad and wonderful and at several points you’ll do what I did, which is look around and say, ‘this is happening on Broadway??!!’ Fragile magic.
Not just the short amount of time hinders the budding relationships – in friendships, mentorships, and maybe romantic ones – from flourishing. The reality that makes this show so special is also what hinders the characters from hoping for anything more than mediocre: they know that nothing really happens in life like you see in the movies. This is most evident in the song ‘Omar Sharif’, which will send chills down your spine the entire time Katrina sings it, or more accurately, the entire time the force of this music uses Lenk as a vessel to convey its message in an otherworldly sort of way. ‘Omar Sharif’ is an outstanding song and Katrina’s performance during it may win her the Tony, so far away but almost a certainty. She and Tewfiq create pure magic in the park with ‘Something Different’, and despite seeing this opportunity they’ve gotten, we all know and they know that nothing in their lives is really ever going to change. Katrina really steals the show, but it’s in this scene where Shalhoub shows you why he so famous. I really almost went onstage to give him a hug when he shared what keeps him from trying or hoping for anything great, and I didn’t even watch Monk.
I wanted more music, because what there is is truly wonderful and different – it is SO Israeli with that middle eastern rhythm and tones of klezmer music – but I realize that anything more would harm the delicate thing happening onstage. David Yazbek has created a masterpiece. And David Cromer’s masterful direction lets the play happen, seemingly on its own, unfolding so naturally that it feels like a giant body of water, moving ever so slowly with no way of stopping it, slowing it down, or speeding it up. It just happens. There’s so much restraint on everyone’s part to keep the show small and subtle and natural, and that’s what makes the result so special and somehow enormous. It’s like it’s happening in spite of itself, in spite of audience expectations, in spite of being in a Broadway theatre. (I bet this was even more magical when it was downtown in a small theatre, but apparently it still works.) That the unfolding of the action (what little there is) and the monotonous pace of these characters’ lives seems unfettered and unfussed and so natural is really a tribute to everyone involved, letting there be such a subtle result. Like they sing in the show, “nothing is as beautiful as something that you don’t expect.”
This show will stay with you after you’ve seen it, staking permanent space in your mind so you think about it constantly. There’s more silence happening on this stage than in any other theatrical experience I’ve ever seen or heard of. Pure silence. That’s weird right? An often silent, quiet and still show? And yet that silence is a revelation. It’s not the kind that’s filled with unease, that makes you think okay can someone just do something? No, you’re content to just sit with them in that silence, to let it wash over you so you enjoy it all together, and to think with them about their nothing town and their predictable lives, and just, be. Just be in that space with these characters. With such a realistic portrayal of regular people in an unspecial town, silence and boredom and nothing is required. Normal life has those moments, and since realism and honesty are honored here, the experience reflects real life. And that never really gets to happen in musical theatre. I’ll admit at some of those moments I was itching for a song to begin, but that wouldn’t have had the same effect. The restraint evident here is part of why it works. It languishes, it flows like a lazy river, and to tamper with that would throw off the sense of realism, the sense that we are just getting a peek into actual people’s lives. And honestly I feel so lucky that I got to see into these people’s lives, and that this little show for grown-ups with absolutely zero commercial promise on paper is so wonderful.
STAGEDOOR
I went to the very last preview before opening night, so the cast may have just been extra excited to share the love, but everyone came out and took pictures and happily talked to everyone waiting. The crowd is different from usual, because it’s a lot of Israelis and Jews and Arabs who want to talk and it’s so freaking awesome. The title of this post has HABIBI!! in it because that’s the first thing I think of when I think about this show – the Israeli woman in the crowd at stagedoor who I think every time a cast member came out would scream HABIBI! in excitement. It was the best. It’s telling such an important story and it’s rare to get Middle Eastern people presented in a show where they are just average people with regular lives. So everyone is excited about that and you should be too.
INFORMATION
It’s a short 90 minutes with no intermission. If you’re like me and you already have to pee just reading that, don’t run to the toilets as soon as it ends because the musicians play a little amazing concert at curtain call.
The most important information? The cast recording is now finished, and it’s streaming on soundcloud. Entertainment Weekly has it here for you to listen to for free RIGHT NOW. Like I said above, try not to repeat “Omar Sharif” over and over and over and over…
Rose at the Park Theatre is moving, heartbreaking, and overly ambitious
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show just feels right to talk about during the High Holidays.
The first act of Rose is riveting theatre. Martin Sherman’s two-hander (that’s one actor) doesn’t feel like theatre at all; it feels like you are listening to your (probably not your your, statistically speaking) Jewish grandmother (but decades ago) recount her harrowing life of persecution. It’s written well, so that it keeps moving forward at the right pace and keeps interest up, and it’s performed exceptionally, by Dame Maureen Lipman who if she wasn’t already a dame would be made a dame for how dame good she is in this.
Telling her story, the Dame’s Rose starts in the 1920s as a little Ukrainian girl growing up with a dying dad and a severe mom as pogroms hit her shtetl. She moves to the big city of Warsaw to help her brother and his new wife and to flee the violence, but then of course violence starts there and they get moved into the infamous ghetto, and then it’s the Holocaust big time and it’s heartbreak after heartbreak and you’re like how much shit can one single woman face and you realize how many single people experienced all this suffering and it is A. LOT.
And yet, it’s not done in a way that’s just a sadness dump, which is so easily could be. Or as a ‘look how bad we’ve had it’ dump (though holy hell it’s true). In telling her history, she exemplifies all the great things about Jewishness: the humor, the darker humor, the argumentativeness, the love of playing devil’s advocate (it’s called something different in Jewish obviously but not sure what), the physical communication styles (not just Italians!), the strength, the community, and of course the importance of memories and how memory shapes us. This tale is meaningful for having us remember the history, and also for being so unapologetically Jewish.
All in the first hour plus, we cover the pogroms of the 1920s, the Holocaust, the post-Holocaust camps that many countries were responsible for – like the British, stop lying about how great they were – and then the struggle for war refugees to get to the promised land, Israel, and all the forces – like the British – that forcibly, often fatally, stopped them. I’m sure there are many people in each audience that don’t realize just how insanely awful good-seeming nations were to the Jews after the war ended, and that British soldiers eagerly killed survivors rather than let them step onto the land they were indigenous to because of the British Mandate and their complicity in the massacres of the Jewish minority population (if you don’t know all about this history but say things like ‘the current situation is not complicated!’ then I don’t know how to help you). But Rose survives all this, barely, losing everyone she knows and loves to be the one who makes it. Her recounting of what happened to her daughter is so raw yet so subtle, it feels intrusive to listen to. She builds a new family, she finds success, she grows older, all in the first act. Honestly, when the first act ended I thought it was the end of the 2 and 1/2 hour show and I did amazingly at holding my bladder. But no, all of that happens in just one act somehow. It’s the kind of interval where a lot of people just sit silently (while I climb over them to get to the toilet).
Man I’m going on about the first act, huh. It’s because it was special. It would have been something if that was the whole show, this tale of one woman’s strength through persecution and suffering to represent so many similar tales that it’s an amalgam of. The second act, though, tries to do too much. For a show that starts with the pogroms of the 1920s, it is insane that it also tries to cover the modern crisis in the Middle East. This attempt feels like one meant to appease – who, I have no idea – by saying ‘we realize that in talking about Jews all night we better share the other side!’, the other side of what being the important question, but I got that feeling, like they felt the need to both-sides the topic of Jewish oppression. Of course, a full and honest (and well-informed) look at the crisis would be important, but it felt tacked on, a weird addition to this particular show, and like a sort of apology for taking up all this time making a fuss about Jewish suffering. Also, on a dramatic level, it was a strange turnabout from being all about Rose’s journey from her perspective, being directly in all this terrible action and direct suffering, to then have her tell us thirdhand about what’s happening to other people via people related to her. It would be nearly impossible for what feels like a weirdly intentioned CYA addendum to have the same emotional impact or the same integrity as the personal part that came before, and so of course it doesn’t.
INFORMATION
The show runs 2 1/2 hours.
The Park Theatre is an absolute shit show. The circle/mezz level uses those terrible seats, I don’t know what it’s called, where you don’t have your own seat but squeeze onto a longer row kind of jawn with strangers and your ENTIRE ROW has to stand up and lift the seat for anyone to walk by because there’s no legroom. Also, the Park’s website seat map is a travesty because it shows aisles at the far ends but there’s no actual exit over there, and if I worked for the ADA I would sue them for that. ALSO what kind of theatre has a bar space as its only entry/exit and PUTS A BIG LONG TABLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THAT SPACE? a fire hazard omfg anyway thank god the show was good because I am probably not going to be invited back after this rant.
