All My Sons at the Old Vic: I Don't Know How Many Sons We're Talking About But I'm Boredby Randi / May 24, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, playing at Broadway’s Booth Theatre.
If you’re familiar with artist and playwright Taylor Mac, you’d know before going into one of his shows that it’ll be unique, to say the least. But you don’t even need to know Mac’s provocative past works (like his A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) to know that something billing itself as a sequel to Shakespeare’s most violent, disgustingly gory play, Titus Andronicus, will be eeeeenteresting. And gory. And weird af. And it is!
But Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, starring the great Nathan Lane, is more than just fart jokes and blood (although there’s a lot of scatological humor, which is the fancy way of saying you see a lot of actual, um, emptying of intestines. Of corpses). As you’d expect from Mac, Gary also manages to say some noble things about class, injustice, and modern society. It’s just simultaneously squirting blood out of stabbed necks and accidentally ingesting corpse feces.
As you may know, Titus Andronicus (not to be confused with the superior Titus – Andromedon) is a revenge tragedy, in which the bloodthirsty Roman general kills the Queen of the Goths’ son for killing all his sons (not to be confused with All My Sons) and then the Goth Queen has her other sons rape Titus’s daughter AND CUT OFF HER HANDS, so then Titus kills those sons and bakes them into a pie and serves it to the Goth Queen…and this isn’t even all of it. It’s beyond gory and disturbing, and there’s a huuuge body count by the end. You really only need to know this last bit going into Gary, in which Mac asks the question, at the end of this epic, insane massacre, who cleans it all up?
And his answer, for our amusement, is Gary. In Titus, there’s an unnamed clown who is sent off to be hanged. Mac has saved him from the hanging and called him Gary, played by the great Nathan Lane as no one else could play this character. By volunteering for cleanup, Gary escapes death and gets a promotion, what a big day for him, to maid. With the help of the equally-anachronistically-named maid Janice (Kristine Nielsen), the two of them attempt to sort through the massive pile of corpses, emptying their intestines of all gases and substances for reasons unconvincing for the work required, honestly. While they work, they wax philosophically – in iambic pentameter most of the time – about privilege, class, and politics. And feces.
They also meet Carol (Julie White), the former midwife bleeding out various wounds in her neck, who is dealing with the turmoil and guilt of not having done enough to save her former charge, which all sounds quite depressing but like I said, she’s bleeding out her neck and she’s Julie White, so it’s rather hilarious. One of the most remarkable details of this play is that Julie White, cast so perfectly, wasn’t supposed to be in it: absolute ledge Andrea Martin was originally playing Janice, and Kristine Nielsen was Carol. But Martin was injured days before previews began and had to leave the show, bumping Nielsen up to the lead role of Janice and bringing White in as a last minute addition. For this extreme change, everyone involved deserves kudos for making it work.
Although all three actors (mostly the women) try too hard too often to milk all the obvious humor from their characters, to the point where sometimes they go too far and it becomes unfunny, they succeed often enough to make it an amusing, enjoyable show, even though because it is so insane I have no idea whether I actually recommend it, or who exactly I would recommend it to.
Some of the philosophical statements the comic trio share are striking and powerful, especially when they are relevant to the current political crises (and especially when they are in rhyming couplets, I mean damn). The setup overall, with the help left with the responsibility of cleaning up the mess of the rich and powerful, already says a lot about power structures and who pays the greatest price. But amid Gary’s attempt to create a new genre, a ‘fooling’, to better express his political views, and amid Janice’s continued efforts to drain all the corpses, the play somewhat loses its focus. While trying to provide political commentary and outright humor, it somehow manages to deny a little too much of both.
INFORMATION
Gary is playing at the Booth Theatre until August 4.
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Appropriate at the Donmar: So Much to Work With, So Much that Doesn’t Work
Today’s show is Appropriate, playing at the Donmar Warehouse until October 5.
In the week leading up to our performance of Appropriate, husbo and I were debating the pronunciation of the title: Was it “appropriate” like when something is or is not proper? Or was it “appropri-ATE”, like what white people with dreadlocks do to a culture that isn’t theirs? Is it both?! Both would be amazing. We were pumped. Sadly, our intrigue over the title was more exciting than the actual play.
While the show does somewhat engage both meanings of the word, Appropriate puts a lot of interesting feelers out there regarding racism and prejudice and how modern-day Americans deal with their history and their present relationships with bigotry and what’s proper and what’s not – but fails to deliver real meaningful conversation about any of it. We have a family drama (a very classic-feeling one in many ways, largely because the playwright ‘stole’ (his words!) bits from all the classic American plays) of a pretty shittastic family convening at their deceased patriarch’s plantation home before it goes to auction, and, as expected, ghosts (and ghost-like hoods) from the family’s history are dug up, as are interpersonal issues between the remaining relatives and their own prejudices.
The plot centers on the three grown children of the patriarch, Franz (a total fuck-up former child rapist??) ( played by Edward Hogg), Bo (who seems semi normal) (played by Steven Mackintosh), and Toni (Jean-Ralphio was really singing about her and not his sister – she is THE WORST) (played by Monica Dolan), and their families. When a book of horrifying old photographs – of black people being lynched – are found, reactions vary. Most want to sell the photos to pay off the father’s lingering debts. Some characters just want to hide them from their kids. The struggle over what to do with the pictures reflects the larger struggle among the family of whether they trust each other (they do not) and of what these pictures mean for them, for their memories of their father, and whether they care.
Toni, she doesn’t care. Toni sucks. I can’t BELIEVE that they got the character of Toni to suck even more than the character who literally was a child rapist. Dolan starts off the show pitched at an 11 on a scale of 1-10 so she has nowhere to go and no choice but to stay at an 11, just screaming at the same level of intensity so you never really care about anything she says and can too easily ignore her. You wait and wait for this main character to explain in an impassioned climactic reveal the reason why she is such a g-d bitch to everyone and why she doesn’t care that her father was a klan member, or why she’s cool with her teenage son using racist language, or why she hates everyone in her family especially her brother’s Jew wife (this is a phrase that is used), aside from the obvious reason of ‘she’s also a bigot’, but instead, her big climactic reveal is that she’s sad (but in a loud way) because there’s no one left in the world who held her as a baby. Fuck you, lady. That’s most people. And that’s not a good enough excuse to be a racist piece of shit. In fact, nothing in the play helped give the characters enough reason to act as they do, in all their variously bigoted ways.
And that might be the most brilliant part of the play – how realistically shitty it made its characters, how realistic it is that Toni would be racist like her father and that her teenage son would be too, and that when they use racist language no one would be around to hear them and Toni wouldn’t think anything of it. But there’s so much that feels close to powerful that stops short. There’s so much that could be said about dealing with the father’s racist history, but instead there’s a lot of bickering among siblings. Which is again, realistic, but the less interesting choice.
The playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, is relatively young man whose works are already regarded as modern American classics. He’s African-American, so we know that his decisions about how to discuss racism were carefully and precisely made. But, I honestly think that more than any other show I’ve ever seen in London, this one can be too heavily influenced by its audience. During the entire last third, the elephant in the room, at least for me, is that no one in the all-white family at any point says ‘maybe we shouldn’t be profiting off of black suffering again,’ off of black people’s trauma that their family caused. It seems like the family fails to say this precisely because they are so terrible and because their whiteness blinds them from this realization. And I believe that’s kind of what BJJ was going for, the power of what he doesn’t show or tell, but I think the mostly-white London audience would have to be in on the joke for that to work here, and they are really, really not. It seems like a vital point that he left unsaid, assuming that decent people would find the omission flagrant, but maybe there aren’t as many decent people as he thinks.
And along the same lines, I hope, I really hope, that he wanted audiences to find the same problems with how the play and the characters treat Jews, but I fear that I’m misplacing this hope. AS USUAL, London audiences react in really troubling ways to anything about Jewishness. Bo’s wife, Rachael (played by Jaimi Barbakoff) – a character that Ben Brantley called “defensively Jewish” in 2014 even though a) that’s not apparent and b) that’s not a thing? would you say that about a black person? (Brantley is such an ass) – tells Toni the father did not like her because she was Jewish. Although this sheds more light on the father’s definite racism, our audience dismisses it, agreeing with Toni that this Jew doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say, instead of realizing for themselves that this is A Bad Take. I’ve shared frequently over the years how troublingly London audiences react to anything Jewish in plays – like when they laughed really hard in Caroline, or Change, when Caroline tells her young Jewish charge that he will burn in hell (they did not laugh like that in NYC (because it’s…not funny)) – and this was another doozy. When Toni calls Rachael a slur, when Toni dismisses Rachael’s valid concerns about her father, saying he didn’t like her not because she’s a Jew but because she’s an annoying person – all of this made our audience side with Toni, who is the wrong person to side with. I doubt BJJ expected this, or at least I hope he didn’t mean for it. When Toni and Rachael fight, the audience’s hate of Rachael was palpable. In fact, in other reviews I’ve seen, most are calling Rachael the most unlikable character, which blows my mind. Did they SEE the others? If BJJ was trying to get the audience to realize for themselves how the family should be refusing to profit off of black suffering again, and if he similarly wanted the audience to identify on their own that the anti-Semitism of the characters was wrong, it did not work.
I was truly disturbed for most of this play, and not in the good way that drama should disturb your comfort. I was mostly unsettled by the people around me, who seemed to be getting a way different message from the play than I was, one that was super troubling especially in today’s very racist times. And then I was troubled that maybe they were getting exactly what was intended after all, and that I maybe expected equality that wasn’t there.
The best parts were Isabella Pappas’s performance as Rachael’s young daughter, since she is an astoundingly natural performer, and at the end when Bo and Franz awkwardly say goodbye and then don’t know what to do so they shake hands, and immediately in my head I heard Chris Farley’s Tommy Boy say “Brothers don’t shake hands! Brothers hug!!!” and laughed hysterically.
INFORMATION
Appropriate plays the Donmar Warehouse in London until October 5.
The first act is only 50 minutes so the second act is way too long, about an hour and a quarter.
You’ve already heard how forked up our audience was and judging from my entire theatre-going experience in London, it was not a fluke. But what’s more, five phones went off during the final scenes.
“Bobbie We’ve Been Trying to [Like] You”: I Saw the West End Revival of Company Again
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are taking a second look at the West End revival of Sondheim’s Company, which has extended its much-celebrated run and is eyeing Broadway.
Theatre followers will know that the current revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company is the most celebrated show in London right now, at least. It might be the most celebrated show in the world, given how reviewers are positively falling over themselves to exalt it more than everyone else, trying to get closer to it so some of its glory can rub off on them OR SOMETHING. I don’t know why they’re doing it, because I am literally the only reviewer not joining the overhype club. As we saw a few months ago, I thought this gender-switched revival of Company was…fine. Not life-changing, and certainly not revolutionary in the musical theatre realm as so many are claiming, as they’re distracted by the main character now being female and overlooking that, even with the switch, it remains an out-dated, old-fashioned, kind of sexist show. So why did I see it again?
Well, I wanted to see if I was wrong. I can be wrong! I gave it another chance to see if everyone else was right to be lauding this production more than any of the great theatre on right now (like Hadestown). Also, a good portion of my dislike of the show the first go-round was due to seeing the understudy for Bobbie. With lead Rosalie Craig getting unprecedented raves, and heavily favored to sweep awards, I had to actually catch her apparently jaw-dropping performance. Since she is always good, I got re-excited. I was super open and ready to fall in love with this show and admit that I was wrong.
Bitch I’m never wrong.
It’s fine, and yes it was a lot more enjoyable with Rosalie. She is so nuanced and likable in all her work, and she’s lovely here, and best in the book scenes. However, some of the music still falls flat without a big-voiced singer, and there doesn’t seem to be any emotional stakes for her. I didn’t feel anything during “Marry Me a Little”. “Being Alive” has always been one of my favorite musical theatre songs, yet this production has made me question that, because it’s performed kind of quietly and without power. Is this song only riveting when it’s sung to the rafters? The repeated, simple melody and its concise, moving lyrics require an obvious showing of growth and reflection and decision-making shown through dynamic, evolving, and emotional singing – otherwise, it’s stagnant and weak. And that’s what happens here. Her acting is great but it’s not coming across through the music as it should. Without the emotion that belting can help express, the song lost its power. And I’m not usually one to worship belting over acting, but for this song, it only fulfills its fullest emotional potential when the singer’s soul is laid bare, when they’re being completely vulnerable and opening up to the audience and getting everything they feel out there. It’s no longer a mesmerizing character moment when it’s “hmm I guess I do want to find love, as I already told you” versus “HOLY SHIT IF I DON’T FIND LOVE I AM GOING TO EXPLODE.” The latter way is gripping and powerful; the former is just meh.
That’s generally how I feel about the show overall. I still don’t find the gender switch all that interesting. Yes, it’s great to switch up classic roles so that it’s not just white men getting big parts, but I feel that others are forcing more meaning onto the switch than it actually has. It’s cool to see how the show works with a female Bobbie, but that’s really it. Having one doesn’t make this the definitive story of our times or anything. I said before that I found a female Bobbie less compelling than a male Bobby, because of two (potentially contradictory) reasons: 1) society has always bothered women about getting married up, so it’s not anything radical to have a woman thinking about the pressure versus the desire to marry; whereas for a man it did seem more unique; and 2) in this age, it’s bullshit to put that pressure to marry on women anymore.
As for #1, I guess I can understand people finding Bobbie’s situation compelling even if it’s absolutely run-of-the-mill, because maybe they identify with it as an everywoman kind of thing. I just didn’t feel any conflict in Bobbie’s own perspective of her situation, because she says throughout the show to her friends that she is ready for marriage and has indeed been trying. They don’t seem to bother her about being unmarried so much as they ask her a question and she eagerly tells them that she wants to get married. There’s no big change in her thought process or anything, nor is there pressure from the married friends. The people around Bobby in past productions seemed to be incessantly bothering him, with the staging effectively showing them crowding him and coming closer and closer into his personal space, while he needed to finally come to this conclusion himself. Here, it’s like Bobbie already knows and tells her friends from the start that she wants to get married and has been trying, so like…yeah, that’s that. So the big revelation of “Being Alive” actually feels ill-timed here, and overall ill-fitting, since Bobbie has already told us – repeatedly – the revelations she’s supposed to be having in the song.
As for #2, in my first review, I shot this down from my perspective as a woman about Bobbie’s age: Since I don’t feel it or see it, I said this pressure isn’t a thing nowadays and no one cares about unmarried 30-somethings. And while this is my experience, I realize that’s not true for everyone. And, aligning my perspective with Bobbie’s since we’re the same demographic was ill-informed, because the character/s I should be identifying with are the married friends. Of course no one is bothering me about getting married since I am; and although I don’t see it with my single friends or with society at large, it’s not my place to say that it’s wrongly represented. But what I can say is that literally no younger married couples bother their single friends about getting married. We don’t give a shit as long as you’re happy. And if you do want to get married, no actual friends would nag about how you should really hurry up. That’s not a friend, then. In this production, there really isn’t any nagging anyway, not compared to others. Her married friends kind of say ‘eh you looking to marry soon’ and Bobbie’s like ‘YEAH LOVE TO’ and that’s that. There’s more of the couples hoping that she’s happy than anything, and telling her she’s lucky to be single. So the more I think about it, it’s not even that the pressure on the lead character wouldn’t be a thing today – the pressure doesn’t even seem to exist in the play universe. So what’s the conflict? Just that she’s putting the pressure on herself? She seems pretty content though, just aware that she wants to find the right person. WHERE IS THE PROBLEM.
Aside from the nonexistence of the central plot or emotional journey, the show is very entertaining. The supporting cast is great, although I was terrified from more recent word of mouth that the hamminess had upped to unbearable levels. Considering how much scenery Patti LuPone was chewing in previews, I was scared that none of the amazing set would be left. Luckily, everyone was still operating within optimal limits. While I still don’t think Patti’s/Joanne’s new book scenes around “Ladies Who Lunch” work at all, her performance of that song and of “The Little Things You Do Together” were stronger. Best of all, Jonathan Bailey is still stealing the show and making it all worthwhile with his “Getting Married Today”. His Jamie is manic hilarity without going to over-the-top annoying, and it’s the funniest scene, absolutely pitch perfect in every way, with credit to Daisy Maywood’s Priest and just impeccable staging. And I still love Gavin Spokes’s Harry (so heartfelt with is “Sorry/Grateful”) and Richard Fleeshman’s Andy. They’re wonderful.
I don’t often get to see shows in previews and again after opening, so I was shocked that a lot of changes actually did happen. For one, the entirety of the “Tick, Tock” sequence exists now. There was absolutely nothing of that when I saw it earlier, and now there’s at least a five-minute segment of Bobbie having a nightmare about her biological clock and seeing snippets of her potential lives (played by new company members – there are so many silent ensemble members now!) if she married this guy or that and had a baby or several. It’s pretty interesting although it’s unclear what her takeaway is.
Speaking of those new cast members, they’re also used to fill the subway carriages even more in the wholly substandard “Another Hundred People”. I said enough before about how bad it is, so suffice it to say it’s still bad, just with more people involved.
The other disappointing thing that I didn’t mind the first time was the production of “Side by Side/What Would We Do Without You”. The choreography – some of the only choreography in the show – is mostly fun complicated hand movements while the cast is seated, very “War is a Science”. It’s not dancing. Sometimes they play party games. Yet they felt the need to have the cast do exaggerated, vocalized ‘huffs’ no less than FOUR times during the song. Guys. Musical theatre usually requires dancing while singing; all of these performers have done and can do that easily. It’s weird to pretend the cast is so exhausted from their one bit of choreo, and it’s not funny to repeat the same ‘huff huff huff huff!’ four times. Man alive.
So, I tried again and while I am so happy I saw Rosalie, who is great, it’s still not a compelling take on the material. This version, which on paper seems like a no brainer, somehow lacks any reason for us to be interested in Bobbie’s situation. Whenever a higher-up takes a look at a movie script or an early novel draft, the first question they ask about the lead character is “Why do we care about them??” It’s important to be able to answer that.
