Race Like You’re a Contestant on ‘Race to Bachelor Island’ to See the Hilarious ‘Tootsie’by Randi / July 2, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the play Sweat by Lynn Nottage, currently playing at London’s Gielgud Theatre until July 20.
You know how society as we know it is falling apart and there’s nothing we can really do about it, so decent (and not so decent, but no one deserves the crumbling of the world) people are suffering in poverty and drug addiction and racism and sexism and classism and overall misery, and we need governments to work together for the people in order to solve any of these societal problems but the people running things are too busy thinking about their own comforts instead of caring about anyone else, let alone all of society, so things are just falling apart for the regular person and it’s all incredibly depressing? Yeah, well, so, Sweat.
Lynn Notage’s highly distressing, highly moving play about Reading, Pennsylvania and the devastation caused by joblessness (as well as the aforementioned –isms) is a hell of a depressing show. Nottage interviewed real citizens of Reading (not including Michael Scott) to research this show, since Reading has notably experienced a horrible decline in employment and 40% of the population now lives in poverty. I don’t know how many times I can say ‘depressing’ in one review but we will probably break that record today. Sweat shows us the lives of a small group of friends and acquaintances in Reading before and after all their lives changed for the worse.
This group consists of people who work at the big factory in town, people who used to work at the big factory in town, and their kids who have little choice but to also work at the big factory in town: Martha Plimpton’s volatile Tracy and her equally hot-tempered son Jason (stereotypical and scarily accurate central-PA white people who probably voted for the cheeto toilet); management-material Cynthia and her son Chris (black people who have to work harder to prove themselves), plus their estranged husband/father who is now an addict; their floaty old-hippie now-drunk friend Jessie; the bartender friend Stan; the bar’s Mexican busboy Oscar; and the good-intentioned parole officer. Yes, parole officer: the show begins with the kids, Jason and Chris, just released from prison. The rest of the show – before returning depressingly (there’s another!) to present day – shows us what led up to their arrest.
If this sounds compelling to you, well good, because we are all living in this world, and Sweat felt like a genuine reflection of the hardships of the working class, from the fear of how quickly joblessness can destroy your life, to America’s opioid epidemic, to how this fear to have someone real to blame for your lot in life can so easily lead to blaming those who are different from you. As someone who tries to focus on making her social justice efforts intersectional, I found a lot of this show a gut-punch of a reminder that some other people who we write off as not caring about people different from them simply don’t have the ability, the time, the luxury of caring about anything except working enough to make enough money to feed themselves to stay alive and then repeat the next day, and all their next days. It doesn’t make them good or bad people (well, some of them are bad people); it just makes for a world where caring for each other isn’t seen as a priority, and so we’re stuck in this vicious cycle of shit.
Nottage’s nuanced playwriting shines best as she develops these characters, along with a pretty remarkable cast. Plimpton was of course incredible, but she scared the absolute shit out of me. She was 100% exactly like some people I’ve met. She even looked exactly like a woman I used to work with: same exact fake blonde hair and gruff demeanor and ease of saying suuuper racist things. She was like half the women in Upper Darby who say “Wha, you think ya better than me?? YA THINK YA BETTER THAN ME?” and then knock over the bar table. That was Tracy, and her white supremacist son never had a chance with her antagonistic tendencies. (NB: Never get face tattoos, just don’t, you’ll never get a job et al., and ESPECIALLY don’t get white supremacist face tattoos. Or, ya know, do, so we know to stay away from you.) I found the whole cast moving and convincing in their individual ways. My favorite was honestly Leanne Best, who had little to do as Jessie but managed to turn her one big scene into the most heartbreaking part of a show that’s all hardship. When she reminisces about how she was supposed to see the world as a young adult but she started working at the factory and never could stop, she keeps repeating the list of destinations she and her boyfriend had memorized as a sort of mantra: “Istanbul, Tehran, Kandahar, Kabul” and so on. Her melancholy and regret at never having left Reading was palpable and tragic, and it was a tiny but wonderful performance.
But the plot teeters a bit, and it’s hard to provide a strong enough answer as to what we were actually supposed to take away from how depressing it all is. I wish, I honestly really wish, that the play had ended a scene early. Once we see all the pre-prison scenes (most of the action is the flashback), we meet again with the parole officer with Jason and Chris. He’s trying to inspire them and get them to really try with their new leases on life, and his scene ends with him talking to both men but speaking to the audience, and saying something super inspiring like “so what are you going to do to make it better? what are you going to do?” and then the theatre blacks out and I was like ‘HOLY SHIT I WANNA DO ALL THE GOOD THINGS! LET ME GO DO THEM!’ and I found it incredibly powerful. But then there was another scene! And, this final scene was clearly supposed to be super moving, but it actually wasn’t, and considering the content, it’s a shame that it just doesn’t work.
Overall, however, it’s a decent, poignant look at modern tragedy. There’s so much nuance about how ingrained racism, for one example, can be. I was blown away realizing how Tracy blames everything on her friend Cynthia’s inability as a low-level manager to stop some huge things from happening in the company, yet completely accepts her (white) bartender friend Stan’s reporting that his boss changed a rule at the bar. This kind of subtle creation of each realistic character makes Sweat a play to see, even if you won’t really learn anything except ‘fork, this is a ball of shit.’
INFORMATION
Sweat ends its short run (intentionally limited; only 50 performances at this theatre) on July 20, but it’s the kind of show that I am sure will be popping up all over the place with regional theatres, tours, everyone trying it on for size given how relevant it is.
If you can get there before July 20, the best seats (I’m SO happy I remembered for my own good!) at the Gielgud, if you pee in the ladies room and pee often, are front stalls, about Row D-K, because the door to the kind-of-hidden ladies (WHY DO THEY WANT TO KEEP THESE BATHROOMS A SECRET) is literally RIGHT THERE, if you are sitting on the aisle stage right (that’s HOUSE LEFT). I was sitting three feet from the door to the bathroom door! It was the best ever! I was so happy! (And then so quickly unhappy, obviously (did you READ the review??)) It was also really well air-conditioned on the hottest day in London so far this summer, so it was nice not to literally sweat.
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“Speed-the-Plow” is in the West End with Lindsay Lohan: Cool
“Speed-the-Plow”, the David Mamet play best known for the celebrities attached to its various productions because they’re the only reason to sit through its vacuity, is now on the West End. Remember how a few years ago, Jeremy Piven was set to star on Broadway but he had to bow out due to mercury poisoning because he ate too much sushi? That was this show. And that’s the most interesting thing about it! Now it’s on the West End, starring Lindsay Lohan in her Redemption Tour™ sponsored by Oprah. (Oprah was there opening night, and I didn’t know. I’m so BT about it. Though it’s probably for the best because if I ever met her I’d be like “Ah’s snitting next to Borpo!”)
Lohan not only showed up, but remembered all her lines and, less condescendingly, was actually decent. She was well cast as a young attractive woman who messes with a Hollywood exec’s head because of all her wimmininess, which I’m sure she has done often in her real life but due to her failure circa 2007 to show up to work rather than wimmininess.
“Speed-the-Plow” is about two Hollywood executives who are preparing to pitch a terrible-sounding but sure-to-be-money-making prison film to the studio head. They only have the option until the next morning, which is quite the forced timeline for allowing all sorts of dramatic things to happen. We only have 24 hours to pitch this to the boss! Oh no! He’s going to NYC for the day? Well let’s just meet him tomorrow morning and hope he’s not late, instead of mentioning anything about the film to him on the phone! Idiots.
Bobby is the newly minted head of production, and Charlie is his longtime, long-suffering associate. I say long-suffering because we get the idea that the two friends have been working together for a long, long time, but Bobby is the only one who has been promoted or paid well. So what is that about? Judging this production, I would say it’s because Americans think British people are smarter because of their accent, and Bobby (despite the understudy’s best efforts), is clearly British, so he got the promotions. Charlie, on the other hand, can do a super impressive American accent, so his studio bosses assumed he wasn’t as smart or cultured as Bobby. My blurring of the lines between the actors and their characters seems only fitting given the nonsense of this flimsy play and how much my mind wandered throughout. And indeed, Charlie’s accent was so impressive (especially compared to Bobby’s FAILURE TO SAY HIS R’S) that I almost thought he could be a compatriot. But then I saw his name was Nigel Lindsay. Nope. Not American. Can’t be more British than that. (Nigel was actually quite great in the role. But he acted like and physically resembled Norbert Leo Butz enough that I couldn’t help dreaming of how amazing Norbert probably was in the Broadway revival.)
Lindsay plays Karen, a role – originated on Broadway by Madonna, never forget – that is both thankless and demeaning, but with great shoes. She’s a temporary secretary for Bobby, and we know she is new to the movie business and quite naïve about its operating because she tells everyone she meets how ‘naïve’ she is every five minutes. It’s a super short play, less than 90 minutes, and half the words were Lindsay saying ‘naïve’. The other half was Bobby the Britman saying “entuh-tainment”. (And “unduh-stand”. SAY YOUR R’S. It’s the ONE rule of doing American accents.)
Bobby has been given a book about radiation and the end of the world and humanity and stuff to provide a ‘courtesy read’, which means he will read it to be nice but there’s no way in hell the studio would ever make it as a film. He tells naïve Karen this, and naïve Karen is like, but why? “Because it wouldn’t make money.” But why? “Because no one wants to see a movie about that.” But why? “BECAUSE I SAID SO DO YOU UNDUH-STAND?”
But Karen won’t take no for an answer, so she goes to his house at night, even though he’s gross and old, to discuss the enormous long book that she somehow read in its entirety and tabbed between finishing her work day and dinner time. Karen loved the book, to say the least. She thinks it’s the most brilliant piece of writing that e’er touched her heart and thinks it would somehow make a great movie. This is where Mamet gets both lazy and annoying. Karen reads SO MUCH OF THE BOOK out loud to us in her attempt to convince Bobby of its brilliance. All the parts she reads sound like the Dalai Lama when he is in a drug-induced dream fighting off Ewok-shaped clouds. Then the tables sort of turn, and even though we know Bobby is trying to seduce her, she starts seducing Bobby. It’s gross because Bobby is old and can’t say his r’s. Karen just keeps reading high Dalai Lama passages until Bobby says he’ll make the movie with her and then they doooo it. So gross.
Obviously this play is blargh. The only possible theme or moral you can take from it is that Hollywood values money over boring stories (ooh burn!) and that women ruin everything. David Mamet is like a more jackassery version of Aaron Sorkin, which makes sense because a smart friend of mine (not the internet) told me that Sorkin was inspired by Mamet. But Sorkin is better because at least “The West Wing” had solid female characters that weren’t just wimmins being vagina-havers that bother the men, as all female characters in Mamet works turn out to be because he seems a misogynist at heart. Lindsay’s character here exists only to mess up the bro dynamic between the two male leads, and then when the men realize that she messed with their heads (seemingly not with bad intentions), they dispose of her. OH no they don’t kill her, they just kick her out and say “Try getting another job in Hollywood ever again, missy!” which is maybe worse. Like what jerks.
If anyone can explain to me why this play is called “Speed-the-Plow”, and why hyphens, I will give you a cookie. Is this a famous phrase that other people know about and I just never learned, like wag the dog or get the pip? Don’t know it. (Interestingly, Mamet wrote “Wag the Dog” as well. But that one doesn’t have hyphens! Why not! Why is he messing with our minds?) So, in closing, you should see it. I think that’s what I’m trying to say.
“Speed-the-Plow” is about two Hollywood executives who are preparing to pitch a terrible-sounding but sure-to-be-money-making prison film to the studio head. They only have the option until the next morning, which is quite the forced timeline for allowing all sorts of dramatic things to happen. We only have 24 hours to pitch this to the boss! Oh no! He’s going to NYC for the day? Well let’s just meet him tomorrow morning and hope he’s not late, instead of mentioning anything about the film to him on the phone! Idiots.
Bobby is the newly minted head of production, and Charlie is his longtime, long-suffering associate. I say long-suffering because we get the idea that the two friends have been working together for a long, long time, but Bobby is the only one who has been promoted or paid well. So what is that about? Judging this production, I would say it’s because Americans think British people are smarter because of their accent, and Bobby (despite the understudy’s best efforts), is clearly British, so he got the promotions. Charlie, on the other hand, can do a super impressive American accent, so his studio bosses assumed he wasn’t as smart or cultured as Bobby. My blurring of the lines between the actors and their characters seems only fitting given the nonsense of this flimsy play and how much my mind wandered throughout. And indeed, Charlie’s accent was so impressive (especially compared to Bobby’s FAILURE TO SAY HIS R’S) that I almost thought he could be a compatriot. But then I saw his name was Nigel Lindsay. Nope. Not American. Can’t be more British than that. (Nigel was actually quite great in the role. But he acted like and physically resembled Norbert Leo Butz enough that I couldn’t help dreaming of how amazing Norbert probably was in the Broadway revival.)
Lindsay plays Karen, a role – originated on Broadway by Madonna, never forget – that is both thankless and demeaning, but with great shoes. She’s a temporary secretary for Bobby, and we know she is new to the movie business and quite naïve about its operating because she tells everyone she meets how ‘naïve’ she is every five minutes. It’s a super short play, less than 90 minutes, and half the words were Lindsay saying ‘naïve’. The other half was Bobby the Britman saying “entuh-tainment”. (And “unduh-stand”. SAY YOUR R’S. It’s the ONE rule of doing American accents.)
Bobby has been given a book about radiation and the end of the world and humanity and stuff to provide a ‘courtesy read’, which means he will read it to be nice but there’s no way in hell the studio would ever make it as a film. He tells naïve Karen this, and naïve Karen is like, but why? “Because it wouldn’t make money.” But why? “Because no one wants to see a movie about that.” But why? “BECAUSE I SAID SO DO YOU UNDUH-STAND?”
But Karen won’t take no for an answer, so she goes to his house at night, even though he’s gross and old, to discuss the enormous long book that she somehow read in its entirety and tabbed between finishing her work day and dinner time. Karen loved the book, to say the least. She thinks it’s the most brilliant piece of writing that e’er touched her heart and thinks it would somehow make a great movie. This is where Mamet gets both lazy and annoying. Karen reads SO MUCH OF THE BOOK out loud to us in her attempt to convince Bobby of its brilliance. All the parts she reads sound like the Dalai Lama when he is in a drug-induced dream fighting off Ewok-shaped clouds. Then the tables sort of turn, and even though we know Bobby is trying to seduce her, she starts seducing Bobby. It’s gross because Bobby is old and can’t say his r’s. Karen just keeps reading high Dalai Lama passages until Bobby says he’ll make the movie with her and then they doooo it. So gross.
Obviously this play is blargh. The only possible theme or moral you can take from it is that Hollywood values money over boring stories (ooh burn!) and that women ruin everything. David Mamet is like a more jackassery version of Aaron Sorkin, which makes sense because a smart friend of mine (not the internet) told me that Sorkin was inspired by Mamet. But Sorkin is better because at least “The West Wing” had solid female characters that weren’t just wimmins being vagina-havers that bother the men, as all female characters in Mamet works turn out to be because he seems a misogynist at heart. Lindsay’s character here exists only to mess up the bro dynamic between the two male leads, and then when the men realize that she messed with their heads (seemingly not with bad intentions), they dispose of her. OH no they don’t kill her, they just kick her out and say “Try getting another job in Hollywood ever again, missy!” which is maybe worse. Like what jerks.
If anyone can explain to me why this play is called “Speed-the-Plow”, and why hyphens, I will give you a cookie. Is this a famous phrase that other people know about and I just never learned, like wag the dog or get the pip? Don’t know it. (Interestingly, Mamet wrote “Wag the Dog” as well. But that one doesn’t have hyphens! Why not! Why is he messing with our minds?) So, in closing, you should see it. I think that’s what I’m trying to say.
All About Eve: Fasten Your Seatbeats, It’s Going to be a Bumpy Night Because This Show is Terrible
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is All About Eve at London’s Noel Coward Theatre, playing until May 11. Watch the movie instead!
A few years ago, my family gathered together on Christmas morning to do one of our favorite things: watch a new Oscars screener. The movie was ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’, which would kickstart the career of the incredible Oscar Isaac. Because we are movie people – and because we are decent human beings who know how to behave – we watched in silence for about an hour. But at that point, my sister-in-law broke the silence and asked the room, to hilarious effect, “So, this is terrible, right?” It didn’t matter that some disagreed; for me that line was better than the movie and one of the funniest moments ever. If I were willing to talk in the theatre, I would have quoted her recently when I saw the new production of All About Eve at London’s Noel Coward Theatre. After the sheen of seeing its famous stars wore off, it was absolute torture to sit through, and it took all my might not to say to my husband, “So, this is terrible, right?
As you probably know, the movie “All About Eve” is a classic Best Picture winner about two headstrong actresses, one an established Broadway star and one yoot trying to take her place. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen the movie, but I remember that, although the two women were devious (one more than the other) and determined and like not great people, they weren’t fully out of their minds batshit crazy. ENTER: Ivo van Hove, London’s favorite theatre director who is known for his visually striking takes on reworking classics but who is arguably a misogynist. What a perfect show for Ivo to destroy so he can continue showing off his hatred of women while also displaying his love of stark staging and cold projections! Instead of the actresses being strong women, one of whom is determined to a fault and kind of scary, both are now outrageous lunatics who may as well be clawing at each other the entire time and screaming like babies and tearing each other’s hair out while Ivo sits in a chair offstage smoking a cigar and muttering ‘yes this is women.’
What makes it all worse is that it stars the great Gillian Anderson as Margo Channing, the big Broadway star, and the world’s new favorite blonde Lily James as Eve Harrington, the young upstart. These are two huge actresses right now and this classic work with the two of them? it should be EPIC in its greatness, not in its failure. To make matters worse, because this stars these two giant celebrities, tickets are astronomically expensive. So we paid more than we have paid for any other tickets in the past six or so months to see this steaming pile of dog shit, except worse than that because at least a pile of dog shit necessitates a doggo being nearby. There were no dogs!
So, let’s do a quick plot overview. Margo Channing (Anderson) is a Broadway star, currently in a play written by her friend Lloyd, who is married to her friend Karen, both of whom are cast so strangely that there is no forking way they would be married in real life. After the performance one evening, Karen brings a young woman, Eve (James), who was waiting for Margo at stage door into Margo’s dressing room. PROBLEM #1: Who in tarnation lets a random fan come backstage to meet the actress? As someone who stagedoored mm let’s just say a lot, I can tell you right now, that shit does not and SHOULD NOT happen. So, right off the bat we got some bullshit. To increase the crazy quotient, Margo hires Eve to work as her assistant, which also means living with her. Cool guys, yeah, this is a thing, I am also Lin-Manuel’s personal assistant and I live with Kelli O’Hara, this is the result of stagedooring.
So Eve ingratiates herself into Margo’s life but Margo starts to distrust her, which she should have done when she first met her, but she was too busy worrying about being old. Her main character trait is being insecure about her age because she is over 40 (gasp!) and her boyfriend, Bill, is younger, so to make her feel better, Bill says to Margo “You’re not old! You’re young! You’re six!” which is DISGUSTING ughhh men are gross. We see her birthday party happen pretty much in real time, and it’s a bad party, and everyone is in the kitchen, which is hidden from our view, so it’s worse than your average shitty party. I can’t believe this show. Eve weasels her way in more and more and somehow becomes Margo’s understudy in the current play, which is definitely what happens when you stage-door stalk celebrities, you get cast in the Broadway play mm hmm sure sure, I am a multi-Tony winner yes. And here is my biggest problem with this story: Everyone says that Eve is utterly fantastic at her first reading, so we know that she is actually a great actress. Meaning, she doesn’t have to scheme anymore. The most powerful people in the theatre now know that she is excellent and are ready to hire her…so…that’s that then, right guys? I don’t understand why there can’t be two great actresses in NYC in this universe. They know there are like, lots of them, right? WHY CAN’T THERE BE TWO? Everything after Eve gets hired has zero force because there’s literally zero reason for her to continue being a crazy beeyotch. Things are slow and boring for a while and then boom, out of nowhere the whole ending is so nonsensical it actually hurts. The playwright was going to leave his wife for Eve? Since when? Since they met like the day before and talked once? Eve was gonna just put up with Addison forever and let him blackmail her? She could have easily gotten her good review out of him and then told him to fork off. I don’t get her being submissive after all she has done. And the whole tidy wrap up with another girl in Eve’s room wanting to be like her to show that what, women operate in a cycle of trickery and dominance? Physical pain.
Is the writing or the direction worse? Ivo tried to be clever but everything looked messy and busy. It was like Ivo thought up a hundred new tricks and instead of picking one or two to focus on, he threw them all in and hoped for the best. There was creepy music vamping the entire time that became excessive and annoying. There were long pauses that were supposed to be dramatic but were mostly frustrating. If they cut half of those long pauses, it would have been a 90 minute show. Most of all, the whole movie-camera concept was ill-conceived. If we wanted to see this story presented more like a movie, we would have watched the damn movie, Ivo, and we would have loved it and we would have saved hundreds of dollars and we would not have gotten AGITA from all the ANGER. There were literally cameramen with working cameras following the actors around, and their filming was projected onto the back wall for us to watch live. Sometimes important action was happening out of our view, like in the kitchen (the birthday party scene) or the bathroom (literally the climax of the show) and the only way the audience saw this, this important action, was because the cameraman was filming and we watched the projection. WHO STAGES THE MOST CLIMACTIC SCENES OF A PLAY OFFSTAGE. I mean, I get that you are going for some sort of expose vibe but this isn’t a FORKING MOVIE, IVO. If you want to direct a movie I’m sure someone would hire you to do that, but don’t take a stage show and try to make it your next film. Ugh the cameras so often settled on empty glasses and dishes and projected those for us to stare at and it’s like, ‘ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING DEEP, BECAUSE WE ARE JUST LOOKING AT GLASSES.’
But then the writing was so cringeworthy that with literally every other line, my husband and I were kicking each other. They owe me new stockings because of how bad this writing was! Not one line of honest or realistic dialogue is in the whole thing. There was a line about how every ticket holder to a play would ask for refunds if an understudy was on – this in a city (London) where they famously DON’T GIVE REFUNDS IF AN UNDERSTUDY IS ON! Don’t get me started about how shitty a policy that bullshit is, especially for a show like this when there is a 1000% price increase for these big stars.
I wish I could say that if they had a different director take this in a different direction, it would have been good. But nothing happening on that stage was salvageable. Gillian, who is often superb onstage, is not superb here. She spoke in a low gravely monotone that seemed bored and kept us from connecting. At least she still has a strong stage presence and is usually great. Lily, on the other hand, should not be a stage actress. Her climactic screaming breakdown evoked no emotions other than fremdschamen. She is winning onscreen but is simply not meant for the stage.
There is one trick that Ivo employed that works: when Margo stares at herself in the mirror (projected to us, naturally) and slowly sees herself morph into an old lady. That was cool. You know what wasn’t cool? Having the cameraman film Margo throwing up in the bathroom after drinking too much. That was not cool. I am so tired of Ivo’s misogyny. He made these two women into painful caricatures where they were once interesting women, flawed but recognizable as humans. This is more like cartoon version of what MRA men like to joke about women being like.
To add insult to injury, it is two hours long – WITHOUT AN INTERVAL. Most normal shows do an hour for Act 1, 20 minute intermission, and an hour for Act 2, but this one just skips the interval. It could be to preserve this utterly silly movie vibe, but I would bet you a million dollars that they did it because they knew people would skip out on the second half. Halfway through, there is even a very clear change in vibe that screams out to be the act break, and would have been a good one, but they simply pause and then KEEP TORTURING YOU while you now also have to pee. FIE. FIE UPON HOVE (also the name of a town in England, I’m guessing).
INFORMATION
All About Eve is playing at the Noel Coward Theatre until May 11. Programmes were £4.50, 50p less than normal because I bet the programme sellers felt bad about all the money everyone’s spending to see this monstrosity. In contrast to my usual thinking, I recommend the dress circle in this theatre and not the stalls, because the stalls are below ground level and they don’t let you leave through the main doors at the end so you have to exit onto the street which is some bullshit.
I did not try to stage door – what was I gonna say, “hey you were really great in ‘Mamma Mia 2’ but not this”?? – so I can’t say if they come out or not but like do you care, don’t see this, it’s bad.
