Dishoom: London's Hippest Restaurant Pretty Good For Vegansby Randi / May 7, 2015
“New York, New York, a wonderful town! The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down!” I’m sure you know that line from the classic musical “On The Town”, because it’s the only memorable line in the whole shebang. Did you see the ol’ movie? With Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, freaking wonderful cast? I’m sure I saw it, but I don’t remember. If I remembered it, I’m pretty sure I would have been more prepared for the heavy onslaught of absolute CAH-RAZY that hit me in the Lyric Theatre when I saw the current musical revival.
I really don’t understand how this wacky, bizarre musical is considered a classic, and I reeeeally don’t understand whoever calls it a family show. The current revival is really good, very well done, but the material is off the charts nuts, just a gallimaufry of seemingly unrelated scenes, sight gags, baudy jokes, and nonsense that will have you wide-eyed and asking the stranger sitting next to you “Hey…hey man…what the hell is happening on that stage?…it’s happening, right?” P.S., this is the only instance where I condone talking in the theatre. Just to find out if you are hallucinating real fast.
It begins innocently enough, as innocently as sailors can be.
Three sailor boys in their little white uniforms and their cute little Purim hats have 24 hours of leave in NYC and are so excited! Like three little puppies except not as cute or as lovable! Because they are dirty! Dirty dirty boys! 24 hours in NYC, what do you do? Eat some bagels and pizza? Go to the Empire State Building? See a show? No! You troll the streets for random women for their one night. Oy!
Tony Yazbeck, a Tony nominee for his work here, plays Gabey, so yeah he’s 9 years old, and he has his heart set on a certain Miss Turnstiles, the girl whose poster is all over the subways because she won a weird creepy little beauty pageant. We flashback to the actual creepy ass pageant, where our heroine (?) Ivy wins. She has an annoying voice but is a beautiful dancer. We like her fine. So obviously we worry that some rando sailor is on the loose searching for her. (She’s played by actual New York City Ballet-erina Megan Fairchild, whose little brother Robert is a few blocks away kicking ass in “An American In Paris”! Both starring in Tony-nominated-famous-for-Gene-Kelly shows! I hope they don’t have another sibling.)
Our other two sailors, Chip and Ozzie, vow to help Gabey (we are either working with preschoolers or chipmunks here) find Ivy. Chip (Jay Armstrong Johnson) and Ozzie (Clyde Alves) separate to try to find her, because, well, it’s easier to find a random girl in NYC if you split up. P.S., I’m going to use the words ‘rando’ and ‘random’ 100x here and I thought it was worth mentioning that the director of this show is John Rando. Can’t make this shit up.
Chip hops into a cab that happens to be driven by a youngish white woman, but instead of being cool about how women can be cab drivers, the woman Hildy (Alysha Umphress) pretty much kidnaps Chip and assaults him. He begs to be let off at any of the famous places he wants to see but she refuses and instead takes him to her apartment, while singing a song to this perfect stranger called “Come Up To My Place”. But it’s okay because she’s a woman! It’s cool! No it’s not. It’s so freaking weird and creepy that we are supposed to laugh and love their dynamic when it’s still a victim and a sex offender. It’s like she’s an Uber driver and not a yellow cabbie.
Chip is too dumb to mind, really, which I guess is lucky. Alysha has a great booming voice (you may recognize her as one of the trolls in the Frozen 2 (Frozen Again) video. He indeed goes up to her place and is like fine with it? but still dumb and totally confused? And he meets Hildy’s sad pathetic roommate who is really probably the least necessary character in any show ever. She has a cold and sneezes a lot. I do too.
Our third Sailor, Ozzie, seems equally dumb but I think he’s a bit of a calculating genius, because he offers to look for Ivy in NYC landmarks and big museums. Meaning, he gets to see the stuff he wants to see. He’s a smart cookie. Named Ozzie. He goes to the Museum of Natural History and is in the Early Humans room with apes and Neanderthals and what not and there’s a blonde sitting on the bench writing! Look! A blonde! Her name is Claire de Loone (not joking, and yes she is a loon) (played by Elizabeth Stanley who is like the Ann Veal of Broadway musicals) and she is doing anthropology research. She asks Ozzie if she can measure him, because apparently her advanced scientific research is to find men and record their measurements, so apparently she is less apt for anthropology than she is for just anthropologie.
When Claire takes men’s measurements, she naturally finds them irresistible and, even though she is engaged to a judge, she seduces them. Again, family show. So she and Ozzie get carried away and sing one of the most hideous songs I’ve ever heard, not joking, called “Carried Away”, which is in some godawful minor key with a horrible melody. Then the early humans on display and the primate models COME TO LIFE and they all dance and sing this acne song with the apes and the homo habilis and everyone is like acid tripping more than Willy Wonka and at this point my companion said ‘What is happening?’ and it was insane. What is this show.
Back to sailor #1, Gabey, who is so depressed and lonely wandering about NYC because he hasn’t found this girl on the poster yet. I’m pretty sure he sings “I’m So Ronery” at this point; could have been something else. In a flash of smarts/stalkerness, he goes to Carnegie Hall because the poster said she studied there. And hey will you look at that, he goes in to the rehearsal rooms and she’s there! Yay! Show over! No it’s not. They meet and he asks her out and she says yes! I wanted to yell “No Ivy don’t! He’s some random sailor!” but I didn’t.
Luckily, Ivy’s voice teacher is Jackie Hoffman, the funniest person, the best thing about most productions she’s in or even not in. She’s a drunk voice teacher here as well as an angry old lady running through the streets during the rest of the show. Most of her anger is from seeing the sailors vandalize property and harassing people. We’re supposed to think she’s crazy and laugh at her but she’s actually the only sane character in the entire show.
Gabey and Ivy plan to meet that night, but sadly the voice teacher forces Ivy to work that night (as a dancer on Coney Island it’s not weird) or else she’ll smear her reputation. I mean she was doing her a favor. So Ivy stands Gabey up and Gabey is sad because he’s nine.
Act II
The sailors and the two non-Ivy random women all agree to meet up at a club where Claire and her judge-fiancé are having an engagement party with no guests. Gabey is so so sad, and Jackie Hoffman is a lounge singer singing a song called “I Wish I Was Dead”. It’s a weird start. The group bar hops a few times, each time leaving Claire’s judge-fiancé (who is okay with her having affairs) to pay the bills, each time entering a new club to find Jackie Hoffman singing the same song. Finally Jackie Hoffman is in a bar not as a lounge singer but as the drunk vocal coach, and Gabey gets out of her that Ivy is at Coney Island. So they all RUN to Coney Island! Yay!
On the way to Coney Island, Gabey dreams about meeting Ivy, and they have a beautiful dream ballet which is the real reason for seeing this show. Considering Ivy is played by a ballerina and not really an actress, and that the rest of the show is nonsense and this is beautiful, this is where she and the show come to life. It’s really the saving grace of this show.
Gabey finds Ivy on Coney Island pretty easily. She’s a belly dancer sort of thing in a club’s harem. Awwwkward. Gabey “accidentally” rips her costume off, and she’s arrested for indecent exposure! The cops come about the time the rest of the boys and their girls come. The three sailors are taken to the naval authorities for cavorting with this CRIMINAL who dared show her belly and all seems lost as the boys board their ship, but then the three women chase them saying how the judge helped clear all the police mess. And they all get to say goodbye and happily look back on the ridiculously random and disturbing day they had.
The whole thing makes so little sense that it was almost hilarious and worth seeing for that reason. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so surprised by a show. I guess I had no idea what it was about. The cast is uniformly great, they’re just given the wackiest material to work with. Godspeed to them.
Tony Yazbeck, a Tony nominee for his work here, plays Gabey, so yeah he’s 9 years old, and he has his heart set on a certain Miss Turnstiles, the girl whose poster is all over the subways because she won a weird creepy little beauty pageant. We flashback to the actual creepy ass pageant, where our heroine (?) Ivy wins. She has an annoying voice but is a beautiful dancer. We like her fine. So obviously we worry that some rando sailor is on the loose searching for her. (She’s played by actual New York City Ballet-erina Megan Fairchild, whose little brother Robert is a few blocks away kicking ass in “An American In Paris”! Both starring in Tony-nominated-famous-for-Gene-Kelly shows! I hope they don’t have another sibling.)
Our other two sailors, Chip and Ozzie, vow to help Gabey (we are either working with preschoolers or chipmunks here) find Ivy. Chip (Jay Armstrong Johnson) and Ozzie (Clyde Alves) separate to try to find her, because, well, it’s easier to find a random girl in NYC if you split up. P.S., I’m going to use the words ‘rando’ and ‘random’ 100x here and I thought it was worth mentioning that the director of this show is John Rando. Can’t make this shit up.
Chip hops into a cab that happens to be driven by a youngish white woman, but instead of being cool about how women can be cab drivers, the woman Hildy (Alysha Umphress) pretty much kidnaps Chip and assaults him. He begs to be let off at any of the famous places he wants to see but she refuses and instead takes him to her apartment, while singing a song to this perfect stranger called “Come Up To My Place”. But it’s okay because she’s a woman! It’s cool! No it’s not. It’s so freaking weird and creepy that we are supposed to laugh and love their dynamic when it’s still a victim and a sex offender. It’s like she’s an Uber driver and not a yellow cabbie.
Chip is too dumb to mind, really, which I guess is lucky. Alysha has a great booming voice (you may recognize her as one of the trolls in the Frozen 2 (Frozen Again) video. He indeed goes up to her place and is like fine with it? but still dumb and totally confused? And he meets Hildy’s sad pathetic roommate who is really probably the least necessary character in any show ever. She has a cold and sneezes a lot. I do too.
Our third Sailor, Ozzie, seems equally dumb but I think he’s a bit of a calculating genius, because he offers to look for Ivy in NYC landmarks and big museums. Meaning, he gets to see the stuff he wants to see. He’s a smart cookie. Named Ozzie. He goes to the Museum of Natural History and is in the Early Humans room with apes and Neanderthals and what not and there’s a blonde sitting on the bench writing! Look! A blonde! Her name is Claire de Loone (not joking, and yes she is a loon) (played by Elizabeth Stanley who is like the Ann Veal of Broadway musicals) and she is doing anthropology research. She asks Ozzie if she can measure him, because apparently her advanced scientific research is to find men and record their measurements, so apparently she is less apt for anthropology than she is for just anthropologie.
When Claire takes men’s measurements, she naturally finds them irresistible and, even though she is engaged to a judge, she seduces them. Again, family show. So she and Ozzie get carried away and sing one of the most hideous songs I’ve ever heard, not joking, called “Carried Away”, which is in some godawful minor key with a horrible melody. Then the early humans on display and the primate models COME TO LIFE and they all dance and sing this acne song with the apes and the homo habilis and everyone is like acid tripping more than Willy Wonka and at this point my companion said ‘What is happening?’ and it was insane. What is this show.
Back to sailor #1, Gabey, who is so depressed and lonely wandering about NYC because he hasn’t found this girl on the poster yet. I’m pretty sure he sings “I’m So Ronery” at this point; could have been something else. In a flash of smarts/stalkerness, he goes to Carnegie Hall because the poster said she studied there. And hey will you look at that, he goes in to the rehearsal rooms and she’s there! Yay! Show over! No it’s not. They meet and he asks her out and she says yes! I wanted to yell “No Ivy don’t! He’s some random sailor!” but I didn’t.
Luckily, Ivy’s voice teacher is Jackie Hoffman, the funniest person, the best thing about most productions she’s in or even not in. She’s a drunk voice teacher here as well as an angry old lady running through the streets during the rest of the show. Most of her anger is from seeing the sailors vandalize property and harassing people. We’re supposed to think she’s crazy and laugh at her but she’s actually the only sane character in the entire show.
Gabey and Ivy plan to meet that night, but sadly the voice teacher forces Ivy to work that night (as a dancer on Coney Island it’s not weird) or else she’ll smear her reputation. I mean she was doing her a favor. So Ivy stands Gabey up and Gabey is sad because he’s nine.
Act II
The sailors and the two non-Ivy random women all agree to meet up at a club where Claire and her judge-fiancé are having an engagement party with no guests. Gabey is so so sad, and Jackie Hoffman is a lounge singer singing a song called “I Wish I Was Dead”. It’s a weird start. The group bar hops a few times, each time leaving Claire’s judge-fiancé (who is okay with her having affairs) to pay the bills, each time entering a new club to find Jackie Hoffman singing the same song. Finally Jackie Hoffman is in a bar not as a lounge singer but as the drunk vocal coach, and Gabey gets out of her that Ivy is at Coney Island. So they all RUN to Coney Island! Yay!
On the way to Coney Island, Gabey dreams about meeting Ivy, and they have a beautiful dream ballet which is the real reason for seeing this show. Considering Ivy is played by a ballerina and not really an actress, and that the rest of the show is nonsense and this is beautiful, this is where she and the show come to life. It’s really the saving grace of this show.
Gabey finds Ivy on Coney Island pretty easily. She’s a belly dancer sort of thing in a club’s harem. Awwwkward. Gabey “accidentally” rips her costume off, and she’s arrested for indecent exposure! The cops come about the time the rest of the boys and their girls come. The three sailors are taken to the naval authorities for cavorting with this CRIMINAL who dared show her belly and all seems lost as the boys board their ship, but then the three women chase them saying how the judge helped clear all the police mess. And they all get to say goodbye and happily look back on the ridiculously random and disturbing day they had.
The whole thing makes so little sense that it was almost hilarious and worth seeing for that reason. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so surprised by a show. I guess I had no idea what it was about. The cast is uniformly great, they’re just given the wackiest material to work with. Godspeed to them.
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Indecent at the Menier: A Glorious and Wrenching Jewish Triumph
It’s a special Theatre Tuesday! because last week’s Theatre Thursday was actually Yom Kippur so we were offline because as this show teaches you Judaism is important and deserves respect!
I’ve been complaining about how Jewishness is treated on London stages for as long as I can remember, and I know some of you are sick of it. Thankfully for you clowns, this week’s show, the new UK production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent at the Menier Chocolate Factory, tells its heart-breaking, full-bodied Jewish tale with respect for its subject matter and the people represented. Not that one show solves an endemic problem, but I cried through the whole thing and not just at the sad parts. At the fact that a Jewish story was being treated lovingly, and with actual Jewish people involved, onstage and offstage, (Joey Tribbiani voice:) IN LONDON! This beautiful production of the Tony-winning Broadway hit is nearly two hours long with no intermission — which as you know means I had to pee horribly for half the show (and true to form I got a UTI in post) — and I still loved it. That’s as much love I can send a show, truly.
Indecent treats a narrowly defined and unassuming subject — the lifespan of a Yiddish play from inception through celebration and on to suppression — on an epic scale. Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance is the (real) work, and we see a troupe of actors (well, various troupes, in various plays-within-plays, don’t think about it too hard too too hard) tell the story of Asch’s writing of the play, the first reading of it, the first production, and onto worldwide fame…and then censorship of it on Broadway, of all places. Asch’s play tells of a young Jewish girl whose father runs a brothel, and the girl falls in love with one of the prostitutes, and the girls’ father gets like, so mad. Likewise, people in the real world were equally displeased, Jews and goys alike. Two women in love! Jewish people treated as complicated living breathing beings and not paragons of perfection! The horror!
God of Vengeance was ahead of its time, but luckily a few people believed in it, recognizing its art and beauty and how tenderly it treated the central love story, and they helped make it happen. (Believing in art is necessary!) People like my man Lemmel (Finbar Lynch), a man who was at the very first reading of the play in someone’s living room, and was with it all the way through its Euro tour, to NYC, and back to Europe just in time to perform it in a ghetto attic in hushed tones. Yeah, this play gets to the Holocaust, and you might be like ‘ugh we get it the Holocaust’ but the Holocaust was a really big deal (“remember that we suffered!”)! Going in, I was most excited to see American queen Alexandra Silber and Molly Osbourne (double Tzeitels!) playing various actresses playing the lovers, and they were as great as I expected, but Lemmel was the one who really grabbed our hearts and broke them. His love for God of Vengeance and for the love story in that play is the real heart of this play. Like I thought the love story in GOV might be the central emotional core of Indecent but it’s really Lemmel’s love for the GOV love story that was the real one all along. The real good place was the friends we made along the way. Finbar was so good, and not just because you know how I feel about small old Jewish men (I don’t think he is Jewish but he is now on the official list of goyim who are allowed to play Jews) who make me sad, like Eli Wallach in The Holiday, oh man. So good. Right at those heartstrings.
Several times during the show, I thought hmm maybe this bit isn’t totally necessary, maybe like 10-15 minutes could be cut, like the Berlin cabaret scene that makes you feel like when you watch R-rated movies with your parents. But this is hundo p one of those shows that upon reflection you realize were masterfully set. Rebecca Taichman’s compassionate and thoughtful direction treats the piece so kindly and with such care that that’s its own piece of art. (And I’m not just saying that because I especially enjoyed all the Yiddish projected on the backdrop, proving you can learn from using Duolingo (I was so proud of how much I could read and understand.)) All the moving parts, all the various characters the actors portray prove to be necessary to show GOV’s trajectory as a parallel to the history of Jews during this time period. They’re all the puzzle pieces necessary to put the story of this underlying play together, and you know like not all puzzle pieces are the dogs’ faces but you still need the ones that make the grass and trees and stuff to make it all complete. Yes I have done one puzzle in the past 20 years and it was of a dog. No I don’t enjoy puzzles.
From the Lodz section onwards, my crying was real bad. The audience was so quiet, and I was so nervous that I would do my choking-hiccupping crying loud enough to disrupt the theatre so I had to do the Joey-thinking-about-Chandler thing and distract myself a little bit and the only thing that I could think of (because it was still relevant subject matter, at least) was the Crazy Ex Girlfriend song I quoted above, ‘Remember that we Suffered”, so while I was crying outwardly at Lemmel my dude, in my head I was going “The sweet and the bitter/Remember that we suffered/Streisand and Hitler/Remember that we suffered/Spielberg and Hitler/Remember that we suffered/Have we mentioned Hitler? I’m just saying that we suffered!” It’s the best song. Anyway. The impact of seeing the words ‘an impossibly long line’ projected again towards the end broke me, absolutely broke me. It was brilliant and powerful writing and also so mean, because I was wearing two masks and it’s really hard to cry with two masks.
I knew from friends who had seen it on Bway that ‘the rain scene’, when you finally get to see what everyone had been talking about the whole time, was the most beautiful and emotional part, but I didn’t even imagine what the context would be. That aspect — who is imagining that scene and why — is something that I will both treasure and be haunted by.
Above all, it was glorious to see (during the high holidays no less) a play about Jewish people and Jewish subject matter actually performed and created by Jewish people. And in London! It’s a 5782 miracle! I hope it’s a sign of permanent change, although the fact that the Guardian review of this play felt it at all appropriate to say ‘hey you know who else is a Jew, Philip Roth!” as a way to shoehorn in yet another message about their view of the Israel conversation (that’s def what they were doing, btw) shows how much work this place still has to do.
But I digress, like the Guardian writer. This play will stick with me, and I’m sure many other audience members, as a paradigm of caring, protected, heartfelt, authentic theatre-making. I’m so grateful that this was well done, so grateful to the people involved for giving Jews one little corner of respite in a year filled with disrespect and other shit.
INFORMATION
Indecent plays at the Menier Chocolate Factory (not a chocolate factory) until November 27. I recommend you get tickets and if you’d like to get me one too I would go again (the NHS loves giving me antibx).
The Menier asks audience members to wear masks, but like every other theatre, it doesn’t have a mandate. So other people don’t have wear one and many won’t, although this crowd was better about it than at any other theatre we’ve been to recently.
Toilets are down the stairs in the restaurant part of the cafe, so if you will have to run at the end, you want to sit near the aisles, because the rows are suuuuper long, all the way across the theatre jawns.
I don’t know if any of the cast are stage-dooring because I didn’t try, because we are in a pandemic.
Sting’s “The Last Ship” Leaves Its Mark As It Leaves Broadway
It’s a sad state on Broadway when small, lovely shows can’t succeed. Granted, if you are a tourist with time for only one show in NYC, you’re going to try for “The Lion King” or “The Book of Mormon” (unless you are Mormon) or “Beautiful” (because middle-aged ladies freaking love to sing along in that show, the horror). Tourists, the people that new shows need to attract, are understandably reluctant to risk limited time and money for unproven ventures like “Big Fish”, or the BSE® “The Bridges of Madison County”, or, this season, “The Last Ship”.
“The Last Ship” is the latest artistic casualty on Broadway, closing this past weekend after a short run of just under four months. It wasn’t great, but damn it was moving, lovely, and unique. It sounded like nothing else on Broadway now or in recent memory. Sting, yes that Sting, wrote the musical inspired by his childhood and the shipbuilding yards of the northern UK. His music for “The Last Ship” sounds like quintessential Sting: haunting, dark, but beautiful.
The crazy thing is, I hated the music when I first heard it last year. I attended the Tony Awards dress rehearsal, and along with my bff and my mom I was like, ‘ughhh Sting get off the STAGE this is TERRIBLE’! And then!! And then they had Sting rehearse his song a second time! They could have made Neil Patrick Harris do “Sugar Daddy” again or repeated the amazing “Gentleman’s Guide” number but nooo we had to listen to old Irish wailings twice? I was literally groaning and almost yelling at the people in charge. That’s how crazy I was. And it’s possibly the problem the show had in getting off the ground – the style of music isn’t easy to accept; it is not a recognizable Broadway style. You might not like it at first. But the second or third time, you fall madly in love and can’t stop listening to it or singing it. Maybe that’s what it takes to wrap your mind around something so new and so moving. Listen for yourself:
The crazy thing is, I hated the music when I first heard it last year. I attended the Tony Awards dress rehearsal, and along with my bff and my mom I was like, ‘ughhh Sting get off the STAGE this is TERRIBLE’! And then!! And then they had Sting rehearse his song a second time! They could have made Neil Patrick Harris do “Sugar Daddy” again or repeated the amazing “Gentleman’s Guide” number but nooo we had to listen to old Irish wailings twice? I was literally groaning and almost yelling at the people in charge. That’s how crazy I was. And it’s possibly the problem the show had in getting off the ground – the style of music isn’t easy to accept; it is not a recognizable Broadway style. You might not like it at first. But the second or third time, you fall madly in love and can’t stop listening to it or singing it. Maybe that’s what it takes to wrap your mind around something so new and so moving. Listen for yourself:
Sadly, most shows need to garner an immediate and large fanbase, and it is just getting more and more difficult for new non-jukebox and non-movie-based shows to do this. Sting himself joined the cast in the middle of the run to try to boost ticket sales, proving how devoted and proud he was of this work. I saw the show once Sting had joined, and it was completely magical. That was in large part due to Sting’s presence and incredible voice, but considering he took on only a minor role, it was also due to the rest of the wonderful cast and that haunting music.
The show concerns the people living in a small northern England town, in which the main source of work is in the shipyard. Corporate goons (not really) declare that they are closing the poorly performing shipyard as times achange because new ventures would bring in more income. Instead of accepting the offer to find new jobs working for the villainous (not really) company, the townspeople decide to work together to build one last ship as a symbol of the lives they’ve known and because it would be nice and fun and I guess they had nothing else to do either because it’s freaking way north England and it’s cold and boring there and there is no theatre. Anyway they make this really lovely commitment, yet you can also see why some people had trouble with the book – they were like, soooo this is about people building a ship in protest sort of okay that’s boring. It’s far from the type of fare one would consider worthy of a musical, but the wonderful performances and the poignant music made it more than worthy.
Immediately, the musical sets a certain tone with just the first few bars of the opening song, “Island of Souls”. It sounds like Sting but transposed for theatre, and it’s a bit eerie, a bit sad, and totally lovely as the voices of the ensemble mesh to almost resemble the winds of the ocean. A young teenager leaves his girlfriend behind as he sets off to find his fortune on the seas; the boy’s harsh father confirms his disappointment in him; the men of the town continue building their ships. This first look at the story to come effectively sets the stage.
The show concerns the people living in a small northern England town, in which the main source of work is in the shipyard. Corporate goons (not really) declare that they are closing the poorly performing shipyard as times achange because new ventures would bring in more income. Instead of accepting the offer to find new jobs working for the villainous (not really) company, the townspeople decide to work together to build one last ship as a symbol of the lives they’ve known and because it would be nice and fun and I guess they had nothing else to do either because it’s freaking way north England and it’s cold and boring there and there is no theatre. Anyway they make this really lovely commitment, yet you can also see why some people had trouble with the book – they were like, soooo this is about people building a ship in protest sort of okay that’s boring. It’s far from the type of fare one would consider worthy of a musical, but the wonderful performances and the poignant music made it more than worthy.
Immediately, the musical sets a certain tone with just the first few bars of the opening song, “Island of Souls”. It sounds like Sting but transposed for theatre, and it’s a bit eerie, a bit sad, and totally lovely as the voices of the ensemble mesh to almost resemble the winds of the ocean. A young teenager leaves his girlfriend behind as he sets off to find his fortune on the seas; the boy’s harsh father confirms his disappointment in him; the men of the town continue building their ships. This first look at the story to come effectively sets the stage.
We jump 15 or so years to find that teenage boy, Gideon, returning to the town now an aimless man (Michael Esper), having failed in his pursuits and looking for his old love. That girl, Meg, is now a tough ass broad played by the superb Rachel Tucker, whose belt seemingly has no limits. Of course Meg has a son about 15 years old, and of course Gideon turns out to be the father. Kind of cliché there. Meg’s long-time partner, Arthur (Aaron Lazar), has raised the boy as his own as he waits for Meg to finally marry him. The chemistry of the reunited lovers is palpable, as is the shaky position of pretty decent guy Arthur as he realizes Meg still has feelings for Gideon. One of my absolute favorite parts of the show is that, despite the evident remnants of love between Meg and Gideon, she chooses to remain with Arthur, who is the right man for her now. Expecting Meg and Gideon to end up together, I had already written Arthur off as another ill-treated musical character who never really did anything wrong but whom the audience for some reason roots against – like Benny in “Rent”. (Seriously – what did he do wrong?) So I was pleasantly surprised when the plot took the much more mature path of recognizing that a person’s needs change with time just as much as the person does. It was a beautiful aspect of the book.
Then we have the great Fred Applegate as the town’s priest who is also bad ass as well as big-hearted. They give poor Fred cancer and kill him off in Act 2. Another unnecessary clichéd development. But Fred himself never does wrong, and he was so lovable here as the outspoken, can’t-be-arsed with manners and tradition man of the cloth.
Anyway, the company announces the closing of the shipyard, and the town mourns the forthcoming loss of its defining feature. Priest Fred Applegate convinces the foreman and the builders that they need to build one last glorious ship in order to achieve closure as well as feel proud of themselves for their fine work all these years. Newly arrived Gideon causes quite a stir and decides to help the men even though he left originally to avoid working in the shipyard, effectively. It’s all camaraderie and emotional growth through the symbolic work from here on out.
While the first act was nearly flawless, the second act was kind of a mess. I can’t deny that there were serious problems there. It slowed down in large part due to its breaking of my NUMBER 1 RULE OF MUSICALS: Do not start Act II with a crappy slow song, especially if it is sung by a minor and/or old man character. Seroiusly. To bring people back in from intermission – a truly marvelous segment of time in which you can eat ice cream and freaking pee – you need to start with a rollicking good number. They technically tried to satisfy my rule by having some ensemble girls belt a fun ranty song about the men, but it was still an intermission song, like “Telly” in “Matilda”, and not officially part of the show. So the real first song of Act II was Priest Fred Applegate, who is old and dying, and just ugh. Not the best way to start out, and kind of unnecessary overall. It was absolutely akin to last season’s “Rocky”, in which Dakin Matthews (Headmaster Charleston) as Rocky’s coach starts Act II with a shit song about his old days in the ring. Oh my god, no. Both of these songs dragged the shows’ momentum to a halt and set the stage for mostly lackluster second acts. Hey Broadway, stop this nonsense of having the lovable old men sing shit songs to bring us back in. ahhhh.
It didn’t help that the next song was my least favorite. Gideon and his son get arrested when all the shipbuilders try to protest the yard’s closing. In their jail cell for some forced father-son time, Gideon sort of teaches his son to fight but also to dance??? The song is literally called “The Night The Pugilist Learned How to Dance”. I just no I can’t deal with it.
Luckily, after that, the book picked up and the music got back to being awesomely entertaining. Brian Yorkey (of “Next to Normal”) and John Logan (from film) wrote the book, and despite its slow bits, I thought it was a nice job done on such a small, personal story. Again, killing the priest seemed like unnecessary additional drama in a freaking drama, but it did give rise to one of the best scenes: his wake. To honor such an awesome man, the town throws a crazy Irish-jig dancing kind of wake, and it’s an incredibly fun ensemble number that I would have loved to have seen on the Tonys if the show lasted longer.
Another fantastic ensemble number was the exuberant Act I drinking song “We’ve Got Now’t Else”, which my friend and I spent all of intermission trying to decipher. (“What the hell were they saying? We’ve got what else? Huh?” Still don’t really know what it means but whatevs.)
Seeing Sting in the role of Jackie, the ship yard foreman, was a treat I am so lucky to have experienced. But Jackie is only a supporting part; the rest of the cast was wonderful and made the show as enjoyable as it was overall. I wish the show could have gotten the better run that it deserved. Hopefully the show will find new life, maybe in the West End (where it should have started). But this is the kind of small, touching show that stays with you, so for all the people who did get a chance to enjoy it, at least it’ll remain a part of us. At least the good songs will.
Then we have the great Fred Applegate as the town’s priest who is also bad ass as well as big-hearted. They give poor Fred cancer and kill him off in Act 2. Another unnecessary clichéd development. But Fred himself never does wrong, and he was so lovable here as the outspoken, can’t-be-arsed with manners and tradition man of the cloth.
Anyway, the company announces the closing of the shipyard, and the town mourns the forthcoming loss of its defining feature. Priest Fred Applegate convinces the foreman and the builders that they need to build one last glorious ship in order to achieve closure as well as feel proud of themselves for their fine work all these years. Newly arrived Gideon causes quite a stir and decides to help the men even though he left originally to avoid working in the shipyard, effectively. It’s all camaraderie and emotional growth through the symbolic work from here on out.
While the first act was nearly flawless, the second act was kind of a mess. I can’t deny that there were serious problems there. It slowed down in large part due to its breaking of my NUMBER 1 RULE OF MUSICALS: Do not start Act II with a crappy slow song, especially if it is sung by a minor and/or old man character. Seroiusly. To bring people back in from intermission – a truly marvelous segment of time in which you can eat ice cream and freaking pee – you need to start with a rollicking good number. They technically tried to satisfy my rule by having some ensemble girls belt a fun ranty song about the men, but it was still an intermission song, like “Telly” in “Matilda”, and not officially part of the show. So the real first song of Act II was Priest Fred Applegate, who is old and dying, and just ugh. Not the best way to start out, and kind of unnecessary overall. It was absolutely akin to last season’s “Rocky”, in which Dakin Matthews (Headmaster Charleston) as Rocky’s coach starts Act II with a shit song about his old days in the ring. Oh my god, no. Both of these songs dragged the shows’ momentum to a halt and set the stage for mostly lackluster second acts. Hey Broadway, stop this nonsense of having the lovable old men sing shit songs to bring us back in. ahhhh.
It didn’t help that the next song was my least favorite. Gideon and his son get arrested when all the shipbuilders try to protest the yard’s closing. In their jail cell for some forced father-son time, Gideon sort of teaches his son to fight but also to dance??? The song is literally called “The Night The Pugilist Learned How to Dance”. I just no I can’t deal with it.
Luckily, after that, the book picked up and the music got back to being awesomely entertaining. Brian Yorkey (of “Next to Normal”) and John Logan (from film) wrote the book, and despite its slow bits, I thought it was a nice job done on such a small, personal story. Again, killing the priest seemed like unnecessary additional drama in a freaking drama, but it did give rise to one of the best scenes: his wake. To honor such an awesome man, the town throws a crazy Irish-jig dancing kind of wake, and it’s an incredibly fun ensemble number that I would have loved to have seen on the Tonys if the show lasted longer.
Another fantastic ensemble number was the exuberant Act I drinking song “We’ve Got Now’t Else”, which my friend and I spent all of intermission trying to decipher. (“What the hell were they saying? We’ve got what else? Huh?” Still don’t really know what it means but whatevs.)
Seeing Sting in the role of Jackie, the ship yard foreman, was a treat I am so lucky to have experienced. But Jackie is only a supporting part; the rest of the cast was wonderful and made the show as enjoyable as it was overall. I wish the show could have gotten the better run that it deserved. Hopefully the show will find new life, maybe in the West End (where it should have started). But this is the kind of small, touching show that stays with you, so for all the people who did get a chance to enjoy it, at least it’ll remain a part of us. At least the good songs will.
