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July 12 – I felt much the same about The Marriage of Bette and Boo
the second time I saw it as I did when
I blogged about it before – loved the play, admired the casting, had issues with the direction. The audience was more into the play this time, which made the performance more fun. Terry Beaver got applause in the middle of his scene, as the priest imitating sizzling bacon. I definitely admire Christopher Evan Welch’s performance as Boo – the scene that ends the first act, with the screaming fight between Bette and Boo about vacuuming gravy, really sticks with me as an example of typical Durangian absurdity that makes your heart ache with its real-life resonance. I was delighted to see the great playwright
Kia Corthron in the audience.
After the matinee performance, I was the guest speaker in a talkback with the audience, hosted and moderated by
Ted Sod, who’s the dramaturg for the Roundabout’s education department. Ted is extremely diligent about researching the play at hand and gave the audience useful background about the production, and his intelligent questions prompted me to discourse smoothly on Durang’s place in the long tradition of savage comedy, going all the way back to satyr plays and continuing up through
Joe Orton and Theater of the Absurd,
Saturday Night Live and The
Onion. And we talked about the Brechtian structure of the play and how it was similar to and different from such classic American autobiographical plays as
Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Glass
Menagerie. I think we did a good job helping the audience figure out how to deal with a laff riot of a play about alcoholism and dead babies.
Late that night, I went with the intrepid Mr. David Zinn to see
Fuerzabruta, by the wacky gang of Argentinians who put on
De La Guarda a few years ago. The new show (not so
new, actually -- it's been running at the Daryl Roth Theatre
off Union Square for months) is unmistakeably Son of De La
Guarda, with aerial antics, physical exertion, the audience standing and milling and moving around and getting sprayed with water. I suppose there was some kind of theme of human beings withstanding forces of nature – the performers kept getting smashed over the head with squares of Styrofoam and plunging through paper doors at high speed, and the most impressive scene had two of them strapped to a giant sail waving back and forth like a storm-tossed ship at sea. But it sort of devolved into a tacky girlie show, when a giant side-lit plastic pool descended from the ceiling and a group of four girls in bikinis slid around just over our heads, while guys in the audience reached up for them.
(The first Friday of every month at 10:30 is "Boys
Night," marketed to gay guys, in which the hunky dudes in
the cast do the swimsuit water ballet number.) The kids in the audience (and they were mostly under 40) took pictures constantly with cameras and cel phones. I’ve never been a fan of contentless spectacles so this left me entirely unimpressed. I had lots more fun hanging out with David at
Nowhere, a funky neighborhood queer bar on East 14th Street I’d never heard of before.
July 17 – To celebrate Stephen’s birthday, Michael Feinstein
(above, far right) and his partner Terrence Flannery hosted an intimate dinner party at his East Side townhouse. The other guests were Stephen’s boyfriend Alvaro (just in from Guatemala), chanteuse
Mary Cleere
Haran, the fabulous Miss Brenda Currin, and her friend Ed
Schloss, who is such a musical-theater fanatic that he left the rest of us in the dust. After a delicious vegan Indian meal, we repaired to the music room where Michael and Mary Cleere entertained us with an astonishing array of songs, and at the end of the evening we nestled in the Green Room to preview Michael’s new Sinatra tribute album.
July 21 – I saw Stephen and Alvaro again at [title of show]
on Broadway, which I totally totally loved. I just loved every minute of it, as apparently did most of the audience, which was clearly filled with devotees
(“tossers,” in [tos] parlance), who applauded every
entrance as if it were Liza Minnelli or Chita Rivera (or
should I say Mary Stout and Dinah Manoff?). The cast was clearly flying on the adrenalin of good reviews, and the show has been considerably expanded, altered, tweaked, and improved since the run at the Vineyard Theater. I fell in love with Hunter Bell all over again but really respected all of the performances – so funny, so simple, yet so theatrically daring and poignant and honest, all at the same time. And I’m extremely impressed with Michael Berresse’s staging, which is superbly detailed and densely witty. One of the things I especially love about Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen (and the director, who is Jeff’s boyfriend) is how unafraid they are to be gay, talk about being gay, and to move their bodies in ways that no man can do unless he’s
completely comfortable in his sexuality. Of course I was eager to see how they would dramatize what’s happened to them between the Off-Broadway run two years ago and opening on Broadway – it takes a different tone than the earlier scenes, written in three weeks to beat the deadline for a festival, but the new material is strong,
though more obviously shaped for dramatic purposes and less
Seinfeldian. Heidi Blickenstaff really gets to show off what a glorious singer she is, and Susan Blackwell establishes herself as the kind of character actor so original you can’t really compare her to anyone. Tom
(below, with Alvaro) loved her description of herself as “a handsome lady,” just one of the phrases that will clearly enter the culture thanks to
[tos], along with “show-mos” and the drag name Tulita Pepsi. These actors really put themselves out on the line in the show, and it was beautiful to see them get a real standing ovation and see the tears in tough cookie Jeff Bowen’s eyes.
see previous entry here
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