Hey, Everybody!
I know I probably don't have many readers left since I can't seem to get it together to actually post much these days. But, on the off chance, that anyone's still out taking this all in...
Does anyone need a handyman? My boyfriend has some time on his handss and is great at fixing/hooking up electronics, building, painting, and all that sort of stuff. He's also a great cook.
Drop me a line if there's anything of that sort you need done and I'll pass it on. No job too big or too small.
UPDATE: Tim says he is a "qualified electronics technician, plumber, etc." and not a "handyman." He's English...bear with him, please. :)
Sorry for the unintended blog absence. I've been so busy working, looking for work, auditioning, waiting around at auditions, and having adventures around the city with Tim that I've had little time to sit down and write.
Things are going well, except that temping has been slow. Anyone need some help at their office? Drop me a line.
Tim has been having a lovely time here in town. He's in the process of re-doing my entire apartment, which is weird, but in a good way. The place has been in a constant state of flux since he got here. It's going to be fabulous when he's done with it.
He's also discovered one of the brilliant things about New York...doughnuts. To my surprise and complete agreement, he has fallen head over heels for Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kreme. Oh, my God, is my boyfriend awesome or what?
To compliment all the doughnuts, I've also introduced him to cheese steaks and cheese fries, Philadelphia regional delicacies that are truely some of my favorite things. We tried a new place called Shorty's, which is on 9th Avenue, just off 42nd Street. Very tasty, let me tell you. He thought there was a bit more Wiz than entirely necessary, but, otherwise, loved it all.
Oh, I must tell you about our adventures in television. Or, rather, our adventures WITH a television. He went on eBay one day and found that someone was auctioning off a 34" Sony Trinitron HDTV with matching stand. And...we got this gargantuan piece of equipment. Holy Shit! Right?!
The only problem? Well, we had to transport it from an apartment in SoHo to my place. And, as it turned out, this was a bigger issue than either of us ever thought. We had figured on carrying the thing ourselves and bringing it uptown in a cab. Um...first mistake. No cab would take us, because the television was too big and not even the largest, van-sized cabs have seats that fold down in the back.
So we got on the phone to Tim, who powered up the internet and found us a guy with a van who came to pick us up on the SoHo street corner where we'd deposited ourselves. He got us back to the apartment and we told him we'd be able to get the thing up to the apartment ourselves.
Stupid, stupid us.
This television is heavier than either one of us. It's big and awkward and nearly impossible for two wiry guys to carry up three flights of stairs. Sigh.
So we end up trolling around on Craig's List and finally find two guys who can come over and help us get the thing up the stairs. When they show up, Guy #2 takes one look at this mammoth piece of equipment and says there's no way he can do this.
They leave and Guy #1 says he'll be back with someone else. Okay, fine. Ten minutes later, they're both back and we're going to give it a go. Guy #1 on the front of the TV going backward up the stairs and Guy #2 and me on the back end going up forward. Tim was clearing the hallway and getting the living room (or, as he says, "the lounge") ready. Woot!
And it went really well. We got it up and in place and Tim has been working on getting it hooked up. Fun stuff!
Okay, I've also seen some theatre and I'll write about it soon.
Tim was just sitting on the couch here complaining that I don't mention him enough here on the blog. Okay, here we go...
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How's that, darling?
Back in New York, safe and sound. No problems, not even with US Airways. Tim came back with me, although he found a better deal on American Airlines, which even allowed him to fly directly into New York whereas I was going through Charlotte.
Anyhow, I'm in the process of re-acclimating to life in New York and it occurred to me that I'd written about the shows I saw over there on All That Chat, but had neglected to even mention them here. I was on a pretty serious budget this time, so I only saw three shows, two in the West End, and one at a regional theatre. So I'll reprint here what I posted over there.
Hairspray, Shaftesbury Theatre
I'm in the UK at the moment and, since I'd never seen Michael Ball in anything, decided to go check out the West End production of HAIRSPRAY. I've seen the show several times before, and, in fact, it's playing about 5 blocks away from my apartment in Midtown Manhattan, so I thought it was bit odd to be seeing it at the Shaftesbury tonight. Oh, well...
Michael Ball is a terrific and vastly over-qualified Edna. Of the actors I've seen in this role (Fierstein, Vilanch, McKean, and Travolta) he's easily the most believable as a woman. In fact, had I wandered into the theatre knowing nothing about the show, I would probably not have been certain it wasn't an actual woman. He's playing it more like a real woman rather than an over the top comic. More Travolta than Fierstein. Seven years later, I still can't get Fierstein's voice out of my head on those lines and it's always weird to hear other voices saying them. Not fair to Ball or any of the others I've seen in the role, but there it is. To my mind, Edna just doesn't work as well with any other actor.
The audience was just as rude or even more so than a typical New York audience. The two women to my right chatted throughout the entire performance and the woman to my left texted throughout. At least the Texter made some effort to hide the light from her cell phone.
The souvenir program cost 6 pounds, or a little more than $12. It's lovely and contains a lot of information about the show, but wow! That's a lot of money to spend to learn about the cast. As you probably know, there is nothing in UK theatres provided free of charge to give information.
Speaking of the program, I was introduced to a term tonight with which I was unfamiliar. All the leads have "walking covers," in addition to understudies listed. In some cases, the walking cover was also listed as an understudy and each role has at least two understudies. Anyone have any idea what a walking cover is?
The stage of the Shaftesbury seems a good deal smaller than the Neil Simon Theatre and certainly smaller than whichever Loop theatre I saw the show in when it was in Chicago.
The whole production seemed...what's the word?...slicker, I guess, than in New York. It's more polished and showy and seemed more like a show than actors telling a story. Does that make sense? The Tracy was really good, but she just wasn't as real as Tracys I've seen in New York.
The Little Inez was the best I've seen yet and it seems that the role was cast here with an older actress than is usually used in the US. If Seaweed is a junior or senior in high school, than this Little Inez could have been a freshman, rather than a junior high kid. And I understood nearly every word she sang, an occurance that is rarer than it really should be.
A lot of the jokes just sort of went by this British crowd and there were times when I was the only one laughing. Don't know if that's British reserve or just British not-getting-the-American-jokes. I felt really bad for the actress in the Female Authority Figure/Jackie Hoffman roles. Almost none of what she was doing was landing. The audience perked up in the scene where she's the gym teacher when she lapsed into an (apparently authentic for the actress) Scottish accent for a few lines. No idea what those lines were because I couldn't understand her, but it did get a reaction from the audience.
The actor playing Link was a semi-finalist on their JOSEPH reality show awhile back. He's good, but I didn't get a strong sense of the character from him or a sense that he'd made any strong decision about who this guy is. And he's cute, but not drop dead gorgeous. So the net result was that I didn't quite see why Tracy and the other girls go ga-ga over him.
On the whole, I really enjoyed it though. This show is always a good time.
Merrily We Roll Along, Watermill Theatre
I'm in the UK at the moment and, over the weekend, the boyfriend and I took a field trip out to Newbury, Berkshire to see John Doyle's production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG at the Watermill Theatre.
I apoligize in advance for the scattershot nature of my thoughts here. I'm noting things as I think of them and my brain can be terribly non-linear at times.
The reason for Doyle's now well known staging conceit of actor/musicians has always been the small size of the Watermill's stage (not to mention the size of its budgets). However, even that didn't prepare me for how tiny the place actually was. The stage is a 12'x12' square and the auditorium holds fewer than 300 people. This stage is dominated by a grand piano with its keyboard facing downstage. The main playing spaces were on the piano bench, and around the perimeter of the piano. Now and then, a spotlight would capture someone elsewhere for a line or two.
When not otherwise involved in the scene the cast played instruments from the side lined up in a column, much as they did in Doyle's SWEENEY TODD.
Doyle's actor/musician concept has never bothered me and, likewise, I didn't mind seeing it applied to this particular piece because the material itself has always been so problematic. Since there's never been a standard playing text anyway, why not let Doyle do what he wants and see if it works? The reduced orchestration didn't bother me, nor did the sometimes odd blocking necessitated by the instruments.
The cast was dressed in cocktail wear throughout with only a rare nod to any particular period (eg: Joe's wide bow tie). In this respect, it resembled Doyle's COMPANY, but with a bit more variation in color and style. I thought this worked because the characters in this show do spend a lot of time at the vacuous cocktail parties that are a Sondheim staple. (Is a party in a Sondheim show ever REALLY a good thing? No one ever seems to have any fun at them...makes me wonder what a gathering at the real Sondheim manse might be like.)
The cast was a mixed bad of too-young-for-the-first-act and too-old-for-the-second-act, a common casting issue with this show. It only really bothered me at the very beginning when we have a Frank who looks 25 years old. I have no idea what the answer to this problem is other than double casting all the leads.
There were no breaks for applause anywhere in the first act and only one such break in the second act, after the revue number spoofing the Kennedys, which, given the context, seemed appropriate.
The actor playing Frank spent a lot of time actually playing the piano, which meant that he spent much time facing upstage. This is probably why he had a mic in his hair. I didn't notice anyone else's, but I'm guessing that they all had them because there was no difference in sound quality between the actors. Under ordinary circumstances, I'm sure mics are not necessary in this space.
The actress playing Gussie was made up and wigged to look, weirdly enough, just like Christine Ebersole. No idea if that was intentional or not. While I'm pretty sure that John Doyle knows who Ebersole is, it's doubtful that anyone else in this crowd would. What's the point in homage/parody if literally not a single person is going to get the joke?
While the accents were generally good, it was obvious that there were no actual Americans involved to help them with the American pronunciations of certain words. Off the top of my head, they were
mispronouncing "iodine," "Houston," "Evelyn," as well as the ever popular "schedule."
The device of a suicidal Frank seeing the show as his life flashing before his eyes isn't really clear here, and it's difficult, at times, to remember that what we're seeing is intended to be Frank's life flashing before his eyes as he contemplates jumping off a roof. To that end, most of the scenes end with a pin spot on Frank looking either pensive or like a deer in the headlights, but the pivitol scene at the beginning that explains that is somewhat unclear. And the result is that we see that the other characters, especially Mary and Beth, are terribly underwritten. When you don't realize that what we're seeing is Frank's Life Written By Frank And Starring Frank, all the other characters seem like cardboard. And it's tough to care about them. When you realize that you're seeing Frank's interpretation of everything, the other characters still seem like cardboard cutouts, but, at least then, you can understand why that's so and you can approach Frank as the unreliable narrator that he is.
Because of the weirdness in the writing, Charley's big on-air meltdown "Franklin Shepard, Inc." sort of comes out of the blue and we have no idea what to make of it so early in the proceedings. We don't really know Charley well at that point and have no gauge for what this means other than that we're told this was the end of the friendship between Frank and Charley.
The one serious misstep in this production was in the Kennedy-spoofing revue song performed in the second act by Frank, Charley, and Beth. The actors didn't even attempt to mimic the various Kennedys and basically did the number straight. And it didn't work at all. Normally, I'm all for stripping Sondheim's songs of artiface and just singing them and letting the lyrics get the laughs. But, here, the exact opposite approach is needed. The laughs are supposed to be found primarily in the performance, rather than the lyrics. And, instead of a hilarious SNL-style parody, it came off as a clever song, poorly performed. And there's no way that what I saw would have sparked Joe and Gussie to propel Frank and Charley into the big time.
Doyle also employs a device of unspooling reels of tape that I'm not certain I understood. Whenever a new year is introduced, a reel of tape is taken out of a box on the piano labled with the year and taken up stage to a reel-to-reel player and installed and played. Whomever does this makes sure the audience can see the year by showing the box top around. Then, during each scene, there's always someone somewhere on the stage unspooling tape from a reel onto the floor. Sometimes it's a lead (Mary, for lack of much else to do, does it a lot), sometimes an ensemble member. I think it has to do with replaying memories and destroying the past. But I have no idea. You don't notice it at first, but it becomes more and more prominent as the show goes on leading up to Mary doing it while actually playing the final scene with Frank and Charley.
Okay, I've been nitpicking this production a lot. But, on the whole, I really liked it. Doyle's concept of actor/musicians neither added nor took anything away from the proceedings. The cast was really good. I just wish the show itself were better. There are huge gaps in character and story (the major development of how Frank got into movie producing is not touched upon at all; likewise, the downfall of Joe) and it's hard to care about a stage full of bitches and assholes.
If you happen to be in the UK, I recommend heading out to the middle of nowhere to check this out. It's probably not going anywhere and Doyle says that this will be his last production at the Watermill.
Barring that, I'm insanely curious about their summer production of SUNSET BLVD. No idea how a show built around enormous spectacle to the exclusion of all else will play without the spectacle.
The Vortex, Apollo Theatre
Just in from a new production of the early Noel Coward play THE VORTEX starring Felicity Kendal at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.
I didn't know this play before and had only heard the title. Takes place in London in the 1920's. Florence Lancaster is a lady of leisure with a dizzying social life that includes witty, arty friends, a husband, a much younger lover, her son, and her son's fiancee. What starts out as a typical drawing room comedy in the first act turns into a nightmarish weekend in the country in the second and a fiery, confrontational pas de deux for mother and son in the third.
Kendal is delicious as the 50ish lady trying to convince everyone (including herself) that she's really only 30ish and still the great beauty that captivates all who meet her. Dan Stevens is her unhappy son who's flailing about in life trying to grasp onto something real.
This play starts out as something we'd think of a typically Coward: witty, well-dressed English people making catty remarks in well-appointed rooms and slowly unravels until all that's left is the raw battle of will between Kendal and Stevens in which all the carefully constructed artiface of their lives comes crashing down.
It's like something out of J.B. Priestley.
Go see this if you have a chance. It's a compact marvel with a two hour running time that includes three acts and two intermissions.
