Wig Out!

I didn't loooove Wig Out!, but I feel like I should have. Chalk it up to a bad night. The wind was howling, the theater was freezing cold, and most New Yorkers were at home watching the Palin/Biden debate, not out at the theater. Those few that were at the Vineyard that night didn't seem to know what they were in for, and when the scantily clad black drag queens sauntered down the on-stage catwalk, the reaction was more "huh?" than "you go girl!" So while I might not have had a fire lit under me as much as I should have by this play, I can still testify that Wig Out! is funny, smart, and completely outrageous, with a lot of style and a lot of attitude. It's smart, complex performances range from total camp pastiche to the real depths of ugly, honest human emotion. Go with your friends and have a few drinks beforehand. It's not often that a play is so outrageously funny and also intellectually challenging.

Wig Out! is playing at The Vineyard through November 16th.

BEAST

On the list of comedy-killers, torrential downpours and sleepy matinee audiences should be placed right under cancer jokes. Unfortunately, the afternoon performance of BEAST I saw* was subject to both, and the "marauding adventure" felt less like a comedy and more like an incensed playwright's threatening letter to George W. Bush, a letter that happened to exist in the form of a play. Despite the usual fantastic performances by Lisa Joyce** and Logan Marshall-Green, playwright Michael Weller and director Jo Bonney never escape the clutches of the vindictive and angry political agenda of the play, and the characters are seen less as humans than they are as symbols and objects used to illustrate that agenda. Rather than appreciating the story unfolding onstage, I couldn't help but feel subjected to an onslaught of subtextual howls, including "the Iraq war is terrible!" and "we are abandoning our veterans!" and of course "George W. Bush is a total moron!", all of which are sadly true, but don't add up to good and engaging theater. Watching Marshall-Green and Corey Stoll's maimed, scarred, half-crazed soldiers fumble through a series of exchanges with blind prostitutes, backwards truck drivers, and desperate army widows is a lot to ask of an audience. If the point of such a difficult, upsetting journey is nothing more than a grotesque two-hour lambasting of the Bush administration, one has to wonder if there's a better way to incite change in the world.

*I do feel compelled to mention that the performance I was invited to of BEAST was a fairly early preview, and to my understanding, there were still some pretty major changes happening in the process. If they have since found their footing, it's possible that the BEAST onstage now at NYTW is an entirely different animal than the one I saw. However, my personal taste for political dramas is pretty specific, and I particularly dislike the feeling of being a captive audience for a playwright who is preaching to the choir about the evils of war, so it's hard for me to imagine feeling much differently, even if they really nailed it.

**Lisa Joyce is amazing. She really should be more famous by now. She is one of the most consistent and startlingly truthful young actresses today, in a class with Anna Paquin and a select few others. Watch out for this one.

Saturday Ramble: Musings on Broadway, Art, the Future, etc.

Check out Terry Teachout's strike-inspired essay today on the rising expense of a Broadway ticket. Terry asks an essential question: If Broadway costs twice as much today as it did in 1968, is the product twice as good? Are the current crop of plays and musicals even worth the outrageous expense?

It seems to me that the obvious answer is no, Elle Woods and her peers couldn't hold a candle to the Broadway of 1968, with its new plays by Arthur Miller and Brian Friel, performances by Dustin Hoffman, Lotte Lenya, and Zoe Caldwell, and long-running original productions of "Hello, Dolly!", "Hair", and "Fiddler on the Roof". But Terry has a great, and important point that beyond Broadway bashing, the forum for great new work has simply relocated, with the highest quality coming from Off-Broadway and regional productions, which also manage to remain affordable.

Don't get me wrong: I like musicals, the same way I like ice-cream sundaes. But man cannot live by dessert alone, and now that most of Broadway is shuttered, it has become clearer than ever before that there are better and cheaper places to get a steak.

I think we can (mostly) all agree that Off-Broadway and regional theater deserves a lot more attention for all the new work generated. But with the "arbiters of taste" promoting stuff like visits to grocery stores, and spending more time slamming some of Broadway's less interesting fare than discussing theater that's interesting and engaging but happens to take place in smaller houses with less funding... how do you get the butts in the seats? When art gets replaced by reality television and child-star idols, how do you wipe the slate clean? How do you shift the average American's appetite for cultural consumption, and change it from a craving for pink sugary fluff to a desire for something more unknown and adventurous? If we continue down this path we're headed on, is there any room for real art at all?

And hey, I'm not saying the only good theater (or art) is that which does something totally new/experimental/whatever. I really just want to see good stories well-told. That's what I crave. It just happens to be true that the artists who create good stories and tell them well, those artists often run with the creators and innovators who end up doing new, non-traditional work. I think of the innovation more as a positive result of good art, rather than the point and purpose of good art.

In which Moxie's hopeless crush on Jesse Tyler Ferguson lives on

A few gems from Playbill Q&A with Jesse Tyler Ferguson:

Favorite show tune: "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"

Last good movie you saw: I loved "Knocked Up." Genius comedic performances.

Worst flubbed line: I completely blanked on my lyrics to "Come Up to My Place" from On The Town. I basically forgot all my lyrics to the first verse. The orchestra just kept going without me. The first lyrics that were actually sung were Lea DeLaria singing: "Did I hear right? Did you say the Hippodrome?"

If you could star in any movie musical, which would it be? "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

I don't know about a MOVIE musical, but I think a revival of H2$ might be a really good idea. If only the off-broadway scene was healthy enough, they could put it up somewhere snazzy like 37 Arts, have Jesse star, make it really dark and skewer American values, and it could run for ages. And hello, he would be GREAT in it. This is the part where I start getting wicked pissed at the downward spiral the theater scene is headed into. Back to work....

The Vertical Hour[s of boredom] recoups - What are the audiences thinking?

Variety brings news today that The Vertical Hour has recouped, in spite of the nasty reviews and an early closing. Producer Scott Rudin said, "We had a couple of rocky weeks coming up, and we decided we'd accomplished what we'd set out to do with the play." Uh huh.

While I wish any show success, and can hardly begrudge any recoupment, this just rubs me the wrong way. I really like Julianne Moore on film (her naked, screaming entrance by flight in The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite moments on film), but she was heinously ill-suited for that roll, and possibly just not fit for the stage. I love love love Bill Nighy, but for God's sake, put him in a play that's worth a damn, not this meandering and arrogant claptrap.

The thing that irritates me is the damning evidence that audiences would rather shell out their $110 for a bad performance by someone they've seen on film than pay $60 for a fabulously-reviewed Off-Broadway show featuring talented stage actors. I recently heard a well-known not-for-profit theater producer say that Off-Broadway is tougher than ever because producing is almost as expensive off as it is on. Adding insult to injury, the real droves of audiences just won't come out unless you have an elucidating title like "My Father is Jewish, My Mother's Italian, and I'm in Therapy". Because of these, and other more complicated issues, you can expect Off-Broadway hits like The Voysey Inheritance or The Clean House to have multiple extensions, but not to transfer to a commercial Off-Broadway venue and have a long run, as they might have 10 years ago. More and more, it's becoming Broadway transfers or nothing at all, which is hugely limiting to say the least. What happened? Were audiences really just more discriminating back then? More willing to trek below 42nd Street? Smarter? Where has the Off-Broadway audience gone?

Resolutions

Happy New Year! The Village Voice has a fantastic article about New Year's resolutions for Off-Broadway, in which they survey some of Moxie's favorite people from the theater community. Actor Matt Maher wants the theater to assert its strengths:

I want the theater to stop competing with TV and film and just be itself. The more the Internet asserts itself,as more and more people are making their own movies and pilots and websites and interactive sitcoms and the like, the more crucial it is for theater to assert its strengths: richly collaborative, never-to-be-repeated, meticulously planned events that are meant to be shared with people right there in the room with you.

Right on. Moxie has found that as she gets more acclimated to being a part of the workforce, as well as the blogosphere, she has even more appreciation of the fresh raw quality a good evening of theater has to offer. As we all take on more ipods, blackberries, laptops, bluetooth, and youtubing, theater becomes all the more critical.

Playwright Rob Handel (Aphrodisiac) has a resolution for the playwrights of off-broadway, including himself:

In 2007, I resolve to write plays that meet the challenge laid down by the plays I saw in 2006, plays by writers who demand a theater of ideas and language and image—who write characters unafraid to say "Yoi ma i fa ha. d'lal ad na amginck tai" (The Internationalist); who write stage directions unafraid to say "The FIVE SAMS emerge from Samantha" (Dead City); and who demand directors and theaters with the imagination to interpret and execute their scripts.

Moxie found the last resolution the most inspirational, from the quirky, wonderful, and rather brilliant David Herskovits:

The resolution I would like to see us make in theaters everywhere is not to operate from a position of fear—fear of artistic failure, of the unknown, of losing audience or funders, of poor press. Fear of employing an untried talent, of being the first to embrace something new (especially when others may have questioned it), of deploying production practices, schedules, staffing and organizational models outside our zone of comfort.

Fear of letting go of what we know—the comfortable narcotic familiar. All this kills the flourishing creative imagination. We know that and pay lip service to it reli giously, but how often do we really, really let go of our established machinery? And how often do we find ourselves saying no—even in the politest possible way—to impulses only because, really, that's just not how we do things? Say yes!

Resolutions are also given from Adam Rapp, Anne Kaufman, Sara Benson, and Adam Bock, to name a few. Check it out!

Floyd and Clea update: Ticket Discount!

Playwrights Horizons has been kind enough to offer a "Blog Discount" to Moxie's fabulous theater-going readers. If you read Moxie's review and are interested in seeing it, here's the info.

Order by December 5, and all seats are $45.00 (reg $65) for performances November 10 – December 17 with code FCAL. Additional performances Monday, November 20.

Thanksgiving Weekend Special! All seats $40.00 (reg $65) for performances Friday, Nov. 24 – Sunday, Nov. 26 with code FCAL. Limit 4 tickets per order. Subject to availability.

Order online at www.playwrightshorizons.org, or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (noon - 8 p.m. daily), or use code at the Ticket Central Box Office 416 West 42nd Street (noon – 8 p.m. daily).

Performances Tuesday – Friday 8pm, Saturday 2:30 & 8pm, Sunday 2:30 & 7:30pm

Review: MTC's The American Pilot

Moxie recently took in an early preview of The American Pilot at Manhattan Theater Club. The play is terrifying, emotional, and intelligent, though largely humorless. Because writing plot summaries makes Moxie want to pluck out her armpit hairs one by one, here's MTC's summary:

"In a rural village in a war-torn country, an American pilot crash-lands. Should the villagers in the region help him, murder him or use him as a pawn in a dangerous game with the enemy? This powerful, topical and very human new play just earned raves at London's Royal Shakespeare Company. This new production will mark its eagerly anticipated American premiere."

Aaron Stanton plays the injured and captive pilot with gut-wrenching accuracy. The Pilot's lines mostly consist of barking out "My guys are coming for me! Get me a phone! Get me a phone or my government will bomb you!" and occasionally singing along to stale rap songs like "Gin and Juice," but Stanton creates a real picture of a good-natured air force boy from Georgia caught in a terrifying situation.

Anjali Bhimani and Rita Wolf are the strongest actors in the ensemble. Greig injects the minimal amount of warmth required into their characters - welcome in an expanse of melancholy, angry, fearful, and agitated men. Wolf is pragmatic and human as a wife trying to negotiate life in a war-torn country, and Bhimani is spirited and fierce as her headstrong daughter. However, the play never really allows them room to take a breath from the drama/trauma, and so, neither can the audience. As the American Pilot is held captive and tortured, the audience verges on feeling subjected to something, as well. Waleed Zuaiter also shines as the conflicted Captain, but again, is only allowed to show a select few colors in the one-noted script.

Ultimately, it's a really smart play that sheds new light on the multitude of horrors going on abroad right now. With the slew of stale, unkempt, and unfocused political dramas like Eve Ensler's The Treatment around these days, The American Pilot is a breath of fresh air. If only the air were just a bit sweeter at points, if only to make the play's many brilliant points more digestible. However, it is an early preview, so things will certainly change for the better!

Photo courtesy of playbill.com