Zoe Lister-Jones Swallows Her Pride

Wow. Theatermania is reporting that Zoe Lister-Jones will return to The Little Dog Laughed, but just for the final 2 week of performances. Lister-Jones created the role of Ellen at Second Stage, but was replaced by the popular Ari Graynor for Broadway. I wonder who made that phone call? "Hey, Zoe! It's me, [broadway producer of Little Dog Laughed]!! Yeah, it HAS been a while! So, uh, I have a question for you, and feel free to say no, but..."

I haven't heard of anything Zoe's been doing since LDL finished it's run off-broadway, but can she really be in such dire straights that she had to do this? On the other hand, maybe she'll have a triumphant return and make those producers rue the day they replaced her. Maybe.

Moxie Hearts Jack Bauer

May I just say how much more complete my life feels now that Jack Bauer is back in it? I know, he's violent, dangerous, has a tendency to drop off the face of the earth and then just come back with little or no explanation, but I love him, I need him, and I prefer not to live without him.

This season seems like it could shape up to be the greatest or the wonkiest season yet. Regina King is a fierce ass-kicker, but D.B. Woodside seems like a tough sell as the president. Would the U.S.A. ever elect another Palmer? Really? After all that scandal? (Wait a minute... this is starting to sound vaguely familiar). And Peter MacNichol is a fantastic actor, but his type is so predictable on the show, just like Stephen Spinella last year. Wiry, off-center, kinda bug-eyed and arch guys can't be trusted with important government decisions. Yeah. We get it.

However, none of this detracts from the joy I get watching Jack Bauer bite someone's neck out. *Sigh*... I'm so easy to please.

Wallace Shawn Presents the Classiest One-Man Show Ever

Just got a staff offer for tickets to The Fever tonight. Sadly, I must decline as I am already committed to seeing Mary Poppins tonight... alls I'm sayin' is that house better do pirouettes on it's shutters or I'm walking out. Anyway the offer reads:

We’ve been offered tickets to see the new Wallace Shawn play THE FEVER tonight. The show is at 8pm at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row. (It’s recommended that you arrive between 7:30 and 7:45pm to enjoy a glass of champagne with Mr. Shawn onstage before the performance starts.)

Is there a post-show scotch-and-cigar hour with Wally in the Theatre Row lounge, too? Don't forget your spats!

Review: The Vietnamization of New Jersey

Chris Durang's The Vietnamization of New Jersey is receiving it's long-overdue New York premier at The Beckett Theater. According to their website, the Alchemy Theatre Company "aims to explore the boundaries of theatrical storytelling, seeking greater immediacy in recording the human condition." Well, push boundaries they do in this aggressive staging of Durang's dissection of the American family during the Vietnam era. From their website:

What's a patriotic mother to do when her beloved son returns from Vietnam sooooooooo bummed out? A scathing satire of American Family "Values," Christopher Durang's The Vietnamization of New Jersey is an outrageous, diabolical romp through 1960's suburbia where the Left, Right, and Middle (Class) are all in the crosshairs. Ozzie Ann, Harry, Et... and the irrepressible Davey... battle for the soul of the family unit; fortunately Hazel, their always helpful and handy housekeeper, is there to provide much needed answers!

The conflict that arises between the family members is frequently comedic and consistently disturbing. Nick Westrae shines as the teenage son of pushover WASP parents, rebelling in a series of insane ways, from shoving his corn flakes down his pants to making out with his war-veteran brother's wife (oh, and the brother happens to be blind). And that's only the beginning. James Duane Polk also lights up the stage in a hilarious gender-bending turn as the family's African-American maid, who seems at first to care for the family, but may have it in for them just as much as they do for each other. Michael Cyril Creighton, of Rip Me Open fame, makes the most of the smallish role of Father McGillicutty, the nervous and probably-gay priest who advises the family to embrace war in Vietnam, famine, poverty, and even homosexuality as god's plan for population control. Creighton's Father McGillicutty is brimming with nervous tics and hesitation, the most believable of all the characters who are at their wits end.

The unfortunate aspect of the play is the unfocused, halting manner in which it's been staged by director Robert Saxner. Durang works best when it's played at a clip, naturalistically, with the bizarreness accepted by the characters and production as a part of everyday life. This production seems to call needless attention to every quirk and oddity in Durang's script, losing much of the humor by pointing effortfully at it. Of course, it is in previews, and some elements are sure to strengthen as they settle into performances.

It's impossible to see a dramatization of American life during the Vietnam war and not reflect on our own times, and the similarities between the two. Aside from a few delightful performances, the play is worth seeing as a means of reflection on how truly scary and uncertain our times are, and how little we may have learned from all that happened in the 1970's.

The Vietnamization of New Jersey runs at Theatre Row's The Beckett Theater through January 28th.

Review: The Scene

The Scene is an utter, total blast. Watching it is every bit as wickedly delightful as a good chick-lit beach read, minus the guilt factor that comes with rotting your brain away on paragraphs about manolos and flirtinis.

As you might know by now, I refuse to write plot summaries, so here is one from Second Stage:

The tale of an out-of-work New York actor — married to a news producer — who has an affair with a fresh-faced Ohioan ingenue and finds himself more morally and spiritually lost than he was before. This black comedy about the ever-elusive “place-to-be”takes on the empty narcissism of American pop culture with bitterly funny results.

I've never been a huge fan of Tony Shalhoub - he's funny, sure, but he always just seems like the obvious go-to guy for the jewish/ethnic idiosyncratic roles. This changed my mind 180 degrees, and if there is a Tony Shalhoub fan club out there, I'm ready to join. Charlie, the out of work actor, is no Monk - he's a guy's guy, goes to swanky parties, and doesn't take bullshit.. that is, until he begins to unravel and lose his way, falling into the ready, waiting arms of the predatory Clea (Anna Camp, who is about to be NY's it girl because of this role). Shalhoub attacks the role with exactly the right balance of quirkiness and down-to-earth, average-joe new yorker-ness. He goes from hot to cold in a flash, one moment chewing up the scenery, the next drawing us into his loneliness and confusion with simplicity and stillness. It's very convincing that this sudden spiral into desperation could happen to anyone, which makes the play very unsettling, and almost scary.

Patricia Heaton is funny and sympathetic as the overworked tv producer whose husband leaves her just as they're about to adopt a child, and Christopher Evan Welch makes sweet lemonade out of what could have been a lemon of a role - the feckless best friend/sidekick/shoulder to cry on/wingman. Anna Camp is the one who really shines in this production. She begins the play with a string of "ohmigod!"s and "like, totally surreal!"s, a dumb blonde of the highest order. In typical Rebeck style, she soon proves herself to be much more intelligent, manipulative, and interesting than she first appears. Each character has expectations of Clea which she expertly uses against them, to getting exactly what she wants. Watching her work is almost like watching one of the alien machines in War of the Worlds - extracting what she needs for survival out of each character, and then abandoning the waste when she moves along. The results are delightfully horrifying.

The Scene takes aim at the narcissism behind much of what we Americans (especially New Yorkers) put so much value on - youth, sex appeal, a tough 'tude, the "right" friends, success, and money. Rebeck is carefully (and thankfully) ambiguous about any kind of "lesson" within the play, and at the end, it seems that the 40-somethings who have slaved their lives away for success are just as lost as the 20-somethings at the beginning of the journey.

Photo yanked from The Times.

Moxie warned you...

And now it's happening: Nicole Kidman is definitely making the Rabbit Hole movie. David Lindsay-Abaire will pen the screenplay. Since you already know how I feel about Kidman herself in the role, I at least hope they consider keeping on Tyne Daly, Mary Catherine Garrison, John Slattery, and John Gallagher Jr (or Spring Awakening's resident rock star, as I like to call him). The rest of the ensemble was every bit as good as Cynthia Nixon was, and it would be so cool to see these frequent theater folks onscreen.

I also really hope Lindsay-Abaire spares us from a dramatic flashback to the accident itself. The play was so strong in what it didn't show us, as well as what it did show us, and losing that could turn the story into a classic lifetime drama.

As snarky as I may be about Kidman as an actress, kudos to her for taking the play under the wing of her production company, Blossom Films, and getting it made. Let's just hope it doesn't suffer the same fate as the Proof movie.

Seriously, though, Nicole -- what's with the weird lips? No more plastic surgery until 2010 at the earliest.

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!

"Don't you wish y'd go on forever..."

It was New Years Eve-eve, and Moxie was in a utterly wretched mood. The year winding to an end made me reflect on all that's happened (happy things, for the most part), and it all just felt so overwhelming that the whole thing could just come crashing down. There I was surfing a major and inexplicable downward spiral, when my patient, understanding, and perpetually adorable boyfriend suggested we watch some tv and just chill on out. I obliged, and turned on the tube to find a Great Performances broadcast of the National's production of Oklahoma, pre-broadway transfer. Magically, all of my worries began to immediately drift out to sea as I was enveloped by musical theater bliss. When I was a really little kid, I wore out the old VHS of the old Shirley Jones Oklahoma movie. I knew every word of every song, and probably first learned to sing by belting along with Ado Annie - god bless my poor parents for being so encouraging rather than wincing and holding their ears. Watching the classic musical again, I realized how little I even understood when I first saw it. I think I learned half the words in "Kansas City" just from singing along - words like burlesque, privvy, even the surrey with the fringe on top was a totally foreign thing for someone so little.

The thing that kept me watching after Hugh Jackman's big entrance with "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning," was how incredibly that production was staged. The National Theatre's Olivier Theater is an amazing space, and was home to His Dark Materials, Moxie's favorite theater experience of all-time. Putting the whole thing on the revolve allowed them to use one big scrim as background, angled up and over the actors' heads, blazing blue like the giant midwestern sky. The angle created so much perspective that the horizon looked like the land was just going on forever - so emblematic of the feelings of the characters about the land, and their future on it.

Oklahoma blazed the trail for musicals as we know them. It was the very first musical in which the action led right into the songs, and the songs furthered the story. The characters sing because they need to, to fully express how they're feeling. If you haven't seen that production, try to get your hands on the DVD. I know it's out there, probably on netflix. Did anybody manage to see it in London?

Images from PBS's Great Performances website.

Turistas Go Home!

Variety reports that Broadway box offices are at a record high this year (due to high attendance, but also skyrocketing ticket prices... not so good). Meanwhile, Gothamist says that NYC tourism is at a record high, as well. The city is full of Brits, looking to cash in on America's pitifully weak dollar. Check out this depressing illustration:

Would that Moxie was a sassy cockney lass, pockets stuffed with pounds rather than dollars here in the Big Apple! The crowds are pretty heinous, but the other night after a fabulous night at Spring Awakening, Moxie and her little bro' overheard an adorable mop-headed child say to his mother, "you know what I notice about New York City? All the women wear high heels." And then for a brief moment, it was every bit as magical as when I was little, and awestruck at the bright lights of Broadway.

Times Sqare photo courtesty of brianramnath on flickr.

King Lear Casting Gossip

Moxie cannot WAIT for The Public's production of King Lear! Kevin Kline will play the aging monarch. Kline is at the top of a short list of older actors Moxie has a big fat crush on, ever since seeing the silly but delightful French Kiss (a certain bug-eyed actor featured in Earth Girls are Easy is also on the list). There's no doubt that he'll be incredible, and compared with some of the stage roles he's played in the past few years, which have been only so-so roles for him, Lear seems like a perfect fit.

What Moxie is even more excited about, though, is the casting rumors she's heard circulating. Logan Marshall Green will play Edmund ("Now Gods, stand up for Bastards!") and Michael Cerveris will play Kent! This is so perfect, I could just purr.

Now, who will play the women? For Cordelia, Moxie would love to see The Public cast someone with some backbone and spunk. The last thing I feel like watching is another pretty Juliet type with a lovely speaking voice and nothing interesting or edgy going on. Why not Alison Pill? Bryce Dallas Howard would also be fierce, as would Amy Ryan.


Regan and Goneril... I always think of them as the real politicians of the group, old-timey Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clintons, if you will. If there were a god in heaven, they'd cast Tina Benko, delicious viper that she is. Being an agnostic, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Office Holiday Gift Envy

Moxie's office is overflowing with sickly-sweet chocolatey treats sent by actors, agents, and managers (several of whom I've never spoken to in my life - do these people think stale nougat will make 2007 the watershed year for their clients?). The sugary onslaught at first seemed like it would be a wonderland, until Moxie devoured six brownies in one afternoon and then felt like a few of Santa's elves were getting rambunctious in her belly. Fat Witch Brownies, I'm putting you on notice, and your adorable blondie cousins, too.

From the office itself, Moxie was looking forward to some kind of company emblem-embroidered denim button-down or the like, but instead was surprised to receive an extra paid vacation day, which is sort of a cool treat and a let down at the same time. Moxie was satisfied until she heard what a friend of hers got from his boss, who happens to be Conan O'Brien. Apparently, the king of late-late-night got his whole staff XBox 360s, along with a year-long subscription to the online gaming thingie that sounds supercool. Well, poopiepants... score one for television, zero for not-for-profit theater.

Interesting Spring Awakening Tidbits

The theater world seems so Spring Awakening-obsessed, Moxie has shied away from posting about it here (for the most part). But we do love it (more than anything else on Broadway, in fact) and we've been following Broadway World's ongoing interview series titled "Going Geeky on 'Spring Awakening'".

Here's an interesting tidbit from part 3 of the series, and interview with Michael Mayer and Kimberly Grigsby. Here's a cool tidbit about a part of the show that Moxie has always been curious about:

BB: ...Most of the scenes are played very straightforward. The actors talk and relate directly to each other in the scene, and then the songs are done kind of a concert scenario with the microphones. Except for one scene between “I Don’t Do Sadness” and “Blue Wind”. The scene itself is done on the mics, and I was wondering what your reasoning was for taking that scene specifically in such a different way?

MICHAEL [MAYER]: It’s a complicated, and here’s a really geeky, answer. There are lots of reasons for it, but I would say there are three main reasons. One is the stupid, obvious reason which is I knew I wanted them to be singing at those mics for their songs and getting them from the scene to those mics was a complicated, near impossible thing to do without it being really awkward. That was one thing but number two, the second reason is that in the play itself, I mean the source material, we find out at the very end of the play that the masked man, which doesn’t exist anymore, says to Moritz in the graveyard, “I came to you once before and I tried to stop you from killing yourself”. Scholars have agreed over the decades that what that refers to is that he sort of, as a shape shifter, had come in the form of Ilsa. So it wasn’t really Ilsa, it was the masked man in disguise as Ilsa. So that means that the actual scene between Moritz and Ilsa as originally written by Frank Wendekind a hundred and some odd years ago wasn’t a real scene and that they never really connect. Which they don’t, right? So she says, “Come with me” and he says, “I can’t” they’re really in their own world. And the third reason is that it was an homage to Elizabeth LeCompte, the director and artistic director of the Wooster Group and I’ve just always been a fan of theirs and I just thought, you know, I really believe in the theory of the avant-garde which is that the avant-garde is there for the practitioners. It’s not there for the general public and so people like me who are not such brilliant artists but the ones who have more traffic in the commercial world and real people, we go to see the work that is done by the true masters and the true innovators like Richard Foreman and Elizabeth LeCompte and Peter Brook and people like that, and we take from them and we sort of make it accessible. Anyway, so that’s why. Those are the three reasons.

Cool! Moxie never would have guessed that Ilse's mysterious appearance in the second act had that kind of back-story behind it. It makes Moritz's death a lot sadder, imagining that Ilse is actually the spirit of a grown-up Melchior, attempting to save his friend's life. Of course, there's no easy way of incorporating that into this staging, but we're glad to know it nonetheless.

Part 1 of the series was an interview with Stephen Spinella (a favorite of Moxie's from his stint on 24 last season). Spinella talked about the beginning of his own career as an actor, and how he owes much of his success to his long friendship and collaboration with Tony Kushner.

SS: Oh yeah, Tony Kushner [and I] met when we were in graduate school in NYU and we had an extended argument one afternoon in the student lounge about, y’now the relative merits of the Village Voice verses the New York Review of books and we sort of became friends and he started directing stuff. He was in the directing program and I was in the acting program. And he put me in a couple of projects and that summer he wrote a play called “The Age Of Assassins” which I don’t think has ever been published, and asked me if I would do it. If I remember right it was a four hour evening in a very small theater on 18th street and the cast had about, I don’t know twenty different actors in it. It was a huge, huge production.

BB - How long was the process between when “Angels of America” started to come into development and when it hit Broadway?

SS - Well, we were doing another play called “Bright Room Called Day” and that was about 1985 and he said he had an idea. We were talking one afternoon, he said he had an idea to write a gay play and it would be just gay men and his preliminary idea was that it would include Roy Cohen, at least one Mormon character and it would deal with AIDS. Then the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco picked up “A Bright Room Called Day”. They actually came to see the production we did in this tiny theater on 22nd street. They decided to do the play at the Eureka and while he was doing it there with Oscar Eustis. Oscar Eustis was then the artistic director of the Eureka Theatre who is now running the Public Theatre. Oscar asked Tony, y’now if he had a gay play because it was San Francisco and Tony said, “Well I’m thinking about this play that would include Roy Cohen, a Mormon character and it would deal with AIDS.” And he said “well, if you can write it for the company I’ll commission it.” The Eureka Theatre company had three women in it and one man. So the play that originally was supposed to be all men now had to include three women, so he created the angel, Harper and Hannah. And by bringing those characters in the thing sort of grew exponentially and that’s how it turned into a two evening play.

Spinella goes on to explain how much impact Angels in America had on his career:

I mean that made my career. I didn’t have a career before that. I mean I hadn’t done anything really significant. I don’t think I had more than two paying jobs in New York City before I came in with that over a ten year period. I had done some regional stuff and a couple of interesting projects, but it was all regional stuff and that changed everything. That absolutely changed everything.

Aww... just one more tale of people who "grow up" together in the theater, and then both end up being so accomplished. Moxie wonders which writers of our generation will end up being the Tony Kushners of the world.

Is Nellie McKay dating Michael Cerveris?

Because if so, that is SO HOT. They arrived at the Spring Awakening opening night party together. Check out their matching coolness factor - Nellie looks like she's already over Spring Awakening, Tavern on the Green, and life, while Michael has that sexy sideways I'm-up-to-no-good thing going on. Maybe Nellie can write a rap about him, and slyly refer to him as the masked man. BEST. COUPLE. EVER.

Also, Moxie is just enchanted by the lovely father and daughter, Chuck and Lili Cooper. So cute!

You can check out all the Spring Awakening opening night photos at broadwayworld.com.

Review: The Voysey Inheritance

The Voysey Inheritance is one of the most surprising pieces of theater Moxie has seen this season. As soon as you walk into the Atlantic, and behold the ornate drawing room onstage, it's impossible not to think "whoa, here comes the 20-minute nap in Act One, we're in for 3 hours of talking." Instead, Mamet's new adaptation of Harvey Granville Barker's 5 act play now clocks in at 2 hours, and is snappy, zesty, and because of the ferocious performances, downright exciting.


Exceeding expectations once again is Michael Stuhlbarg as the heir to the Voysey legacy, one which happens to be fraught with upper-class crime, secrecy, and deceit. Stuhlbarg's performance is subtle and thoughtful. The wheels of his mind are visibly turning as he tries over and over to sort out legally the illegal misdeeds of his father. Samantha Soule is sharp as a pin and just delightful to watch, matching Stuhlbarg in the ability to let us inside the complexities of their characters' emotions.

So Atlantic has done it again. Moxie must admit, she's never seen a show at Atlantic she didn't really, really like. Tina Howe's The Bald Soprano & The Lesson, Mamet's Romance, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Spring Awakening, and now The Voysey Inheritance. Keep 'em coming!

The Voysey Inheritance runs through Jan. 7th at The Atlantic Theater Company.

Boring, Boring, Boring.

Moxie is bored, so bored at work! Winter blues are setting in unsettlingly early this year, a good month before the holidays. It's 5 of 5, and dark outside, cold and windy, and all there is to look forward to is "club strength" at New York Sports Club tonight. Theater buzz lately seems to be limited to "Company is brilliant!" "No it's not!" [duel ensues], and "Hey everybody! Julianne Moore is so-so onstage!" Moxie attended opening night of The Vertical Hour, and doesn't even care to bore you, darling reader, with the humdrum details. Julianne's okay. The play is eh. Bill Nighy is good. Watch Love, Actually, you'll have a much better time.

Moxie can't even be bothered to get excited over Britney's kfed-less, panty-less escapades, nor Lindsay Lohan's AA antics. Hos will be hos. Ho ho ho.

Pug bowl to the rescue!



Instant cure for wintery blues courtesy of Cute Overload.