the craptacular

You were the apple of Julie Taymor’s eye.  And contained at least two characters who were essentially analogous to her crazy self.  You were also an occasionally awesome looking hot mess of nonsensical insanity.

And last night, the folks at the Foxwoods Theater laid you to rest.  Lucky and I couldn’t be happier we had the chance to witness your particular brand of cray-cray.  Because however truly dismal you were, however many times our jaws fell open or our faces met our palms, you were really, really going for it.  We respect that, even as we ridicule it mercilessly.  And what’s more… you were kind of the most noteworthy thing to ever happen on Broadway.  What with your obscene budget and backstage dramz and inability to make your way out of previews.

We will talk of you for the ages, I’m sure.  Be proud to say we saw you not once, but twice each.

Perhaps we will not mourn your loss for long.  Perhaps the show will get even worse, and we’ll mourn your loss forever.  We know, at the very least, that Julie probs will.  Meanwhile, as she cries into her piles of severance cash, we’ll be praying that you return at least long enough for us to see Christopher Tierney sport the Spidey suit again.  We like his bod.

Photo: Jacob Cohl

Do you know what has happened every year on April 18 throughout history? That’s when all the awesome people were born.

Which leads us to this: ZOMG It’s BOTH Gavin Creel’s and Reeve Carney’s birthday.

Gavin, besides being the awesomest person on earth, was recently seen onstage in Prometheus Bound. Besides that, he’s a rockstar, has a cute dog, champions excellent social causes, and sings better than anyone else, ever. Like, to the extent that we compare every other singer in humanity to him. (Example: “Yeah, he can sing. But he’s not like, a Gavin-level singer.”) He’s turning 35 today.

Reeve Carney starred in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which is absolutely not his fault. He’s also a rockstar, and maybe he has a cute dog too, but we don’t really know. He’s turning 28 today, and he was born and raised, for the most part, on the most beautiful island in all the world—Manhattan. Spider-Man closed last evening for restructuring, so we’ll have to wait a bit to see Reeve back on stage. Our hope of hopes? That someone can figure out how to surround this lovely performer with an equally lovely show.

Photo: Monica Simoes (Gavin)

So. Some things happened this week.  Catch Me If You Can, Sleep No More and War Horse had dates with the critics and not everyone was happy about it.  Christopher J Hanke redacted his strip-off challenge and literally no one was happy about it.  Below, some thoughts to ponder while you file your taxes:

• The brilliant Joshua Henry is joining the cast of Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess in Boston. Seriously, is this show trying to kill us dead with casting awesomeness?

• Tony-winning actor Jason Alexander wrote a way-longer-than-140-character schpiel on Twitter this week about the play War Horse, and Ben Brantley’s review of the show. It’s informally entitled Wah Wah Critics Are Wrong and/or Not Entitled to Their Opinions, Even Though I Totally Believe in Freedom of Expression and Everything, Because I Am an Artist. The kicker? Brantley’s review wasn’t even bad.

• In this week’s episode of his Broadway.com vlog “Frump Tower,” Christopher J Hanke challenged fellow vlogger Nick Adams to a strip off.  Then took it back.  We’re simply not going to allow that kind of tomfoolery, Hanke.  So.  We’ve decided this strip-off should be produced as a benefit for BCEFA.  We’ll promise to use our teeth to put singles in your thong without biting, and BCEFA will get some much needed cash.  That’s what you’d call a win-win.

• Producers announced that the Hair tour would make an extended, 10-week stop this summer on… Broadway.  No complaints here.  We clearly love the show.  The Mick even popped an enormous lady boner that hasn’t gone down for days.  They better pull up some seats in that theater to make room for her cot.  She’s moving in.

• Catch Me If You Can opened to generally, well, negative reviews.  We’re not surprised.  But we are sad for Aaron Tveit.  And praying his ego will recover/he won’t run off to the solace of Hollywood to lick his wounds and never return.  We like his bum too much to watch it leave.

• Official reviews for Sleep No More hit the wires this week.  We loved the show, and it seems others did too and that’s great.  But let’s be serious.  The most important development here is the awesome mental image of Ben Brantley attempting to take notes in the dark while wearing that crazy mask.

They sing! They act! And yeah, they apparently dance, too. Behold Broadway’s newest young crop of… um… hoofers. Or something.

Sutton Foster
Yeah, she danced in Thoroughly Modern Millie. But that’s nothing compared to what she’s up to in Kathleen Marshall’s revival of Anything Goes. The choreography in the show’s barn burner of a title number isn’t exactly complicated, but it’s Sutton’s breezy execution that makes it so winning. And check out her split on the floor late in the second act. Which she does in lingerie. If that’s not worth another Tony Award, I’m not sure what is.

Will Swenson
Your eyes do not deceive you. That is Will Swenson in a dress. And he is dancing. And while Will doesn’t have nearly the workout in Priscilla Queen of the Desert that his costar Nick Adams does, the show still requires that he do more than keep the beat. He does it quite successfully, too.

Aaron Tveit
During Catch Me If You Can’s splashy opening number, I actually gasped. Not at the crazy technicolor costumes and gnarly wigs, but at Aaron Tveit, who apparently… can dance. And in ways that are not embarrassing. A far cry from Gabe’s various abstract, up-in-the-rafters pole dances in Next to Normal, Jerry Mitchell’s choreography summons all of Aaron’s inner razzle dazzle. We like it. We feel like someone’s pulling one over on us—is there a secret body double in that scene?—but we like it.

Norbert Leo Butz
Forget that he’s wearing a fat suit. Forget that he does not look, or in any way seem like a dancer. Norbert Leo Butz is an undercover dancer. In fact, he won an Astaire Award for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—a show in which his character did not, for the most part, do any actual dancing. So in Catch Me If You Can, it’s not entirely shocking that Norbert carries off the show’s big production number with such panache. In fact, he steals the entire show in that scene, due in no small part to his dancing. Or creative placement of arms. Or entirely insane flailing. Whatever is happening there, it’s awesome.

Daniel Radcliffe
Yeah, you can kinda hear him counting under his breath. But no matter. Dan Radcliffe can dance, baby. Why? Because Dan Radcliffe wants to dance more than anything on earth. And like everyone on this list, he proves that with enough training, crazy things are achievable. In this case, the boy didn’t just live. He tapped off into the sunset.

photo: The Hartman Group

Hair‘s coming back to Broadway this summer, y’all, and thumbs up to that. We’re always happy to see shows that we love alive and thriving, and within walking distance. But upon hearing the news this morning, including the announcement that the show would play at the St. James Theatre after American Idiot vacates, we here at The Craptacular couldn’t help continuing our conversation about how these shows seem so inexorably married in our minds.

Maybe they seem this way because they share a lot of the same fans. And maybe, too, it’s because art, in this case, imitated life—or at least history. As hippie culture in the 60s and 70s got cynical, shaved its head, and fastened safety pins to its clothes, so Hair quietly closed and American Idiot opened on Broadway. Voila. A historical/cultural shift is playacted on the streets of the theater district, and the only thing that survived the revolution was Theo Stockman.

We have no idea what this means for humanity, however, now that Hair is back. Except that we now all have something to keep us swooning all summer. (Right at you, Steel Burkhardt.) And we had to ask:

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So. Broadway’s unlikeliest star, Billie Joe Armstrong, is clearly having a fabulous time playing St. Jimmy in American Idiot, which closes in two weeks–and raiding the show’s costume rack. Or something. Here’s photographic evidence of his various offstage antics.

Billie Joe as cheerleader:

A selection from Billie Joe’s collection of sequined minidresses:

Red:

Purple:

Billie Joe as The Naked Cowboy:

Billie Joe (possibly?) as… as shrimp? As a Bubba Gump shrimp?

Photos:
Facebook, Tumblr (1, 2), Twitter (1, 2), The New York Times

Intermission at the Neil Simon Theater Lucky turns to me and reading the dry, dead-behind the eyes look on my face says, “I feel like you’re not enjoying this.”

Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

Things didn’t get any better after intermission, either.  In fact, the musical’s finest moment—a number called “Don’t Break the Rules” in which the inimitable Norbert Leo Butz steals the show—had come and gone about halfway through the first act.   It would not be topped.

It’s a shame, too—given the amazingly talented cast and creative team behind the show—that what happens on that stage is just so dreadfully safe, so amazingly average.  But Catch Me If You Can is truly boring, through and through.

The problems started pretty much right away, with the cheap conceit used to turn a pretty badass story into a MUSICAL (!): Frank Abagnale Jr., just about the be arrested, wants to tell everyone in this here theater the true story of his life as if it were a 60s variety show.  You know, big band and slightly-past-their-prime dancers in terrible wigs and all.  Honestly.  What about this story said BIG BAND (!), FLASHY DANCERS (!), VARIETY HOUR(!)?  And why did we need a trick to make this a musical anyway?  Why couldn’t we let the story do the work?  Ugh.  No.  Double ugh.

Unfortunately the problems didn’t end there.   I mean.  We’re talking about a big, glitzy, two and a half hour long musical and I’m sitting in the audience stewing with irritation about the crappy wigs on the dancers?  Do you think the wigs would have bothered me if everything else had fallen in line?

The showgirls—per the variety hour conceit—are in almost every single scene, and their overabundance reads as completely superfluous most of the time.  Plus, their costumes are as chintzy looking as their wigs.  In fact, while we’re on the topic of chintzy, the set—which is mostly just a band riser that moves around—is also pretty lackluster.

It might be easier to overlook issues like that if the musical itself were more captivating.  But the songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman are pretty unremarkable too.  They sounded nice enough when they were happening, but by morning I couldn’t even recall a single one.  And Shaiman’s score is… I don’t even know what it is.  Because it doesn’t sound like 1960, but it doesn’t sound like 2011, either.  It is without time or place or cultural reference, really.  It is pastiche in a bad way.

And now I’m just getting mean.  The truth is, everyone up on the stage is working really hard.  They’re doing what’s been asked of them, and they’re doing it very well.  Each and every brushstroke falls into place.  But the overall picture is pretty dull.  And out-dated.  And strangely heartless.  I couldn’t muster thirty seconds of emotion for the characters on that stage, and worse, they couldn’t muster it for me, either.

Despite the fact that they steal the two moments of the show where anything comes close to being interesting, Kerry Butler and Norbert Leo Butz are totally wasted in this show.  Aaron Tveit is undeniably talented, but he is working so hard he scarcely finds a moment to let the cracks show, to be a compelling human being and not just a really slick caricature. There are some other actors in this show too, I think, but like the songs, none of them made an impression.  Nothing seemed to stick.

I suppose if your biggest goal is to pass a night at the theater in which you do not groan and facepalm yourself to death—a la Memphis—or feel vaguely horrified and 90% unsure of what is happening on stage—a la Spider-Man—then Catch Me If You Can isn’t a bad choice.  But honestly, I’d encourage you to reach a little higher.  Elsewhere in New York you might find a show to love, filled with characters that reach out and grab hold of your heart.  That’s not happening at the Neil Simon Theater any time soon.

Photo: Joan Marcus

The people sitting next to me went to the wrong show. They were sweet—two friends from Philadelphia and their tweenage daughters, and they meant to get tickets to How to Succeed…. The girls, they thought, were too old for Mary Poppins or any of the other “kid” shows. But when they got to the TKTS window, they mistakenly asked for Anything Goes. They didn’t realize the error until they were in their seats, wondering aloud why there was a picture of a boat on the scrim.

I did my best to reassure them. The star of the show, I told them, was very well known in Broadway circles, and had reputation for being very good. I was happy not to have to retract that statement, or make apologies for it at intermission, but I needn’t have worried. This show stars Sutton Foster. Did I really think she would disappoint?

And when I say that she doesn’t disappoint in Kathleen Marshall’s genial revival of Anything Goes, which opened last night at the Sondheim Theatre, I say that as the understatement of the season.

Sutton is reason enough to see this show all by herself. Her performance is so assured here, as pitch-perfect and unwavering as her big, vibrato-free high notes. It’s not just that she’s confident as saucy nightclub owner Reno Sweeney—a role tackled by some of musical theater’s more formidable leading ladies over the years—it’s that she’s confident doing it her way. Her Reno isn’t just a hubba-hubba bombshell or a down-on-her-luck dame. She’s earthbound and vulnerable, and at times, kind of dorky. Just check out her dancing during some of the weirder lyrics in “You’re the Top”. She’s in on the joke, and thank goodness. Otherwise the comic ministrations of this otherwise fusty—and let’s be real, dated—show, could get old real quick.

To boot, Sutton looks amazing. Costume designer Martin Pakledinaz plays her tall/slim/statuesque thing to the hilt. She dominates the entire stage to the extent that the other performances around her, with a couple of key exceptions, have to work hard to make an impact, but they succeed. Laura Osnes in particular is giving a lovely performance here as Hope Harcourt, the sweet-as-sugar young heiress who steals the heart of the leading man. Adam Godley plays Hope’s betrothed, Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, with debonair zaniness as he mangles American catchphrases and eventually wins Reno for himself.

But really, this show is all about Sutton. Plot is sort of an afterthought. (In short: A bunch of people on a boat have some crazy good times and all somehow end up married to each other.) Cole Porter’s songs are Cole Porter’s songs—as effervescent and winning as ever. The show’s title number is a stunner—amazing because the recipe for its success seems so simple: A great song, some well-executed dancing, and and a winning star.

If you’re the type to be a little careless at the ticket window, you’d do much worse than to mistakenly buy this ticket at TKTS. Although I have a feeling you won’t be finding it there quite so easily in the future.