the craptacular

The Mick

In the top drawer of my bureau, buried at the back amidst tangles of bracelets and enormous earrings I rarely get to wear, there is a napkin. It’s folded into the tiniest square possible and hidden inside it are several tiny, green pills. My emergency Valiums.

This napkin hadn’t seen the light of day in easily a year until last month, when a good friend invited Lucky and I to join her at Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. I recognized the name immediately, having read several articles in the NYTimes, and even before she could explain the show my stomach was in knots and my heart was pounding. I ran for the Valiums, just to make sure they were there, before I even considered the invitation.

Staged over several floors in a warehouse in Chelsea, Sleep No More is basically impossible to adequately explain. It is as much haunted house as it is theater, a heady combination of Hitchcock’s style and Macbeth’s dark plot arcs. It is beautiful, physically moving, vaguely terrifying and absolutely, unequivocally amazing.

It is also my nightmare.

To give you a bit of background, I had one of the worst panic attacks of my life on a haunted trail walk. I am also terrified of people wearing masks (every audience member is required to wear one) and I can barely set foot in a costume shop for more than a few minutes before it’s hard for me to breathe. In fact, I try to avoid leaving the house on Halloween altogether. And if you move too quickly or drop something near me any day of the year, I am likely to jump and scream like a gunshot has just gone off. Even just thinking back on Sleep No More, I am shaking again.

Hence, the Valium.

Even medicated, I was still utterly terrified when I reached the fictional McKittrick Hotel and our journey through Sleep No More began. I caused a minor scene in the elevator when the operator gave me the impression I was going to be forced to experience the show alone. (A scene that, looking back, probably lead to Lucky being torn out of my clutches and forced to go it alone herself.)

But every second of that fear was worth it. I have never, never experienced anything as amazing as Sleep No More. I’m fairly certain I never will again.

No detail was overlooked. Wandering the performance space, everything I saw or touched—every drawer I opened or book I thumbed through—was a part of the story. My every sense was employed to immerse me in the experience of Sleep No More.

The cemetery smelled like hundreds of years of decay, damp with two day old rain. In the darkness, it seemed impossible that something awful wasn’t lurking behind every crumbling brick wall or monument, waiting to accost me. The air in the candy shop was sweet, like a momentary escape from an extended nightmare. Standing in gumshoe detective office where Malcolm joined us, I felt like I was in the safest place I could even imagine and his presence only served to make the room more soothing. Moving trees in the half-lit ballroom—Burnham wood marching on Dunsinane—were menacing.

The actors are in your midst. I danced on the ballroom floor with one. And followed Macbeth as his Lady manipulated him through murder and crazy sexfights. You can follow whoever you find, whoever you like. Or you can just roam on your own and see what happens. The story unfolds around you, and even when you think you’ve seen everything you’ve missed at least half. Getting separated from Lucky proved as much, as she’d seen an entirely different show than I had in the hours we spent apart.

For several days afterward, I couldn’t shake the smell of cemetery. Or the memories of the things I’d seen and touched and felt. It stays with you; its power amazes you more every day. Sleep No More is a moving tribute to the power of drama—it is both theater as you have never experienced it and as it was always intended to be. Immersive and all-consuming, it eradicates any sense of reality and allows you to live in the world of Macbeth for a night. And even if you’re terrified, it is an utterly unmissable experience. Just. Maybe take some Valium beforehand.

***

Lucky

He kicked me out of the elevator. There are lots of things I will remember about Sleep No More, Punchdrunk’s epic, wordless, radically re-imagined production of Macbeth, but the thing I will remember forever is that he kicked me out of the elevator.

Done up as a creepy bellhop, the actor in question undobutedly couldn’t help himself. The Mick was, after all, clinging to my shoulder and literally shaking with fear, and that’s too much temptation. All I know is that he stopped the elevator, opened the door and said, “Right this way, everyone.”

Except when I turned around, I was the only one who’d gotten off. Apparently, after I stepped out, the bellhop had put his hand down in front of The Mick, stopping her from following me. Because the audience at Sleep No More is asked to stay silent throughout, no one was about to call after me, and in the end, I’m glad they didn’t. Because as the bellhop intoned, just before I stepped out, Sleep No More is an individual experience.

And was it ever. I think it would have been even if I’d stayed with my friends, but I spent the next two hours wandering the five floors of performance space by myself. On those five floors, a cast of actors performs Macbeth, or rather insinuates Macbeth, because except for some well-placed shouting and grunting, there are no spoken lines. Everything is conveyed through movement, facial expressions, dance, and some intricately-staged fight scenes. And then, of course, so much is expressed through the show’s most formidable character of all: The set. Decorated as a dilapidated hotel—or a home, or a mental hospital, or a graveyard, or a candy store, or a ballroom in the woods—the breathtaking surroundings look (and sound and smell—music and scents are used throughout) like a nightmare or a Hitchcock movie, or all three. And they’re yours to explore for the duration of the show.

Sleep No More does what all truly great suspense and horror films do: It presents things that, on the surface, aren’t particularly scary—a child’s room, a candle-lit chapel. But our own associations and fears render them chilling. There is nothing scarier in Sleep No More than entering an empty room, even though you know, rationally, that this is not a standard goofball haunted house. Nothing is going to jump out at you. No one is going to scream. Here, it’s the silence and emptiness that generates the terror, that creates the space in your own mind for all your personal demons to dance.

While you may not be able to piece together a coherent story at Sleep No More, that hardly matters. It unfolds with the mystery and unpredictability of a dream. For an audience, the effects are literally mind-boggling, and present only a single challenge: How far into it do you want to go?

Who doesn’t love seeing Broadway actors in movies? There’s always a curious sense of satisfaction that comes along with it, like we’ve seen our children go on to do amazing things in the world. Of course, the results are not always so amazing. (Right at you, people who saw Jonah Hex for 8 minutes of Johnny Gallagher.) Here’s a short list of Broadway actors who have ventured over to the (very) dark side, to horror movies.

Also, we should disclaim this a bit: We’ve never seen any of the movies in question, probably because kids who like Broadway tend not to be obsessed with, like, horror movies. So forgive our lack of understanding of the genre, and these performances in particular. Feel free to comment with any firsthand impressions.

Patrick Wilson in Insidious

Oh, Patrick Wilson. Patrick Wilson the movie star. Beautiful, twice-Tony-nominated Patrick Wilson, who has been in some incredibly great movies (Angels in America, Little Children), and some crazy bad ones (The Switch, The Phantom of the Opera). In his latest, he plays a bland dad-type—we’re praying with all our might that he doesn’t fall headlong into this typecasting gutter—who has a possessed kid. Our favorite part: When the mom hears scary voices coming out of the baby monitor. Oh dear.
RottenTomatoes rating: 60%

Raul Esparza in My Soul to Take

Here’s what we know: He played a psycho killer with “good” and “bad” voices for his different personalities. Here’s what we love: Not even the New York Times could resist namedropping Stephen Sondheim in its review of this film. Raul doesn’t turn up in the movie’s hilarious-for-multiple-reasons trailer, but he appears to have really long hair.
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 8% — OUCH!

Roger Bart in Hostel: Part II

In a film by gore-porn auteur Eli Roth, Roger Bart plays… get ready… an American businessman who wins a lottery in which he is allowed to kill a young female tourist. Oh, FABULOUS. A clear, logical progression from Carmen Ghia. We can’t bear to even read about this film, mostly because we’re already sufficiently terrified/mortified by that image of Roger on the poster.
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 45%

Stark Sands in Day of the Dead

No lie: Stark Sands played a vegetarian zombie in a movie with Mariah Carey’s husband, and his one line in the trailer is, “Sweet spear.” That’s so ridiculous that it’s kind of awesome. Goodness knows that we’re suckers for Stark in uniform, but still. This one probably won’t be on our Netflix queue any time soon.
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 14%

Today, Tom Riley, is your birthday. The big 3-0. And good news (!)—for you, for the viewing public—a quick perusal of Google Image Search tells us you just get more fly with each passing year.

We hope you have a glorious day full of knowing eye-brow raises and cute American gals fawning over your… performance.

Since we can’t have you, we’re going to celebrate by staring at that lovely pic up there, which can cure a nerdy girl’s shit day/cause a lady-boner faster than you can say “Lit majors are luscious.”

Photo: Jenny Anderson

So, there’s something I don’t get about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies. OK, there are lots of things I don’t get about Love Never Dies, but here’s the main one: Why is the Phantom so hot right now? Because I saw the original show. Eight times. And while the Phantom might have been appealing for his keen intellect, and because he’s an outcast and because he occasionally kills annoying people and whatever, I wouldn’t exactly describe him as… well… hot. I would describe him as crazy. I would describe him as kind of a creepy perv who potentially has a vast and interesting collection of sex dolls. (It’s strongly implied!) But hot? No.

Except that, if you’ve seen Love Never Dies, which takes place a decade in the future, the Phantom is like… suddenly and distinctly hot. Which kind of makes me wonder.

How did the Phantom go from this….

To this…

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Something that we didn’t expect to be talking about today: The 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It seems that lots of other folks are talking about it, too, given the new revival that’s starring everyone’s favorite young cinematic wizard, Daniel Radcliffe. Neither of us saw the ’95 version, which starred Matthew Broderick and won him a Tony. The Mick was 12 and otherwise deeply distracted from Broadway by the rigors of fifth grade. I, at the tender age of 15, knew about the show thanks to its performance on the Tony Awards that year, which I taped on VHS like any typical high schooler who clearly had no friends.

But watching that Tony Awards footage now, with a whole new production on Broadway, it presents an interesting contrast—and some distinct similarities. Clearly, no one thinks they can stage How to Succeed… without a movie star at the helm. On the other hand, the new revival presents the story as a straight-forward, unironic fable—blatant sexism and all, while the old one winked pretty hard at the audience, and at itself. Check out Wayne Cilento’s bendy/stiff businessman choreography, and the inclusion of the secretaries at the end in a welcome Girl Power moment.

On another interesting note, Matthew Broderick may have taken home the trophy in ’95, but the biggest moment in the show’s biggest number clearly belonged to the mind-blowing Lillias White. In light of that, we kind of had to wonder. If the two How to Succeeds were playing across the street from each other…

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And then God created Gavin Creel. And his solar plexus.

That should probably be the tagline of Prometheus Bound at A.R.T., because you will see so much of both if you happen to catch Diane Paulus’s production, which closes on April 2 — on the dancefloor, and chained to a rock, and hanging from the ceiling, and dangling from the mezzanine. You might even forget that there’s an actual show happening around him.

But please don’t forget it, because in a world where so much theater sucks, or panders to your parents, or some dim idea of what your parents want to see onstage, Prometheus Bound is awesome. And kind of terrifying. And problematic in places. But if it were possible to see it 100 times, for both half-naked Gavin and the show itself, we would.

The story is a simple one: Prometheus (Gavin) gives humans fire, which pisses off Zeus (no one; he’s offstage) and gets himself chained to a rock for eternity. I know, sounds like the most miserable night of musical theater in all existence, but bear with us for a sec, because this show offers an abundance of good things.

One of them is Serj Tankian’s moody rock score. (For theater nerds: He’s from System of a Down. That’s a band.) It’s melodic without a trace of perkiness, and intricate without being indecipherable. The songs sung by Prometheus’s personal chorus of fangirls/angels/tormenters are especially beautiful in their wailing/ecstatic/rock goddess way. Earplugs are provided upon entry, but that’s mostly for patrons whose loudest concert to date was James Taylor—and trust me when I tell you that there are lots of those people in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Writer Steven Sater’s book and lyrics are less successful in the way that they blend Aeschylus’s lyricism with contemporary speech. (Remember that moment in Spring Awakening when all the kids started referring to things as “my junk” and you had no fucking clue what they were talking about, because no one of any age, of any era, says things like that? Yeah… like that.) But when they’re doing one thing or the other—being grandiose and poetical, or down and dirty—they get the story told.

There are some other issues, too. For example, the show tries, with graphic displays of cruelty and semi-cruelty, to draw ties between political oppression and S&M. Yeah, no. Those things are not the same. Nor do they hang sensibly together because like… all human motivation is ultimately sexual? Or because people are sometimes judged and marginalized because of the ways they like to have sex? Or something else that isn’t totally clear? At any rate, if you thought you’d be a fan of Gavin Creel wearing a ball gag, we promise that this show will change your mind forever and ever.

Also of note is the show’s big-singing cast, especially Uzo Aduba, who plays trainwrecked, despairing Io as both ferocious and achingly vulnerable. And Lea Delaria is appropriately terrifying as Force, one of Zeus’s cronies. You’ll see them up close, too, as most of the show is staged in, above, and occasionally directly on top of, the audience. It’s hard to imagine how this concept would ever work in a Broadway theater, but Diane Paulus has sorted out interesting ways of blurring the lines between audience an actor before. We hope she gets the chance to do it again with Prometheus Bound.

Photo: Marcus Stern

Newsflash: Christopher Sieber is officially the best part of what’s happening right now at the Longacre Theater in La Cage Aux Folles.  I was swooning in my seat the entire show.  Now, I’ve kind of always loved him—since I first set eyes on him in Into the Woods, at least—but I’ve only personally seem him live a handful of times.  And I’m going to need that to change, Broadway.  I’m going to need to see him in at least one great show per season, every season, until his voice literally gives out.  So start casting him, people.  Or writing vehicles just for him (that are less dumb than The Kid).  Or at least have the human decency to send him over to my apartment to sing me to sleep every night.

In case you need a list of reasons he’s wonderful, I’ll include one below.  Just the highlights, though.  It’d be impossible to list everything.

• His thighs look awesome in a pair of tuxedo pants.
• He sings like an angel.
• He acts real good in both comedies and dramas.
• He can even wear purple crushed velvet with panache, which is saying something.
• He’s got an incredibly inviting, warm charisma.  It oozes out his pores and fills an entire theater.
• He’d probs melt your heart/look amazing rocking babies to sleep and whispering a lullaby across their downy tufts of hair, not that I’ve ever imagined him doing that before.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Here’s the thing about How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: it is not a joke.  Sitting in the Hirschfeld Theater—where the show opened Sunday night—for two hours and forty minutes, I kept waiting for the joke.  Or the moral.  Or like… the point where it finally all made sense.

And that moment never came.

Not that the story itself doesn’t make sense.  It does.  It’s swift and clear and you always know exactly what is happening at every minute of the show.  The book is precise.  The songs tell the story, and they sound real good.  How to Succeed is a wonderful example of good, old-fashioned musical theater.

Unfortunately, no matter how deft Mr. Loesser and crew’s craft, this show just doesn’t make sense in 2011.  At least, not to this young professional (woman).  Because all of the scheming and brown nosing J Pierrepont Finch does instead of working never actually bites him on the ass.  And secretary Rosemary Pilkington actually means it when she dreams of the day she can stay at home and keep dinner warm while her workaholic husband ignores her constantly.  And at no point do you get the sense that anyone involved in this production in any way, sees the absurdity of what is happening on stage.

There is no tongue in cheek humor.  No knowing nod to the fact that all of this is ridiculous—in 1961 and today.  No bigger lesson to it all.  For Christ’s sake, you actually cheer for the scheming slacker to succeed without actually being good at anything beyond manipulating his colleagues.  It’s ludicrous.  In real life, you would want to kick his teeth in, much like his cast of colleagues.

And yet, despite the actual stupidity of the content, and some really enthusiastic arm swinging and kicking that I think we’re supposed to refer to as choreography, How to Succeed… succeeds.  Daniel Radcliffe probably deserves all the credit for that, too.

Perhaps it is because the line between actor and character is blurry, here.  Because you want to see “The Boy (wizard) Who Lived” live it up on the Great White Way.  But you root for Finch as he slides out of each new sticky situation he’s schemed his way into like he’s made of Teflon.  You can’t wait to see what genius piece of research or deft turn of phrase and happy stroke of luck is going to pull him through each steaming pile he’s stepped in.

Radcliffe’s performance is all hard work and passion. He busts his balls to do right by Finch and the show reaps the reward.  When you leave the theater, it’s pretty plain that the production would suffer without him.  Nothing would seem as impressive if we didn’t know that this was a big risk for Radcliffe, and a skill set he was not born with.  But it’s not just that the audience is charmed by Radcliffe’s hard work.  He makes that hunger—that hint of manic desperation to make the pieces fall into place— work for the character, too, even when Finch is doing his best succeed without working a day in his life.

As Finch, Radcliffe is charming, smart, quick witted and sharp tongued.  He has the perfect shit-eating grin.  His singing voice, though lacking in raw power, plays well in the theater and his dancing is shockingly good (it stops the show at least once, in fact).

How to Succeed is not going to change the world for anyone (besides, perhaps, Mr. Radcliffe).  And the material would probably have been better handled by someone who could re-imagine it for 2011.  Rob Ashford’s dull direction is only remarkable in the performance he created with Radcliffe, and his choreography needs to calm the fuck down.  The costumes are nice, but average—though they do make great use of a vivid blue that reflects Radcliffe’s startling eyes—and the set is both very pretty and very 1961, but it won’t knock your socks off either.  At the end of the day, this is merely a capable revival, carried by a breakout star.  But oddly enough, I’m not mad about it.  Radcliffe’s considerable charm and powerhouse performance were enough to win me over.  I’d pay to see it again.

Photo: Ari Mintz

Shows have done a lot of nutty things over the years to show an audience that their $127 is well spent. Priscilla‘s thing is sequins. And feathers. And glitter. Splashed across the stage by the bucketful over at the Palace Theatre, where Priscilla opened on March 20, the effect is kind of awesome. And headache-inducing. But no amount of glitz, in this case, can create a suitable diversion for the show’s glaring blemish—that it’s not all that great.

Based on the 1994 film—sentences that start that way can never end well, I know—the show follows three drag performer friends as they take an allegedly zany road trip across Australia for reasons that kind of don’t matter, so I won’t recount them here. The show’s creators really want them to matter, of course, and they also really want you to focus on how MADCAP and FUN the proceedings are supposed to be, except that they stop being fun as soon as Will Swenson’s character sings “I Say a Little Prayer” as an anthem of longing for his young son.

Yeah, scratch your head over that one for a minute. Shoehorned into the show as its EMOTIONAL TOUCHSTONE, I think we’re supposed to make all kinds of associations with this song that stem from important/meaningful events in our own lives and therefore be deeply moved. I was just kind of confused, and frankly, I think Will Swenson is, too. Because when we saw Priscilla, the song was greeted by the audience with a bemused smattering of laughter. Ouch.

In fact, there are no original songs in Priscilla. Designed for maximum FUN and FAMILIARITY, the “score” is more or less an iTunes playlist of jaunty 70s and 80s pop and dance hits, which is fine, except that I don’t really need to pay a shitton of money to hear my Power Walk mix in a Broadway show. Also, Adam Guettel exists and there are way better pop songs out there than “I Love the Nightlife.” Those two distinct realities mean that Priscilla’s score should just be… better. Or at least try harder.

Still, though, I think this show is just supposed to be FUN. As opposed to say, SUBSTANTIAL. And it has its moments and performances that won’t make you want to die alternately of boredom or sensory overload. Tony Sheldon, who comes to Broadway from the London production, plays aging transexual Bernadette with a real sense of pathos—a much-welcome thing after being walloped in the face with all that glitter. And while Nick Adams will probs not win any Tonys here, his abs (all 23 of them) should qualify for some special prize.

The costumes, too, deserve a mention, partly because they want one so very badly, and partly because they actually deserve it. Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner’s creations—from dancing cupcakes to Adams’s fully-bejeweled bodysuit, to minidresses made entirely of flip-flops—do, in fact, live up to the show’s promises of EXTREME UNBRIDLED FUN. The closing number, featuring the chorus done up as the flora and fauna of Australia (including what has got to be the most adorable kangaroo costume ever) is a stunner. If only the story and the songs could make your eyes/ears/brain take notice in the same way.

Photo: Joan Marcus