the craptacular

Stop smiling, Johnny.

American Idiot: Ok, let’s get it right out of our systems. Scream. Stomp. Raise your middle fingers high. And say it with me: Congrats, Tony nominating committee, for being such a bunch of pearl-clutching ninnies about this show. As The Mick said, it’s like they all saw American Idiot, and thought, “OMG, This show is confusing and loud!” and gave up right there. On the bright side, we’re sure that Billie Joe Armstrong could give a fuck, and is probably secretly relieved that he doesn’t have to go head-to-head in any category, in any part of his life, with the keyboard guy from Bon Jovi. And Stark Sands is still hot.

Fela!: I love this show. I love its cockiness and its energy and its mind-blowing chorus of insanely toned female dancers. But what I mostly love is that someone thought it would be a great idea to make a Broadway musical—not a tribute concert, or a performance art piece, or a museum installation—about a vaguely-obscure African pop musician and his in-your-face political views. Bring on the Tonys, baby, because I’m thrilled with anything on a Broadway stage that looks forward and not backward, and Fela! does a fine job of that indeed.

Enron: So, I guess everyone hated it, huh? No Best Play, no Norbert, no nothing. (Except, you know, Lucy Prebble getting nominated for Best Original Score, which is just kind of unsatisfying.) American critics claimed that they’d heard it all before, from The Smartest Guy in the Room to the finance page of the New York Times. I thought it was towering—raptors and light sabers included. My best advice on this grim day? See it before it closes and try to control your gag reflex when you read all the “Enron Fails! Again!” headlines.

Finian’s Rainbow: Nice job, Kate Baldwin! You’re pretty and you sing pretty and I’m happy to see your name kicking around like a bazillion months after your show ended, and props to Chris Fitzgerald as well, because you’re talented, and you’re sexy in a totally uncomfortable way. Both of you kids—your show was an epic WTF, but I liked it a lot, even though the set looked like it was a papier mache diorama made by a second grader for science class. I’m almost glad it didn’t get too many nominations, though, because like… that craziness closed for a reason. Which brings me to.

Ragtime: OK, I’ll bite. I don’t get it. I don’t get why this show was revived and I don’t get why people were so attached to it when it failed (again! You know, like Enron!), and I don’t get why the Tony nominating committee felt the need to remind us of how regretful and attached to it we should be. And mostly, I don’t get why we’re rewarding what’s dead and gone, and what clearly didn’t work. The show itself is hugely problematic—what the hell even happens in that muddy second act?—but this revival itself was so blah. It looked just like it looked the first time around. (How sad that the costumer is nominated again… for the same costumes.) It sounded just like it sounded the first time around. The only thing different is that it lacked the one golden, brilliant thing that the original had—its stellar original cast. Ragtime minus Audra? Minus Stokes and Marin and even TV’s Lea Michele? Why bother? So it can be nominated for a truckload of Tonys, I guess. If this was the committee’s most rebellious move of the year… well… no wonder American Idiot didn’t get much love. And prepare thy acceptance speech, Bobby Steggert, and try to remember that you’re accepting for Ragtime and not Yank!, even though… you know… you’re really winning for Yank!

La Cage: Robin de Jesus is darling, but I have no idea what he’s doing in La Cage aux Folles, or what accent he’s doing, or what planet he’s on, which is proof of how thin the Best Featured Actor in a Musical category is this year. And Kelsey Grammer? This must be the nominating committee’s way of injecting some REAL STAR POWER into this year’s telecast. Or maybe they’re just trying to encourage Grammer to actually learn his lines. The sucky thing about his nomination isn’t that he’s stiff and dull in the role, it’s that he’s going to split the vote with Doug Hodge, who actually deserves the Tony.

Promises, Promises: Rob Ashford is the worst. Kids, that’s not choreography. That’s creative placement of arms in time to music. How did we ever get from Michael Bennett to here? Sean Hayes can win, though. That’s OK.

This is what’s annoying us right now.

American Idiot is ineligible for the Best Original Score Tony.

How is this even happening? I mean. We understand why Come Fly Away doesn’t count as an original score.  Even FELA!—with songs drawn from Afrobeat artist Fela Kuti’s expansive catalog—seems like a poor fit for the Best Original Score category.

But American Idiot?  That we don’t understand. Yes, it was a Grammy Award-winning pop album before it had a life on the stage, but it was initially conceived with staging in mind. Billie Joe Armstrong has said so on numerous occasions, though he never had specific ideas about what kind of staging it would be. The album is distinctly narrative. It has characters and consistent themes. How is it so different from something that was only envisioned as a stage piece? Have we forgotten about the 1980 concept album that became Les Miserables? Jekyll and Hyde was a bestselling concept album—and a favorite of Miss America contestants everywhere—long before it was staged.

Really, though, the committee ruling feels like it’s about something else. It’s not really about how “original” the music in American Idiot is or isn’t. It’s about the Tony committee’s terrible fear of jukebox musicals. We get it. We all want to see new, original musicals thrive, and the idea of a Broadway filled with secondhand, non-narrative pop songs that have been shoehorned into musicals is indeed scary.

But Broadway’s fear of the Jukebox has made the Tony committee awfully forgetful. What about the 1993 musical Tommy, which began in 1969 as rock opera by The Who? It won Pete Townshend the Tony for Best Original Score, and deservedly so. Why is American Idiot so different?

The true bummer of all this is that the other options for Best Original Score are so incredibly grim; are we really stuck with The Addams Family or Memphis? Pickings are so slim this season that even plays—Enron, Fences, and The Royal Family—seem like genuine contenders for the Tony.

If those are our only choices, that doesn’t look so good for the future of the American musical either. Including American Idiot in the pool of nominees might have been an ideological stretch—but it would have been a vote for a newer (and louder!) idea of Broadway, and a nod to change and growth—two things necessary to survival in any form. And in a world where we can’t find even three new musicals to nominate for Best Original Score, that might be more than just a smart idea. It might be a lifeline to the American musical, and the Broadway that we’d all like to see in the future.

There is this amazing moment during Everyday Rapture, Sherie Rene Scott’s one-woman show that opened last night at the American Airlines Theatre, when it’s hard to believe what’s happening onstage.

In that moment, Scott sits onstage alone and proceeds to tell the audience about how she had an abortion. And how she doesn’t regret it. And then she sings a song about it. The moment is both heartbreaking and affirming—it’s moving theater. But then you remember who Scott is, and where you are, and what in hell is actually happening around you.

Because Scott is not famous. She is, by her own admission, only a semi-star on Broadway—a place where even very big stars are not really stars—but here she is with her own show. Not only does she have her own show. It’s about her life. And she wrote it. And it’s playing a massive Broadway house at the tail end of a spotty Broadway season. The same season in which the New York Times ran a whole story about how Broadway shows need to cast famous people to succeed, where apparently actors like Abigail Breslin and Valerie Harper just weren’t quite famous enough.

So, in case you’re keeping track. We have a not-famous actress talking (and singing!) about her own not-famous life, and the details of it are not exactly prettied-up for the stage, or designed to appeal to a conservative out-of-town audience. And it’s all done up in a Broadway production in this great big theater that seems aptly named; it really does feel like an airplane hanger. It seems like a miracle that it happened at all. An even bigger miracle—or maybe a much, much smaller one? It’s awesome.

In Everyday Rapture, Scott tells the abbreviated, vaguely fictionalized, song-and-dance version of her life story, including tales of her Mennonite roots and her childhood friendship with Becky Phelps, daughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps. There are also songs by Mr. Rogers, a funny sequence where Scott spoofs her attitudes about her own fame (or… semi-fame), and a sweet anecdote about her 3-year-old son. But of course, the show is not really about those things. If it were, it’s unlikely that Broadway—or its notoriously fickle audiences, critics, and producers—would be much interested. All of these anecdotes are Scott’s way of presenting her personal search for meaning—religious, spiritual, and philosophical. She asks herself a question, and presents it to the audience: Is she, as an actress, allowed to be ambitious and self-assured and humble and deferring to a greater power? At the same time? A show about Scott’s semi-famous life could have ended up a show about nothing. Instead, this is a show about everything.

It helps that Scott is amazingly likable, that she sings with such power and ease, and that the songs are good peppy fun. A show about the search for spiritual meaning could get laborious pretty quickly. This never does. Nor do the songs make things seem fluffy or understated.

Another reassuring thing about Everyday Rapture? It’s about a woman. And it’s about a woman having some very uniquely female experiences. And it was written by the woman who had those experiences. Broadway is not the testosterone-sodden place that is Hollywood, so it’s not exactly out-of-the-ordinary to see something like this. Carrie Fisher had a show this year, too. But there is something special about a show, and an industry, that values a story like Scott’s, and that sees it as important enough to put on a great big stage. Television, in most cases, would do us no such honor, not without endless in-line disclaimers about Scott’s age, weight, and romantic and reproductive prospects. A film would have reduced Scott to the quirky best friend. And yet here she is—the star of her own show. Well, she’s the semi-star. The real star is the show itself, and it burns bright and big—much bigger than Scott herself. But something tells me she doesn’t mind much.

Photo: Sh-K-Boom

Yeah, so, the face is kind of funny. But look at the thighs in those jeans!

Even just a quick glance at the Craptacular’s most popular search terms will tell you that the interwebz is curious about Aaron Tveit.  The fact that people land on our little page when they search for Aaron Tveit also illustrates how very little there is to know about him.  I mean, really.  Our page?  We’ve mentioned in his hotness in passing a maximum of four times, and Google leads you here?  (Not that we’re complaining.)

Apparently no one knows anything about Aaron Tveit except that they want to know more.  The man is a mystery.  A mystery who’s hind-parts looks really good in a pair of tight jeans.

I mean, in order to even sort out Mr. Tveit’s birth year/sign, I had to read about a zillion old articles and check in with several friends who I love dearly even though it turns out they might be stalkers—M_____, I’m looking at you.  (1983, Libra, in case you were wondering).  An actual birth-date is much harder to come by.  In fact, I’ve yet to find it.  And he plays demure (code: dumb) every time it comes up these days.

It’s possible Aaron has a serious business reason for this.  Or maybe, what he’s really hiding is the fact that he’s not so interesting.  Maybe the most interesting thing about Aaron Tveit—besides the fact that he can sing real good and smile like the sun—is the fact that no one knows anything about him.  Maybe the mystery is what keeps y’all  landing on our page.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn that he might be dull.  Because there’s something terribly winning about him.  Something that makes me want to believe the message boards and anon posts when they say he’s sweet like candy and straight as an arrow.  Something that makes me excited for the moment he hits the New York stage again, or makes some other kind of theater news, so that we have a real reason to cover him.  You know, a thin guise for talking about how much we like the way he looks in a pair of jeans.  As opposed to this post, which has one purpose and one purpose only: to tell you I like his bum.

Throwing this in just because I can.

Photo Credit: fuckyeahaarontveit.tumblr.com

There’s been talk of some pretty crazy behavior in Broadway theaters recently.  I’ve even witnessed some of it firsthand.  I actually thought that nothing could irritate me more than the wasted Green Day fans beside me at a recent showing of American Idiot, singing along so loudly I could hardly hear the cast and swaying their vodka cranberries in the air as if they were lighters.

And then I went to see a preview performance of Lucy Prebble’s new play, Enron, and I was proved completely wrong.  Because as the lights on darkened on Norbert Leo Butz for the final time and applause was barely beginning to erupt, I watched tons of people burst out of their seats and stumble over other patrons in a rush to get to the aisle and run out of the theater.  Before the curtain call.  My blood actually started to boil.  I scoffed loudly.

Were they kidding?

Now.  I’ve been known to make a mad dash for the ladies room at intermission when time is short and lines are often long.  (One particularly memorable sprint past the mezzanine bar in the Hirschfeld prompted a staff member to call after me: “Get it!  Get it!”)  And I could even understand not returning after intermission if a show was really that bad.  But sprinting out of the theater before curtain call?  Really? Do that many of you have bladder control issues?  Is it that far past your bedtime?  Are you going to turn into a pumpkin?

I find that upsetting in general.  But I find it particularly offensive given the quality of the work we had just seen on stage in the Broadhurst Theater.  Lucy Prebble told a story so Shakespearean it seemed almost impossible it could be real, and her rapid-fire, Aaron Sorkin-esque dialogue was wonderful.  (Really, she’s a Brit?)  Rupert Goold’s direction and staging made inventive use of a fairly stark set and symbolic props and the cast—featuring  Norbert Leo Butz, Stephen Kunken, Marin Mazzie and Gregory Itzin—turned in top notch performances.  As Jeffery Skilling and Andy Fastow, Norbert and Stephen gave especially powerful and nuanced performances which were absolutely applause-worthy.

I know that taste is taste—it is subjective, and what does it for me might not do it for you, or anyone else for that matter.  But I’m pretty sure this impatient mass exodus had little or nothing to do with the quality of the work and much more to do with the selfish desire to be the first ones to the Icon Parking Garage down the block.  And I think that’s a real shame.  Forget about the fact that it’s rude, not just to the actors on that stage, but to the patrons you’re knocking over in your haste to leave.  Call me crazy, but I’d rather deal with drunken fans singing along with the show—at least that displays some kind of appreciation for the work of art before us.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

Remember when everyone’s favorite news magazine decided that Jonathan Groff wasn’t as good an actor after he came out of the closet? Oh, right, so I do. That happened yesterday, didn’t it.

On Newsweek online, an entertainment reporter wrote a piece on gay actors and how they can’t play straight characters. Because, you know, gay actors just can’t. Or something. He singles out Jonathan Groff’s Glee performance in particular, uses all kinds of bigot-y language to describe it, and then suggests that Groff’s character seems really gay because… you know… Jonathan is gay.

What. THE FUCK.

AfterElton has done a splendid job of calling out the writer, Ramin Setoodeh, on his reasoning. But where do his opinions leave me? Or the gazillions of other girls just like me, who have no problem seeing Groff as a straight romantic lead? Because he’s a good actor. And because he’s gorgeous. And maybe because we don’t have any trouble separating the shit that happens on a stage or a television screen from like, this thing we call reality.

Groff’s character, Jesse St. James, is over-the-top, for sure. But over-the-top does not somehow equate with being gay. Nor does it mean that I come away from Groff’s performance thinking that we should definitely go shoe shopping together someday. That’s partly because I have seen Jon’s choice in footwear, and trust me, he needs my help a lot more than I need his, but it’s also because I prefer not to think of people as a checklist of stereotypes.

Setoodeh also wades into some scary territory with his idea of what’s macho and manly (Jerry Orbach? What? Are you my grandmother?), what’s attractive and what’s not, and what seems gay and what doesn’t. Who is he to say? Who is anyone? To insinuate that a convincing leading man is one thing, and one thing only, is insulting to me personally, as someone who’s adored all kinds of actors in their roles—up to and including Jonathan Groff.

And hey. If Setoodeh is so put off by Groff in Glee, that leaves more of him for the rest of us girls. And boys. And whoever else is open-minded enough to value a performance as a performance, and a person as a person.

What’s the hottest thing that ever happened to you in a Theater?

For Lucky, I’m pretty sure it occurred one very blizzardly night this winter when Gavin Creel came up into the balcony during the end-of-show dance party at Hair and leaned his very cute, very firm butt up against her back as he boogied down.

For me, I’m positive it was a couple Saturdays ago when Benjamin Walker leapt off the stage during Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and got extremely, uh…up close and personal with me.

If you’ve seen the show—or read this review—you know that during the campaigning process, Andrew Jackson (Benjamin Walker) leaps off the stage and saunters toward an entranced audience member, promising to show them his ‘stimulus package.’  Sadly, that article doesn’t quite capture the experience completely and the night I became Ben Walker’s target, I was less than prepared.

It all started with Ben straddling my lap.  I was so taken back by his nearness that I couldn’t even get my legs out of his way fast enough.  For one terrifying, slow-motion fraction of a second I fumbled, afraid I was going to knock him over, unable to break our eye contact, acutely aware of every place in which his body was touching mine.

That alone would have been more than enough.  Ben could have stopped there and my experience would have been complete.  There were already lots of glorious places our bodies were touching.  But he didn’t stop there.  No.  Noooo.  Because Andrew Jackson wants to be President, man.  And he’s going to prove how bad he wants it.  He’s going to prove it by offering you some serious contact with his biggest asset.  And yes, that was a pun.

I am not even kidding and, apparently, neither was Ben.  That fine gentleman rolled his hips forward until his business was pressed up against my body and swiveled like Elvis, which is a nice way of saying that Benjamin Walker dry-humped me.  And it was awesome.  For a few shining seconds, there was not enough air between us to slip a piece of paper between my boobs and his junk.  I almost died.

And let me tell you, it would have been an okay death.  Sitting there with a really hot guy gyrating against me, gazing down into my eyes, running his hands through my hair…  I didn’t care that there was a huge audience behind us.  I couldn’t even hear Lucky giggling madly beside me.  It was just me and Ben and Old Hickory.

After Ben had climbed off me and rejoined the cast on stage, Lucky turned to ask if I was okay.  “Not really,” was all I could manage.  My entire person was trembling.  My heart was racing.  Paying attention to the show was basically impossible because it was taking a lot of focus to regulate my breathing and any brainpower I could spare was devoted to hoping I hadn’t done anything embarrassing.  Like, you know, moaning audibly.  Already it was hard to be sure what had just happened.

Once again, I had been incapacitated at the Public Theater.

After the show, I realized there was a pattern forming.  A pattern I quite liked.  Mind-numbing encounters with Jonathan Groff on Lafayette Street, Ben Walker’s junk all up on my person…the Public Theater is a magical place.  (Even Lucky’s sexiest moment, though not physically at the Public, was in a show produced by the Public.)  I might officially upgrade the Public Theater to My-Favorite-Place-in-the-City-of-New-York.  Maybe in the world.  I mean.  How can you not love a place that has the power to make all those things happen?

…Oh, I’m sorry.  You thought, given the title, that this was going to be a serious piece, didn’t you?  So wrong.  So.  Wrong.

As someone who loves musicals, I admit this with some shame: Until Promises, Promises, I’d never seen Kristin Chenoweth in anything. I remember her Tony win for You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown only because I taped it on VHS while I was in high school, and I was a little too old—and a little too poor—to get excited about Wicked when it first opened.

So I was excited to see this show, but a little incredulous that she could ever live up to her formidable hype. This is an actress, after all, who has been a part of every theater fan’s Ultimate Fantasy Cast for the last decade. We’ve wanted her to play everyone from Eliza to Auntie Mame. And we got Fran.

In Promises, Promises, Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach’s musical take on the film The Apartment, it’s hard to know what to make of Chenoweth. Mostly, I wonderReed what the hell everyone had been freaking out about for most of my musical-loving life. Playing Fran Kubelik, a corporate cafeteria waitress down on her luck, Chenoweth seemed more grumpy than fragile. She can sing the songs, for sure, but you got the sense that she’d been directed to not smile under any circumstances, like doing so would blow any chance of creating a convincingly depressive character.

In fact, the real story here is hardly about Chenoweth at all. It’s about her costar Sean Hayes, who manages to steal the show out from under her by the time you even get to her first song. As middle manager Chuck Baxter, his performance manages to be as charming and light on its feet as hers is wooden. (A joke about nasal spray is just about the funniest on Broadway this season.) In fact, he makes what would otherwise be a rather cumbersome show—seriously, there are times when the thing feels like it’s four hours long—a mostly painless jaunt.

The cast of Bloodsong of Love are rocking out, or something.

Two nights in a row last week, I saw new musicals with Blood in their title: Bloodsong of Love and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.  Apparently, the hot new thing on Broadway is to stick blood in the title of your show and throw some reddish liquid approximation of the bodily fluid at your characters (or, in the case of Bloodsong, at your audience as well).

Unfortunately all blood is not created equal.  And I’m not just talking about the fact that the fake-blood used in one show made for a better substitute than it did in the other, though that was definitely also true.  No.  I mean just because you put the word blood in your title and stuck your tongue in your cheek, doesn’t mean your show is going to be successful.  Shocking, I know.  It seems like such fertile ground, with no room for artistic misstep at all.

But missteps there were, and seeing Bloodsong of Love and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson back to back definitely underscored them.

I started to sense that seeing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson again was going to make Bloodsong of Love look real bad by comparison, when, upon leaving Ars Nova, Lucky and I spent exactly two seconds talking about Bloodsong and its hot leading man—Eric William Morris—before conversation turned, again, to Hair and Will Swenson and Priscilla Queen of the Desert.  We never really got back to talking about Bloodsong that night, either.

In fact, we didn’t get back to talking about it until the next night, and by that point, there was no question.  Where Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was the kind of show that made me want to see it compulsively—to circle right back around and return to my seat for another showing—Bloodsong of Love just made me glad my tickets were only $25.

Bloodsong just lacked…blood.  Metaphorically, I mean— there was definitely no lack of the fake fluid flying around that stage—there was something missing just under the surface.  I enjoyed myself, sure.  But I didn’t leave the theater mourning the fact that I wouldn’t be able to see the show again before it closed on May 9th.  And I definitely didn’t laugh as hard as I had hoped to.  Or even as hard as about 50% of the other audience members seemed to be laughing.  (Were they Joe Iconis’ friends? Lucky and I later wondered. Or maybe they were just friends with that Banana guy.)

Bloodsong simply never took off, mostly because the writing just wasn’t good enough.  There, I said it.  The show came so close to liftoff so many times, but it just never happened.  The actors were terrific and they worked hard, the physical comedy was consistently funny and the direction was great, but the rest of the show just didn’t live up to expectations.  I don’t know if it was a fear of misinterpretation, a lack of trust in his future audience, or just plain lack of skill (gosh, I hope not), but Joe Iconis’ book and lyrics fell short.  And I mean that literally.  Because Bloody Bloody showed us the distances you have to go in order to make this whole musical as tongue-in-cheek satire thing work.  They’re quite far, those distances.  And you have to travel them in an all out, balls-to-the-wall kind of fashion.

Satire requires complete faith in both the joke and your audience, and 100% commitment.  You cannot hesitate.  You cannot try and explain it.  You have to make the joke flippantly—tongue always, always, always firmly in cheek—and trust that it will land, even when it’s obscure.  And you can never falter from your conviction (ironic, as that’s sort of the theme of Bloodsong).  Writing satire is absolutely terrifying, because you’re going so far afield that it’s impossible to be sure how it will be taken.  It seemed to me, as an audience member, that Joe Iconis let his fear get the better of him.  He tried to hold our hands by balancing a kooky, jokey book with earnest, heartfelt lyrics, and in doing so he made both the book and the lyrics look kind of stupid.  In Bloody Bloody Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman attempted no balance at all, offered no apology or explanation, and that’s why it worked.

Perhaps part of what allowed Timbers and Friedman the opportunity to be so damn crazy, so unapologetic, was the source material.  Andrew Jackson’s life is surprisingly fertile ground for a show, partly because (unless you’re a history buff) you remember exactly one thing about him: the Trail of Tears.  Oh, and that he was the President.  That leaves a lot of fresh material that can be presented to us, as an audience, in any number of ways.  Spaghetti Westerns…even if you’ve never seen one, you know what they are.  They form such a specific, controlled genre that even when you’re parodying that, as a writer, you are extremely limited.

Maybe it’s also our collective memory as an audience.  The source of the humor in Bloody Bloody is so fresh—politics and emo-dominated airwaves—that we haven’t forgotten what’s being poked at.  And no one thinks we need any kind of reminder.  But with spaghetti westerns, Bloodsong’s humor isn’t quite so present.  It’s not making fun of your life today, or the music you listen to, its making fun a genre of film you’ve probably never seen.  And in an attempt to make things clear to you, the audience, Joe Iconis’ jokes turn out so heavy they beat you painfully over the head when they land.

And maybe, at the end of the day, I just preferred Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson because Benjamin Walker leapt out into the audience, straddled my lap, and literally rubbed his (stimulus) package all over my body, while the handsome leading man in Bloodsong of Love never came anywhere near me.  Silly and shallow though it may sound, I think that’s actually the whole point, right there, in a nutshell.  Because in that moment Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and its leading man proved that in pursuit of great satire—great theater—they were willing to go completely, well, balls to the wall unsuspecting female audience member’s chest.

It takes serious commitment to rub up on a girl in those pants.

Photo Credit: Peter James Zielinski; Joan Marcus.