the craptacular

I have a question for you. You’re not allowed to use Google, or call your lifeline. Either you know it or you don’t. Here it is:

What does Frankie Valli look like?

Think about it for a second.

Chances are, my good little theatre bunny of a certain age, you immediately thought of one of two things: A nondescript Italian guy in a red blazer, or John Lloyd Young. Without the wings. Hell, maybe even with the wings.

Now let me ask you another question.

What does Elvis Presley look like?

True, you listened to nothing but the OBCs of Evita and Side Show between the ages of 13 and 19, but you still have a pretty concrete idea of what Elvis looked like.

That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with Million Dollar Quartet.

You know what Elvis looks like. Elvis is Elvis, and Elvis is a legend. The guy standing on the stage in this odd little jukebox musical, which opens April 11 at the Nederlander Theatre, on the other hand, is not Elvis. He does not sing like Elvis. He does not look like Elvis, except for the cleft in his chin, which has been meticulously drawn on using an eyebrow pencil. And yet this crazy show asks you to believe that this guy is Elvis, that the guy standing next to him is Johnny Cash, and that both of them would be, on any given night, hanging out with Hunter Foster.

The show re-imagines one of the most storied happenings in rock and roll history—a night in 1956 on which Presley, Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins all gathered at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee for a jam session. We see the jam session re-created in one swift act that lasts for about an hour and 45 minutes. If you paid the top ticket price, that’s $1.19 per minute of entertainment for this show. And trust me, there’s reason to be concerned with the math. (Note that American Idiot is a one-act with almost the exact same running time, but because that show would give you an aneurysm if it lasted even a moment longer, you’ll be grateful for its brevity.)

But back to Elvis. The problem with the show isn’t just that it feels really silly to watch a fake Elvis when the legend of the real Elvis looms so large. The problem is that even a fake Elvis comes with historical baggage. It’s obvious that the show’s creators have tried really hard to distinguish actor Eddie Clendening’s performance from a cheap Elvis impersonation, but the show can’t win with this. By giving us a “realistic,” human, unspangled Elvis, the performance just seems… not very much like Elvis. A show like Jersey Boys works because Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons made legendary music. Their lives and personalities were less well known, and conjured fewer audience expectations than Elvis ever could.

Levi Kreis’s Jerry Lee Lewis and Robert Britton Lyons’s Carl Perkins fare far better than Clandening’s Elvis or Lance Guest’s Johnny Cash for this very reason. Despite looking a lot like Harry Connick, Jr., Kreis is appropriately overblown as the loony Jerry Lee Lewis, and he has a great voice. Lyons is likewise affecting as Perkins—a poor sharecropper who learned how to play guitar from an African American field worker. Because I’m not enough of a hipster to know what the real Carl Perkins looked like, and because I just Googled him and Lyons is way cuter, I’m tempted to prefer the Million Dollar Quartet version of him to reality, or I’m at least content to let Lyons teach me about who this person was. The music suffers from this same wobbly authenticity crisis. He does what he can, but Clandening’s performance of “Hound Dog” feels like a chintzy cover of the original.

The show’s other problem is its plot, which feels like it was forced on the piece simply to qualify it as a Broadway show and not an impersonation concert. Sam Phillips acts as narrator, and Hunter Foster does what he can with all that exposition, but the details—Johnny Cash’s contract is up; RCA wants Phillips to come to New York with Elvis; Phillips sold Elvis’s contract to RCA—don’t amount to much in the end. In fact, I’m not sure how the show’s central plot point eventually resolves, or if it even did. Really, this is just an excuse to play some old rock and roll songs.

There are some other admirable things, though. All the actors onstage play their own instruments, and well, which does give the show a thundering, concert-like energy. This is especially useful because the last 20 minutes of the show are, in essence, a concert. Because it happens after the bows, I’m tempted to call this an Insufferable Singing Curtain Call—one of my least favorite theatrical “innovations”—but it’s admittedly satisfying. In it, we do finally see Elvis—and everyone else—in some tasteful spangles, and singing their most recognizable hits.

And when it’s through, there is a voice that comes over the PA and announces that Elvis has indeed left the building. But you sort of have to wonder if he was ever there to begin with.

Raúl and Sutton wiz one bad wig

Make no mistake, the plot behind Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ Anyone Can Whistle has been done better, both before and since its original 1964 staging.  And it will probably be done better again.  You know, seeing as this ‘stranger comes into town and changes everyone’s view of themselves and the world around them while falling in love’ thing seems to be a favorite amongst musical theater writers.

Anyone Can Whistle hasn’t been revived on Broadway since the original ran for only nine performances, and after last night, I don’t think anyone is shocked.  The book is…wonky, and sometimes because the book is wonky the songs don’t seem to fit quite right.  Sondheim and Laurents appear to have thrown about 600 million ideas at the wall and kept the ones that stuck (which, lucky us, still left them with about 598 million ideas to fit into two-ish hours).  Sadly, the combined smarts and savvy of those two crazy fools just couldn’t save Anyone Can Whistle from itself.

But let me tell you.  A powerhouse cast—like the one Encores! has assembled this spring—comes pretty darn close.

Donna Murphy as Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper prowls that set in her dangerously high heels, chewing on scenery and making a mockery of like, every other Sondheim actress out there.  (Sadly, she doesn’t get a really memorable, knockout song, which is almost as big a tragedy as the rest of the show itself.)  Sutton Foster as Nurse Fay Apple sings the house down; to the point where halfway through “There Won’t Be Trumpets” you already know how amazing, how explosive, the applause is going to sound.  And Raúl Esparza brings J Bowen Hapgood some leading man charm, a dash of silliness and his usual vocal insanity, so much so that I actually had tears in my eyes during “Everybody Says Don’t,” which isn’t exactly an emotional powerhouse of a song.

Sure, there were moments where I actually had to ask myself “what is happening on this stage right now?” or “are we still watching this number?”  But somehow, despite it all, I had a great time last night.  I have to credit that to a handful of showstopping performers bringing their showstopping best to the stage, even when the material they were handed was questionable at best.

Also, as an almost unrelated aside: Sutton Foster is the tallest drink of water in history. With like, seven miles of limbs. Casting opposite her must be a bitch.  Actually, acting opposite her probably is too.

I mean, is it just me, or did Raúl have to bust out a pair of those Cuban heels to get within six inches of her height?

Pretty sure Sutton isn't the only one in heels, here...

Photo Credit: BroadwayWorld.com

Gawker is reporting that someone was spotted giving a blowjob during the first act of American Idiot last night. In the audience, not on the stage. Although doesn’t that happen on the stage, too? Or was that just my Stark Sands-addled imagination?

Immediate thoughts:

• Is Johnny Gallagher really that sexy? We vote yes, but still.
• Oh, you gentle, unionized Broadway ushers. None of your training could possibly prepare you for this.
• We’re waiting for the show’s press office to release some tepid statement, but we’d bet that secretly, Billie Joe Armstrong is pleased.
• Dude. American Idiot only has one act.
• The fact that American Idiot only has one act could have influenced this situation. Some people in the audience—particularly in those $127 orchestra seats—may have questioned how much bang for their buck (pun intended! yeah baby!) they were actually getting, and might have looked to enhance the entertainment value a bit.
• Can this go on the marquee? “So awesome it will make you want to go down on someone!”

Raul is undressing you with his eyes.

Something extremely bizarre has happened in my life.  In the last nine or ten months, my default dude—you know, the type even my friends can spot for me from a mile away—has shifted dramatically.

For me, the archetype was set around the time of my fourteenth birthday and it was Taylor Hanson.  Consequently I’ve basically always gone for beautiful, delicately featured, dare I say ‘pretty’ boys.  Ones with flushed cheeks and fair complexions and piercing baby-blue eyes.  Boys who are willowy to the point of being breakable with one overzealous thrust of the hips.  Boys who are exquisite.

Anyway.  We’re talking about a good decade (plus) of my life, here, in which this was my standard bear.  I mean.  There were always outliers—P___, who I loved for far too long, was mostly fair but he was short his eyes and hair were dark—but my wheelhouse had remained so consistent, for so long, that this recent change has even shocked my friends.

“I feel like I don’t even know you anymore,” Lucky said to me at Joe’s Pub the other night, awed and maybe a little bit horrified.  I had just pointed out the dark, juiced-up, hairy, tattoo covered dude I’d been making eyes with.

That guy, that jacked, olive-toned, hirsute, guy’s guy, is just the most recent in a long line of totally manly men.  Of broad, muscled, dark-featured, scruffy, gruff men.  Of Steel Burkhardts.  And as this new line of men grows, as I continue to find myself eye-fucking every ‘gorilla’ on Manhattan Island, I grow more and more confused.  How is this happening?  How does a girl go from lusting after the Taylor Hansons of this world to, well, his exact opposite?

And then I figured it out.  I pinpointed the shift.  Raúl Esparza.  Raúl Esparza as Duke Orsino, to be exact.  In this situation—like pot or spray paint for your average, troubled suburban kid—Raúl was my gateway drug.

I saw The Twelfth Night in the Park several times last summer.  I won’t give my exact number, but it was definitely more than twice and less than some number that would make me look any crazier than I already do.  I will, however, confess that I definitely saw it way less than I wanted to.  (This is not difficult, given the fact that I literally wanted to be in that theater every single day and sadly, those tickets are not easy to earn, and I do, in fact, have a day job).

Lovely and talented though Anne Hathaway and Audra McDonald were, I promise you it wasn’t either one of them I was desperate to binge on.  It wasn’t even my nerdy love of Shakespeare that kept me going back.  It was 100% Raúl.  During those few scant weeks he was hitting the stage at the Delacourte nightly, I wanted my life to be all Raúl all the time.  Because when would I get that chance again?  And because it made me happy and tingly and swoony to see him.

And that’s it, right there.  That’s when everything changed.  When my preference suddenly became scotch-swilling, hair-covered, heavy-browed, broad-chested, manly men.  If Gaston—that swarthy brute of Beauty and the Beast fame—walked past me on the streets of New York, I’d follow him like a puppy.  Will Swenson is suddenly more appealing than Hunter Parrish.  I mean, a few weeks ago as I eye-fucked the aforementioned gorilla in Joe’s Pub, Lucky was stuck looking on and I know she was immensely uncomfortable.  Not just because he and I were being kind of lewd, but because this was a girl she didn’t recognize.  This is a girl I hardly recognize.

And yet, my biggest concern these days isn’t that I barely recognize my own feelings.  Once I realized Raúl was the source of this whole…thing in my life, I actually started to feel much better about it.  No, my biggest concern is this: with Raúl only hitting the stage for four nights in Anyone Can Whistle, and the entire original cast of Hair off in London—having taken Swenson and Steel along with it—who the heck am I going to have inappropriate crushes on now?  Anyone have suggestions?

When actor Ben Walker steps on stage in the first moments of The Public Theater‘s new production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, you’ll immediately notice one thing. Well, if you’re a certain kind of person—if you’re me, in other words—you’ll notice one thing, and here it is:

That Ben is combustably hot. Nuclear fusion hot. (Or is that nucular?) Standing there in a snug pair of trousers and a gun holster that holds both an actual gun and a microphone, he plays the satirical, emo-singing seventh President of the United States in this new rock musical about presidential politics. (Good luck figuring out which politics the show embraces, however. No one, no party, and no ideal goes unscathed or unquestioned.) And he plays the role with hair-brained gusto and bravado. At some point, he even threatens to copulate with you. You, the whole audience. The whole world. And clearly, judging from their reaction, most of the audience is happy about it. My, how things change.

Because Ben and I, you see, have some unfortunate history. And if memory serves, “nuclear,” wouldn’t exactly have been my first descriptor of choice in 2005, when he was starring in the concert staging of a rickety-but-potential-filled new musical at Lincoln Center called Spring Awakening. Ben, you see, popped my Melchior cherry. And truth be told, he kind of sucked at it.

Some of the sucking was not his fault. Clocking in a nearly three hours and filled with high-handed monologues about like, death and stuff, the whole show was a leaden, pretentious mess full of kids who talked like grownups and grownups who just talked to much. It starred Walker, two actors I’d never heard of named Lea Michele and John Gallagher, Jr., and Michael Cerveris doing that pseudo-English accent that Madonna did when she was pregnant. The whole show needed a good therapist and some Prozac—and it would eventually get some, thanks Michael Mayer—but Melchior needed it most. Walker’s performance was whiny and charmless, and the character was a bore—not to mention a rapist, WTF. No matter how hard he worked, he simply could not convince me that Melchior deserved any kind of redemption.

The performance left such a bad impression that when I saw Jonathan Groff as Melchior at Atlantic Theater Company a year later, I had a really positive reaction, and not just because Groff is such a beautiful, darling little cupcake of a boy. His whole approach was different—more astute and wide-eyed, less bratty. I remember saying to a friend at intermission, “I just figured out what was wrong at Lincoln Center: That kid playing Melchior.”

Ouch. I know. And given that, I was cautious about Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. But apparently, I needn’t have worried.

I don’t know what happened. OK, I do know what happened. Walker went to the gym. A lot. But it’s not even that. It’s that in addition to getting buff, he got really good. And he landed a role that really suits him. He plays Andrew Jackson as an over-caffeinated lunatic who’s brimming with sly one-liners. The whole performance, with all of its winking irony and bawdy humor, is so well-calibrated. It feels both effortless and edgy—qualities that his Melchior could have used.

Granted, the show that’s surrounding Ben Walker and his emotive character this time is, frankly, a whole lot better than Spring Awakening was in 2005. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is funny and relevant and light on its feet. It does well by its hard-working actors. Of course, this show owes a lot to Spring Awakening, from its modern-idiom take on the past, to its liberal use of rockstar vernacular. But maybe Andrew Jackson took an even more important lesson from its knicker-wearing, hard-rocking successor: The need for a really great leading man.

...Yeah. Good luck unknotting your panties.

Happy Monday, kids! (Hah. Like Monday is ever ‘happy.’)

The Glee back nine premiere is a mere eight days away, and we thought it was about time to pimp our coverage here on the Craptacular.  Yes, I just used the word pimp.  On purpose.

There’s lots in store.  As you can imagine—and as our tags cloud over there on the right displays quite prominently—anything involving Jonathan Groff gets us kind of hot and bothered.  We’ve got lots to say.  But what we’re most excited about at this moment is the Twitter Party we’re planning.

Check out our feed @thecraptacular.  We’ll be live-tweeting the premiere episode, starting right on time at 9.28 pm EST.  We’re hoping you’ll tweet along with us, because we’ll be keeping an eye on your feeds as well and plucking out any gems we find.

Mention the words “Gavin Creel” and “London” in the same sentence, and some people apparently get a little hyper on their respective online social networks. Now, I understand that an entire nation has been feeling Creel-deprived since the boy left Mary Poppins, but who knew there would be such an outpouring of… um… love… at the announcement that Gavin would be returning to the West End with Hair. Here are a few kind words from Gavin’s apparent welcoming committee…

Lea and Rachel...sometimes, its hard to separate the two.

Lea Michele.  As a theater fan I’ve had the privilege of love/hating her for years.  I coined her ‘Man-Hands Michele’ years before the writers on Glee even had the chance to dream up that joke.  But now, as the rest of the country begins to root for Lea as the loveable pain-in-the-ass Rachel Berry, my opinion seems to confuse people.

For years, it confused me too.  For years I felt bad about not being on board the Lea Michele is Awesome Express.  I mean, Jonathan Groff has always loved her.  And she can sing like a BAMF.  Shouldn’t that be enough evidence for me?  For some reason, it wasn’t.

Because despite all the awesome things about her—and there are lots of those things—something just felt off.  It was difficult to pinpoint exactly, but her whole life seemed like a performance.  Like every last word or smile was dripping with condescension .  Like despite her chipper smile Lea only deigned to perform for us, to speak to us, to even breathe the same air as us, not because it meant anything to her, but because it would get her somewhere.  And we—all of us, from Jonathan right on down—were beneath her.  Useful only because our adoration could prove she was worthy of even more adoration, could make her more famous.

For years I felt bad about this.  I was sure I didn’t have any real reason to feel this way, to believe these things.  I was convinced I had to be wrong and even felt embarrassed by my love/hate for Lea.  I thought it made me seem like a crazy, jealous Jonathan Groff Fan-Girl, and even in 2007 I was at least a decade too old for that kind of behavior.  And worse.  I wondered if it meant I actually was a jealous Jonathan fan.  Guiltily, I swallowed my feelings.

Thankfully, last year, Lea herself relieved me of that guilt.  One night late in 2009, she and I attended the same party.  At first, this seemed really cool.  I mean, here Lea was, at the same silly Broadway party I was attending.  She was mingling with the little people!  Only.  She never did mingle with the little people.  She refused.  To the point where even the venue staff was seriously unimpressed with her, and quite vocal about that fact.

“Who does she think she is? Even Meryl Streep mingles and poses for photos when she comes here!” remarked one of the waitresses.  Repeatedly.

Poof.  The Mick’s Irish Guilt, gone.  Right there, just like that.  Because let me tell you, Lea wouldn’t have had to beat people back with a stick.  It wouldn’t have turned into a riot.  Most of the attendees didn’t even see her.  As the night ended and she walked back to the VIP area—where we were standing—I watched Lea point blank refuse the lone young man who told her he loved her and asked for a quick photo.  None of the rest of us even said a word.  Foul.  Turns out I wasn’t totally imagining her superiority complex.  It was real, and now I’d seen it in action.

The thing about Lea is, I can’t totally hate her.  Because maybe she was just having a bad night.  Despite everything, I want to give her the benefit of the doubt.  She’s human, after all.  More complex than I can sort out in the time I’ve spent around her.  And besides, it’s not like she’s Tiger Woods.  She’s not despicable.  She’s just…weirdly disingenuous.  And sometimes she’s not very nice.  And yes, that turns me off.  It makes me kind of hate her some days.

But none of that changes the fact that she’s one of the most talented performers of her generation.  None of that erases that shining moment when she stands alone on the stage, in the spotlight, and belts out “Taking Chances” so your heart pounds and you fist pump with joy because, oh my god, a Theater Girl just nailed it in front of the entire nation.  And that, I have to root for.

Photo Credit: thetvaddict.com