If you’re a theater person anywhere near my age, there’s a good chance that you have strong feelings about Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson’s famous Bob Fosse musical Pippin. I’m one of the folks who love it, but for many, the mere mention of the fey, pop-tune-driven faux medicine show prompts violent eye rolling.
Why is this? I think it’s because the show became both a victim of its time and a victim of its own popularity. It was, after all, the first Broadway musical to employ television advertising, and it ran on Broadway for six years. But the warm, catchy tunes developed arthritis after too many bad high school and college and community theater productions. After too many young j
uveniles auditioned with “Corner of the Sky” or “Extraordinary” (guilty!). As one of the shows boosters, this has always made me sad.
Perhaps one of the reasons the show hasn’t aged all that well is that so many of the numbers depend on irony. Very few of the songs in Pippin are about what they are actually about. If you know what I mean. Fastrada’s “Spread a Little Sunshine” is about spreading chaos, not love. “Glory” is about how awful war is not how glorious it is. “Extraordinary” is really commenting on a clueless young man’s inflated sense of his own importance. And “With You, ” a beautiful love ballad that I actually sang in my big sister’s wedding, is about an orgy. Good irony isn’t that easy to pull off, and when it gets tired it can devolve into a deadly coyness.
That’s why the current tour version of the Broadway revival version of the American Repertory Theater’s reimagining of Pippin is such great news.
On paper, I don’t like the high concept ART used: Basically, a Cirque du Soleil Pippin. I cringed at the thought. I remember how much I dislike that concept when I’ve seen used in various disappointing productions of Bernstein’s Candide.
This morning Cousin John picked me up and took me to the sparkling building where he lives with his wife Milana and new baby Vivienne.
Vilnius was exactly what I wanted it to be. I’ve long wanted to visit the Baltics, and so far they haven’t let me down. Vilnius is a city of 600, 000, and the old town simply sparkles in the clear Baltic sun. It was chilly but not cold.
The city is absolutely crawling with beautiful old churches, mostly Catholic (Milana says that Lithuanians are even more religious than Poles). But there are also the inevitable Russian Orthodox structures as well.
The main Cathedral has the coolest bell tower I think I have ever seen. It looks like what would happen if a tradtional bell tower and a lighthouse had a baby. It’s just not like any campanile I’ve seen before. Tragically, I didn’ tmanage to get a picture of it, so I’m going to cheat and grab one off the interwebs.
I've always had this weird love for "proletariat" art.
We took a lovely walk around town on Saturday afternoon.
Saturday evening we parked little Viv with John and Milana and I went off to the ballet. It was a performance by the Baltic Ballet Group and the piece was called Depeche Mode: Another World. We loved it.
The town turned out with a huge parade welcoming my visit.
Cities with the Best Looking People
Los Angeles
New York
Rome
Milan
Paris
Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 272 user reviews.
I graduated from this school thirty years ago this month, back when still had hopes and dreams and a waistline and my original cardiac arterial connections.
Today I passed my old Alma Mater, The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, on Madison Avenue. I decided to step in and just look around. I was met by a receptionist who wanted to know what the hell I was doing there. “I graduated from here exactly thirty years ago, ” I said. “Really?” She replied. “Today is graduation day, as a matter of fact.”
I looked around at all the kids in their neatly pressed suits and dresses, having just returned from the stage of the Majestic Theater on Broadway where their ceremony had been held. I should have asked who the speaker had been. In April of 1981, when I graduated on the set of Deathtrap at the Music Box Theater, the speakers had been Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn and silent screen legend Lillian Gish.
Today’s graduates looked predictably happy, tired and excited. I sure hoped they were smarter than I was thirty years ago. I stifled the impulse to collar some of them and give them some unsolicited advice.
Then I realized the person I really wanted to give advice to was my young, stupid, callow, naïve, hopeful 1981 self. What I really wanted was to jump into a time machine, just for five minutes, and MAKE my 21-year old self listen to some wise words from his future self.
Here’s What I’d Tell My Stupid 21-Year Old 1981 Just-Graduated From Acting School Self
Either get out of show business right now or get a lot smarter about it immediately.
Come out of the damn closet already. There’s no prize for who stays in the longest.[1]
Low carb, low carb, low carb, low carb, low carb.
Resist the impulse to take Meridia without a doctor’s supervision.
Learn about your credit rating. Treat it like your first born child.
Credit cards are The Devil.
It’s not too late to make friends with your own body. Do anything you have to to achieve this.
Did I mention low carb?
You’re skinnier and better looking than you think you are.
Investigate the new and growing world of computer and video gaming. It might be a better career path than acting.
Like the song says, enjoy yourself, but always remember: it’s later than you think.
We're very serious at Ground Zero.
Friends for thirty-two years. I'm lucky they'll still hang out with me. But then, they don't have to do it very often.
I wonder if I would have listened?
[1] But wait about three years before you start having sex. There’s a scourge coming and it’ll be a little while before they know how you can avoid it.
Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 227 user reviews.
With Luci and Derek, who came down from Connecticut to meet me for lunch! Why? Because they are teh awesome!
Very fun Saturday. My friends Luci and Derek, from my World of Warcraft guild (that’s Ritual Noise on Proudmoore, if you must know), came down on the train from Connecticut and I met them at Grand Central. I’d met Luci (and her brother Dave, another guild mate) last year, but hadn’t had the opportunity of meeting Derek in person yet.
We had a lovely breakfast across 42nd Street from GCT and took a walk around Tudor City and the United Nations neighborhood. (We had all agreed that crowded Times Square could do without us that day.) [INSERT PHOTO]
Amy on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Ashley Judd and Jason Patric.
After saying so long to them, I zoomed back uptown to my hotel, were I threw a couple of things in a bag and made my way down to Penn Station where I caught a New Jersey Transit train to New Brunswick, where my friend Amy is doing a play with Peter Scolari and a bunch of other talented people.
Amy in The Fox on the Fairway (that's Peter Scolari on the right).
The play is The Fox on the Fairway, a new play by Ken Ludwig, the guy who had a hit with Lend Me A Tenor. Like Tenor, the new play is a farce, and it was delightful Amy romping around on stage. Amy is an amazing actress and it’s always great to get a chance to see her work.
Her performance schedule over the weekend is tiring (five shows between Friday and Sunday) so we shared a hotel room across the street from the theater so we had sort of a slumber party.
Memorable Performances by My Ridiculously Talented Friend Amy
Cat on a Hot Ten Roof, Broadway (Mae)
The Fox on the Fairway, George Street Theater, New Brunswick, New Jersey (Mrs. Peabody)[1]
The Women, Old Globe Theater, San Diego (Edith)
The Stand-In, Los Angeles
Amy in The Women at the Old Globe (in the pink, top left).
[1]From the New York Times review:“Ms. Hohn, all dangerous décolletage as the club’s ever-available divorcée, Pamela, is especially delightful when wildly feigning a bout of hysterical blindness.”
Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 228 user reviews.
Stone and Parker in front of the Neil Simon Theater on Broadway
My friend David and I saw The Book of Mormon last night. It was every bit as good as I hoped it would be. Better, actually. It’s a remarkable instance of the creators of a show having their cake and eating it, too . . . in a big way. Meaning, the show has elements that are utterly profane and offensive, and yet overall it’s sweet and hopeful. It’s not mean spirited at all, which is surprising, considering the ridiculous religion it’s portraying.
The performances are fantastic. The two leads should share the Tony award . . . in fact, I really hope that’s what happens.
I highly recommend this show to anyone whose planning a trip to New York any time soon.
///
For a brief moment, my delirious enjoyment of the show was derailed. In the second act, there’s a wonderful number called “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream, ” depicting the horrors that commonly bedevil (to coin a phrase) worried young Mormons everywhere. Somehow the theme of recurring anxiety triggered my own: Money.
Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells
Yeah, even though I’m in the midst of a wonderfully beefy project, I have no work scheduled when it’s over yet, and I still haven’t gotten over the blind terror of post September 2008 contractor life. It’s not been easy, and I have to continue to work hard to find new opportunities.
The Only Three Things I Worry About
Money
Health
Actually, there isn’t a third thing
Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 266 user reviews.
It’s easy for an old actor like me to get depressed about the current state of commercial theater. Broadway seems to have been taken over by corporate interests and slumming movie and television stars. A cursory look at the Internet Broadway Database (www.ibdb.com) can be disheartening: Is there anything there that’s not a rock concert, a Disney franchise, or a revival?
I’m happy to report that Broadway is getting a scandalous blast of fresh air this week in the form of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a new musical by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman about our charismatic but highly controversial seventh President.
This is a crazy which show comes to Broadway from the downtown New York theater group Les Freres Corbusier. LFC is, according to their press materials, “devoted to aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, sophomoric humor and rigorous academic research.” Uh, so noted.
Your immersion into the world of this show begins the moment you enter into Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Donyale Werle’s set design spills off of the stage and engulfs the entire theater with an anarchic melange of frontier, rock and roll, and, well, blood. (Example: I was sitting almost directly underneath a suspended, full-sized, upside-down pony. No, don’t ask why.)
Blood? Yep. The galaxy of tiny red lights that fill the space set you up for one of the main themes of the evening. More on that below.
When the show begins, the young cast of fourteen (plus three on-stage musicians) take the stage with an aggressive swagger and high-octane energy that doesn’t let up for the next hour and forty minutes.
The best way I can describe the delightful show that follows is a combination of history class meets SCTV, blended together in a gumbo of rock and roll and classic burlesque theatrics.
Burlesque? Let me be clear. I mean the traditional sense of burlesque; that is, an entertainment style that characterized by extremely broad, even grotesque, parody, and short, staccato rhythms.
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson tells the story of Old Hickory through a series of raucous sketches and songs. It traces Jackson’s history from his rough-and-ready childhood on the Indian-plagued frontier to his military heroics and ultimately his political triumphs.
Benjamin Walker as Jackson has gotten a lot of buzz, much of it about how hot he is. In addition, the producers are aggressively marketing the sexy quotient of BBAJ, down to the blurb on the show’s poster – “History just got all sexypants, ” not to mention that the poster itself is a blatant rip-off of the cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA album.
Remind you of anything?
This approach may help sell tickets, but I think it’s selling the show, and Walker, short. Walker is certainly an attractive leading man, and he can pull off the form-fitting outfits the costumer has put him in with aplomb. But mostly he’s just good. It’s a demanding role that allows him to display a dizzying range as a performer. Like the rest of the show, his performance is funny, sad and smart.
One of the main weapons in the show’s arsenal is a cheerful sense of offensiveness. Far from trying to clean up the less politically correct aspects of Jackson’s character, BBAJ positively revels in them, and in fact goes out of its way to offend in any other way it can. This kind of humor – offensive jokes that are funny not because of their specific content but because of their sheer offensiveness – are right up my alley. Not everyone in the audience agreed, however. I heard several disapproving mutters from the theater patron sitting next to me as I guffawed at the tasteless fun the show has with the show’s studious narrator character (a hilarious
Kristine Nielsen).
Neilsen scores big as the deranged narrator.
As mentioned above, the show makes sure you think of Jackson as being drenched in blood.
Bloody Bloody Benjamin Walker
I’m pretty sure the love song between Jackson and his true love Rachel is the first one I’ve ever seen in which the lovers are covered in blood by the last stanza.
As a production, BBAJ is a remarkable piece of controlled chaos. The feeling of spontaneity is palpable: songs and scenes regularly get interrupted or even completely derailed. The cast is uniformly nimble, strong, and convincing throughout all of the mayhem. I also could actually understand what they were saying and singing, which is more than I can say for other current shows (COUGH*Next to Normal*COUGH). Much credit for the antic and intense staging to director Alex Timbers.
Another genius thing the show does is to make the political world of the early 19th Century feel startlingly, alarmingly, familiar. Far from being a golden age of innocence, the show makes clear that politics and statecraft have always been a corrupt, rigged game. Playing Monroe, Van Buren, and Clay, respectively, Ben Steinfeld, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe and Bryce Pinkham regularly stop the show with their broad and brave clowning. And special mention must be made of Jeff Hiller, who turns John Quincy Adams into an astonishingly funny cartoon.
Jeff Hiller knocks it out of the park as John Quincy Adams.
But the most transporting accomplishment of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is the fact that, well before the end of the show, you realize that the main character of the play isn’t really Andrew Jackson. It’s us. Jackson is merely a stand-in for a nation of people who have always believed two things: 1) We are the nice guy; the good guy; we believe in freedom and liberty; and 2) What we want, we REALLY want, and we’re going to take it, no matter what. The sad truth underlying the gonzo humor of the show is that these two beliefs are, of course, mutually contradictory, which means that our proxy Jackson is, like us, both guilty and insane.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of theater that more devastatingly explored the American character than Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. I highly recommend you get to the Jacobs Theater posthaste and see it.
Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 183 user reviews.
productions. After too many young j
