Tag: theater

I just got back from the Edinburgh Fringe where I saw, among a mountain of others, the inimitable comedian, actress, and millennial-scream-masquerading-as-a-cabaret-singer that is Catherine Cohen. This was the second time I’ve seen her now and it was just as thrilling and piercing of an experience as the first. She deserves the world’s attention, but honestly I’m not sure the world even just barely deserves to have her. 

Her schtick (if we’re squeezing her into the phonebook of Fringe acts) is simple: she dresses up millennial rage, sexy confessions, and “Why am I like this?” woes into a sequinned, come-hither cabaret act. The songs—which are, by the way, properly addicting pop songs—are gruesomely honest, with lyrics that make you guffaw and laugh but then wince at how accurately such a foundational, human truth you assumed would be kept burrowed deep inside of your own selfish, bashful self could be so easily excavated by Cohen, tossed around, and kicked aside with one of her white patent boots.  

She doesn’t stop. There’s a tendency for comedians to present their kernel of truth about the world or human nature and dance around it, spend minutes on the dissection of the thing, and come at it from every angle, filling an hour, milking their One Keen Observation for everything it’s got, but Cohen doesn’t. Nothing is precious. She moves at a rapid pace, stomping through her routine with no time to spare, ploughing ahead to her next song or her next joke with ad-libs and on-the-fly crowd work stuffed in between without fear or trepidation or losing the thread or alienating a crowd because it’s 2019 for hellsake and there’s just not enough time. She doesn’t second guess herself for a second. She doesn’t flinch.

This was the Fringe and so the crowd was a mix of everything. There were tourists and students and locals and young people and old people and people wandering in with no idea what they were in for and people like me who had seen the light of Catherine Cohen and were desperate for more. Like all Fringe shows there was a slight tension in the air. At one point a row of very bro-y university-age men were sniggering amongst themselves over some aside and Catherine paused. She turned her eyes to them and cooed into the mic. “What are you boys talking about over there?” The guys jostled each other the way they do and laughed uneasily, but their response wasn’t required, Cohen already had her set of props. The boys were already in the volcano. She danced around them, cutting into them—the idea of them, the essence of a row of rowdy straight boys—with her signature wit and seduction that honestly fails all description and has to be seen in person to be believed. She segued effortlessly into her next song about needing a man who, “Doesn’t care if I live or die.”

There’s a push-pull relationship in comedy right now of the expectation to be self-effacing, but not too clever; to be aware and political, but not too self-righteous, not too cloying; to be smart and self-regulating and to really “get it” but not to come off as too cool, too alienating, too satisfied with how much you’ve figured out your own neuroses. Those rules don’t exist at a Catherine Cohen show. She’s burned the whole thing to the ground. She wants to be famous, she wants to be thin and pretty and loved, she wants you to be obsessed with her and she will tell you these things outright, with no dressage, with no set up, with no punchline, even, with zero self-doubt or even the slightest hint of parody. These are the things she wants and you will worship her, you will agree with her when she says “Wow, I have an amazing voice,” you will believe her when she drinks from her water bottle and says “This is just a light little snack” and you’ll be so entranced by her at this point that you’ll believe anything she tells you about the world and how it works because it’s hers. 

You walk away from a Catherine Cohen show worried. Is there a place for this kind of thing in the world? Is there an audience outside of comedy clubs and tastemaker websites and five-minute late night sets where Cohen can actually be a superstar—the kind of superstar she kitschily says she wants to be but also because she flat-out deserves to be one? 

There’s a sizeable population that will cast her off as too crass, too inappropriate, too selfish, too gross. And in the waning days of meet-me-in-the-middle diplomacy, can the kind of people that are instantly allergic to this sort of thing become Cohen converts? 

It’s a hard question to ask because it requires a certain amount of staring into the abyss of America—what we value and how we value it; what our relationship is to intimate truths and how we honor them or avoid them or if we even recognize them at all. But the magical thing about Catherine Cohen is that that is where her comedy genius lies. No, not in dancing on the edge of the abyss, not towing the line—that would be all too easy for her. No, you can find her very much deep down in the abyss itself. Stare hard enough into it and you’ll see her dancing down at the bottom, preaching to whoever’s there to listen.

After what felt like a prolonged theater drought, I’ve been SEEING SOME STUFF finally. Just two plays, though. But I feel like it’s been more, but I think that’s only because they’re both blockbuster plays that feel like more than just two. 

The first I saw was All My Sons, which was sadly not anything worth writing home about apart from Sally Field who was expertly being the kind of Sally Field she’s become an icon for. Kudos for that. Otherwise, it’s another kitchen table drama—yes, one of the original kitchen table dramas, but what does that mean in 2019? 

Characters stare wistfully out into the audience and comment on the weather in metaphorical terms. There are weary mothers and brutish men. The American Dream is shown, very heavy handedly, to be futile and horrific—a daring idea back in the 40s when the play was first put on, but come on, take a look around. Obviously we still, ~as a society~ need to be told these things today, but the production of this play doesn’t even try to put a new spin on anything. It opens and closes with a kind of zoom-in, zoom-out, world-weary, “This Is America,” in-your-face ploy that comes off with all the subtlety of a high school PowerPoint presentation, and it’s just not a good idea to make me roll my eyes in the first two minutes of the curtain rising.

Gosh I’m being a bit mean. (And there’s no actual curtain in this play—when did these theaters just collectively decide to get rid of curtains? It’s been ages since I’ve seen a show with an actual curtain. Anyway.)  

But Sally Field was great! But also, what else could she possibly be? That’s her baseline. Ok, I’ll stop now. 

I also saw Rosmersholm, another classic play (maybe lesser known, but by a classic playwright), which was first put on historically even earlier than All My Sons, and explores even darker, more tumultuous themes with more grace. Rosmersholm skips the wambulance (rude again, sorry) of the American Dream (Norwegian in this case?) and cuts right into the essential questions of humanity, religion, politics, and particularly female politics. 

Hayley Atwell stars and gives one of the greatest performances I’ve personally ever seen (right up there with Imelda Staunton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). She has a scene at the beginning of act two where she absolutely goes for broke and provoked in me that kind of bubbling, visceral reaction only theater can. She completely floored me and to that I say, go get that Marvel/Disney money sis, as long as it lets you keep doing work like this. 

The play itself is bleak—bleaker than A Doll’s House, which I remember reading in college and feeling equal feelings of ooph. Things do threaten to get a bit too melodramatic near the end, but the actors throw themselves so willingly into each probing monologue and existential wail that you can’t help but allow yourself to be carried away with them.

Company has blown every other show I’ve seen this year out of the water. I didn’t expect it to! It’s a blockbuster musical with championship pedigree running through its cast, director, and history, and somehow, through a confluence of hype and burnout, something like that can work against a show, but not at all in this case.

Company is an abstract musical with a fluid structure and virtual plotlessness. On the night of her 30th birthday, Bobbie (not Bobby due to a timely gender swap for this revival) navigates a cavalcade of her closest friends, all of whom are coupled up and personify different facets of marriage in all its ups and downs. With hysteria, cynicism, detachment, and over-attachment, each couple interrogates Bobbie on her singledom, leaving her to step aside and analyze the company she keeps.

Something special happened on the night I saw it, one week into previews. The superstar director Marianne Elliott got up on stage before the start to give a slight disclaimer about them still being in previews and that due to illness, the lead actress would be replaced for the night by Jennifer Saayeng, a cast member who already plays the role of Jenny, and that the role of Jenny would be covered by another actress. The curtain rises and Saayeng, who has had literally only hours of rehearsal for the lead role of the biggest new show on the West End, takes the stage.

First staged in 1970, Company is an interesting time capsule of a play. With the institution of marriage as its centerpiece, and adjoining dissections of divorce, drug use, and career ambition, a lesser production would run the risk of feeling dated. Here, the topics are more current and vital than ever, used as tools to uncover the greater ills of modern life. A joint shared between a couple is less about paranoia and legality than about uncovering a new dimension to how much they thought they knew about each other. A riff on pre-marriage jitters (played with expert, cartoonish precision by Jonathan Bailey) becomes a hilariously apt disassembly of gay marriage. Ultimately Company isn’t about these trappings of modern life, but about what life still manages to be in spite of them. It’s about loneliness in a crowded room.

Enter Saayeng, who takes the stage as Bobbie with that singular fear etched into her face. Theater is magical because it’s a live wire for empathy. Automatically, the audience is latched onto her performance, reading into and feeding off of every wince of insecurity she exhibits throughout—it’s a rare moment where character and actor merge into one. Race brings a startling new dimension to the show. Saayeng is Black and spends large portions of the show pushing her way through riotous crowds of mostly Whites. Even in this bonkers, off-the-wall musical comedy, the reality of what we see is palpable and current. Whether Bobbie is standing on her own in defiance or in dismay, we believe her and we feel it too.

At the end of the night, there were standing ovations, as would be expected. Crowds shot up for Jonathan Bailey’s hilarious turn. Even more shot up for Patti Lupone because well, Patti Lupone. But the entire theater shot up and absolutely erupted for Jennifer Saayeng, who burst into tears along with many in the audience. She nailed every beat of the performance against insane expectations.

Rarely does a play totally transport me—at least not in the way a movie or a book does. The obvious, inherent artifice of a stage can both serve its purpose of delivering a message and alienate its own audience, sometimes at the same time. With Saayeng’s vulnerability laid bare, there was a very real throughline that sucked me right into it, crushing me with the musical’s themes and ideas like nothing else ever has.

So… it was great! Incredible! Complete bliss. I wonder if it would have had the same power over me had the actress swapping not occurred. It probably would have, but definitely not as easily. Either way, what I thought was just going to be a night out at another blockbuster West End production actually ended up being exactly and perfectly that.

This year my relationship with London theater has evolved into what can only be described as picky. I used to be fine with oohing and aahing at whatever the basic hook of a show was (an ambitious set, flashy dancing, a famous person, etc.) but now I’ve become picky! Quicker to criticize than to applaud.

(Tangent: I went to see Aladdin because the tickets were free and it was worse than I thought it could possibly be. I was expecting something akin to the Lion King where it would be a blockbuster, machine of a show, but it was a disaster. The Aladdin was not the Aladdin on the posters, the Jasmine sang through her nose, and there was no giant snake at the end! I’ve read reviews that likened it to a pantomime and I couldn’t agree more. It felt like Aladdin charades. Anyway, the best part of it was the audience because it was a Las Vegas audience—tired tourists that had been wandering London all day and just wanted to be entertained. They hooped and hollered at everything, the magic carpet ride was a euphoric experience. People lost their minds. At the very end of the show, there was no standing ovation because why would there be, save for ONE person. An older man in one of the front rows shot right to his feet and clapped like the biggest fan in the world for the whole length of the curtain call. I could see the smile he was giving the cast even though his back was turned to me. At one point he gave a big thumbs up. It was cute and made me wonder if I’ve become too jaded. Anyway.)

I saw the second half of The Inheritance finally, and I wasn’t as moved by it as I had been by Part I. Everything came to its inevitable Vanessa Redgrave conclusion and felt somewhat hollow compared to the ending of Part I, which did an amazing job of weaving the past and the present together to create this sense of unity and shared direction for the future. Part II felt too obvious with the notes it was trying to hit and none of them felt as vital as the first half. Acting-wise it felt stiffer than before and dare I say straighter.

The best play I’ve seen this year so far has been Home, I’m Darling at the National Theatre. It’s a brilliant send-up to our fetishization of nostalgia—in this case nostalgia for the 50s—where the biggest plot twist happens in the first ten minutes of the show. Katherine Parkinson plays the perfect lead as a sort of self-induced bored housewife. She’s imprisoned herself to domesticity on her own volition and you can feel the horrors of that kind of life catching up with her like viruses.

Her mother, played by Sian Thomas, delivers the play’s standout monologue—a critique of her daughter’s brand of feminism and how it fits and doesn’t fit with ~the state of the world~ today. Laura Wade, the writer of the play, does the expert feat of towing the line between soap-box and soap opera, crafting a play that both hooks you with its inventive premise and challenges your natural assumptions, creating an elevated conversation you don’t realize you’re a part of until it’s over.

On the musical side of things, I saw Hamilton, which I guess is a big deal. But I think the window for having your jaw dropped by Hamilton has closed by now. I mean, it lived up to the hype and was outstanding (though I have to admit, right before the intermission I was worried there wasn’t going to be an intermission, and then I felt ashamed at having worried about that in the first place and then I said screw it and embraced the fact that yes, I WAS KIND OF BORED BY HAMILTON). Especially in the current world, it felt like an Obama-era relic from when optimism was shamelessly abundant, bordering on naive. It felt strong and empowering, defiant and unbeatable, but vague; singing (rapping) to an empty room. Maybe I’m projecting!

The best musical I’ve seen this year so far has been Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I should probably call out my hypocrisy here because where Hamilton is inventive and original and fresh, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is maybe just fresh, being practically a connect-the-dots rehash of Billy Elliot with shades of Kinky Boots. That being said, it does what it does masterfully, with the music being the real standout. I guess where Hamilton has the weight of the world on its politics, Jamie doesn’t, so it’s free to run wild and have a fun time. Unfair to both? Probably.

And those are just about all the highlights! Long Day’s Journey Into Night was excellent but I was too overloaded on kitchen-table dramas to appreciate it in the moment. Julie had potential to rise above its angry high school sentiment, but didn’t, and wasted Vanessa Kirby. Killer Joe was an absolute dud that couldn’t even be saved by Orlando Bloom’s butt.

So, again, pickiness.

One of my favorite t-shirts is a dark blue one that has an all-over, stylized print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I’ve had it for at least 6 years and have lately only been wearing it as a running/gym shirt, which probably contributed to what cumulated in my finger ripping right through the fabric the other day. “Ripping” suggests the fabric still had a bit of toughness to it though, which it definitely did not. The thread had been worn completely thin and a huge hole opened up like a wet tissue paper tearing in half. There’s lots of Hokusai shirts out there but I’ve yet to find a decent replacement.

That’s the long way of saying I went to see a play called The Great Wave the other day at the National Theatre. Is that an earned transition? A new year of theater is kicking off and I’m already hugely satisfied with what I’ve seen. The Great Wave, so far, is my favorite. It’s about two sisters—the typical setup of bookish vs. wild child—who are torn apart by the titular great wave. One sister is swept away, leaving the other and their mother to cope with the aftermath: a whodunit police investigation and a twisting (and shockingly relevant) political scandal that unfold with a thriller’s pace. The set rotates with each changing scene. Time expands menacingly, with years ticking by from the 70s to present day.

In a way, the play is a spiritual sequel to Pachinko, which I read earlier this year. It uses intimate family bonds to tackle issues of cultural identity and global politics in a way that makes you feel completely inside of and connected to the world presented to you—as you should because, in actuality, it really is your world. It’s a brave play. The acting is astounding and even the played-straight villains have their moments of heartbreak and empathy. You see the ending coming, then you don’t, then you do, and then it doesn’t even matter and you want to see it all over again.

Then I saw another play, like, less than a week after seeing The Great Wave. I tend to go on unhealthy media binges like this (see post below where I saw Black Panther and Lady Bird in one weekend for some reason). I don’t consider myself a theater person and sometimes I’ll even say, seemingly offhandedly but usually just after seeing something, that I don’t like plays, I don’t like musicals, I don’t like tha theataaah. Yet somehow I end up seeing way too many shows not to call myself one (one in the amateur sense… not to stick my neck out too far).

The Inheritance is what I saw next. It’s another blockbuster play. It has sweeping, Angels in America ambitions and in many ways exceeds them. Its structure is ingenious and complicated: ten men stay on the stage for the length of the play, acting as a sort of collective subconscious of the modern gay man in America. They’re joined by the aged ghost of E. M. Forster, who uses his novel Howard’s End to create a narrative that interrogates the gay experience of today vs. the one of just a few decades ago. It looks back at the dangerous world in which Angels in America was conceived and asks how far we’ve come, what have we lost, what have we gained, where do we go from here, etc. It’s a two part play, of course.

It’s a credit to the writing that you never get lost in the surreality of it all. The story-within-a-story-and-then-some has clear delineations and the boys on stage are all fleshed out (emphasis on the flesh in some cases!).

I still have to go see part 2, so I can’t yet gather all of my thoughts together. Part 1 is funny, daring, and has a moving, tear-jerking, perfect finale, but it’s not without its frustrations. For a play that wants to be about a huge swath of humanity, there needed to be a female voice(es, actually). Vanessa Redgrave pops in for part 2, so I’m looking forward to where that goes. And while the methods of storytelling are innovative, the actual plot line is fairly tame, almost cliche, with kitchen table relationship drama, eviction notice drama, AIDS drama, and of course, swooning over New York. Some of the beats are lifted directly from Howard’s End and others feel cobbled together from other gay touchstones. There are shades of Rent, Angels in America, A Little Life, Dead Poets Society, and The Normal Heart. The similarities seem intentional, but not always warranted.

Comparing The Great Wave and The Inheritance is impossible, but I will say they both use up-to-the-minute contemporary life to frame their stories. However, where The Great Wave uses that to compel the plot along and keep things in context of current events, The Inheritance does something that I struggled the most with. The play stays ultra-relevant, including a scene set at a 2016 election night gathering where the stage literally begins to sink. But it starts to flounder with its commentary. At times, it’s not clear whether the play is mocking the liberal bourgeoisie or blindly engaging with it. The characters do and say things that flirt with parody and satire, but without the amount of integrity required so that the audience can clearly tell. I had a similar feeling while reading (ploughing, slowly, reluctantly) through A Little Life, which has moments of brilliant, hilarious parody… until you realise it’s not intentional.

I could go on and on, but I haven’t even seen part 2, so I have to stop myself! Maybe everything will change, who knows. I will say that The Inheritance succeeds in what it wants to feel like. It’s like a music video, in a way, where the feeling or the essence of the thing is there and the audience is clearly clued in, but the clockwork underneath isn’t exactly sensical. It knows what it wants to feel like, not necessarily what it wants to be about. Nevertheless, you instantly want to play it again when it’s over.