PART TWO
23/24 Season Jump Start
Reviewed by David Spencer
Same principle here: I’ll sum up each of the following relatively new offerings by telling you exactly what you need to know, as I see it, to determine if you’d care to see it.
Eisenhower: This Piece of Land at the Theatre at St. Clements, features John Rubenstein as the 34th President of the United States, ex officio, working on his memoirs. It tends to help a one-actor historical if the dramatist can contrive a reason why the actor is breaking the fourth wall and speaking to us—or a context in which he’s literally speaking to an audience—and in this one, playwright Richard Hellesen presents Eisenhower, wanting to set things straight for a reporter, dictating into a tape recorder.
This presents a bit of an actor-connecting-to-audience challenge for the playwright’s son, director Peter Hellesen, because during the whole of its two acts, It restrains Eisenhower from overtly playing to the crowd. We all know that eventually the actor will start to use the stage space to emphasize by moving from here to there, that he will face front and address us as if, collectively, we’re the fellow to whom he’s addressing his remarks—and understanding the poetic convention, we go along with it—but it takes rather too long for Hellesen to warm into it and the contrivance draws attention to itself when Eisenhower acknowledges the “reality” of the tape recorder’s ON-OFF switch and breaks out of it.
As to the play itself…go elsewhere for warts-and-all. It’s a tribute biography, hammering home the notion of Eisenhower as a progressive Republican who was unafraid to cross the aisle and put country over party. There is no meaningful mention of darker factors, such as having had to contend with Richard Nixon as his vice president. As such, the play is decent enough, if a little long.
In the title role is John Rubenstein. The performance is not an indelible tour de force in the manner of Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain, James Whitmore’s Will Rogers or William Windom’s James Thurber—but then again, the script doesn’t give him material of tour de force octane. But he’s never less than solid, never less than interesting, never less than invested in every minute…so what’s to complain?
Is that a positive review? I suppose it is.
Unequivocally positive is my view of Alex Edelman: Just for Us at the Hudson. Mr. Edelman, previously unknown to me (but obviously quite popular) is standup comic in his late 30s, which does not seem especially young for a standup these days except for one really significant factor…he seems to have revived, for the new generation, and with gusto, the tradition of the Jewish stand-up comic whose Jewishness is an inextricable part of his material, his rhythms, his subject matter, his thematic undercurrent, even his secular POV. (Well, yes, Lewis Black…but he’s a generation removed, more of an elder statesman now.)
But of course what’s remarkable is not that Edelman’s revived it…but how he’s revived it. Not as a throwback to the styles of previous generations—the Alan Kings, the Buddy Hacketts, the Mort Sahls and etc.—but fully in keeping with young, radical, hip liberalism. Indeed, the inciting true incident whence sprang his 90 minute recounting and many-sidebar-ruminations-upon, is a day in 2017 when he saw an internet Open House callout for what would clearly be a white supremacist gathering in a Queens apartment…and decided to attend…just to kindasorta see how the Other Half lives; you know…up close.
Edelman never plays it safe, the way I always feel Colin Quinn does these days. His observations have teeth and his Jewishness is forever front and center. But what’s so remarkably right for the present moment about him is that he is naturally charming-disarming…and that while the material has edge, he makes his Jewishness somehow a shared experience; he draws you into it with him and makes it inclusive. When he enters that apartment, you’re in the perceptive bubble right along with him.
Here’s hoping his Broadway monology becomes a recurring feature.
I guess Grey House is well-done if you like that kind of thing, and I don’t mean the horror genre per se. I mean a particular sub-genre of horror; I don’t think it has a name, at least not one I’ve ever heard, but its narratives tell of innocents and not-so-innocents (sometimes a pair that includes one of each) who are drawn into recurring cycles of a long-established community and/or remote location; cycles in which the outsider is consumed by, or absorbed into, the horror. There’s never a happy ending (well, almost never; we’ll debate The Shining and its two filmed iterations another time); the ending, rather, is that the horror will continue to perpetuate itself. The ride is about learning, as the outsider learns, what he or she is caught up in, as the clues coalesce into the dreadful, implacable truth.
Personally, I dislike the misanthropy of this kind of story, but it has its revered classics: Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby. But the strength of those lies in the fact that they eventually fill in the blanks. When the story is over, you get the punch line (if you’re not ahead of it).
But then there are the stories of that genre that like to keep things vague. All you ever really know is that there’s some malevolent force that needs to perpetuate itself.
Levi Holloway’s thriller, at the Lyceum, is squarely in that tradition: Young married couple (Tatiana Maslany, Paul Sparks) have a car accident during a blizzard, seek shelter in a cabin populated by a bunch of young girls and one boy, various ages and weirdosities, who may or may not be overseen by an elderly woman (Laurie Metcalf) who also resides there. Or maybe she’s overseen by them. Who knows? (And say I: who cares? But that’s me.)
There’s nothing much in the way of boo! here, it’s all foreboding atmosphere, as aided and abetted by director Joe Mantello, a one-way visit to the po’ folks Overlook Hotel. But good luck figuring out what it wants of its guests. Unlike the Overlook, the Grey House isn’t including you in on the memos.
And as I say, if that’s your thing, you’ll find it aplenty in Grey House. If not, then be afraid. Be very afraid.
When comedian Don Adams played bumbling CONTROL Secret Agent 86 on the hit spy genre satire sitcom Get Smart!, he established a number of catch-phrases that caught the public fancy, as well as a few verbal running gags. My favorite of them is arguably the most esoteric, because it requires an especially hip sense of humor. My favorite iteration of the gag happened in the Get Smart feature film, The Nude Bomb, which took comic swipes at the fashion industry. Presaging the action climax sequence, Max and his newly assigned female partner are concealed in the deep woods, watching, at a distance, a convoy of enemy trucks, presumably headed toward their secret installation…but all they’re approaching is the solid face of a mountain. Just when it seems that the convoy will have to stop or crash, the mountain face unzips like a giant fly. The convoy passes through the opening and the mountainous fly closes behind it.
And Max says:
“That’s the second biggest zipper I ever saw!”
The joke, of course, is that no matter how fantastical the thing Max may be confronted with, he has always seen one that’s more fantastical. Making the joke esoteric is that it’s sincere, not braggadocio, and that he will never say anything else about the more superlative thing, nor will anyone ask him to particularize before moving on to the next beat.
The joke here, though, is that when I tell you Once Upon a One More Time, at the Marquis, is the second worst Cinderella empowerment musical I’ve ever seen…it happens to be true. Last season’s Bad Cinderella, mere months older, as the Broadway crow flies, was worse. But OUAOMT still meets a fairly high bar for low.
It has been crafted, if that’s the word, around the Brittney Spears song catalog, and its premise is that, after centuries of repetition, certain female fairy tale characters, Cinderella in particular, have started thinking for themselves, and begin seeking the break the expected patterns that limit their sense of self-worth, dignity and respect. Just about any Jay Ward Fractured Fairy Tale of the early ‘60s (a feature of Rocky and Bullwinkle) was far better at skewering conventions and tropes in five minutes than OUAOMT is in its exhausting two acts. Its humor is labored, it’s relentlessly over-choreographed and its staging is flat—literally: very little makes use of levels or interesting angles, it consists mostly of running around on the stage floor as if the set were built around a rehearsal studio.
The cast is very talented. Particular kudos goes to Jennifer Simard, in the exact same thankless evil stepmother slot occupied by Carolee Carmello in that other goofy show, and similarly showing how in control she is within a context of stylistic chaos. Where they live hip-hoppily ever after.