A Weekend in New York (or, A Gentleman's Guide to Matilda of the Opera)

My (very) belated Mother's Day present this year was a weekend in New York, and for me that means one thing: a chance to get some really good dim sum.  Seriously, there are like zero dim sum places in this area, it's so annoying...wait, what?  Oh yeah, and Broadway too, that's an important part of the whole New York trip thing, right.

I got in three shows and was able to enjoy myself at all of them, despite the occasional onstage flub or annoying audience member (who puts down the triple-digit prices for a Broadway ticket and then doesn't even bother to pay attention to the show, I ask you?).  And since I'm doing this whole review thing now, why not profess my opinions to all you lovely people out there?

****

A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder
Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 West 48th St.

Dying is easy; comedy is hard--but dying several times in a comedy makes Jefferson Mays the hardest working man in musicals right now.  He plays no less than eight ill-fated upper class twits in this year's darkly hilarious Tony champion, a deliciously fun cross between the bloody rampages of Sweeney Todd and the farcical flights of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Mays' characters are all members of the well-heeled and unbearably snooty D'Ysquith family, holders of the earldom of Highhurst.  Monty Navarro (an adorably mischievous Bryce Pinkham) is ninth in the D'Ysquith succession line--unbeknownst to him until recently, as his mother had been cut off from the family for marrying below her station.  Treated with contempt by his kin, enraged at the indignities his mother suffered from their neglect, and desperate to prove himself to his socially ambitious lover Sibella (Lisa O'Hare), what is there for Monty to do but systematically bump off everyone ahead of him in line for the D'Ysquith title?

Pinkham and Mays carry the show through its series of amusing and creative demises, displaying excellent comic timing and excellent vocal chops.  The highlights in Robert L Freedman and Steven Lutvak's light operetta-esque score include the present earl's "I Don't Understand the Poor," Monty's tender ode to "Sibella," and "I've Decided to Marry You," a dizzy farce of a trio for Monty, Sibella, and Phoebe (Lauren Worsham), a demure branch of the D'Ysquith tree who charms Monty.

Alexander Dodge's stage-within-a-stage set is quite charming, and gives the production the same music-hall vibe as the recent revival of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  The entire production is a lot of fun, but if you can see it with Mays and Pinkham, do so--bloody intrigue has never been so satisfying, or so funny.

Matilda
Shubert Theatre, 225 West 44th St.

The set for Matilda is one of the most fascinating I've seen in recent memory.  An explosion of letter tiles spills out around the proscenium, looking like the aftermath of a particularly violent game of Scrabble.  Study the seemingly chaotic jumble long enough, and words start to emerge that reflect the story to come: Burp.  Incredible.  Monster.

It's an excellent set-up for Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly's main theme in Matilda, which is the power of words and stories to bring pain, comfort, and rebellion.  For Roald Dahls' five-year-old girl genius, stories aren't simply a means of escaping the indignities suffered at the hands of nasty adults, but guidance and inspiration in finding her own strength.  Recognizing the helplessness of the characters in books to alter the inevitably tragic course of their lives, Matilda Wormwood vows to take matters into her own hands instead ("Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty" she reasons).  Meanwhile, school's headmistress Miss Trunchbull (Christopher Sieber, displaying good comic timing, marvelously sadistic menace, and an impressively padded HHH-cup bra) uses words as weapons as much as she does her towering strength and endless array of cruel punishments.

Matilda has long been my favorite Dahl book, and Minchin and Kelly do right by the source material's dark and whimsical feel in songs like "Miracle" (in which a troop of parents dote excessively on their horrid offspring) and "When I Grow Up."  (Word to the wise: have a good listen to the cast recording before attending; Minchin's lyrics tend to go by too fast to be properly understood the first time around, especially when sung by less-than-articulate child actors.)  They also expand on the original nicely, adding a more developed backstory for Matilda's kind but cowed teacher Miss Honey (Jill Paice)--a tale so fantastically morbid it's easy to imagine Dahl penning it.

While the child actors are hit-and-miss (as young actors often are), Matilda has enough musical delights to keep things going, and the adult cast is very well-rounded.  Lesli Margherita and Matt Harrington are wonderfully tacky as Matilda's awful parents, and Jill Paice is a pleasantly sweet Miss Honey.  Making the most of minor roles are Phillip Spaeth as Mrs. Wormwood's flamboyant dance instructor and Alex Brightman as Matilda's older brother--a dullard whose dialogue, despite consisting entirely of single-word barks, always carries the maximum comedic potential.  The power of language, indeed.

The Phantom of the Opera
Majestic Theatre, 247 West 44th St.

You can talk about Andrew Lloyd Webber's soaring, melodramtic score, the lavish sets and costumes, the chandelier.  You can mention Hal Prince's spooky-sensual direction, or the captivating quality of the story and how it resonates with the angry, lonely misfit in all of us.  But at the end of the day (and there have been over twenty-six years' worth of days) the real power behind Phantom of the Opera comes from the people in the cast, who bear the burden of breathing life and humanity into the musical's rather sketched-in collection of characters.  Without their energy and nuance, the entire thing drags and falls flat.  Luckily, the current Phantom cast has two particularly good examples of actors who make the most of what little the book gives them.

The first of these is Norm Lewis in the pivotal title role.  Lewis provides one of the more distinctive interpretations of the Phantom, a fact that has less to do with his ethnicity (he is the first black actor to don the mask on Broadway, and only the third to do so worldwide) and more to do with his voice, which is deeper and richer than is usually cast in the part.  He savors the phrases in "Music of the Night" with a visceral quality that makes the song sound fresh even after all this time, and balances the character's predatory, poisonously seductive qualities with a cringing pathos and maliciously childish streak that brings out the Phantom's ultimate, tragic humanity.

The other is Jeremy Hays, who has the somewhat unenviable task of embodying the Phantom's romantic rival, Raoul de Chagny.  The good, normal Prince Charming to the dangerous, darkly fascinating Phantom, Raoul always runs the risk of coming off as a non-entity, or worse, an insufferable boor.  Hays gives the character strength, sensitivity, and an unforced charm that makes him a worthy foil to the sinister masked man, which increases the dramatic tension and effectiveness of the musical's central love triangle.

As for the lady torn between them, the immensely (and to my mind, excessively) popular Sierra Boggess continues in the role of Christine for about another month, but don't feel too broke up if you catch a performance with alternate Mary Michael Patterson.  Patterson has a lovely, clear voice and does a wonderful job of developing Christine's growing strength and maturity over the course of the evening.  It would be great to see her take over as the principal when Boggess' limited run in the part concludes.

Know the Score: Top 5 Best Tony NON-Winners (plus more crossover fun! Yay!)

Sometimes, being a great show just isn't enough. This month "Know the Score" focuses on the musicals that, despite being awesome, didn't win the Tony award for Best New Musical.


And guess what, I've been pimping out my talents to other reviewers for your education and entertainment once again! This time I join Steve of Judge of Character to add my somewhat obsessive perspective on The Phantom of the Opera! Enjoy!

Musical Hell COMMENTARY: Phantom of the Opera

Time to go behind the scenes of my weirdness again, with a commentary track for the Phantom of the Opera episode.

Musical Hell Review: Love Never Dies

You normally have to go to the darker corners of Fanfiction.net to find a story on the caliber of our next subject.  But thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber and his huge piles of money, Love Never Dies is available on DVD for you to...um, enjoy.



This episode would not have been possible without the input of two generous and talented guys.  The first is Roby "TheAbsentCommentator" Johnson, who graciously agreed to cameo on the "Beneath a Moonless Sky" parody.  He has a website where he reviews movies, video games, and other various oddities, and you should totally check it out.  The next is the amazingly talented Raphael, who wrote the hilariously dirty lyrics to said parody, and also let me borrow one of his drawings as a visual aid.  You should also totally check out  his website, as well as his latest project "Phantom Fight Club," which uses the Soul Caliber V character creation option to put the characters and creative team of Phantom of the Opera through a no-holds-barred tournament.  Because deep in your heart, you've always wanted to see Joel Schumacher getting the crap beat out of him with a flaming skull.

Musical Hell Review: The Phantom of the Opera

Broadway's longest-running musical rings up twenty-five years this month, so it's time to look at a much less successful chapter in its history: the hauntingly awful film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera!




NOTE: YouTube content bots have been an issue with this particular offering; if you can't see the episode here, please check the Zippcast link!

Weird-As-Hell Musical/Video Game Crossovers

I don't know why I'm surprised that Andrew Lloyd Webber now has a game coming out for the Wii. I mean, it's only logical that a man so shameless in self-promoting himself in every other form of media would turn to video games eventually. This is probably the next logical step after reality show hosting and cannibalizing his own works for profit.

I guess it just seems weird because you don't see a whole lot intersection between “video games” and “musicals' on the Venn diagram of life. This is probably because, despite increasing amounts of evidence to the contrary, the video game demographic is perceived as almost exclusively male. And men don't like musicals, because they're too close to opera which is “culture” and all red-blooded men must avoid anything with a whiff of culture about it like the plague. (This infallible wisdom has been handed down to us by generations of gender based humor, along with such timeless maxims such as “women are weepy” and “men are infantile morons who are liable to hurt themselves if unsupervised.”) It one of those things that doesn't seem like a natural combination, like the Olympics and intelligent event coverage.

And yet, a handful of video game/musical crossovers do exist. Most of these come from Japan, which is well-known for its love of gaming, theatricality, and seriously weird shit. The earliest of these is probably Arm Joe, a fighting game featuring characters from Les Miserables. (The game's title is a play on Les Mis' Japanese title Ah, Mijou!, which translated means “Jean Valjean's Super Mega-Battle Rangers.”) There's something bizarre and yet extremely cathartic about watching Valjean and Javert punching the stuffing out of each other, or having Cosette and Eponine duke it out for Marius' affections. For those of you looking to play lesser-known characters, the game offers Valjean's robot double, a bunny named Ponpon, and a character known simply as “Police.” I'll bet some of the bit players on the barricade are kicking themselves because they didn't get the cut ahead of Ponpon and Police.

For those of you who are lovers and not fighters, a company called Mirai Soft has created a dating sim loosely based on Phantom of the Opera. Dating sims are a genre of game entirely alien to me, and this one is entirely in Japanese so I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole plot, even after seeing the (NSFW) trailer and reading this Let's Play of it, I still can't quite figure out what the Hell the point of it all is. As far as I can tell, the player takes the role of Christine who gets to interact with several other male characters and maybe fall in love with one or more of them, even though one of them is likely to be her long-lost brother. Oh, and have sex. Lots and lots of sex. So basically it's a video game version of a porno, which makes that four things the Japanese do very well. Gaming, theatricality, seriously weird shit, porno, and androgyny. Five. Five things.

And that rather awkward Monty Python inspired segue brings us to the next subject: a musical based on a video game. The all-female Takarazuka Revue, a company well-known for being on the cutting edge of weird Japanese shit, has developed a series of shows based around the Ace Attorney series. I'm not sure why they chose this particular property as the source for their first video game based show, apart from its popularity and that enough of the characters in it look feminine enough as to make no difference. I suspect somewhere, someone just couldn't resist the idea of making a big dance number around somebody shouting “OBJECTION!”

I'd actually like to see more video-game based musicals. The genre borrows from everywhere else for inspiration, so why not this? We could have Mario tap-dancing on Goomba heads, an epic villain song for Diablo, a dramatic confrontation duet between GlaDOS and Wheatley...the possibilities are endless.

On Phantom, Vegas, and the Art of the Guilty Pleasure

So I didn't post much last week because I was off spending the weekend in Las Vegas. I have returned home exhausted, satiated, and poorer, which is how you know you've had a good time in Vegas.

 I love Sin City--an affection instilled in me by my grandfather, who had a deep fondness for Elvis, penny slots, and cheap food--so I don't usually need a specific excuse to visit it, but this time I had one. I wanted to see Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian before it closes in September. Phantom has long been high on my list of favorite musicals, a fact which I used to have a hard time talking about because it's not one of those shows that "serious" music theater fans are supposed to like. Sweeney Todd? Goes without saying. Music Man? Sure, can't go wrong with the classics. But Phantom? I almost dared not bring it up lest the self-appointed guardians of artistic integrity clutched their pearls while shrieking at me, "You admit to enjoying an Andrew Lloyd Webber show?  Blasphemy!"

But I do.  I love it.  I love the whole dark and twisted take on the Beauty and the Beast theme, I love the soaring grandeur of the score, and I love the sumptuous elegance of the costumes.  I am not so blind in my affection as to think it is a show without fault (indeed, I now feel a lot of Phantom's success is due to Hal Prince's skillful direction smoothing over the holes in the libretto and giving the whole thing a proper sense of urgency), but I still get a giddy thrill every time those thundering organ chords start in, and I probably always will.

I suppose in a way that makes Phantom my guilty pleasure, although truth be told I've long ceased to feel guilty about it.  My real guilty pleasure, the one I'm almost ashamed to admit even in the not-all-that-private confines of the Internet, is Jekyll and Hyde, a show I retain a sneaking fondness for in spite of all the bombastic power ballads and cheesy lyrics it throws at me.  Come on, how can you not like a show where the climax features the lead actor singing a duet with himself?  (Unless the lead actor is David Hasselhoff.  Then all bets are off.)

Guilty pleasures are good things.  Like chocolate, they're the little indulgences we allow ourselves to bring variety and sweet delight to our diet, giving us a little bit of shameless forbidden joy before we return to "healthier" fare.  I also think they're a good exercise in humility, and an inoculation against the "more-artsier-than-thou" hauteur that too often befalls musical lovers.  Sure you can name the original cast of Company off the top of your head and wax eloquent about the score of The Light in the Piazza, but how snooty can you be when you know, deep in your heart, that you've also seen Cats twenty-four times?

I think that's why I like Las Vegas so much: it is, above all, a city devoted to guilty pleasures.  Want to blow fifty bucks at the craps table?  Drink margaritas from a glass taller than a toddler?  Enjoy a rich, expensive meal created by a guy with his own Food Network program?  Vegas has got you covered.  And of course, this carries over into entertainment.  From big crowd-pleasing musicals to circus and magic acts, from ventriloquists to showgirls wearing little more than elaborate confections made of rhinestones and ostrich feathers, the Strip is populated by the sorts of shows that the arbiters of good taste would rather we turned up our noses at.  Vegas assures its visitors that "what happens here, stays here," a phrase that ostensibly promises an experience in no-consequences hedonism--but really, they're reassuring you that nobody back home need know you saw Donny and Marie at the Flamingo Hilton.

So go ahead.  Cuddle up with your Carrie bootleg, or put in that ticket order for The Addams Family tour.  It's okay.  I promise I won't tell anyone.