Month: August 2018

Review: Scott Thompson / Buddy Cole

On By dramaqueennycIn cabaret, reviewLeave a comment

“He was one of those faggots that made respectable gays so uncomfortable.” Thus said Buddy Cole, the fey martini-drinking creation of comedian Scott Thompson. This was from a monologue that Scott / Buddy did on Canadian sketch comedy show Kids in the Hall. It was about a friend of Buddy’s, but he could have been talking about himself. Now Thompson has revived Buddy for a tour called Aprés Le Dèluge which just had a sold out run at Joe’s Pub, a collection of about 10 monologues set in various years between 1995 (when Kids went off the air) and today.

In these monologues, buddy covers a variety of issues from straight men to having children – Buddy chose to have an imaginary child (“so much simpler!”) – to adventures with Uday Hussein while dressed in a burqa. Things get really hilarious when we get to the present day, when Buddy encourages trans kids to fight their corner, and observes “Thank goodness they changed the word for # from ‘pound sign’ to ‘hashtag’ because #MeToo would mean something completely different.”

The wild audience response at Joe’s Pub indicates there’s a real hunger for Cole’s scandalous super-gay brand of comedy; I certainly could use a lot more of it myself. To quote Buddy one last time “As Molière said to Guy de Maupassant at a café in Vienna, ‘That’s nice. You should write that down.’”

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: The Count Basie Orchestra

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This big band has been in continuous existence (with the shortest of breaks in the early 1950s) for 83 years now. I attribute their longevity and continued popularity to the fact that they are “the band that plays the blues” as their motto goes. Bluesiness has never gone totally out of fashion, being an important part of jazz, rock and hip-hop. This big band was “rhythm and blues” long before that term existed, and they still can’t be beat for rhythm or blues today.

Their command of volume control, both loud and soft, is astonishing; there’s a number in their current songlist at Birdland where they put this on gratuitous display. Bandleader Scotty Barnhart gives the signal to the rhythm section to bring the volume down, again and again, until you think they can’t get any quieter, and then take it down some more. Astonishing.

Though the band is know for the tightness of its ensemble playing, each member of the orchestra is a serious soloist in their own right. For the number “Basie Power” the alto sax section of Dave Glasser and Immanuel Wilkins traded solos with an intensity that edged towards bebop. Hot hot hot.

You need a big brassy voice to sing over this band – of its 20+ pieces, over 90% are brass. Carmen Bradford certainly fits the the bill, belting “I Love Being Here With You” with great vigor and bluesiness. Though Count Basie passed in 1984, his orchestra continues to be as dynamic and forceful as ever. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: La Cifra

On By dramaqueennycIn Opera, reviewLeave a comment

This 1789 comic opera by composer Antonio Salieri – only now having it’s American premiere with Dell’Arte Opera – put a permanent grin on my face throughout, and made me openly guffaw more often than any other opera I can think of. It is actually laugh out loud funny.

This is partially due to the work of librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, my pick for greatest opera librettist of all time. He’s most famous for his collaborations with Mozart (La Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte). Mozart called all three opera buffa or “funny opera,” but they are generally more wry, satirical and thoughtful than the gleefully low farce we find in La Cifra. Still – and this is the particular genius of Da Ponte – every now and again there’s a single line that cuts through to very human truths, or casts things in a more ambivalent light. La Cifra made me laugh – a lot – but also frequently made me pause for thought.

Salieri deserves a big part of the credit too. There are some luscious melodies here, but what really stands out is his comic timing, not a terribly common gift in operatic composers. In the Act I finale the ensemble hits a loud chord at the least expected moment, causing one to laugh from sheer surprise. When the cast is puzzling over an important cipher (the titular cifra) in the final scene, Salieri has fun spacing out the letters of this mysterious code. And these are only the most obvious examples of Salieri’s pervasive musical wit.

The character with the most stage time is Rusticone (Angky Budiardjono), a greedy scheming father, a stock type descending from the character Pantalone in commedia dell’arte. Da Ponte comes close to making us sympathize with the wily bastard, to the point of the whole story being seen from his point of view. Budiardjono takes that and runs with it, conspiratorially taking the audience into his confidence. Budiardjono has a vigorous yet precise sense of timing in every way, musically, comically, physically and more.

The plot is fluff directly out of commedia with all sorts of frustrated love, mistaken identity and general buffoonery. Stage director Brittany Goodwin had the savvy to lean into this commedia quality, encouraging the cast to go for a broad physicality which fits the material exceptionally well.

The cast is uniformly strong vocally, but what really matters here is that they are also all gifted comic actors. Standouts in this area include Allison Gish, who gives us Rusticone’s hedonistic daughter Lisotta with infectious exuberance, and Jay Chacon, who is clownish perfection as love-struck peasant Sandrino. Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Head Over Heels

On By dramaqueennycIn Broadway, musical, review, theatre1 Comment

It’s an ancient and powerful idea that the ultimate “safe space” for queer people is the wilds of nature, the “pastoral” landscape. We can go all the way back to the Idylls of Theocritus around 300 BCE, which are rife with shepherds falling for pretty boys. In Shakespeare, the meeting of love and gender fluidity often happens in the forest. For the pastoral’s continued power, you only have to look at the way that queers have latched on such sentiments in Bernstein & Sondheim’s “Somewhere”: “There’s a place for us / Somewhere a place for us / Peace and quiet and open air / Wait for us somewhere.” To say nothing of Dorothy telling Toto: “Somewhere, over the rainbow / Skies are blue / And the dreams that you dare to dream / Really do come true.”

Well, the ever-witty Jeff Whitty (bookwriter of Avenue Q and Jake Shears’s Tales of the City) had the bright idea to take one of the most event-packed pastoral romances ever written in the English language, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and pair it with the music of one of the greatest all-female rock bands of all time, The Go-Go’s. Sidney’s romance takes its name from a bucolic region from Greek mythology – where, incidentally, all of Theocritus’s horny shepherds frolicked. Whitty has taken considerable liberties with Sidney’s intricate plot, generally to the purpose of giving the winning hand to the women, the transgender and the androgynous.

You can take it all as a silly, happy, perky joyride, and have a perfectly good time. Whitty is a master of both satisfying theatrical structure and the one-liner, and the Go-Go’s spiky guitar pop hits just the right tone. But it’s deeper and more subversive than that. Classical comedies always end in marriages. While some couplings at the end of Head Over Heels are nominally heterosexual, none retain classical or even traditional gender roles. Plus the chorus boys are encouraged – by the way they are styled and Spencer Liff’s fleet-footed choreography – to be just as pretty, fey and gay as the ones in Theocritus.

The cast is consistently superb. The most plum roles in the show are the ones that have the richest gender story, and the people in those roles make a full meal of them. Bonnie Milligan is a hoot as buxom beauty Pamela finding her hidden desires. Andrew Durand, as doofy shepherd Musidorus, is both hilarious and touching when he dons Amazon garb to pursue the hand of his aristocratic lady love. Rachel York is every inch the fierce ruling royal as Queen Gynecia. Most fabulous of all is Drag Race Peppermint as the oracle Pythio. She is the first trans woman in a lead on Broadway, and the way Whitty plays Pythio’s story out gives her ample opportunity to be both over-the-top and moving. She handles it with all the sass and grace which made her such a fan favorite. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Michael Feinstein & Christine Ebersole

On By dramaqueennycIn cabaret, reviewLeave a comment

When Michael Feinstein does duet shows with Broadway stars, its a situation where everybody wins, including the audience. Feinstein, the great archivist of “The Great American Songbook,” gets to suggest songs that he’s always wanted to hear these great artists sing. And these artists get to pick Michael’s encyclopedic musical mind, describing an idea of the kind of song they want to sing, to which he responds with an impossibly perfect song.

For the second time, Michael is teaming up with Broadway legend Christine Ebersole, with a travel-themed show called “Two for the Road.” The obscure gem he’s sharing with Christine this time is “Why Don’t We Try Staying Home” a song Cole Porter cut from his 1929 Broadway hit Fifty Million Frenchmen, the intro to which says “We’re always opening plays / or closing cabarets.” That’s literally true for this act – the last performance at the old Feinstein’s at the Regency was them.

For himself Michael dug up a George Gershwin collaboration with lyricists Buddy DeSylva and Irving Caesar “Yankee Doodle Blues.” In keeping with the evening’s theme the song’s patter includes lines like “They say that Europe’s wonderful with all its ancient junk…I had to move from Paris ‘cause I couldn’t eat a frog…I went from there to old Cologne and started on the rounds / But old Cologne don’t smell as sweet and pretty as it sounds…Hey there Miss Liberty I’ll say you’re a bear.” Silly stuff, and Feinstein delivered it with just the right light touch.

One the evening’s most musically stunning moments is a surprising quodlibet of Songbook tunes, in which one of them sings a classic melody, while the other one sings another classic melody in counterpoint. Christine sings Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” while Michael answers with Rodgers & Hart’s “Where or When.” Truly lovely.

There’s room for spontaneity in this show, and one of the warmest moments came when Michael played piano while Christine sang Kern & Hammerstein’s “The Folks Who Live On the Hill.” Totally unplanned, but it’s a song they’ve both sung and even recorded many times before, and this rendition was absolutely magical.

Michael’s own heart-on-sleeve rendition of “Where Am I Going?” from Sweet Charity is definitely a highlight. He’s been truly blossoming as a singer for a long time, going from strength to strength, and this latest topper is easily the most vocally accomplished performance I’ve ever heard him give – with held high notes that would make an opera singer envious. Dazzling, and highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: John Pizzarelli

On By dramaqueennycIn cabaret, reviewLeave a comment

It’s always great to see a cabaret performer you’ve seen with smaller combos perform with a big band. Seeing John Pizzarelli with Swing 7 – a seven piece rhythm and brass band – is “too marvelous for words.” He’s a top exponent of cabaret’s jazzier side, playing a show composed of songs he’s recorded by Duke Ellington, arguably the greatest jazz composer ever, and by Johnny Mercer, arguably the greatest lyricist of the Great American Songbook. And, as always, he does it with astonishing elan and profound musical intelligence.

John’s guitar style is amazingly fluid and elegant, with nonpareil mastery of a technique called “guitar harmonics” that produces high notes of extraordinary expressiveness. But Pizzarelli is a great interpretive artist in more ways than one. He has a particular genius for chordal improvisations, finding hidden musical meanings in the most familiar of standards. Also, as a singer John is very sensitive to the multiple meanings a good lyric can have, and has an uncanny ability to communicate several at once. Both qualities are ideal when assaying Mercer, whose wit can be very subtle indeed.

It’s common courtesy in a jazz setting to applaud for a bit after everybody’s solos, and indeed bandleader John frequently points at one of the instrumentalists as if to say “give it up for so-and-so”! More often in this show, though, the onslaught of flashy jazziness is so relentless that you don’t applaud for fear of missing something amazing. Neither jazz nor cabaret gets much better than this.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Alaska

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This is the best Golden Girls tribute I’ve seen on stage, and for someone who has been covering gay New York entertainment for a long time that’s saying something (I think GG tributes are outnumbered only by Judy Garland tributes). I attribute its success to the fact that Alaska and her pianist Handsome Jeremy are huge Golden Girls fanatics themselves, to the point that they talk about the series being their scripture.

If that’s so, this show, entitled “On Golden Girls,” is all about songs from the hymnal, giving us stories and songs from each of the ladies in turn. This very, very tall queen is a natural for a Bea Arthur, but hilariously portrays Estelle Getty by walking in on her knees.

One of her greatest gifts as a performer is a knack for imaginative exaggeration – she’s is a talented caricaturist. Not to say that’s she’s amateurish or sloppy – not remotely! Caricature has room for precision, wit, intelligence and creativity, and Alaska displays all of this and more. The caricatures here are very loving, which gives the act its considerable heart. Plus, The Golden Girls is already gleefully exaggerated, making for a wonderful match of performer and subject.

Alaska’s always had a strong voice, and she’s increasingly a real song stylist – she can totally handle singing “Hard Hearted Hannah” going the full Bea Arthur. The show was snappy and short! That never happens in drag cabaret! I’m almost tempted to say she should flesh it out a bit and make it longer, but that seems like tempting the fates. Very gay, a lot of fun, and definitely recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Straight White Men

On By dramaqueennycIn Broadway, play, review, theatreLeave a comment

This play is never less than fascinating. When I think of the phrase “straight white men” my first thought is the awful old straight white men who pull the levers of government and business in this country. Or the too-loud, too-cocky douchebags that infest New York City streets, wearing their blue shirts and brown shoes directly from work to the nightclub. Smartly, those aren’t the “straight white men” playwright Young Jean Lee has chosen to focus on. Instead, we spend time with an apparently more virtuous set of liberally-mind brothers, who gradually reveal their true, um, colors.

Lee fakes us out in several ways. She gives everything the appearance of a naturalistic family drama, but really the structure of the play has more to do with Beckett than with late O’Neill. In place of the vaudeville routines in Waiting for Godot, we have stylized roughhousing and the performative traditions that siblings create with one another.

The quiet engine of the play is the character Matt (Paul Schneider) who does temp work for a social service organization and then does the cleaning-up “women’s work” that neither his brothers or father will do. The moments when the action stops so we can watch Matt doing these jobs in real time are some of the most riveting moments of the play.

You see everybody’s worried about Matt, who doesn’t seem worried about much, but has an unexplained crying jag during Christmas celebrations. Novelist brother Drew (Armie Hammer) thinks Matt should see a therapist to treat what he perceives as Matt’s depression. Banker brother Jake (Josh Charles) admires what he understands to be Matt’s ideals, but encourages him to sell them better. Father Ed (Steven Payne) thinks throwing money at the problem of Matt’s student loans will solve things.

Lee seems to be driving at the idea that, in the United States, straight white men’s value is largely measured by capitalist success. This point she explores quite intelligently. But all Matt is doing, from his point of view, is trying to stop solving the unsolvable and do little things that would be immediately useful to others.

The biggest problem with Straight White Men is that I have just stated Matt’s POV more clearly than ever happens in the play. I understand trying not to provide easy answers for an audience, but I think Lee has landed closer to murkiness than the provocative ambiguity she was aiming for. The end of the play both leaves too much hanging, and, structurally speaking, ties thing up too neatly, straining for a symmetry that the subject and play both resist.

These are quibbles, though, with a thought-provoking and brilliantly acted play. I should also mention that transgender legend Kate Bornstein and two-spirit writer Ty Defoe have roles to play as well (though they were way too underused for my taste). Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.