Why I'm excited to see "In the Heights" tomorrow night in the West Coast Entertainment Best of Broadway series:
A#1: My younger daughter, Princess Laura, plans to major in musical theatre, a little item I've mentioned, oh, a thousand times or so on Twitter, Facebook, via email, in person at work, in comments to strangers waiting in line at the grocery store....
Having her involved has increased my appreciation of what it takes to put on a full-blown production that is not just singing, not just dancing, not just acting, but all three coming together to make something far greater than the sum of the parts. The dedication it takes to be on that stage? Awe-inspiring.
#2: Because of her career plans we spent a week in New York City in early February, where she auditioned for 8 colleges. While we were there we got to take in a couple of Broadway shows: "Memphis" and "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying." (By the way, "Memphis" goes on tour at some point and when it gets to Spokane You. Must. See. It.)
The chance to experience Broadway-quality live theatre was mind-blowing. And we get that all the time right here in Spokane! The shows that come through here are simply incredible and we're lucky to live in a city with the facilities that allow us to bring them here (along with all the tourist dollars they attract).
#3: I'm seeing the show because I'm part of a social media gang recruited to talk about the show. That's pretty cool of West Coast Entertainment and it's a chance to see the show in the company of some awesome local folks who really get social media, which means they're good communicators, so that will be fun. There was also mention of an after-party.
#4: As a result of reason A#1 above Princess Laura and I went to the preview event held by West Coast Entertainment earlier this week, where they rolled out teasers on the next season and we got to hear from three members of the cast of "Jersey Boys," one of the shows that's coming. I got so excited I bought season tickets.
A different A#1 reason: The show! The show! "In the Heights" won four Tony Awards in 2008: best musical, best score, best choreography, and best orchestration. Check out the video preview on the West Coast Entertainment site (if the link works right).
I'll be there when the lights go down, jumping in my seat with excitement and getting ready to hit the heights.
Showing posts with label theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theater. Show all posts
Political Scandal? Just Add -Gate
When I was a kid we never watched TV at dinner—a rule that was broken night after night beginning May 17, 1974, with some somber news program on the tiny black and white on a corner shelf over the kitchen table. I was 11 years old.
My primary memories: We couldn’t talk, no matter what. Dad shushed us furiously if we so much as whispered. He was angry—very angry—about something. And someone important had done something really, really wrong and was getting in trouble.
This all came back to me as I watched the opening lines of “Frost/Nixon” at the Spokane Civic Theatre the other night.
The somber news over our dinner table, of course, was the Senate Watergate hearings. Nixon indeed did something really, really wrong and got in trouble. And Dad was mad because he had voted for Nixon.
I don’t have any memories of the actual interviews David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon three years after Nixon left office. The era came vividly to life in the show, thanks in part to the dreadfully accurate leisure suits (OMG, the polyester with top stitching!), loud ties, and plaid pants. The show’s opening montage of images of protesters and “Tricky Dick” in historic encounters on two TV sets, set to the Beatles’ “Revolution,” got the show off to a strong start and it only got better.
Wes Deitrick as Nixon anchors the show. Simply stunning. The voice, the mannerisms, the psychological depths. When he unburdened himself of his guilt at last in the closing interview with Frost—admitting that he let the American people down—it moved me to tears.
You knew this was a man overly obsessed with power and control, but at the same time genuinely honored and in some ways humbled by the chance to have served as President. To have flown so near the sun, Icarus, only to plunge seaward thanks to your own hubris: This is the historical lesson Nixon teaches us.
The entire cast delivered. Kelly Hauenstein as Frost uses body language effectively as the seemingly shallow dilettante, a mere talk show host but not a true journalist as measured by other journalists, dominated by Nixon in the early interviews but then coming back with newly discovered evidence and pressing Nixon to the point that the former president says, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal!”
Yes it is, Mr. President. Yes it is.
Go see “Frost/Nixon.”
Your turn
What do you remember from the Watergate era?
Related reading
Your turn
What do you remember from the Watergate era?
Related reading
I'm Dreaming of a.... (cue music)
Quick—name a song from the show “White Christmas.”
No, not that one. Too obvious.
How about “Sisters”? Or “Blue Skies”?
There’s more than one great number in the Spokane Civic Theatre production of “White Christmas” in its Northwest premiere, right here in Bing Crosby’s hometown.
There’s more than one great number in the Spokane Civic Theatre production of “White Christmas” in its Northwest premiere, right here in Bing Crosby’s hometown.
To the credit of Spokane’s talent pool I didn’t think once about Bing Crosby (or about Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, who played the other three major roles in the original film).
This despite the fact that as a kid I watched every one of the Crosby/Hope “Road” movies with Dorothy Lamour multiple times, along with plenty of other movies starring some combination of the singing, dancing and acting talents of the mid-20th century.
Instead I marveled at the talent we have here. What, did my mom miss the memo or something? How do all these adults know how to tap dance like that?! She should have kept hauling me to dance lessons but nooooo, it was my little sister who had the dance ability and got to keep going after I quit.
I said before in my review of The Cemetery Club at the Civic that I’m no theater reviewer. I just love going and entering into the magic that falls over the room when the lights dim and the orchestra (or, in this case, fairly small ensemble) strikes up the first note or the first line is spoken. And magic it was, clear up to the end when the audience participated right on cue.
Of special note for me:
- I was blown away by the tap dancing.
- I loved the singing.
- Kevin Partridge reminded me of Michael Buble when he sang “Blue Skies” and struck just the right expression after his first kiss from the rich-voiced Betty Haynes (played by Andrea Dawson).
- Their voices blended so beautifully in the combo number “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me/How Deep Is the Ocean.”
- Kathie Doyle-Lipe as Martha “The Megaphone” Watson was spunky and funny as always—and those cartwheels are a scene stealer.
- When Elizabeth Martin as little Susan Waverly finally got to belt out a number everyone was delighted by her talent.
- The staging for the number in which General Waverly’s men are represented by shadowy silhouettes marching behind the backdrop was particularly striking.
- The women’s costumes were wonderful, with some beautiful rich fabrics.
- I always marvel at set design and how they can put so many places into such compact spaces; the same is true again here, with everything from a nightclub and a train to a barn.
- All four leads had to undress and dress again on stage (and probably thanked their lucky stars that undergarments were pretty substantial in the 1950s).
- Special credit goes to Kevin Partridge for dealing nicely with a stuck zipper—he had us all in suspense as to how he would handle it if it wouldn’t go up.
- Paige Wamsley and Jillian Wylie as Rita and Rhoda entered into the spirit of their roles as the Oxydol girls and the "lite" version of the two female leads, Siri Hafso as Judy Haynes and Andrea Dawson as Betty Haynes.
- Ed Bryan as Ezekiel Foster showed just how much humor you can pack into two things: walking really, r-e-a-l-l-y slowly and saying, “Ayup.” Oh, make that three things: giving an unexpected gift and a hug.
The scene that really got me, though? The discussion about what you do with a general when the time for war has passed. I couldn’t help but think of all the men and women coming home now, wartorn and marked for life. We can’t all just head to Vermont for a nice Christmas Eve variety show at an inn and make their lives whole.
That isn’t the point of the play, obviously. It’s a wonderful, heartwarming production in the best sense of the word “heartwarming,” at least for me as a sentimental woman who cries easily (and who is now wondering how hard it would be to learn to tap dance at my age….).
It’s no wonder that as of two days ago the Civic was down to around 1,000 tickets out of a total 8,000 seats available. Get yours now.
The Cemetery Club: A Really Amateur Theater Review
I wouldn’t belong to a club that would have me as a member, Groucho Marx famously said. There’s one club we all have the chance to join if we take the risk of loving someone: the Cemetery Club.
I got a sneak peek at the dress rehearsal in return for which I’m sharing some of my impressions via social media. (If you end up buying tickets as a result, give a shout-out here, on the Civic Facebook page or @SpoCivicTheatre on Twitter so my friend and Civic marketing director Allyson Shoshana gets credit for her mad social media marketing skills J ).
You first have to sign the disclaimer noting that I am not only not a professional theater critic, I’m not even an amateur theater critic, and I’m no Bobo the Theater Ho.
Instead I’m someone who cries at Hallmark commercials (although I forget to buy cards, as friends and family can attest), considers “willing suspension of disbelief” a normal everyday occurrence, grew up on a pretty steady diet of old Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers/Bob Hope movies, and is a sucker for happy endings.
If you have a girlfriend who can finish your sentences—and sometimes does, much to your irritation—and who never lets you get away with anything, you’ll see yourself on stage. Lines about aging, plenty of jokes about death and cemeteries, and the unseen Selma whose many weddings “are like reunions” drew plenty of laughs at all the right spots from the small audience who saw it with me.
Likewise some great physical comedy, character-revealing mannerisms and gestures that spoke volumes. You could feel the audience response to Thomas Heppler as Sam Katz revealing his nervousness with a truly awkward Groucho Marx imitation, or to Mary Starkey as Doris saying volumes without saying a word just by banging an iron down on the ironing board.
The “heartwarming comedy” description on the Civic website gives you part of the flavor but not all of it, unless "heartwarming" is code for "makes Barb cry."
Without giving away any plot lines I’ll just say that I was first moved to a few tears by Ida cooking up a storm after her Murray died, then cried through several scenes in Act II. I always consider it a good sign when the audience goes silent with intensity, as they did more than once. And I wasn’t the only one—I heard you sniffing, people! Seriously—take a hanky.
Without giving away any plot lines I’ll just say that I was first moved to a few tears by Ida cooking up a storm after her Murray died, then cried through several scenes in Act II. I always consider it a good sign when the audience goes silent with intensity, as they did more than once. And I wasn’t the only one—I heard you sniffing, people! Seriously—take a hanky.
I have few bones to pick with any of it. The staging in the Firth Chew Studio was wonderfully effective for this, and the audience responded to facial expressions we couldn’t even see thanks to the responses from the other actors on stage. The casting was also dead-on (and tell me if I'm the only one who thinks that Vera Ora Winslow, the actress who plays Mildred, looks like Bea Arthur).
Just a few things—because even when my disbelief is willingly suspended my continuity editor keeps ticking—that are really script issues, not acting/directing/staging:
- Would a Jewish woman of that generation from Queens say “For Christ’s sake!” as Lucille does, and then “Goddamn!” in the next sentence?
- Would a Jewish restaurateur really name his place Klein’s Korean Kitchen (KKK)?
- When Selma’s wedding is first discussed it’s in two weeks. A month passes between that and the next scene at the cemetery and Selma’s wedding is still two weeks away.
- I’m sure this was deliberate in order to give Doris and Ida things to do while they get through all the lines involved but honestly, no woman is going to zip up another woman, not tie her bow, and then come back to tie the bow later. Just doesn’t happen—not going to leave those dangling ties.
I laughed, I cried, I’d see it again. You should go.
What other (more professional) critics have to say:
In defense of high school drama
No, I don’t mean the “omiGAWD!” type of high school drama. I mean talented kids singing and dancing and blowing your socks off the way Lewis & Clark High School Tiger Drama did a couple of weeks ago with their production of “Urinetown: The Musical.”
I know what you’re thinking. Poop jokes.
Apparently so was Mr. Wayne Lawson of Spokane, who wrote a letter to the editor suggesting this choice indicated a decline in the moral environment.
I'm a proud LC drama mom, and I only wish "Urinetown" had run more than one weekend so word of mouth could have spread. The place would have been packed night after night.
The play's story was powerful and thought-provoking, wrapped in entertainment. As another LC mom (disclosure: her son is dating Second Daughter) wrote in a response on the Spokesman-Review site:
“Urinetown: the Musical” is a social satire and recipient of multiple Tony awards. It satirizes the legal system, capitalism, social irresponsibility, populism, bureaucracy, corporate mismanagement, and municipal politics. It is a commentary on morality, on humanity, and on love. Furthermore, it has a strong environmental message.
Besides all the lessons in the story line, honestly, if you can get dozens of high school kids to stay hours after school, day after day, to rehearse, paint sets, and prepare, how can anyone complain?
People who lament "kids these days" should see firsthand the dedication, work ethic and commitment demonstrated by students in drama and every other after-school activity.
I think back to the hours of my life given to marching band (yes, I was a University High School Titan Band Jock) and track (not a standout) and how important the lessons were that I learned.
- Show up on time.
- Know your part.
- People are counting on you.
- If you miss a cue, keep going.
What can YOU do?
While you could (as I did) write a rebuttal to Mr. Lawson on the Spokesman website, you can do something far more meaningful.
The Lewis & Clark drama program has been selected as one of 50 high school programs from the entire US to go to the American High School Theater Festival. It’s part of the Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland: the largest arts festival in the world.
Between now and the summer of 2011 the program needs to raise $70,000. I can’t direct you to a PayPal link to give online (yet), but I can ask you to write a check made out to LCHS Drama with a note “for Edinburgh” on the memo line and send it to Lewis & Clark High School c/o Greg Pschirrer, 521 W. 4th Ave., Spokane WA 99204. (If they end up not raising enough to go to Scotland the money will still benefit the drama program--great investment.)
If you want to participate in the fundraising committee, let me know in the comments here or text your email to me at 509.869.2949. Several of us have already told drama teacher Greg Pschirrer that we’re all over this and we need your help.
Go Tiger Drama!
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