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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2018
THEATER: 'Fact" Vs Fiction; Pale "India"
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT ** out of ****
INDIA PALE ALE * out of ****
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT ** out of ****
STUDIO 54
Boy, was I amused and intrigued by the prospect of a Broadway play
starring Daniel Radcliffe as a fact checker at a magazine. I began my
(modest) career working as a fact checker at Premiere magazine. Andnot since the glory days of Michael J. Fox coking it up in BrightLights, Big City and the sitcom Herman's Head has fact checking had
such a glorious presentation in pop culture.
As an example of how fact checking works, the play is absurd. But
that's no criticism, or at least not an observation that matters in theleast. Plays (and films and TV shows and so on) about hospitals, cops,
lawyers or whatever are almost never "accurate." If residents at a
hospital had as much sex on the job as the folks on Grey's Anatomy, it
would be a miracle if any patient survived.
Instead, let me treat The Lifespan Of A Fact as the light entertainment
it is -- as such, it's thin stuff, elevated mostly by a cast that is far
superior to the material at hand. If there's any surprise, it's thatRadcliffe doesn't just hold his own with Bobby Cannavale and CherryJones. No, he practically wipes the floor with them.
Radcliffe has grown tremendously as an actor, choosing roles wisely,
developing confidence and building up his skills film by film, tv role bytv role and play by play. (Or musical!) True, in this brisk undemandingwork by the team of Jeremy Kareken and* David Murrell as well asMICHAEL GILTZ AT WORK
Michael Giltz is a freelance writer
based in NYC and can be reached atmgiltz@pipeline.com
FAVORITE LINKS
Americablog
Five O'Clock Lightning baseball blogDeep Pop -- Lori Lakin's Blog
The Back Page -- Jason Page on ESPN
Radio
Cine-Blog -- George Robinson's Blog
Documents On Art & Cinema - Daryl
Chin's Blog
Brucie G's Wondrous Blog Of
Adventure and Mystery -- Bruce
Greenspan's Blog
BLOG ARCHIVE
► 2019 (7)
▼ 2018 (34)
► December (7)
Gordon Farrell, none of the roles are fleshed out in the least. We leave
the play barely knowing who they are. Nonetheless, Radcliffe's role has
the most stage time and the zingiest lines and he makes the most of it,with a spot-on American accent and a passionate focus. Or maybe I'mjust inherently on the side of the fact checker.
In the play, Jim (Radcliffe) is a Harvard grad eager to make his mark
at a New York magazine. When top editor Emily (Jones) asks for avolunteer to work over the weekend and fact check a major essay byheavyweight writer John (Cannavale), well Jim eagerly raises his hand.
He's done some fact checking during college but has never fact
checked a piece at the magazine before.
Keep in mind, this essay --which begins with the suicide of a young
man in Las Vegas -- is getting crashed into the new issue because
Emily believes it's an award-winning, remarkable work that will makewaves and garner all sorts of attention. So she needs the work donevery quickly (Jim only has a few days -- including the weekend) and itMUST be done by Monday morning so the issue can go to press.
Jim wants to impress and goes whole hog, developing a spread sheet tocover all the relevant information, discrepancies and the like. Thewriter turned just one handwritten page of notes for his fifteen pageessay. Jim soon creates a mountain of paperwork about ten times as
big as the article itself. Phone calls to the writer don't go well. Jim
keeps pointing out fact errors such as the number of licensed stripclubs in Las Vegas and the writer refuses to change it. Why? Becausehe likes the sound of the number he uses more than the actual fact.
The color of bricks outside the hotel where the kid jumped? They're
brown, but to the writer John they looked red. And "red" is better thanbrown because red is the color of blood. A bottle of tabasco sauce wasunearthed beneath a certain bar, but John uses the name of the barnext door because it's called Buckets of Blood! That's a hell of a lot
more evocative, isn't it? Yes, but it's not RIGHT. It's wrong. And Jim
can't let go.► November (4)
▼ October (6)
THEATER: "Thunderbodies!"
and the Glorious Mess of...
THEATER: 'Fact" Vs Fiction;
Pale "India"
THEATER: "Love's Labour's
Lost"...But A Good Meal ...
THEATER: "Mother Of The
Maid" Lacks Fire
THEATER: "Oklahoma" Is
(Just) OK
THEATER: Bill Irwin Clowns (A
Little), The Constit...
► September (1)
► May (5)
► April (6)
► March (4)
► February (1)
► 2017 (6)
► 2016 (2)
► 2015 (14)
► 2014 (2)
► 2013 (5)
► 2012 (18)
► 2011 (15)
► 2010 (10)
► 2009 (43)
► 2008 (86)
► 2007 (781)
► 2006 (2412)
► 2005 (5)
Before you know it, Jim has flown out to Las Vegas to check more facts
on the ground, John is strangling him in frustration and Emily flies out
to see if she can rescue this piece from fact-checking hell without
ruining the integrity of her magazine. (Needless to say, as a factchecker in real life, I never cached any flier miles.)
Every once in a while the play threatens to reveal something about one
of its three characters. Yet at the end, I don't think we really even
know if any of them are gay or straight or anything in between,married or single, lonely or happy, dog lovers or cat fanciers, liberal orconservative or any of the other myriad details one might use to at
least begin to define a person.
Sure, there's a suggestion that John comes from a hardscrabble
background and Jim is privileged. (Harvard and all that.) But was Jima legacy or did he go on a scholarship? John hints at Jim's highersocio-economic status but that goes nowhere too. It seems crazy that
Jim just flew across the country on his own dime to fact check an
article. But Jim may have already purchased that ticket to Vegas for apersonal event. So if John challenged him on having the ability tojump on a plane on a whim, Jim might have responded that it costpretty much everything he had and maybe he's living on a friend'scouch in NYC because the internship at the magazine doesn't pay
anything and he's got six figures of student loan debt and no idea how
he's going to pay it. Or he might have 'fessed up to being wealthy andthe ticket was charged to daddy's AMEX. I mean, he might have said
something like that and we might get to learn something about Jim
and John in the process but the play never bothers.
Thank goodness for the three stars. It's a very minor evening of theater
but they make it as painless as possible. My guest was actually
annoyed that Cherry Jones even accepted her role. (It's that minor of a
part, though Jones does what she can. She deserves much, muchbetter.) Cannavale has a more substantial turn as the writer John. Butstill. Only Radcliffe has any sort of growth when his character evolvesfrom sort-of timid to determined.
I never sat around thinking "Boy, fact checking would make a great
subject for a play!" But you might do something with the interestingpower dynamic. Suddenly an important writer must deal with apersnickety little fact checker? Or a famous celebrity is fielding queriesfrom a nobody about their childhood? (More often, it would be the
famous celebrity's assistant, though Emma Thompson once responded
personally to a fellow fact checker's fax of queries with her own faxthat began, "Dear lonely fact checker!")
That imbalance of power could be fun and we do get a quick visual gag
when the small-ish Radcliffe is burdened with a giant backpack to lookeven tinier as the glowering Cannavale towers over him. To be fair,this dynamic is about the only thing going on in the play, but even
there the plotting is confused. Watching this intern interrupt the
powerful editor he is meeting with for the first time and do it
repeatedly made me squirm in my seat with disbelief as a magazine
intern myself, never mind the man-splaining nature of the moment or
how it spoiled Jim's arc.
Indeed, The Lifespan of a Fact fails to accomplish even the one
essential task: making us care about the central debate of the entire
play, that is the question of whether the essay gets published or not.
More to the point, it never begins to make us care about their
nebulous debate over facts versus fiction or god forbid come to careabout the young man who committed suicide and sparked the wholestory in the first place.
Instead, Jim makes an astonishing claim at the climax which at first I
took at face value. It took me a minute to realize he was making somephilosophical point about the nature of truth, conspiracy theories andthe current online frenzy to seize on a factual error and spin off into
lunacy. Finally, the editor Emily has the two men read out lines from
the beginning of the essay as if it were Holy Scripture while morninglight gently illuminates their faces. It's an absurd scene but the threeactors are such pros they manage to create a quiet moment of gracethrough sheer talent alone. It's a fact that the play sure didn't help.
P.S. This is all based on a true incident. The writer and fact checker
collaborated on a book about their imbroglio and it includes theoriginal essay, the fact checker's notations and questions and theactual facts he dug up and their debate back and forth individual bitsand the nature of "truth" in an essay as opposed to cold facts. After
seeing the play, I actually tried to scare up a copy to read immediately
but had no luck at The Strand or Barnes and* Noble. No such luck sofor the moment I haven't read it. However based on the description, Ican't help thinking they already found the perfect way to tell theirstory.
*That's an ampersand in the company's name of Barnes and Noble, by
the way. It's also an "ampersand" between the first two credited
writers of the play, Jeremy Kareken and David Murrell. In credits for
films, TV, theater and the like, an ampersand indicates two peopleworking together, a team of sorts, like Abbott and Costello. If theywere three individual writers, they would be listed as Kareken, Murrelland Farrell. Why no ampersand in this piece? Blogger can't handle anampersand and messes up the text if I include it. Like I said, I was afact checker.
INDIA PALE ALE * out of ****
MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB AT NEW YORK CITY
CENTER
Nothing makes one feel more like a grinch than to dislike a hopelessly
earnest play brimming with good intentions. Time and again one
hears about the valuable impact of people simply seeing themselves
represented in popular culture. That's as true on stage as anywhereelse. So with the vast majority of plays in the US about white people(and usually white men), one can appreciate and applaud plays that
feature people from Puerto Rico or the Bahamas or Korean Americans
or -- why not? -- Swedes and certainly Japanese and Italian and Irishand German and Filipino and Senegalese and gay and lesbian andbisexual and trans and a thousand other categories. Heck, when younever see yourself on stage, even a villain or cardboard character feels
like a step forward.
So it's a pleasure to sense the palpable happiness of writer Jaclyn
Backhaus, the cast and even audience members as they see Punjabi
people onstage celebrating their families, their life in America, their
traditions, their past and their future. India Pale Ale even winds up
the play with a sharing of samosas between the characters and muchof the audience, which is one way to win over critics and quite aneffective one.
But good intentions get you nowhere and it would be an insult to the
artists involved to grade India Pale Ale on a curve. Instead, one must
be honest and say this thin, cliched drama plays out much likecountless other stories about the same dilemma have done before. A
young character yearns to break free of their family's constricting
sense of what is proper and be a "real" American. Older folk tut-tutand others fall somewhere in the middle, some believing they mustchange and adapt while others see value in the old ways. Whatlanguage to speak (at home and in public), what foods to eat, whatreligion to practice, arranged marriages, respect for elders, and on and
on the issues go. Substitute Italian for Chinese for Haitian for Korean
for Punjabi or for whomever and the story is comfortingly universal.
The story of assimilation can be told again and again but it must
somehow rise above that familiar structure to be fresh and new.
Backhaus unfortunately does not. The play struggles to breathe life
even into the tiresome scene of a clueless (but not quite ill-
intentioned) white person indelicately asking about a character's
race/ethnicity/culture. Or to be more blunt and awkward, "So what areyou?" When act two raises the stakes far too dramatically, the playfalls apart completely.
But it was never held together by much. A banal family anecdote about
being descended from the pirate Brownbeard leads to dialoguedelivered at times in faux pirate lingo (a lot of "yaar" and the like) aswell as a family song about pirates, all of it repeated laboriously
throughout the show. Two characters who seem in love are randomly
separated, just so they can move towards a reunion at the end.Feelings are hurt and lessons are learned. And so on.
One simply can't judge actors when the material is weak, though the
lead Shazi Raja is certainly an attractive presence. Like everyone else,
Raja is surely proud to be telling stories of the Punjabi people. This
first shaky step will hopefully lead to better stories down the road.
Of modest note is the handsome backdrop of scenic designer Neil
Patel. By far the best tech element of the show, it features a metallicborder and round circles that appeared to be the bottom of beer
bottles...and indeed some of them actually were. It echoed the dream
of our heroine to open her own bar and easily evoked the high seaswith the assist of some lighting by Ben Stanton and the sound designby Elisheba Ittoop. It was attractive and eye-catching, without getting
in the way of the proceedings.
THEATER OF 2018
Homelife/The Zoo Story (at Signature) *** out of ****
Escape To Margaritaville **
Broadway By The Year: 1947 and 1966 ***
Lobby Hero ***
Frozen **
Rocktopia *
Angels in America ** 1/2
Mean Girls ** 1/2
The Sting **
Mlima's Tale ** 1/2
Children Of A Lesser God ** 1/2
Sancho: An Act Of Remembrance ** 1/2
The Metromaniacs ***
Summer: The Donna Summer Musical *
The Seafarer **
Henry V (Public Mobile Unit w Zenzi Williams) * 1/2
Saint Joan **
Travesties *** 1/2
Summer and Smoke ** 1/2
My Fair Lady ** 1/2
Broadway By The Year: 1956 and 1975 ** 1/2
Bernhard/Hamlet * 1/2
On Beckett ***
What The Constitution Means To Me **
The Winning Side *
Oklahoma **
Mother Of The Maid *
Love's Labour's Lost ** 1/2
The Lifespan of a Fact **
India Pale Ale *
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s
to BookFilter! Need a smart and easy gift? Head to BookFilter ! Wondering wh
categories, like cookbooks and mystery and more? Head to BookFilter! It’s a w
you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases e
personal recommendations every step of the way. It’s like a fall book preview
category. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox , a weekly pop culture podc
of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for
Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called P
POSTED BY MICHAEL GILTZ AT 6:19 PM
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2018
THEATER: 'Fact" Vs Fiction; Pale "India"
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT ** out of ****
INDIA PALE ALE * out of ****
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT ** out of ****
STUDIO 54
Boy, was I amused and intrigued by the prospect of a Broadway play
starring Daniel Radcliffe as a fact checker at a magazine. I began my
(modest) career working as a fact checker at Premiere magazine. Andnot since the glory days of Michael J. Fox coking it up in BrightLights, Big City and the sitcom Herman's Head has fact checking had
such a glorious presentation in pop culture.
As an example of how fact checking works, the play is absurd. But
that's no criticism, or at least not an observation that matters in theleast. Plays (and films and TV shows and so on) about hospitals, cops,
lawyers or whatever are almost never "accurate." If residents at a
hospital had as much sex on the job as the folks on Grey's Anatomy, it
would be a miracle if any patient survived.
Instead, let me treat The Lifespan Of A Fact as the light entertainment
it is -- as such, it's thin stuff, elevated mostly by a cast that is far
superior to the material at hand. If there's any surprise, it's thatRadcliffe doesn't just hold his own with Bobby Cannavale and CherryJones. No, he practically wipes the floor with them.
Radcliffe has grown tremendously as an actor, choosing roles wisely,
developing confidence and building up his skills film by film, tv role bytv role and play by play. (Or musical!) True, in this brisk undemandingwork by the team of Jeremy Kareken and* David Murrell as well asMICHAEL GILTZ AT WORK
Michael Giltz is a freelance writer
based in NYC and can be reached atmgiltz@pipeline.com
FAVORITE LINKS
Americablog
Five O'Clock Lightning baseball blogDeep Pop -- Lori Lakin's Blog
The Back Page -- Jason Page on ESPN
Radio
Cine-Blog -- George Robinson's Blog
Documents On Art & Cinema - Daryl
Chin's Blog
Brucie G's Wondrous Blog Of
Adventure and Mystery -- Bruce
Greenspan's Blog
BLOG ARCHIVE
► 2019 (7)
▼ 2018 (34)
► December (7)
Gordon Farrell, none of the roles are fleshed out in the least. We leave
the play barely knowing who they are. Nonetheless, Radcliffe's role has
the most stage time and the zingiest lines and he makes the most of it,with a spot-on American accent and a passionate focus. Or maybe I'mjust inherently on the side of the fact checker.
In the play, Jim (Radcliffe) is a Harvard grad eager to make his mark
at a New York magazine. When top editor Emily (Jones) asks for avolunteer to work over the weekend and fact check a major essay byheavyweight writer John (Cannavale), well Jim eagerly raises his hand.
He's done some fact checking during college but has never fact
checked a piece at the magazine before.
Keep in mind, this essay --which begins with the suicide of a young
man in Las Vegas -- is getting crashed into the new issue because
Emily believes it's an award-winning, remarkable work that will makewaves and garner all sorts of attention. So she needs the work donevery quickly (Jim only has a few days -- including the weekend) and itMUST be done by Monday morning so the issue can go to press.
Jim wants to impress and goes whole hog, developing a spread sheet tocover all the relevant information, discrepancies and the like. Thewriter turned just one handwritten page of notes for his fifteen pageessay. Jim soon creates a mountain of paperwork about ten times as
big as the article itself. Phone calls to the writer don't go well. Jim
keeps pointing out fact errors such as the number of licensed stripclubs in Las Vegas and the writer refuses to change it. Why? Becausehe likes the sound of the number he uses more than the actual fact.
The color of bricks outside the hotel where the kid jumped? They're
brown, but to the writer John they looked red. And "red" is better thanbrown because red is the color of blood. A bottle of tabasco sauce wasunearthed beneath a certain bar, but John uses the name of the barnext door because it's called Buckets of Blood! That's a hell of a lot
more evocative, isn't it? Yes, but it's not RIGHT. It's wrong. And Jim
can't let go.► November (4)
▼ October (6)
THEATER: "Thunderbodies!"
and the Glorious Mess of...
THEATER: 'Fact" Vs Fiction;
Pale "India"
THEATER: "Love's Labour's
Lost"...But A Good Meal ...
THEATER: "Mother Of The
Maid" Lacks Fire
THEATER: "Oklahoma" Is
(Just) OK
THEATER: Bill Irwin Clowns (A
Little), The Constit...
► September (1)
► May (5)
► April (6)
► March (4)
► February (1)
► 2017 (6)
► 2016 (2)
► 2015 (14)
► 2014 (2)
► 2013 (5)
► 2012 (18)
► 2011 (15)
► 2010 (10)
► 2009 (43)
► 2008 (86)
► 2007 (781)
► 2006 (2412)
► 2005 (5)
Before you know it, Jim has flown out to Las Vegas to check more facts
on the ground, John is strangling him in frustration and Emily flies out
to see if she can rescue this piece from fact-checking hell without
ruining the integrity of her magazine. (Needless to say, as a factchecker in real life, I never cached any flier miles.)
Every once in a while the play threatens to reveal something about one
of its three characters. Yet at the end, I don't think we really even
know if any of them are gay or straight or anything in between,married or single, lonely or happy, dog lovers or cat fanciers, liberal orconservative or any of the other myriad details one might use to at
least begin to define a person.
Sure, there's a suggestion that John comes from a hardscrabble
background and Jim is privileged. (Harvard and all that.) But was Jima legacy or did he go on a scholarship? John hints at Jim's highersocio-economic status but that goes nowhere too. It seems crazy that
Jim just flew across the country on his own dime to fact check an
article. But Jim may have already purchased that ticket to Vegas for apersonal event. So if John challenged him on having the ability tojump on a plane on a whim, Jim might have responded that it costpretty much everything he had and maybe he's living on a friend'scouch in NYC because the internship at the magazine doesn't pay
anything and he's got six figures of student loan debt and no idea how
he's going to pay it. Or he might have 'fessed up to being wealthy andthe ticket was charged to daddy's AMEX. I mean, he might have said
something like that and we might get to learn something about Jim
and John in the process but the play never bothers.
Thank goodness for the three stars. It's a very minor evening of theater
but they make it as painless as possible. My guest was actually
annoyed that Cherry Jones even accepted her role. (It's that minor of a
part, though Jones does what she can. She deserves much, muchbetter.) Cannavale has a more substantial turn as the writer John. Butstill. Only Radcliffe has any sort of growth when his character evolvesfrom sort-of timid to determined.
I never sat around thinking "Boy, fact checking would make a great
subject for a play!" But you might do something with the interestingpower dynamic. Suddenly an important writer must deal with apersnickety little fact checker? Or a famous celebrity is fielding queriesfrom a nobody about their childhood? (More often, it would be the
famous celebrity's assistant, though Emma Thompson once responded
personally to a fellow fact checker's fax of queries with her own faxthat began, "Dear lonely fact checker!")
That imbalance of power could be fun and we do get a quick visual gag
when the small-ish Radcliffe is burdened with a giant backpack to lookeven tinier as the glowering Cannavale towers over him. To be fair,this dynamic is about the only thing going on in the play, but even
there the plotting is confused. Watching this intern interrupt the
powerful editor he is meeting with for the first time and do it
repeatedly made me squirm in my seat with disbelief as a magazine
intern myself, never mind the man-splaining nature of the moment or
how it spoiled Jim's arc.
Indeed, The Lifespan of a Fact fails to accomplish even the one
essential task: making us care about the central debate of the entire
play, that is the question of whether the essay gets published or not.
More to the point, it never begins to make us care about their
nebulous debate over facts versus fiction or god forbid come to careabout the young man who committed suicide and sparked the wholestory in the first place.
Instead, Jim makes an astonishing claim at the climax which at first I
took at face value. It took me a minute to realize he was making somephilosophical point about the nature of truth, conspiracy theories andthe current online frenzy to seize on a factual error and spin off into
lunacy. Finally, the editor Emily has the two men read out lines from
the beginning of the essay as if it were Holy Scripture while morninglight gently illuminates their faces. It's an absurd scene but the threeactors are such pros they manage to create a quiet moment of gracethrough sheer talent alone. It's a fact that the play sure didn't help.
P.S. This is all based on a true incident. The writer and fact checker
collaborated on a book about their imbroglio and it includes theoriginal essay, the fact checker's notations and questions and theactual facts he dug up and their debate back and forth individual bitsand the nature of "truth" in an essay as opposed to cold facts. After
seeing the play, I actually tried to scare up a copy to read immediately
but had no luck at The Strand or Barnes and* Noble. No such luck sofor the moment I haven't read it. However based on the description, Ican't help thinking they already found the perfect way to tell theirstory.
*That's an ampersand in the company's name of Barnes and Noble, by
the way. It's also an "ampersand" between the first two credited
writers of the play, Jeremy Kareken and David Murrell. In credits for
films, TV, theater and the like, an ampersand indicates two peopleworking together, a team of sorts, like Abbott and Costello. If theywere three individual writers, they would be listed as Kareken, Murrelland Farrell. Why no ampersand in this piece? Blogger can't handle anampersand and messes up the text if I include it. Like I said, I was afact checker.
INDIA PALE ALE * out of ****
MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB AT NEW YORK CITY
CENTER
Nothing makes one feel more like a grinch than to dislike a hopelessly
earnest play brimming with good intentions. Time and again one
hears about the valuable impact of people simply seeing themselves
represented in popular culture. That's as true on stage as anywhereelse. So with the vast majority of plays in the US about white people(and usually white men), one can appreciate and applaud plays that
feature people from Puerto Rico or the Bahamas or Korean Americans
or -- why not? -- Swedes and certainly Japanese and Italian and Irishand German and Filipino and Senegalese and gay and lesbian andbisexual and trans and a thousand other categories. Heck, when younever see yourself on stage, even a villain or cardboard character feels
like a step forward.
So it's a pleasure to sense the palpable happiness of writer Jaclyn
Backhaus, the cast and even audience members as they see Punjabi
people onstage celebrating their families, their life in America, their
traditions, their past and their future. India Pale Ale even winds up
the play with a sharing of samosas between the characters and muchof the audience, which is one way to win over critics and quite aneffective one.
But good intentions get you nowhere and it would be an insult to the
artists involved to grade India Pale Ale on a curve. Instead, one must
be honest and say this thin, cliched drama plays out much likecountless other stories about the same dilemma have done before. A
young character yearns to break free of their family's constricting
sense of what is proper and be a "real" American. Older folk tut-tutand others fall somewhere in the middle, some believing they mustchange and adapt while others see value in the old ways. Whatlanguage to speak (at home and in public), what foods to eat, whatreligion to practice, arranged marriages, respect for elders, and on and
on the issues go. Substitute Italian for Chinese for Haitian for Korean
for Punjabi or for whomever and the story is comfortingly universal.
The story of assimilation can be told again and again but it must
somehow rise above that familiar structure to be fresh and new.
Backhaus unfortunately does not. The play struggles to breathe life
even into the tiresome scene of a clueless (but not quite ill-
intentioned) white person indelicately asking about a character's
race/ethnicity/culture. Or to be more blunt and awkward, "So what areyou?" When act two raises the stakes far too dramatically, the playfalls apart completely.
But it was never held together by much. A banal family anecdote about
being descended from the pirate Brownbeard leads to dialoguedelivered at times in faux pirate lingo (a lot of "yaar" and the like) aswell as a family song about pirates, all of it repeated laboriously
throughout the show. Two characters who seem in love are randomly
separated, just so they can move towards a reunion at the end.Feelings are hurt and lessons are learned. And so on.
One simply can't judge actors when the material is weak, though the
lead Shazi Raja is certainly an attractive presence. Like everyone else,
Raja is surely proud to be telling stories of the Punjabi people. This
first shaky step will hopefully lead to better stories down the road.
Of modest note is the handsome backdrop of scenic designer Neil
Patel. By far the best tech element of the show, it features a metallicborder and round circles that appeared to be the bottom of beer
bottles...and indeed some of them actually were. It echoed the dream
of our heroine to open her own bar and easily evoked the high seaswith the assist of some lighting by Ben Stanton and the sound designby Elisheba Ittoop. It was attractive and eye-catching, without getting
in the way of the proceedings.
THEATER OF 2018
Homelife/The Zoo Story (at Signature) *** out of ****
Escape To Margaritaville **
Broadway By The Year: 1947 and 1966 ***
Lobby Hero ***
Frozen **
Rocktopia *
Angels in America ** 1/2
Mean Girls ** 1/2
The Sting **
Mlima's Tale ** 1/2
Children Of A Lesser God ** 1/2
Sancho: An Act Of Remembrance ** 1/2
The Metromaniacs ***
Summer: The Donna Summer Musical *
The Seafarer **
Henry V (Public Mobile Unit w Zenzi Williams) * 1/2
Saint Joan **
Travesties *** 1/2
Summer and Smoke ** 1/2
My Fair Lady ** 1/2
Broadway By The Year: 1956 and 1975 ** 1/2
Bernhard/Hamlet * 1/2
On Beckett ***
What The Constitution Means To Me **
The Winning Side *
Oklahoma **
Mother Of The Maid *
Love's Labour's Lost ** 1/2
The Lifespan of a Fact **
India Pale Ale *
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s
to BookFilter! Need a smart and easy gift? Head to BookFilter ! Wondering wh
categories, like cookbooks and mystery and more? Head to BookFilter! It’s a w
you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases e
personal recommendations every step of the way. It’s like a fall book preview
category. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox , a weekly pop culture podc
of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for
Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called P
POSTED BY MICHAEL GILTZ AT 6:19 PM
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