#39: May Round-Up/Emergency Theater Dispatch
This is about "May" but it's also about the Tonys.
The main thing that happened to me in May besides a health scare that made me insane is that I, perhaps relatedly, experienced a tremendous backslide into theater kid mania.1 Partly, I was going to the theater a bunch, but there was also so much news—the West End Next to Normal pro-shot and cast album, the Chess revival (!!!!!!!!), the instantly infamous Patti LuPone interview and subsequent open letter trying to ban her from the Tonys, the 7 hours between the announcement of a site-specific non-union A Chorus Line and the announcement that the rights had been pulled, videos of blond Rachel Zegler singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” on an outdoor balcony for the new Jamie Lloyd Evita in London, the actual Tony Awards.
Okay let’s just start with Theater.
Theater
First of all, the Tonys were on Sunday:
Cole Escola won a Tony dressed as Bernadette Peters :) so nothing can hurt me :)
Except… Audra being robbed :( Look, Nicole sings “As if We Never Said Goodbye” loudly and beautifully and I know Audra has six Tonys but she’s really that Good. Her Mama Rose is acting.2
But sorry I do think “Rose’s Turn” should be paywalled!! Just do “Some People” again!
Hamilton medley made me cry because it’s nice to see my friends the Schuyler sisters in one place again.
Randomly, the most “I’m sold” performance for me was Buena Vista Social Club. I am a sucker for Justin Peck I guess. The music is so good? Embarrassingly, never listened to it before 2 days ago. I am so excited to have a minimum of two mojitos and see that show.
On the flip side, if any trusted friends would like to sell me on Maybe Happy Ending I am sincerely listening because Darren Criss means a lot to me and the stage design looks cool but it looks Pixar-lite in a way that makes me want to pull my teeth out…
Jasmine Amy Rogers, you will be back <3
Let Me Sell You On Dead Outlaw For A Minute
Dead Outlaw, 7-time nominee, 0-time winner and the second “corpse musical with a small cast in multiple roles” of the season, is about a failed outlaw named Elmer McCurdy who was shot in 1911 and whose unclaimed body was mummified and lived on as a commercial attraction for 65 years until he was rediscovered, identified, and laid to rest. I think the way it’s being marketed is very Country Rock Boy Show and it seemed like it would be growly Guy in Hat music in a way I don’t care for until I saw a video of Julia Knitel, a woman with a perfect haircut and silver cowboy boots, singing this plaintive, twangy song on a rooftop. I applied for lottery tickets and won them on the first try.
In its first hour-ish, Dead Outlaw is somewhat straightforwardly about a tragic idiot whose sad childhood and obsession with outlaws like Jesse James leads him down a path of poorly executed crime. Once McCurdy dies, the show’s preoccupations crystallize into something special and fascinating—it’s about the closing of the frontier, the money grubbing impresarios who crafted the myth of “the West,” the state of Oklahoma (always up to no good), and a tour of American midway entertainment from traveling carnivals to exploitation horror pictures to wax museums to a Long Beach funhouse. This second half zips through time, introducing us to people McCurdy’s mummified remains may have met along the way—a director’s daughter, a Cherokee runner, a coroner to the stars. In short it is insanely my shit and I feel kind of offended I didn’t know this sooner.
I found out after the fact that Dead Outlaw is produced by Audible, the audiobook company, (lol?) and in retrospect you can tell—the show is narrated by the bandleader (a Western band plays on a stage-upon-a-stage the whole runtime). There’s a Podcast-y quality that would probably annoy me if I didn’t think the show was smart and engaging. I also think the songs are good, but “Dead” which soundtracks all the ads is far from the best one. I saw Dead Outlaw after a healthy stretch of shows I thought were bad and I was in one of those “do I even like theater or do I just like hearing songs I already like live” moods, so I was flooded with joy and relief when I walked out having sincerely loved this.3
A Lot of Other Theater + Live Performance I Saw This Month (We Could See BOOP!)
I saw Boop! (in June but…. who cares).
Boop! is silly but not precisely silly in the way you’d want (more tap dancing, cartoon world shenanigans) and instead wastes a lot of time with a boring mayoral race plot (very Jurassic World: Dominion’s Giant Bugs at the Tech Compound plot. What do you think we’re here for?) but Boop herself, Jasmine Amy Rogers, is absurdly good. Like, fully deserving of that tied-with-Audra Drama Desk Award Good. She’s so impossibly funny and Boop-like, every movement of her hands and mouth made me laugh. Even when she’s not the focus of the moment, Rogers doesn’t let up the Boop-ness and my eyes always went straight to her. She is going to be so famous!! I love her!!!!
Okay also:
Sophia and I went to see the Stephen Sondheim revue Old Friends, which is a) cruise ship entertainment and b) made me cry. There’s no thread or even particularly elegant segues between numbers, a jumbled mix of “let’s sing stuff from Company in sequins” and then a full make-up and set Sweeney Todd moment, but Bernadette Peters sings “Send in the Clowns”! Lea Salonga is a surprisingly delightful Mrs. Lovett! Beth Leavel kills “Ladies Who Lunch”! I find Gavin Lee very charming. Bernadette standing beneath a slideshow photo of herself with Sondheim made me burst into tears. Whatever! Relatedly, that clip of Audra McDonald making the rounds online where she talks about how Sondheim gave her permission to play Rose and also wanted her to play Desiree in A Little Night Music has ruined my life in the sense that I will not rest until I see that.
Sophia and I also went to see Wonderful Town, a charming mess of a 1953 musical about two artist sisters moving from Ohio to Greenwich Village, at New York City Center because they do $28 tickets and I’ll see anything at that price point. The music is by Leonard Bernstein and the book is by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, but I do think this is just Fine work all around for these legends. The songs are pleasant and forgettable, the show ends with a “and now I’ve got a man” whimper, but Anika Noni Rose is so luminous and Aisha Jackson is a ridiculously charismatic star in the making. Also, $28 tickets.
I saw Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces at New York City Ballet and this to me, is perfect!!!!! Loud music… dance that mimics the rhythms of the city… You can watch it on Youtube.
My friend Claire performed Sibelius No. 5 with the New Conductors Orchestra and it’s great duh!!
I missed the first part of
’s Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand inflected play baby, it’s you about four crazed fans detained in Shea Stadium in 1965 for Beatle-related crimes, but I was very happy to catch the extremely funny 2nd part. I laughed and laughed! Can’t wait for part 3.
The Next to Normal Pro-Shot
Next to Normal is a 2008 musical about mental illness that rocked me and every other theater dork’s shit and introduced us all to Aaron “this dude’s hair fucks” Tveit way back when. Pretty much every song is a banger, especially the one about mother/daughter struggling with electroshock therapy/drug use respectively. Life was amazing when I was 13 years old. The original star, Alice Ripley, later turned out to have been engaging in extremely inappropriate behavior with her young fans online, so for that and other reasons, I was excited to learn about a reportedly great new West End revival of the show starring Caissie Levy, who I love and has done nothing bad as far as I know. You can watch the revival via PBS Great Performances for free until June 30th and I highly recommend you do! It doesn’t deviate much from the multi-level, black steel, lit-up-boxes style of the original run but it’s a great cast (especially a sly and slightly evil Jack Wolfe as the teenage son) and makes a couple of smart adjustments to the book to loosen up on the “Medicating is Bad” messaging of the original. Obviously after watching this, I spent 2 weeks listening to the cast album over, and over, and over, and over.
All The Ways I Know To Get Cheap Theater/Dance Tickets in NY, Especially If You’re Under 30-40:
TDF (Theater Development Fund), a $42/annual membership program where you can get extremely good seats for discounted prices (how I got 3rd row seats to Boop! for $60)
New York City Center’s under-40 Access Club program ($28 tickets)
Being really consistent about applying for digital lottery!!
Manhattan Theater Club’s $30 under 35 (how I saw Old Friends!)
LincTix $35 tickets for anyone under 35 (how I saw Camelot and how I’m seeing Ragtime in the fall)
Setting notifications on the Theatr app
Parents in town…
PACNYC also does an under-30 program, which is how I saw Cats: Jellicle Ball, Irish Rep does $25 tix for anyone under 40, New York Theatre Workshop does $25 tix for the first two performances of every show (I’m annoyed I missed this for the Nat King Cole musical). Roundabout Theater does under-40 tix. Shakespeare in the Park is free. There’s so many I’m missing, I assume!!!! I also see a lot of theater via an “it’s okay to be financially irresponsible to see art” mindset. Great city!!
Film
New Releases
Prior to the mixed reviews out of Cannes, I would have told you that Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning was the most important movie event of the year (my life?), but perhaps luckily, I had a few post-festival weeks to adjust my expectations accordingly. By the time the day rolled around, I just wanted to have fun and see a couple of death defying, trillion dollar stunts.
Final Reckoning is not a very good movie (it’s first 2ish hours is all faithless “what you missed in the last 7 films” clip show, Entity gobbledygook, butt stupid retconning, mangled characters, so much CAVE stuff instead of RUNNING AROUND CITIES, a scene where the movie literally gets so distracted by Boobs it forgets to show us the crucial final step of its main heist) but it builds up to two genuinely remarkable set pieces (Tom Cruise goes to a submarine on the bottom-ish of the ocean + Tom Cruise dangles off a tiny old airplane in the sky). I normally hate submarines but this one had Tramell Tillman whose delivery of “And you must be out of your mind” is stuck in my head like a song. I loved diarrhea guy from MI1 who is Hot now and his beautiful wife Tapeesa. I wish Ethan Hunt spent more time with his friends and I wish they all spent more time in cities, which is how I like my Mission: Impossibles, but I can’t complain too hard when a 62 year old madman is intent on flinging himself from great heights for our amusement.
Anyway, I was still excited enough that I baked the Tom Cruise coconut cake for all my friends and it was delicious!
Sidebar In Which I Defend Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning for One Minute
In the lead-up to Final Reckoning, I rewatched Dead Reckoning which so many of my friends hate and I’m sorry, you’re all wrong. Dead Reckoning is nonstop fun: Ethan Hunt mask & stink bomb(?) shenanigans at the super secret Intelligence meeting —> Abu Dhabi airport chase where Shea Wigham (whose character gets mangled in Final Reckoning) and Greg Tarzan Davis (handsome) keep trying to pull peoples faces off —> Pom Klementieff Hot French Assassin in a Sgt. Pepper’s Jacket —> Venice where we get to see Ilsa Faust and even though The Thing That Happens is awful/stupid I also find it genuinely emotionally stirring and deeply high stakes —> perfect comedy Fiat chase —> TRAIN FINALE. She’s no Ilsa, but I think the idea of Hayley Atwell (a hot woman I have always found charming) as an entry point to “what does a rookie IMF agent look like” is a fun idea (that gets abandoned in 8…). Yes, Gabriel is a bad villain but I think the Entity is interesting because I like the idea that Tom Cruise was insanely mad about that deepfake in 2021 and never let it go. Nobody on earth will ever convince me this movie is bad.
Other new releases I saw this month:
It’s funny to see Tim Robinson’s whole deal applied to a character that’s normal-ish and married to Kate Mara, but I thought Friendship was really funny and deeply touching because don’t we all know a guy with a job and a life who’s just… weird? Or maybe we are that guy? A universal fear! I despise drug trip scenes, but Friendship has an actually funny one. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Conner O’Malley’ line “I’ll leave you with this: We never should have gotten out of Afghanistan.”
Jia Zhangke’s Boyhood-meets-scrapbook film Caught by the Tides, a combination of footage from prior films, documentary film taken over the course of decades, and 1/3 of a newly filmed Covid-era love story, is kind of a nightmare premise to me (when a movie is a hybrid of documentary and fiction? No thanks for me) but I was relatively won over by its preoccupation with song and dance and its portrait of a rapidly developing country over the course of 25 years. I also liked when Zhao Tao was charmed by a mall robot. To be honest, I thought this movie would stick with me more and worm its way under my skin over time, but it hasn’t. Mostly it feels like a good advertisement for his other films.
I already wrote about Final Destinations: Bloodlines but it’s awesome and the 3rd best movie of the year.
Repertory
Danielle was in town and we went out for a decadent French prix fixe dinner that was so leisurely we lost track of time and had to hustle for a check/run out around the corner to the Paris for a screening of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, which to me is a perfect New York night. TCTTHWHL on the big screen rocks* (*made me want to barf).
At Home
It was a disturbingly thin movie-watching month for me because I keep hanging out with my friends/putting on Ken Burns’ Baseball because I’m too tired for a whole movie but I did get a few in.
Little Murders, a 1971 comedy about a determined woman who attempts to mold a deeply cynical Elliot Gould into marriage material amidst the chaos of a crumbling city has an insanely promising first half hour and then kind of loses steam, but Donald Sutherland is there playing an existential reverend.
Okay so I liked Volver better when I thought it was a stranger and more supernatural movie than it is, but I did still love it. I liked how inconsequential the murder stuff was. And those colors! Penelope Cruz!
Key Largo’s a fun little summertime Floridian noir. Many a night all I want is a fun little noir.
I watched The Four Seasons TV remake on Netflix. I’ve been telling people this is “for no reason” but it’s actually because I am “earnestly invested in the marital troubles of rich people, especially when played by Colman Domingo and Tina Fey.” Anyway, then I watched the original 1981 film because it’s got Carol Burnett, Rita Moreno AND Len Cariou but it was in fact… Bad.
Rewatched Spike Lee’s Inside Man on my biopsy day because I needed something perfect and comforting.
Books
I re-read The House of Mirth for book club, and if you’re unfamiliar with Mirth it’s a sharp and sad novel about the social descent of a superhot but impoverished 29 year old (hag/) socialite named Lily Bart in 1890s New York who tragically keeps fucking up her chances with various eligible suitors before hitting rock bottom. When I read it in high school, I probably absorbed it as intended—with admiration for Lawrence Selden, a poor lawyer who Lily loves but won’t consider because he can’t give her the life she wants. This time around, I find him annoying and I am enamored by <3 <3 <3 Simon Rosedale <3 <3 <3, a nouveau riche Jewish businessman who Lily rejects for being “gross” but I’m increasingly convinced he was probably hot. I’m picturing Harry from Sex and the City I guess. Earlier in the novel, Lily fumbles a boring sheltered rich boy because she doesn’t want to go to church. You know who doesn’t attend church? Jews. Anyway, the most romantic line in the novel to me is when Rosedale says “If you'd only let me, I'd set you up over them all—I'd put you where you could wipe your feet on 'em!” Carrie Coon from The Gilded Age would never fuck up so bad.
I should just keep this to myself, but I feel the need to qualify that I never actually did theater, I just was a Gleek…
Like truly, you would not believe the number of times Nicole’s Norma becomes randomly silly goofy random in a way that makes zero character sense and I do blame Jamie Lloyd but also…
It’s also totally Trader Joe’s Bag-core. COMPLIMENTARY.
https://x.com/jaynieelynn/status/1934613537394970852?s=46&t=ufBCAhgWneFpkUx1RG5D1w
parents in town soooo true