Tag: Musical

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Lizzie Borden Rocks Theatreworks

CREDIT: New Moon

New Moon

Lizzie & Co.

Rock-and-roll was barely old enough to drink when somebody asked playwright Sam Shepard his opinion about the rock musical. I’ve not been able to run down the exact quote, but the Shepard, who sometimes drummed with The Holy Modal Rounders, thought rock musicals and operas would remain theoretical until somebody composed one that was as “violent” as “a Who concert.” As someone who tends to rate concerts by the degree to which they’ve “ripped my head off,” or “melted my face,” I’ve always agreed with Shepard’s assessment. By that measure, it’s probably fair to note that, in spite of the city’s storied music history, the rock musical didn’t arrive in Memphis until October 2018 when Lizzie — the Lizzie Borden ax-murdering musical — opened at TheatreWorks. I say this as a veteran of Hair, American Idiot, Rock of Ages, Rocky Horror, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and a dozen more electric guitar musicals.  But when it comes to pure rock concert muscle, New Moon’s Lizzie kills the competition. Dead.

Lizzie‘s soundtrack is show-tune aware, but with a punk heart, a goth soul and roots anchored deep in the sisterhood of classic rock. Delivered in an audience-aware, concert-style format, songs like “Why Are All These Heads Off,” and “What The Fuck, Lizzie?” make The Who’s Tommy sound about as quaint and orderly as the collected love songs of Lerner & Lowe. It’s the rare Halloween season treat that should appeal to most traditional theater fans while flirting hard with a quality I’m going to call Goner appeal.

Lizzie Borden Rocks Theatreworks

The story of ax-murderess Lizzie Borden (and her famous 40-whacks) is sung, shouted, and shrieked at the audience by a strong, all-female cast of 4. The book strays far enough from the facts as we know them to qualify as historical fiction, but the details of what actually happened when Mr. & Mrs. Borden were murdered, are beside the point in this bloody portrait of a place where sexual abuse and the status quo walk hand in glove. Director Kell Christie keeps the sex and money elements of the narrative front and center while making the overall experience more like an arena concert than a piece of musical theater. Melissa Andrews’ lights are on point, and Eileen Kuo’s music direction drives hard without sacrificing dynamics.  A nearly perfect ensemble showcases the acting and vocal talents of Christina Hernandez, Annie Freres, Joy Brooke Fairfield, and Jaclyn Suffel.

Lizzie closes Sunday, Oct. 28, so there aren’t many chances left to witness this dreadful tale of horror and woe. You don’t want to miss this one.

Pay-What-You-Can Wed. Oct 24. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Moana

“If you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you’re a Princess,” says Maui, demigod of land and sea voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, of Moana, the eponymous heroine of the new Disney animated extravaganza.

Moana, voiced by a high school freshman named Auli’i Cravalho, is not technically a princess, but rather the daughter of Chief Tui Waialiki (Star Wars veteran Temuera Morrison), leader of Motunui, a picturesque village on a lovingly rendered Polynesian island. But those are just details that have been temporarily glued to the ever-evolving ideal of the Disney Princess. Snow White, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, Pocahontas — the stars of Disney’s animated musicals are all gathered under the same corporate banner at princess.disney.com. They’re the bait that hooks the young girls into the Disney corporate synergy machine: See the movie, buy the merch, ride the ride. It’s easy to get cynical about all of it (and if you’re not feeling cynical yet, don’t worry, I’m cynical enough for both of us), but the truth is, Disney’s just really damn good at making these movies.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho are the voices behind the demigod Maui (left) and Moana, the eponymous teen “princess” of Disney’s new animated feature.

From before Homer told the story of Achilles setting out across the wine-dark sea, we’ve understood that kids need heroes. Stories of trials, bravery, and purpose help us fill in the blanks of who we want to be and, thus, who we become. In the past, Disney’s youngest female fans had Sleeping Beauty as a hero: a character whose best qualities are her utter passivity and attractiveness to men. Now, they have Moana, and it’s a big improvement as role models go. Instead of waiting for a man to come save her and drag her off into domesticity, Moana makes her own decisions. The only men in her life are her stalwart but overprotective father and the vain, tempestuous demigod. Moana is bereft of romance, and it’s all the better movie for it. Instead, it’s the story of a young woman trying to cajole the men around her into doing the right thing and then giving up and just doing it herself. But in stripping the patriarchy from the Princess, all that’s left for directors Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall, and Chris Williams is a pretty straightforward Hero’s Journey, complete with an eccentric, elderly mentor (Gramma Tala, voiced by Rachel House); a descent into the underworld (for a musical number with a hostile giant crab); and a good, old fashioned leap of faith.

Did you catch that there are four directors? I think that’s a record for a non-anthology movie. But that’s Disney under the direction of John Lasseter, who brought the fluid, iterative, team-based creative process with him from Pixar. There’s one official screenwriter (Jared Bush), but at least seven people get “story by” credits — and yet the film still steals beats from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mad Max: Fury Road. There are no missteps, but no big chances are taken, either.

The number of animators stretches well into the hundreds, and the evidence of that investment is up on the screen. Moana is one of the most gorgeous pictures Disney has ever produced. Nevermind the onslaught of stunning technical achievements, from Maui’s unruly locks of curls to the nonstop water effects that would have been impossible just a few years ago — Moana is a brilliantly designed animation. The human characters balance on the edge of the uncanny valley, and they are often interacting with backgrounds and objects that are as photorealistic as anything in a Marvel movie. The visuals are more inventive than the storytelling, and the most impressive moments come in the musical interludes. There’s one moment where Moana and Maui sing their way into an environment inspired by the impressionistic animation of Song of the Sea, and the contrast between the full rendered 3D CGI characters and the 2D backgrounds are like nothing I have ever seen before.

The songs, written by a team that included Hamilton scribe Lin-Manuel Miranda, are unfortunately not as memorable as the visuals. There’s no “Let It Go” or “Be Our Guest” here. With the exception of “Shiny,” sung by Flight of the Conchords Jemaine Clement as the aforementioned giant crab monster, the songs all kind of melt together into an unoffensive Disney goo that will one day seep through hidden speakers outside the Moana Outrigger Adventure ride at Disney World.

If you need me, I’ll be in the tiki bar.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Annie

In the beginning of this version of Annie, Quvenzhané Wallis, starring as the famous cartoon orphan, gives a presentation to her class about her favorite president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression, lots of people were poor and very few were rich. It was like today, only without the internet, she explains as her classmates beat light hip-hop rhythms on their desks, Stomp style. But then FDR made all the poor people rich, and everybody was happy.

This is not quite how the history books record it, of course, but I guess family entertainment needs an educational aspect to partially justify its existence, or, in the case of Annie, to justify two hours of product placement.

Annie has the feel of a vanity project for Jay-Z. The hip-hop mogul who had one of his biggest hits in 1998’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which samples one of the two songs everyone knows from the 1977 Broadway musical. But poverty must seem like a distant memory to Jay-Z at this point, since his musical output for the past few years has pretty much been songs about how rich he is, and how he wants to get even richer. So as part of his “getting even richer” program, he enlisted fellow super-rich dad hip-hop star Will Smith to co-executive produce this remake of the class-conscious musical for the mobile phone age.

For Wallis, however, the memory of poverty must be much clearer. At age 5, the child of a teacher and truck driver was found at a cattle-call audition by the director of 2012’s Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild, and subsequently became the youngest person ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She was reportedly paid more to play Annie than was spent in total on her film debut.

Cameron Diaz as Miss Hannigan

You may have noticed that I have been writing about money for this entire review. That’s appropriate, since that’s pretty much what Annie is about. As a little orphan, Annie doesn’t have any. Instead of an orphanage, she lives in a foster home/child services scam run by Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz, who at least looks like she’s having fun most of the time) with a bevy of other unfortunates. She pines for her parents until one day, while chasing a stray dog she names Sandy, she is saved from certain death by Mr. Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx, who is usually more able to convincingly look like he’s having fun), a cell phone mogul whose Bloomberg-like mayoral bid is floundering. His two campaign handlers, Grace (Rose Byrne) and Guy (Bobby Cannavale) think he needs to look more human to the voters, so he takes Annie to live in his Tony Stark-like penthouse high above New York City, where she charms him and the rest of the city with her wit and spunk.

Wallis remains a compelling screen presence, but for any actor, it’s one thing to do indie realism and quite another thing to do musical theater. She’s game, even when she’s being out danced and out sung by her fellow orphans, and she at least doesn’t embarrass herself like Foxx, who will likely go to his grave remembering the time a director told him to stand still and hold the Purell bottle so the camera can get a nice long shot of the label. Product placement has long been a scourge of Hollywood filmmaking, but Annie is the most egregious offender in recent memory. When a character takes a moment to read off the model number of the Bell helicopter he’s piling into for the big chase scene, it’s clear the balance has tipped from escapist movie musical to extended infomercial. It’s so egregious that the film finds itself compelled to comment on it, with Grace wisecracking to Annie at the clumsy film-within-a-film Twilight parody they attend, “Product placement is the only thing keeping the film industry afloat these days.” Annie is an argument that it’s time to let that kind of filmmaking sink.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Warts and All

Talk about your odd couples: Frog likes his next-door neighbor Toad, even though he’s a neurotic wart-covered mess of complaints. And Toad likes Frog every bit as much, even though he’s preternaturally cheerful (even in the morning) and also covered in unsightly warts. The two old friends rake one another’s leaves and like to chat pleasantly over hot tea and homemade cookies. And no matter how much they fight, they always make up. Story-wise, that’s about all there is to A Year With Frog and Toad, the Tony-nominated musical based on Arnold Lobel’s beloved series of children’s books. There’s no big adventure. In fact, there’s very little plot at all. There’s just Frog, Toad, and all their woodland friends. And that’s enough.

The most frustrating aspect of most contemporary adaptations of children’s stories is the adaptor’s need to insert some level of irony, presumably aimed at the adults in the crowd. In recent years, film adaptations of Dr. Seuss classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat have been pumped up with scatological humor and edgy sexual innuendo. Frog and Toad proves how unnecessary all of that is. Being merely charming, completely un-edgy, and rather smart, it manages to delight children and adults alike.

A Year With Frog and Toad plays out like a series of variety-show skits with songs and comedy routines based on the passing seasons. If the plot and dialogue are simplistic, the lyrics are delightfully clever and sophisticated in a way that is reminiscent of dry-wit lyricists from a bygone era or perhaps a recent episode of The Backyardigans.

“Three things you cannot dispute,” we’re told in the song “Get a Load of Toad.” “Bamboo comes from a bamboo shoot, rutabaga comes from a rutabaga root, and Toad looks funny in a bathing suit.” And he does.

More than anything else, A Year With Frog and Toad proves that children — even very young ones — can be entertained without technical wizardry. At a recent Saturday matinee, the youngsters sat mesmerized, and during intermission many tried to imitate the anthropomorphic movements of the actors playing animals.

Brian C. Gray and Kevin Todd Murphy are wonderful as Frog and Toad, respectively, but both are nearly eclipsed by an extraordinary chorus led by Amber Snyder and Corey Cochran in a variety of roles.

Did I say that there were no ironic winks and nudges for adults? Because there is one. Overwhelmed by his newfound success as a mailman, Snail (Cochran) strips down to a gold-lame-accented mail carrier’s uniform while singing, “I’m coming out — of my shell.” Although the gay allusions soared over the kiddies’ heads, the joke was out of place. That’s not to say it was anything short of fun or fabulous.

Chicago-based director/choreographer Scott Ferguson earned an excellent reputation in Memphis directing camp classics like The Rocky Horror Show and The Mystery of Irma Vep, but his more recent production of the Mark Twain musical Big River was something of a mess. Oddly enough, it’s Ferguson’s eye for kitsch that makes the completely sincere A Year With Frog and Toad such a winner. Who else might have imagined birds flying south for the winter as mid-20th-century flight attendants or transformed a pair of moles into fur-wearing Russian spies.

Laura E. Jordan’s costumes are exemplary, while Tim McMath’s set faithfully renders the look and feel of the original children’s books.

If there is serious complaint to be registered regarding Frog and Toad, it’s with the music direction. And even there, Renee Kemper, who pulls double duty as both musical director and keyboardist, does an excellent job. The problem stems from the fact that she’s the show’s only musician.

It’s a tragedy that when regional theaters stage smaller-scale musicals like A Year with Frog and Toad, they are often faced with the choice of using either a bare-bones band or prerecorded music. It’s unrealistic to say so, but neither choice is really acceptable.

Through December 23rd at Circuit
Playhouse

Categories
News

David Gest is Nuts — The Musical

According the UK’s Guardian, David Gest is launching a stage musical about himself called David Gest is Nuts – My Life As A Musical.

Music will include more than 20 Top Five hits performed by original artists including Gloria Gaynor and Coolio. The show will open at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in February, then will tour.

Friend Michael Jackson was quoted as follows: “David can’t sing and can’t dance. It will be amazing to see just how nuts he gets on stage!”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Tangled up in Dylan lore.

In 1998, Todd Haynes released Velvet Goldmine, a rapturous but prickly ode to glam-rock that referenced genre stars such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop but clung to a fan’s perspective.

He tries something similar with I’m Not There, a pop meditation “inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan” that is less concerned with presenting Dylan’s life in a realistic sense than on ruminating on the character of Dylan as experienced by his most ardent fans.

To do this, Haynes employs six actors — Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and African-American adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin — to play otherwise unconnected roles (none of them named “Bob Dylan”) that each embody a different facet of Dylan’s protean public persona.

Bale is the early, serious folkie Dylan in his first signs of dissatisfaction with the earnestness of the scene. Ledger is an actor who played lead in a “Dylan” biopic whose real life — in his courtship, marriage, and break-up with a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands played beautifully by Charlotte Gainsbourg — represents the most widely known segment of Dylan’s own domestic life. Whishaw plays a man in an interrogation-style interview who claims to be (Dylan influence) Arthur Rimbaud. Franklin is a boxcar-hopping musician who dubs himself “Woody” after Woody Guthrie and eventually visits the great folksinger (as Dylan did) on his deathbed. Blanchett is a scream as the most iconic of Dylan figures, the messy-haired mid-Sixties rock prophet. And Gere — in a dull recurring segment that threatens to stop the movie dead — actually plays an aging Billy the Kid in a reference to the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which Dylan acted in and provided music for.

Through the weaving of these six sections, Haynes touches on reams of Dylan lore, iconography, and soundbites — his electric folk-festival debut, being called “Judas” in London, his relationship with Joan Baez, his motorcycle accident, his chauvinism, his embrace of Christianity, etc. The Blanchett scenes are the strongest, filmed in black-and-white to make them not just a reference to that period of Dylan’s career but to the way it’s been perceived through the lens of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back.

The result is probably the most personal and most ambitious musical “biopic” ever attempted. For remotely obsessive Dylan fans, it’s endlessly compelling, if not always successful. For more casual fans, it’s likely to be entirely inexplicable.

I’m Not There

Opens Wednesday, November 21st

Studio on the Square

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We Recommend We Recommend

Idol Hands

Heinz Winckler (pictured at right) became a star in South Africa after winning that country’s version of American Idol. Over the past three years, he’s recorded multiplatinum singles and performed for massive audiences. And now he’s performing the leading role of Roger Davis in Rent, Jonathan Larson’s socially conscious update of Puccini’s La Bohème, which is opening at The Orpheum this week. The Flyer asked Heinz a few questions about Rent and his life as an “Idol.”

Memphis Flyer: What does the future hold? Concerts and solo recordings or more musical theater?

Heinz Winckler: At the moment, I’m open to the whole multimedia thing. I always liked musicals, but they weren’t my focus. Since I’ve been doing them, my love for acting has quickly developed.

Were you a fan of Rent before you auditioned?

When I auditioned for the part over two years ago, I didn’t even know what Rent was. But now I’m well aware of the genius of Jonathan Larson.

Idol contestants are a rapidly growing force in the entertainment world. It’s like the Mickey Mouse Club on steroids.

Idol really is a strong brand. Anwar [Robinson] and I are both in Rent. Fantasia is on Broadway in The Color Purple. But how much success you derive from being on Idol is really up to the individual. Winners may disappear, while runners-up go on to do very well for themselves.

“Rent,” The Orpheum on Friday, November 23rd, at 8 p.m. and Saturday, November 24th, at 2 and 8 p.m. $15-$55. For more information, call 525-3000 or go to orpheum-memphis.com.

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We Recommend

Viva la Vie Boheme!

Celebrate the bohemian life with RENT at the Orpheum Theatre on November
23-24, with a special chance to win one of five Viva la Vie Boheme gift baskets when you purchase your RENT tickets, compliments of the Orpheum and The Memphis Flyer.

RENT is Broadway’s smash hit musical, now in its 10th Season of Love!
Set in the East Village of New York City, RENT is about being young and learning to survive in NYC. It’s about falling in love, finding your voice and living for today. Winner of the Tony Award® for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize, RENT has made a lasting mark on Broadway with songs that rock and a story that really resonates. Whether it’s your 1st time or your 100th time, the time is now for RENT!

Buy your tickets with our exclusive Memphis Flyer promotion code
and be entered to win gift baskets that each include:

official RENT merchandise, an Orpheum Theatre mug, a Memphis Flyer t-shirt,
a gift certificate to the Flying Saucer, passes to the Stax Museum of Soul
Music, a CD of local musicians from Goner Records, a coupon from
Memphis Pizza Café, plus a coupon from Bluff City Coffee.

This offer starts Wednesday, November 7 and ends Wednesday, November 21.

To take advantage of this offer, please follow these instructions:
1) Follow this link and click “Find Tickets”
2) Then select the number of tickets and price level next to the
Promotions and Special Offers box
3) Next, enter your password: BOHEME
4) Lastly, click “Look for Tickets”

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We Recommend We Recommend

#1 (With a Bullet)

CREDIT: Antonio Nunes | dreamstime.com

It’s no cliché to describe Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical meditation on the men and women who’ve either killed or tried to kill an American president, as history viewed in a funhouse mirror. The fast-paced revue is set in an amusement park shooting gallery where time bends and characters, who never actually knew one another, come face to face. It’s a place where Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, provides inspiration for John F. Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s a melodic dystopia where the dizzy Charles Manson acolyte Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme teaches dizzy and disgruntled former bookkeeper Sara Jane Moore how to shoot by taking potshots at a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket.

Using reconstructed snatches of “Hail to the Chief,” Sousa marches, and 1970s pop songs, Assassins probes the mind of the deranged megalomaniac Charles Guiteau as he marches to the gallows and a self-professed nobody named Giuseppe Zangara whose murderous desires were brought on by severe stomach pains. It allows viewers to slip easily behind John Hinckley’s glasses as he sings about his love for Jodie Foster and his desire to kill Ronald Reagan.

Sondheim’s darkly comic sketch of American history’s most desperate figures, as they pursue the fame they think they deserve, has appeared in Memphis twice before. Both Circuit Playhouse and Rhodes College have staged award-winning productions of this controversial classic. Now the University of Memphis is ready to take its shot. Helmed by third-year MFA candidate David Shouse and performed by a gun-toting ensemble that includes many of the city’s most promising young actors, Assassins promises to be a blast.

“Assassins,” November 8th-10th and 15th-17th, 8 p.m. Department of Theatre & Dance, University of Memphis. $10-$15.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Barf! The Review

I can remember being a child of 6 or 7 and playing with a neighbor’s dog on the gray, nail-scarred porch of a relative’s house somewhere in the vast and verdant emptiness of rural Tennessee. An older male relative — a great-uncle perhaps — approached and touched my shoulder in that creepy way only men who may or may not be your great-uncle can. He said, “You know, son, me and that there dog, we have an awful lot in common.” And being a precocious brat given to speaking in badly mimicked Shakespearian prose, I countered the old man, asking, “Tell me, cousin, beyond your love of wagging, how can that be so?”

“In this world,” he answered too somberly, “if you can’t eat it or screw it, piss on it.” And then he walked away.

I’ve carried those silly words with me for more than 30 years, but I never found much use for the crass metaphor until I sat down to ponder the relative merits of Bark! The Musical. Finding the show unappealing both sexually and gastronomically, I was overcome by a nearly irresistible urge to raise my leg and water all the lovely Lon Anthony statues in Theatre Memphis’ sculpture garden. As much as I’d like to applaud TM for breaking from its habits and staging original work composed by a native Memphian, I just can’t do it.

Bark!, a cutesy musical revue about a bunch of dogs hanging out at Dee Dee’s Doggie Daycare, is enough to make even an avid Andrew Lloyd Webber detractor say kind things about Cats. At least Webber’s creative team had the good sense to forgo too much talk about loving humans and smelly litterboxes in order to tell a story about the secret life of cats who come together in a dark alley to celebrate an arcane feline ritual. Cats, at least, has something like a plot and builds to a climax. Bark!, by comparison, is a narrative-free collection of 22 songs about all the

things we love, hate, and love to hate about dogs, performed by five actors in silly spandex dog costumes. Bark! has poop songs, pee songs, butt-sniffing songs, leg-humping songs, and songs with enough sentimental tear-jerking to fill three remakes of Old Yeller. The most positive thing I can say about the musical is that fans of the Christopher Guest mocumentary Best in Show might get a real kick out of it, if and only if, they can pretend it was actually written by Parker Posey.

Sample lyric: “You fill my bowl. I fill your soul.” And there’s more where that came from.

The most tragic thing about Bark! The Musical (other than the fact it’s yet another “Colon! The Musical” musical) is that the cast is so darn committed, gifted, earnest, and entertaining. The harmonies are tight, the solos heartfelt. The dancing ambitious, energetic, and excellent. But for what? For a children’s show that’s an act too long with too many references to humping, bitches, and cutting off testicles to make it appropriate for children? Nevertheless, Jonathan Christian, Stephen Garrett, Stephanie Kim, Lynden Lewis, and Jesus Manuel Pacheco all deserve super-trouper awards for making something so hard to watch look like a lot of fun to do.

I can’t say enough kind things about Theatre Memphis’ resident costumer André Bruce Ward. But Christian’s shiny silver hound-dog costume makes him look more like a bounty hunter from the Star Wars universe than any of man’s best friends. The remaining costumes transform the actors into refugees from a hippie colony founded by Raggedy Ann and Andy. Conversely, the digitized scenic design by Daniel A. Kopera is as innovative and visually exciting as it is practical.

Bark!, for all its problems, should play well in Memphis. It has had successful runs in L.A. and Chicago and will soon be opening off-Broadway in New York, where it will also find an enthusiastic audience among dog people and furry fetishists. It is cute by design, and for some folks, a collection of sweet pop melodies about fleas, catching frisbees, and farting in your sleep is just what the veterinarian ordered.

The musical compositions by former Memphian David Troy Francis borrow expertly from gospel, blues, doo-wop, and hip-hop traditions. Taken one at a time, they are as adorable as a pound puppy. But without a story to tell, they just lie around the room like an old gaseous mutt who likes to chew the furniture.

Through May 13th