It has been an unbelievably long week. A truly awful, terrible, no-good, very bad week. It started bad, it got worse, and tomorrow will be hell. I have so much work to do, and a long meeting in the middle.

The meeting is to chose who will direct the outdoor summer Shakespeare show. We've opened it up to alums who graduated in 2001 or earlier and are willing to work under our conditions for a modest fee. We have five proposals. Will it be one or another of my close friends? Or will it be one or another person who terrified me in college? Or will it be someone I'm pretty neutral about, but who has far less experience then the others? They are all very strong proposers--three will get their MFAs in directing this June, 4 have done a lot of directing in their 2-4 years post-college--but they are not all strong proposals. Which is a crucial distinction, especially since most of the people making the decision don't know the characters involved. I imagine that tomorrow we will make a decision, a completely logical and smart decision, that will hurt me deeply.
Plus I'll then have to finish all the course catalog edits and collect all the spring quarter proposals. on the upside, it's pay day.

You know how sometimes you really really need to pick a fight with someone but you can't because it's never the right time? It's kind of like the universe is saying "let it go, let it go", but you can't. At the same time you can't actually say what you need to say because a million things come up--real, legitimate things--that mean it would be incredibly insensitive of you to say what needs to be said.

Yeah. Like that.

It's just not worth it. But I have this obnoxious tendency of letting things build until it all explodes, which always gets me in trouble.

On a brighter note... I saw "Light in the Piazza", the new Adam Guettel musical, tonight. It's not quite as good as "Floyd Collins", but it's pretty darn good. Emphasis on pretty, which is its defining feature. Pretty music, pretty lights, pretty set, pretty actors. There are no bad guys, all the conflict is internal (and mostly maternal) emotion.
Unfortunately the leading man (who is in his first major production) seemed to be losing his voice--way too much breath and a missed note or two that even I heard. But if he weren't losing his voice he'd be perfect: he looks right, he's got the right mix of post-adolescent drama and fervor.
And Victoria Clark is AMAZING. I can't emphasize this enough. She delivers an impassioned and nuanced performance that is believable, heartbreaking, and smart. It's a good thing she's the star of the show.
The young lovers aren't quite as believable. Perhaps its because you feel the central conceit of the show doesn't quite work. I suppose the language barrier (he's Italian, she's American, both speak broken versions of the other's language) is supposed to make you think the young Italian man wouldn't notice that he's fallen for an American woman trapped with the brain of a 12-year-old, but it's a little stretch.
I think they'll try to move it to Broadway and it will fail. It will fail like so many Sondheim musicals, and for similar reasons. But I hope it transfers so that Victoria Clark can win the Tony (not that I've seen Donna Murphy or Kristen Chenowith, so I suppose my opinion means little, comparatively at least).
But you have to love a show that rhymes "naked boys" with "corduroys". Even if the overture--played to a cyclorama that dances with light--feels like a cross between a Tchaikovsky waltz and "West Side Story" (real musicians will, no doubt, find this a very bizarre opinion on my part).
Oh, and the last number of act 1, "Say it Somehow", runs out of words and into musical vocalization. I suppose it's the language barrier, but the ahhhhhhhahahhhaaaaahhhhaaaaaa in pretty melody doesn't quite convey the feeling it's presumably going for. And there are some huge plot leaps that you can almost suspend disbelief for, but just almost. Characters make emotional leaps that come very close to making sense, but just barely fail (not for lack of trying on the actors' part).
There's also a sense of "I guess it's done now because we're open". I know there were re-writes after the original production, and I'd heard rumors from friends in the know that they were making cuts and adding songs up to opening night. There is also a song listed in the program that was cut from the show. It's listed as being sung by a character who doesn't exist as anything more than background. Hmmm. (to be fair, most of the programs were stuffed with inserts containing an updated song list. I just didn't get such a program and was very confused).
It's also hard to have so much of the show actually in Italian, or with very heavy accents. There are only 3 characters who actually speak English--unless you count the super-meta-moment when the non-English speaking mother-of-the-groom breaks, faces the audience in pure white light, and explains what the hell the rest of them are saying. Amazingly, this almost works.

The New Yorker review of the show ends as follows: "Still, Guettel's kind of talent cannot be denied. He shouldn't change for Broadway; Broadway, if it is to survive as a creative theatrical force, should change for him." I think that that is an overstatement: Broadway is what it is, and that is part of why Chicago theater and off-Broadway theater is what it is. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
- posted by Heidi @ 1:47 AM