Let the 2009 Pulitzer Prize Speculation Begin

Kinda off topic, but I felt necessary to post. I'm having a hard time imagining an article that could be more worthy of an Explanatory Reporting Pultizer than Roger Lowenstein's article on the subprime mortgage crisis. A topic that has baffled pretty much everyone has all of a sudden become remarkably clear. This is journalism at its best, people.

When Theater and Hockey Don't Mix

Despite my shared love of theater and hockey with Tracy Letts, I do admit the two don't always mesh. This is one of those times:



Seriously, didn't the GCTC have a better fitting gladiator helmet in prop storage? After that display, the Senators have lot my support in the series. Even more so than there terrible play.
(Yahoo! NHL Experts Blog)

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo crap Buffalo buffalo.

Jeff Simon lambasts the glamorous lifestyle of the film critic, which apparently resembles the life of Paris Hilton. Has he been to a screening and looked at the personal appearances of the attendees lately? Also, what the odds that Rex Reed is the "movie critic [he[ recognized but didn’t know emerged from a large journalism factory in the company of a very attractive young woman."

AICN gets an early look at Doubt

Like August: Osage County this year, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt was one of those plays where there was really no other way the Pulitzer Prize could go. I haven't heard much about the movie, but Ain't It Cool News got an early tip, and the report is overwhelmingly positive.

I thought Proof the movie was ruined by big-name but poorly thought out casting, and I'm going to have a hard time seeing someone other than Cherry Jones and Brían F. O'Byrne in the roles. But if you're going to pick film actors for a serious drama, you can't really go wrong with two of the better actors of the past half century: Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, especially when they're both perfect for the role (though Hoffman may be a tad too old). It also helps when you have arguably the best cinematographer of a generation in Roger Deakins (who at this point has reached Scorsese-level Oscar snubbing). The movie comes out December 5, and I'll be shocked if the film doesn't pick up at least a few nominations, if not Best Picture consideration.

Two theater reviews

The lack of posting has been partially due to two of my pieces going to the Maroon. Last week I reviewed both Dead Man's Cell Phone at the Steppenwolf and Four Places at Victory Gardens. I liked them both. Say what you will about Sarah Ruhl, but I do think her sudden popularity is justified. As for Four Places, it's surprisingly one of the better shows I've seen all season, and easily one of the best shows I've ever seen where the average age of the audience was over 60.

A.O. Scott loves him some Roger Ebert

A.O. Scott had a great piece over the weekend on the return of Roger Ebert's written reviews, pointing out rightly that his writing, not his T.V. arguing, has always been his greatest strength. He even makes some choice observations about the state of film criticism that—gasp!— have not been repeated ad nauseum over the last 3 years:

Such attrition is hardly limited to movie reviewers, and it has more to do with the economics of newspapers than with the health of criticism as a cultural undertaking...

It seems to me that “Sneak Previews” and its descendants, far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character.

While he still feels the need to make a point about a glut of online critics, his point about newspaper economy and democratization are surprisingly insightful. I'm glad he didn't resort to the mother's basement line of arguing. That would just make him look silly. Oh wait:

This Just In: Criticism is Dead!

Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Goldstein has made a shocking revelation: New media has reduced the influence of the critic! And he's got the testimony of his 9-year-old son's video game habits to prove it! Someone mail this column back to 2006, when I would have cared. (LAT)

August: Osage County wins the Pulitzer—Congrats Tracy Letts

Looks like I won't have to see Phantom. Tracy Letts absolutely deserved his win for the Pulitzer Prize, and it's not the last award he'll be winning in the next few months. August: Osage County is the best play on Broadway at least since Proof, and I'll most likely be making another bet once Tony season rolls around. (Herald Tribune)

Betting on the Pulitzer Prize

Since we have less than 24 hours until the Pulitzer Prizes are announced and I'm feeling aggressive, I'm willing to make a wager. If August: Osage County doesn't win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, I'll see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway this summer. This may sound like a reward to some, but trust me, Andrew Lloyd Webber is to me a theatrical fate worse than death. Oh God, August: Osage County better win.

Searching for Joe Papp

Tell me if this doesn't sound like an ideal artistic director of a New York theater to you:

Give me an annual budget of $5 million, all my downtown contacts and see if I don’t make a splash. I’d program a season of Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker and Will Eno. Plus—eventually—younger, unproduced playwrights who landed on my desk. (The more violent and obscene, the better.) Foreign writers, too, in fresh translations. Every first Monday I’d throw a free play reading with an open bar. In the summer, I’d open the doors for a two-month workshop by a favored company—Radiohole, the Debate Society or Nature Theater of Oklahoma—ending in a massive celebration. The advertising would be slick and bold, the tickets cheap, the parties raucous and the shows calculated to enrage, excite and astound. For the first five years, I would not accept any subscriber over the age of 35. I’d have blogs, press conferences, preshow talks and fat souvenir programs. I’d constantly bombard the media with video and op-ed pieces tied to our shows—when I wasn’t hosting a kick-ass party.

Time Out New York editor David Cole, who devised this dream scenario, dismissed it as damn near impossibly in today's theater culture, where companies are strained by subscriber demands, critical scorn, raising ticket and rent prices, and the decline in NEA funding. Cole then turned to asking where the next theatrical impresario in the mold of Joe Papp could be found, and preferably one who was slightly less of a douche. It's worth noting that exciting, dangerous theater is somewhat lacking in the U.S., political or otherwise. What I should note is that Chicago, with its smaller real estate prices and less subscription-based audiences, has the potential to support Cole's dream theater, but so far have yet to push quite hard enough.

It was the damn dirty apes!

Charlton Heston died. You are now free to pry his gun from his cold hands (NYT).

Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbauch's Stupid Guys turn into Crazy Girls

I must confess two things before reviewing Margot at the Wedding, which I just saw at Doc. First, the males in my family bear striking resemblances to the males in The Squid and the Whale, so I have an exceedingly intimate relationship with the films of Noah Baumbach (it doesn't help that I watched Kicking and Screaming in my last quarter in college). Secondly, in the movie, Margot's son Claude went to Bronx Science, where I also went for high school. So I have that bias as well.

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"Ennui" is a word that could describe just about every Noah Baumbach movie. Even Baumbach's funny moments are immediately followed by awkward hesitation. Margot at the Wedding may be his most ennui-based movie yet, where every character hates every other character as much as they try to get along with them. While The Squid and the Whale addressed the problems of childhood family life, and Kicking and Screaming dealt with existential crisis of the recent college graduate, Margot at the Wedding is Baumbach's most adult film yet, where we see things from the perspective of the 30-something literati, and not those who depend on them.

The main problem with Baumbach's movies in the past has been his portrayal of women. Perhaps to apologize for that, Margot at the Wedding's focus lays solely on its female characters, with men serving as mere objects to reflecting on the women and not the other way around. While Jack Black gives a fine performance as Malcom, Margot's sister's fiancee, he's still a caricature of the loser male, who may very well have been someone's roommate in Kicking and Screaming (but was somehow smart enough to get into Stuyvesant). The result is a lot more bitchiness over the general idiocy of the males of Baumbach's past work, and a lot more psychopharmaceuticals as well.

I've never been that big a fan of Nicole Kidman, but Margot is without a doubt my favorite role of hers, alternating between being doped up, paranoid, sincere, hostile, defensive, insecure or some combination of each. Hope Davis is also great as Margot's emotionally unstable younger sister Pauline (it's the hormones). While the kids were the strength of The Squid and the Whale, they're actually kind of hollow here, which I found particularly disappointing. It's as if Baumbach sides with whoever he happens to be focusing on for each movie, and all the other characters fall by the wayside. He gets away with it by writing absurd, painfully funny dialog, but he's going to have to make his secondary characters stand on their own two legs more if he wants to advance as a filmmaker.

That being said, I liked Margot at the Wedding a lot, and think it deserved more praise than it got when it came out last fall. It's not a particularly entertaining movie, in the same way that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was not entertaining.

Princess Di: The Musical?

It's like Mystic Pizza: The Musical, except with less taste. (News.com.au via Gawker)

Freakonomics Theater?

In a performance art experiment that would certainly interest Steven Levitt, Annie Dorsen, the director of Passing Strange, offered online patrons to contribute to the script for the play Democracy in America—for the right price, of course:

And for 40 minutes three game actors — Tony Torn, Okwui Okpokwasili, Philippa Kaye — perform the submissions as puckish, avant-garde vaudeville: they move in slow motion ($15); mimic the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” ($50); and recite an ad for Joyce SoHo ($100). Polling may produce bland, conventional art (and politicians), but when you put things up for sale, the results are more unpredictable, awful and interesting.

In addition to being an antidote for theater columnists bemoaning the lack of American political theater, the play serves as an interesting barometer for the tastes of the New York SoHo crowd. While I won't get to see it, it's a fascinating experiment both from a social science and dramatic perspective.

23-Year Old Broadway Playwrights? What have I done with my life?

And I thought a recent grad getting produced at Williamstown was impressive. Nathan Jackson's got nothing on James Gardiner and Nick Blaemire, 23 year old recent graduates of Maryland and Michigan, respectively, who are getting their musical Glory Days produced on Broadway. This is a straight transfer from the Signature Theater in Arlington, VA, and when people barely 2 years older than me get their play on the Great White Way, I must simply tip my cap. Congrats Gardiner and Blaemire, you're now the Lebron James and Mark Zuckerberg of American theater. (NYT)

The Court's Carousel won't leave you walking alone

In the past two years, Chicago has seen two minimalist revivals of Rogers and Hammerstein's two most enduring plays Oklahoma! at American Theater Company and now the Court Theatre's production of Carousel. While it's somewhat frustrating Chicago does not have enough larger theater spaces to mount more extravagant productions, in both cases, the smaller spaces has lead to particularly innovative tactics. ATC returned Oklahoma! to its small-town, Wild West roots, making you feel as if you were actually on the prairie with the actors. And Carousel, lacking the titular set piece, turns the focus of the production to the emotional turmoil and dramatic weight of the story. While the latter production makes for a slightly less enjoyable musical, it also results in a much better work of drama.

In other recent musical revivals, the Court has focused on a bare-bones style, and the results have ranged from outstanding (their prisoner's tale version of Man of La Mancha) or the lackluster (Raisin). While not perfect, this Carousel, directed by Charlie Newell, is a much more challenging production than most remountings of the Great White Way. The focus is more on the acting than the singing, and Nicholas Belton's excellent grasp of his character made up for the unfortunate shrillness of his voice (though he did botch a couple of lines). Johanna McKenzie Miller was probably the best singer, but it was her performance as a more solemn, resigned Julie Jordan that was the real revelation. Ms. Miller's Julie doesnt seem like a queer one as much as a women at her wit's end. The production continued Carousel's long history of multiracial casting, even with a stripped down cast that featured Ernestine Jackson (Mama in the Court's Raisin) triple cast as Netti, the Starkeeper, and Dr. Seldon. It would have been a bolder decision to have one of the black male actors play the conniving criminal Jigger Cragin, but I suppose I can't ask for too much (Matthew Brumlow gave the most consistent performance as Jigger besides).

John Culbert's scene design, an angled wall that makes the stage look bigger than it actually is, was one of the highlights of the production, with one major caveat. Instead of letting the carousel image go altogether, someone felt the need to have a miniature carousel horse hanging by a string from the rafters. The set is so meticulously suited for the scale of this production, and works so efficiently, that's its baffling that such a tacked on, rather silly looking horse would make it past previews. Surely there must be better uses of a Carousel horse than looking like nothing more than a giant Christmas ornament.

The music has always been the most enduring element of Carousel, and it's given a top notch orchestration by Doug Peck. Additionally, the ballet with Bigelow's daughter is a particularly offbeat take by choreographer Randy Duncan, and it works given the offbeat, fiery personality Laura Scheinbaum gives Louise. It's deceptively skillful, starting off looking like kids just playing around until the dancing becomes more elaborate.

Still, the most notable part of Newell's production is the story, as Bigelow's conflicted, ultimately tragic character complements Julie's sorrowful desperation for happiness, even if Ms. Miller and Mr. Benton lack chemistry. While the program notes that Carousel differed from Lilliom, the Hungarian play it adapted, in its more upbeat ending, this is probably the most downbeat ending to Carousel you'll ever see. All in all, in terms of the Court's motto, Newell's production has certainly made this American classic come alive.

Not a cult, sorry for the confusion

So I was a little quick to jump the gun on my hesitancy toward Theatre Tribe. It is a pretty standard collection of theater bloggers, as it turns out. Sorry for my herd mentality paranoia:

Expect more from Tynan's Anger in the future. Upcoming: Reviews of Dead Man's Cellphone and Carousel, reviews of the John Osborne and David Mamet biographies (finally finished!), and, lest my blogging alliances get confused, a daily recap of theater/culture blogosphere at the arbitrary time of 7 p.m. central time (for the moment). I will have fewer other priorities to get to, now that mu BA is done. Of course, baseball season and Smash Bros are new, dangerous distractions too.