Last night I had the pleasure to see As You Like It at BAM, a production of The Bridge Project. I saw their fantastic production of Winter's Tale last year, and will be seeing their Tempest in a month or so. Given their play choices and the quality of this production of As You Like It I'd like to suggest a new slogan, The Bridge Project: Making Bad Plays Surprisingly Bearable.
I'm not going to talk much about the production except to say that it's solid, the cast is pretty great, and that the first half could have used some additional humor or cuts to make it move along more swiftly. If you've ever wanted to see a solid production of As You Like It, I suggest this one. If you don't know/remember which one As You Like It is, it's the one where the guy and girl fall in love, and the girl dresses up like a guy to teach the guy she loves how to be Super Husband-Slash-Lover.
But what I want to talk about SHAKESPEARE SPOILER ALERT is a little moment in the final scene. Rosalind-Dressed-As-A-man stands in front of everybody and reveals that she's going to make everything okay for everybody, and that she'll be right back in a few minutes. She goes offstage. Touchstone (the fool, played with aplomb by reasons to be pretty's Thomas Sadoski) gives a whole 5 minute monologue about how to verbally quarrel, the "Retort Courteous/Quip Modest" speech. This goes on for a short eternity, long enough to allow Rosalind to come back dressed all pretty pretty like a woman, and everybody gasps.
The reveal takes freaking forever. And as surprised as I was that Sadosky actually made the speech funnier than I ever though it was, where is the production with a decent costume designer that cuts or at least moves the speech? The production that has Rosalind say, "I'm going to fix all this", then suddenly a clever costume transformation onstage, and suddenly the man is a woman, and everybody gasps and you buy it?
The same Kennedy Center Honors also featured a tribute to Mel Brooks, with musical numbers from basically everything he ever wrote. Except for Young Frankenstein The Musical, of course.
A few months ago I get a "Google Alert" e-mail for the words "Oedipus for Kids", which is the title of a musical I wrote that was published earlier this year. A surprising e-mail at that, because it was the e-mail that alerted me that the premiere international production of "Oedipus" was to be performed in Windsor, Ontario. With the first performance starting about... Oh, 5 hours after I received the e-mail.
I'd gone to see Oe4K productions in the past, and I might have gone to see this one; there is no out-of-body experience like watching people you've never met perform songs and dialogue you'd written in a Cosi on 23rd street. Yet two things were keeping me from going:
The very very short notice, which is Internet-speak for very very high airfare.
Secondarily, how cold I remember Canada being. Because in a few hours I was headed to a friend's aunt's summer house for the weekend. So: hysterical songs in a gut-busting musical that will make you laugh until your ears bleed brain juice? Or the beach? The choice was pretty clear.
There isn't a blame game here. My publisher is a play publisher. And unfortunately, like anything else involving theater, the move into the digital age comes slow. So the custom content-management system with a massive DB-backend that does auto-messaging to opt-in authors when their works are performed? A little too expensive for the theater world, sad but accurate.
And what about the alternative? I might be interested to hear about how your version of Oedipus For Kids' "Sphinxy" puppet had an eyeball that popped out when he contracted the plague. But while I'd love an e-mail from a prospective production, I can't imagine that, say, Jason Robert Brown's response to an "I'm doing Last Five Years" e-mail is more than a "Great, you're production ten billion and seven".
But what I then learned is that even if there was this author-alert system, it isn't that simple. The theater licensing world gets something known as a "Window Shopper", which is somebody who requests a quote, or even a full out license with materials and the like, but at the end may not actually perform the show and could even switch shows entire just a few short weeks beforehand. So I could have received an e-mail, immediately booked my flight nice and early, and then contacted the theater company the week before to let them know that the author was going to show up.
And then promptly received an e-mail back saying, "What? You're not Jason Robert Brown."
Back in September, the NYTimes posted a feature on the ad campaign evolution for this year's Ragtime Revival. I was looking at it today and found this aborted design: Am I the only one who likes it much better than the one they ended up going with?
Oedipus for Kids. A hysterical 3-person musical from the writers of Broadway Abridged. Performance rights now available.
"A spoof of children’s theater with some truly funny songs and endearingly
loopy performances from a cast of just three."
Charles Isherwood The New York Times
"Patterson
and Varod’s book captures a Christopher Durang-like sensibility that is
infectiously entertaining. Varod and Saferstein’s score is a total treat,
too."
