|
Two self-destructive people, with nothing in common, and with no apparent redeeming qualities, meet in a bar, provide a few early hope-inducing laughs for the audience, sing a couple mildly amusing but forgettable songs, lament about life, meet a variety of uninteresting characters, and somehow survive to be miserable together for at least another day in a kind of weak Scottish relative of the Scorsese movie After Hours. Midsummer received a lot of great reviews, which highlighted what a fun, exhilarating show it is. Huh? The best laugh line was provided by a Tickle Me Elmo toy, which was not one of the dozen or so characters portrayed by Chaon Cross and Patrick Mulvey, whose talents were the saving grace of the show, which went on for an hour forty minutes, seemed like two hours, and would have been better at an hour fifteen. The most profound line of the night was offered, twice, like a lot of other lines in the show, by a parking lot machine, the unrealistic nature of which was brought home by the inability of the machine where I parked my car to operate without human intervention by a disembodied lot attendant. Apparently other potential audience members were smart enough to look past the reviews, as the theater was practically empty. In that regard I felt sorry for the actors, particularly Cross, whom I have greatly enjoyed in recent sold-out productions of Life Sucks, Macbeth and Photograph 51. As if the script weren’t enough of a burden, the actors also had to put up with the on-and-off stomping from the theater space above that would have distracted me enough to stop what I was doing, bang on the ceiling, and yell out “we’re trying to work here,” which, by the way, would have been the second best laugh of the evening. |
Greenhouse Theater Center
The Mushroom Cure – Greenhouse Theater – June 2, 2019
Adam Strauss’s one man show opens with a portrayal of him trying to decide between an iPod and an iriver (a South Korean MP3 player I never heard of before). His well-timed, articulate, and frenzied conversation with himself artfully sets the stage for the show’s comedic inspection of his obsessive compulsive disorder.
Because the show is in a theater, not a club, and is not billed as a standup routine, though it certainly has elements of one, it is sometimes difficult for the audience to know how it should react to Strauss’s abuse of the fourth wall. I found this troublesome only in the sense that there were moments when I felt like the audience didn’t give him the interaction he sought or appreciation he deserved, perhaps debating with themselves as to whether it was appropriate to respond.
Strauss has an engaging personality that makes it easy to sympathize, and frequently emphasize, with his story, for, although most of us probably have not spent 11 hours trying to cook up a foul-tasting psychedelic hallucinogen from mail-order cacti, who hasn’t double or triple-checked that they locked a door or berated themselves at times for indecisively failing to act.
For me, rejecting his offer to the audience to try the concoction he said was cactus juice, which he stirred up on stage, was not one of those times, as he gave no indication that there might be chocolate syrup available to add to it.
At the end of the show, Strauss asks that anyone in the audience who, after listening to him, thinks they have OCD, raise their hand six times, eliciting a nice laugh. But, as with trying the cactus juice, no one did. In the lobby afterward, however, I told him I had been tempted to raise my hand twice. I only told him once.
Bright Star – BoHo Theater – May 2, 2019
It’s the same old story – (spoiler alert) boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, someone throws the baby off a train.
I didn’t know going in that that last key element of Bright Star was based on the true story of the Iron Mountain Baby (though the other 99% of the play isn’t). I just knew that Steve Martin wrote the book of the play and that there would be bluegrass music by him and Edie Brickell.
I’ve seen Martin’s plays The Underpants and Picasso at the Lapin Agile. I haven’t see his Meteor Shower (or a real one for that matter), but it’s enough just to know that one critic wrote: “Meteor Shower plunges into the absurd without establishing a philosophical grounding for the mania. It’s sitcom Ionesco crossed with a Saturday Night Live parody of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
Following that train of thought (pun intended), I’ve seen Orson Welles’s Shadow, which is a play by Austin Pendleton about Welles directing Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And Pendleton played in the 1989 Broadway revival of Grand Hotel, which is coincidental to the fact that three of the actors in Bright Star, the scene-stealing Rachel Whyte, Jennifer Ledesma, and Jeff Pierpoint, were in the version of Grand Hotel I saw last year at Theater Wit.
And Pierpoint, who plays Billy in Bright Star, was once the understudy for the character J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Marriott Lincolnshire Theater. Pierpoint, plays Pierrepont, a match made in theatrical heaven.
This was BoHo’s (Bohemian Theater Ensemble) first production at the Greenhouse Theater Center. I ate once at the BoHo (Bohemian House) restaurant in Chicago, and thankfully will never have to again, as it closed last year after four years of operation. Based on Bright Star, I have higher hopes for the theater company.