theaterboy®

The Equus reviews ...

... are in, and they seem to enjoy frolicking about with words like "equimaniac" and "hippophile."

Guardian eminence Michael Billington puts it bluntly, right at the top of his review: "Forget all the prurient press speculation about Harry Potter's private parts. The revelation of this revival is that Daniel Radcliffe really can act."

(Bonus reading: Billington on the history of stage nudity, a story Tboy likewise enjoyed exploring a few years back in this City Paper piece. Though Tboy wasn't genius enough to slip a "hoo-ha" past his editors. Or to end on "half-cocked.")

The Times' Benedict Nightingale likewise takes the direct route: "OK, it was exactly what all that prurient hype promised."  (Aside: When did critics for The Times of London begin launching their reviews with American colloquialisms?)

The Telegraph drools a bit, saying that "the diminutive (but perfectly formed)" Radcliffe "brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected range and depth."

The Independent, by contrast, is content with "Radcliffe acquits himself well."

Most everyone likes John Napier's design (though for what it's worth, Tboy thinks the horse mask looks like a fruit bowl, at least from the Reuters photo on the Telegraph site).

As for the play, here's Nightingale:  "Equus is at root dated, pretentious and even a bit pernicious ..."

And Billington: "What disturbs me, 34 years after the play's premiere, is the way ... Shaffer romanticises pain."

Both of the big boys take swipes, sidelong or otherwise, at R.D. Laing, whose notions influenced Shaffer's thinking on the blandness of normality.

So there you have it: The critics, as usual, are all over the map.

You, Satan: Behind me.

Technical difficulties (mostly) resolved

The latest episode of the podcast is now really and truly available. Server hiccup. (Or something: Tboy actually has no clue at all.)

The second episode remains mysteriously unavailable, but Tboy assures you it's no great loss.  He'll try to fix it when he has more than 5 minutes.

Kate Debelack, however, still reigns over the first, which is somehow still there for your enjoyment.

(Tboy loves Macs, but he confesses he's beginning to be a little cranky with iWeb.)

Theaterboy Presents:The Show That Goes Like This

Listen, my children, and you shall hear ... the sound of The Show That Goes Like This!

That's right, at loooooong last Tboy has done something about a third episode, which you'll find on the Web over here; if you'd rather listen in iTunes and download it to your iPod, you can click the "Subscribe" icon on this page or just click right here.

In this episode: An interview with D.C.-based actor-director Mitchell Hébert and the cast of his Woolly/UM production of The Distance From Here -- which runs through March 3, so listen now! (Pictured, right: James Gardiner, recent Helen Hayes Award nominee as part of the Dog Sees God ensemble, starring as Darrell.)

Plus, as always, an Eleven O'Clock Number you've gotta hear to believe.  So go on, get your Show on.

Gotta-get-that-music links for you Eleven O'Clock Number fans:

Buy the Ballroom original cast album.

Buy the My Favorite Broadway CD:

Buy the My Favorite Broadway DVD:

Tboy is 39 whole years of age.

(Actually he has to confess: His 30s have been amazing, so he's not really thinking of his 40s with much trepidation.)

1). This is an amazing story.  I had no idea. (Apparently very few people did.)

2). That one's amazing, this one's downright flabbergasting. Tboy's brother-in-law is in the firearms trade, which is how Tboy came to be on the TSA's watch list. (Tboy's sister wrapped Tboy's Christmas present using packing peanuts that had previously been used to ship ammunition or something, so naturally Tboy's luggage set off every explosives-residue alarm in the airport.) So Tboy knows the firearms people are a little wacky.  But he had no idea they'd eat their own with such appetite.  And we let these people have guns?

3). Dr. H is all over the Internets today.  He's weighed in on "actors v. actresses" over here (Tboy would like you to know that yes, this kind of conversation happens all the time), and he's also over here, talking about finding his inner 6-year-old.

Because no visit to the Deep South is complete without a story involving an actor, a hit-and-run, and a woman who's given her husband the metaphorical finger by destroying some significant piece of property. (Tboy can say this because he's from the Deep South, and because no sh*t he has a cousin who tried to set her husband on fire. But he warns you Yankees not to get all supercilious, because we'll shoot your asses.)

Friday, Feb. 23

Our play is coming along fabulously: had a good designer run yesterday, despite the fact that it was 80 degrees in the room (Bikram Theatre). Our playwright came back today and we did another run today.

No one has opened yet: I'm looking forward to seeing all of them. The Unseen is Craig's play that takes place in a prison; Sherry's piece is sort of a history of American/Middle Eastern relations, as filtered through Barbie and the death of a mother ...

We go drinking with the cast of Strike/Slip, by Naomi Iizuka, who I met in the elevator today, and one of the cast members got hit by a car driven by a woman who had just taken her four children out of her house when the house blew up. We found out later that she's going through a bitter divorce (the euphemism for THE GUY'S BEING A TOTAL DICKHEAD) and her husband wasn't going to get the house, so he blew it up for the insurance money. The cast member is healing, but arrives at the bar in a wheelchair. She said the whole incident was very much of a piece with the play.

I just saw Josh Lefkowitz, who's in The As/If Body Loop, the last play to start rehearsing.

More later,

-- Jen

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to "places":

Bob Mondello had a pass this week at Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, by the playwright occasionally known as LuckySpinster, and he rather liked it. "You’d have to be a little nuts to go where Washington Shakespeare Company has traipsed so adventurously," he says right at the top. No fear, though: The story sells, and the Spinster's "skill at matching the Bard’s couplets with her own is impressive, as is her facility for delineating ancient politics -- but it’s her literary wit that sets Rape of Lucrece apart."

Celia Wren weighed in last week in the WashPo, saying much the same. Staging the standards, she writes, is "for wimps": "Kimball and director Sarah Denhardt cannily exploit the discomfort factor" inherent in the topic and the text, and WSC's production "unfurls on an unnervingly intimate scale."  (Tboy, for his part, thought WSC did an amazing job with production values, considering that the show was basically an emergency reboot, and that the Spinster did a bang-up job making a lot of brand-new dialogue sound very much like Shakespeare.)

Our boy Glen Weldon, fearless man, confronted Forum Theatre's multimedia Kid-Simple: A Radio Play in the Flesh, and didn't exactly love it-- though he did make it sound cool enough to make Tboy want to catch up with it: "Director Jessica Burgess throws a lot of stuff against the (fourth) wall, but not much ends up sticking: The script’s wordplay gets lost amid the tumult, and once the proceedings become loaded down with portent and allegory, the show never recovers .... With some tightening, Kid-Simple will become faster, funnier, and less self-conscious. The ending, however, still won’t make any damn sense."

Celia says Jordan Harrison's "gleefully loopy, language-drunk script is an esoteric melding of spy caper and modern fantasy", complete with "a  meta-theatrical spin ... an onstage part for a sound-effects maestro, the Foley Artist, who generates the story's audibles ... in view of the audience." (That would be Scott Burgess.) Sez Celia: "It's a coy gimmick but it defamiliarizes a routine element of theater -- sound -- thereby resuscitating its mystique."

Tboy took his own self out to Olney (on a cold and snowy night, too), for The Constant Wife, which he thought mostly charming: It's a "snappy entertainment" that "plays brisk and pretty and witty," even if "the archly modern attitudes and the brittle, Wilde-at-heart banter ultimately aren’t quite dazzling enough to blind audiences to the thinness of Maugham’s characterizations." The sets and costumes rock, though.

Nelson Pressley seems to have been in the same drawing room: He reviewed the set for two paragraphs (which always strikes Tboy as a sign that a critic's treading carefully around the question of whether he liked the show or not), then went on to not quite weigh in on the rest of the production until toward the end: "Elliott ... couldn't be breezier. The supporting cast pitches their performances accordingly... They manage the affair as Constance would: with a muted but impeccable sense of style."

Oh, and Peter Marks braved the streets of New York, reporting back that Journey's End is gripping and that in the last third of The Coast of Utopia, "the lengthy preliminaries finally have given way to a story of historical suppleness and sweep."

Bonus non-review thingy: PeterM also talks to the puppet guy from the Kennedy Center's Carnival!, which Tboy's gonna catch tomorrow.

So what happened in your dressing room/control booth/lobby this week? What's on your mind as the weekend looms? What's working your last nerve?

Mendenhall gets serious scoping out the lay of the Luhvul land ...

Sunday, Feb. 11

Humana is starting to get busy: Naomi Iizuka showed up for the first read of her piece (Strike Slip). Of interest to DC audiences is Craig Wright (The Unseen) and Sherry Kramer (When Something Wonderful Ends), whose new plays are both being done.  Josh Lefkowitz, who did that great one-man piece at the Fringe and then at Woolly, is here too, in one of the other plays.

There are what seems like 50 apprentices, who work like dogs. There are also two other projects, The Open Road Anthology, which is a collaborative writing project, and Susan Lori Parks'  365 plays.

I played darts at Freddy's last night. My kind of place. Cash only, and bring an oxygen tank. You should come, if at all possible. There's a great energy here.

Best,

Jen

Woe...

Tboy is 39 whole years of age.

(Actually he has to confess: His 30s have been amazing, so he's not really thinking of his 40s with much trepidation.)

Saturday randomness

1). This is an amazing story.  I had no idea. (Apparently very few people did.)

2). That one's amazing, this one's downright flabbergasting. Tboy's brother-in-law is in the firearms trade, which is how Tboy came to be on the TSA's watch list. (Tboy's sister wrapped Tboy's Christmas present using packing peanuts that had previously been used to ship ammunition or something, so naturally Tboy's luggage set off every explosives-residue alarm in the airport.) So Tboy knows the firearms people are a little wacky.  But he had no idea they'd eat their own with such appetite.  And we let these people have guns?

3). Dr. H is all over the Internets today.  He's weighed in on "actors v. actresses" over here (Tboy would like you to know that yes, this kind of conversation happens all the time), and he's also over here, talking about finding his inner 6-year-old.

Dispatch from Humana, Episode the Third

Because no visit to the Deep South is complete without a story involving an actor, a hit-and-run, and a woman who's given her husband the metaphorical finger by destroying some significant piece of property. (Tboy can say this because he's from the Deep South, and because no sh*t he has a cousin who tried to set her husband on fire. But he warns you Yankees not to get all supercilious, because we'll shoot your asses.)

Friday, Feb. 23

Our play is coming along fabulously: had a good designer run yesterday, despite the fact that it was 80 degrees in the room (Bikram Theatre). Our playwright came back today and we did another run today.

No one has opened yet: I'm looking forward to seeing all of them. The Unseen is Craig's play that takes place in a prison; Sherry's piece is sort of a history of American/Middle Eastern relations, as filtered through Barbie and the death of a mother ...

We go drinking with the cast of Strike/Slip, by Naomi Iizuka, who I met in the elevator today, and one of the cast members got hit by a car driven by a woman who had just taken her four children out of her house when the house blew up. We found out later that she's going through a bitter divorce (the euphemism for THE GUY'S BEING A TOTAL DICKHEAD) and her husband wasn't going to get the house, so he blew it up for the insurance money. The cast member is healing, but arrives at the bar in a wheelchair. She said the whole incident was very much of a piece with the play.

I just saw Josh Lefkowitz, who's in The As/If Body Loop, the last play to start rehearsing.

More later,

-- Jen

The Week in Review(s)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to "places":

Bob Mondello had a pass this week at Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, by the playwright occasionally known as LuckySpinster, and he rather liked it. "You’d have to be a little nuts to go where Washington Shakespeare Company has traipsed so adventurously," he says right at the top. No fear, though: The story sells, and the Spinster's "skill at matching the Bard’s couplets with her own is impressive, as is her facility for delineating ancient politics -- but it’s her literary wit that sets Rape of Lucrece apart."

Celia Wren weighed in last week in the WashPo, saying much the same. Staging the standards, she writes, is "for wimps": "Kimball and director Sarah Denhardt cannily exploit the discomfort factor" inherent in the topic and the text, and WSC's production "unfurls on an unnervingly intimate scale."  (Tboy, for his part, thought WSC did an amazing job with production values, considering that the show was basically an emergency reboot, and that the Spinster did a bang-up job making a lot of brand-new dialogue sound very much like Shakespeare.)

Our boy Glen Weldon, fearless man, confronted Forum Theatre's multimedia Kid-Simple: A Radio Play in the Flesh, and didn't exactly love it-- though he did make it sound cool enough to make Tboy want to catch up with it: "Director Jessica Burgess throws a lot of stuff against the (fourth) wall, but not much ends up sticking: The script’s wordplay gets lost amid the tumult, and once the proceedings become loaded down with portent and allegory, the show never recovers .... With some tightening, Kid-Simple will become faster, funnier, and less self-conscious. The ending, however, still won’t make any damn sense."

Celia says Jordan Harrison's "gleefully loopy, language-drunk script is an esoteric melding of spy caper and modern fantasy", complete with "a  meta-theatrical spin ... an onstage part for a sound-effects maestro, the Foley Artist, who generates the story's audibles ... in view of the audience." (That would be Scott Burgess.) Sez Celia: "It's a coy gimmick but it defamiliarizes a routine element of theater -- sound -- thereby resuscitating its mystique."

Tboy took his own self out to Olney (on a cold and snowy night, too), for The Constant Wife, which he thought mostly charming: It's a "snappy entertainment" that "plays brisk and pretty and witty," even if "the archly modern attitudes and the brittle, Wilde-at-heart banter ultimately aren’t quite dazzling enough to blind audiences to the thinness of Maugham’s characterizations." The sets and costumes rock, though.

Nelson Pressley seems to have been in the same drawing room: He reviewed the set for two paragraphs (which always strikes Tboy as a sign that a critic's treading carefully around the question of whether he liked the show or not), then went on to not quite weigh in on the rest of the production until toward the end: "Elliott ... couldn't be breezier. The supporting cast pitches their performances accordingly... They manage the affair as Constance would: with a muted but impeccable sense of style."

Oh, and Peter Marks braved the streets of New York, reporting back that Journey's End is gripping and that in the last third of The Coast of Utopia, "the lengthy preliminaries finally have given way to a story of historical suppleness and sweep."

Bonus non-review thingy: PeterM also talks to the puppet guy from the Kennedy Center's Carnival!, which Tboy's gonna catch tomorrow.

The Friday open thread.

So what happened in your dressing room/control booth/lobby this week? What's on your mind as the weekend looms? What's working your last nerve?

Dispatch from Humana, part deux

Mendenhall gets serious scoping out the lay of the Luhvul land ...

Sunday, Feb. 11

Humana is starting to get busy: Naomi Iizuka showed up for the first read of her piece (Strike Slip). Of interest to DC audiences is Craig Wright (The Unseen) and Sherry Kramer (When Something Wonderful Ends), whose new plays are both being done.  Josh Lefkowitz, who did that great one-man piece at the Fringe and then at Woolly, is here too, in one of the other plays.

There are what seems like 50 apprentices, who work like dogs. There are also two other projects, The Open Road Anthology, which is a collaborative writing project, and Susan Lori Parks'  365 plays.

I played darts at Freddy's last night. My kind of place. Cash only, and bring an oxygen tank. You should come, if at all possible. There's a great energy here.

Best,

Jen