19 April 2020 Sunday

[KathyB]

Exciting news of the day: I accidentally let a tissue get too close to a candle flame. Fortunately nothing else caught fire and it burned itself out quickly.

I am up to the part in Gone with the Wind where Rhett Butler asks the widow Mrs. (Scarlett) Hamilton to lead the dancing for an exorbitant price. At this point, Scarlett is not one of my favorite literary characters--she's way too full of herself. But so is Rhett, it's just that we get Scarlett's viewpoint on everything. And Margaret Mitchell does like to use the exclamation point!

Something positive for today: Desert Island Cast Recordings from the NYT critics

[scenicdesign71]

That tissue/flame ordeal does sound exciting!

Here's another positive thing for today: the adorable Michael Urie will be appearing in a livestream benefit reading of Buyer & Cellar tonight on YouTube.

https://www.broadway.com/buzz/199076/michael-urie-to-return-to-buyer-cellar-with-broadwaycom-living-room-livestream-benefit/

[scenicdesign71]

SO good!

I didn't see B&C during its original run, but later caught it on PBS and found it delightful, notwithstanding my prejudice against it since, after opening at the same time as rogerandtom, B&C went on to win awards, an open-ended commercial transfer (eventually running for a year at the only Off-Broadway house that could've readily accommodated R&T's alley staging, had some enterprising producer ever decided to pick us up), a national tour, a London production and that PBS taping...

...while R&T got the consolation prize of three mildly buzzy months at HERE, a passel of nice reviews and a five-minute segment on NY1, before promptly vanishing from the face of the Earth.   

B&C was, semi-facetiously, the Enemy Show, our direct competition; and in the end it won, hands-down.  So imagine my dismay when I eventually saw the damn thing on TV and found it... pretty darn enchanting.

But if anything, I enjoyed tonight's livestream even more.  I suspect that, while the play itself is a warm, funny, well-constructed and entirely professional piece of writing, turning it into a captivating evening is all on the solo performer.  Someday I'll have to get the script to read, and see whether that impression holds: It's clearly a plum showcase for an actor, but, while I've never seen anyone else in the role, I can't help wondering whether the piece might lose quite a bit of its luster in even slightly lesser hands than Urie's.

When I sent Lance the link to this, he expressed some blanket reservations about the livestreamed, socially-distanced "theatre" that has been sprouting up over the past month; sensibly enough, he worried about the lack (albeit necessary in the current context) of a live, in-person audience for work that was written for one, and about how that would affect the experience.  In response, I could only say that -- as much as I agree with his doubts in principle, and could never accept these kinds of experiments as a permanent replacement for actual theatre -- nevertheless, between this and Lips Together, Teeth Apart a couple weeks ago, as a response to this suddenly weird new world, BroadwayWorld is now two for two.

Terrence McNally's script, with its plentiful interior monologues and spiritually isolated characters, ended up lending itself quite well to the Zoom format, whose Brady Bunch grid of talking heads turned out to be a serendipitously appropriate and elegant format for that reading.  And while I will forever regret missing the original production entirely -- in my head those roles belong to the original cast, despite never having seen them -- Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ari Graynor, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Zachary Quinto are no slouches either, and there wasn't a weak link among them.

Following a slightly different presentational strategy (befitting the one-man-show format) last night, B&C was staged for two cameras in a largely-empty corner of Urie's apartment, giving everything the somewhat artificially hyper-intimate, semi-improvised, confessional feel of a YouTube vlog -- say, that of a desperate aspiring actor in LA -- which, it turned out, serves the piece quite well indeed.  In fact, in Urie's dazzling performance, I didn't miss the give-and-take of a live audience at all -- which is all the more impressive in a longish solo performance where, traditionally, we would be the actor's only scene partner, with that rapport being all there is for him to play against.