16 January 2020 Haircut Thursday

[KathyB]

Today is the day I'm finally getting a haircut, after way too long. I feel like I should ask for a buzz cut. It is also Trash Thursday (as it is every Thursday in my neighborhood) and Stop Procrastinating and Get to Work on the Newsletter Thursday.

Nothing of any consequence has gone on over the past two days, other than my paying my estimated taxes.

[scenicdesign71]

It hasn't been way too long, by my usual standards, but long enough that I've been thinking about getting a haircut soon -- before it gets to having been way too long, for once.

I saw Jagged Little Pill tonight.  It is slickly constructed, faultlessly professional on all fronts, beautifully performed by an excellent cast, moves fleetly and adroitly through two and a half entertaining hours, and even had me crying a bit by the end.

It also owes a lot to Next To Normal (Tom Kitt is credited as music supervisor, orchestrator and arranger) and Dear Evan Hansen -- it's almost hard not to imagine a pitch, at some point in its development, citing those two influences "set to the greatest hits of Alanis Morissette".  Which is perhaps why the evening's implacable earnestness seemed to me to sit somewhat oddly next to its perhaps-too-efficiently engineered focus-group appeal.

Maybe my Gen-X cynicism is showing, but I was a bit surprised by bookwriter Diablo Cody's irony-free, solemnly sincere work here: humor isn't exactly in short supply, as such, but it is uniformly gentle and toothless even when gesturing toward the dry acerbity that I think of as a crucial component of both Cody's and Morissette's respective brands.

Or maybe it's unavoidable that a mostly jukebox score, even by as coruscating a word- and tunesmith as Morissette, would have a genericizing effect upon a story (and with a cast of characters) as large as the one Cody has devised.  Or -- contra the reviews -- perhaps the pruning that has reportedly taken place since Cambridge actually overshot the mark just a bit: while the production at ART was said to be overstuffed to the point of unwieldiness, its sprawl might at least have explained the sketchy quality of the characters -- who may number slightly fewer in the sleeker B'way version while still not seeming fully-enough developed.  By contrast, it's certainly not coincidental that N2N and DEH, both superior works, feature original stories and original scores -- which allow them significantly more latitude for dramatic, musical and character development and specificity in the same running time as JLP.  For all of Cody's ingenuity in fitting the songs into appropriate story moments (helped by a lot of wonderfully resourceful staging and choreography), Morissette's lyrics, even with some adjustments, rarely feel like they're advancing the story so much as dwelling in a single emotional state for five minutes.

Or maybe, as a single, childless middle-aged gay guy with no personal connection to 21st-century upper-middle-class suburban family life, I'm just not the right audience for this show (though DEH, three years ago, and N2N, nine, didn't feel quite so remote to me somehow).  Out of sheer laziness, I went to the theatre tonight still wearing my work clothes: brand-new clean ones for the new job, so without a single  drop of paint on them yet, but still distinctly contractor-casual (Carhartt jacket, hoodie, cargo pants, workboots) in marked contrast to the similar-age but stylishly-attired, impeccably-groomed and very well-off looking folks around me (I lucked into a single eighth-row dead-center orchestra seat without paying premium), for whom the show's "Big Little Lies, Connecticut edition" milieu seemed tailor-made.