Don’t Bring a Horse to a Trench Fight
There are two ways of looking at War Horse. Both points of view are equally true, but it comes down to a matter of taste. One is that the puppets are easily the best thing about the play. The other is that the show would be pointless without them.
No Kick to This High
The last time SHN brought screen icon Kathleen Turner to the Bay Area, in 2007, she was costarring with Bill Irwin in a superb production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, straight from Broadway. Turner’s current SHN show at the Curran Theatre, High, is also fresh from Broadway, but the difference is that this one did very poorly there last April, opening on a Tuesday and closing by that Sunday. But the producers must figure there’s life in the old dog yet, or at least that Turner’s star wattage would be able to sustain it on tour. The current Curran run is only five days, but at least this time it was planned that way, clearing out just in time to bring in Jonathan Pryce in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker next week.
Sprechen Sie Rock?
I should be exactly the right age for Rock of Ages. The Broadway jukebox musical is set in Los Angeles in the mid to late ’80s, which was when I was in high school, so I already know pretty much all of the songs. The trouble is, Rock of Ages features pretty much all of the music I hated in high school. Unlike most Broadway popsicals it’s not mining the songbook of any one act but capturing the musical underbelly of an era. Nominated for several Tony Awards in 2009 (but winner of none, which is merely confirmation that it did indeed have a Broadway run), the shows billed as “an arena-rock love story told through the mind-blowing, face-melting hits of Journey, Night Ranger, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison, Asia, Whitesnake and many more.” (Not to mention Foreigner, Starship, Europe, Extreme, Steve Perry, Bon Jovi, Quarterflash, Quiet Riot, Damn Yankees, Survivor and—a rare bright spot—Joan motherfucking Jett.) Now, I don’t much enjoy having my face melted, particularly with Journey, but I was resigned to an evening of sappy ballads and lite metal.
Next to Unbearable
[Someone said I should add a spoiler warning here because I discuss a plot reveal that happens very, very early in the show (and is a bit surprising at the time) and sets the terms for the whole next two hours. So OK, sure, SPOILER WARNING: In this review I do discuss the premise of the piece.]
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Barrio
Like a lot of theater fans, I got hooked on the late Canadian TV show Slings and Arrows, a thinly veiled parody of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival involving some of the same people who created The Drowsy Chaperone. One problematic consequence is that any new urban musical inevitably reminds me of the ridiculously over-the-top East Hastings: The Musical shown on that series.
