troisoiseaux

I spent a long weekend in NYC with my best friend from college, D., and in an act of mild insanity we saw four shows in 48 hours.

Sunday (12/29)

- Swept Away, the Avett Brothers jukebox musical loosely inspired by the 19th century shipwreck of the Mignonette, in that four men— here the Captain, the Mate, Big Brother, and Little Brother— end up stranded on a lifeboat when their ship sinks and are forced to turn to survival cannibalism. I'd wanted to see this during its pre-Broadway run in DC, and I'm so glad we caught its second-to-last (!) performance on Broadway, because it was SO GOOD. The set was so cool: for most of the show, the set is a ship's deck that takes up most of the stage, but when the storm hits (with also v. cool use of lighting, everyone moving in slow motion, and an emotionally significant lyrical callback) and the ship sinks, the ship's deck tips upwards to reveal a single lifeboat; it rotates, mostly slowly and not in one consistent direction, but during the Mate's descent into madness ("Satan Pulls the Strings", with John Gallagher Jr. in full rock-musical form) it was spinning.

It's a crying shame that this show didn't get the attention it deserved and ended up closing early, not least because it has some serious fandom potential. Like, did anyone tell Tumblr that there's a musical with A Vibe between an earnest young man who almost gets survival cannibalized and the jaded scoundrel who suggests it??? And I say almost because although the dying Little Brother agrees to sacrifice himself so that the others have a chance at surviving to be rescued, Big Brother— a god-fearin' farmer who only ended up on the doomed whaling ship because he was chasing down his brother who ran off to sea, to bring him home— insists on being the one to kill him and then sacrifices himself instead. And so Little Brother lives and marries his sweetheart and then appears as a ghost to the Mate while he's dying of tuberculosis in an indigent hospital so that the Mate can die in his arms???? (All three appear as ghosts to the dying Mate— it's the frame story— but like. Literal pieta.) I also loved the dynamic between the two brothers, but you can see why I'm going to be rotating this one in my head for a while.

- Our Town with Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager; his matter-of-fact patter wasn't what I had imagined when I've previously read the play, but worked really well. This staging was intentionally not rooted in any particular time or place, visually, with costumes that ran the gamut from "definitely modern" to "plausibly early 20th century". Besides Parsons, the other stand-outs to me were Mrs. Gibbs— I confess, in no small part by positive comparison to Mrs. Webb, because she just brought so much more life and personality to the role— and the milkman Howie, who was played by a Deaf actor and signed most of his lines (he also, e.g., "wrote" his congrats to the happy couple when greeting Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb on the morning of the wedding and the respective actresses read his note out loud); the other actors both spoke out loud and signed when they responded to him.

Monday (12/30)

- Cabaret with Adam Lambert as the Emcee and Alui'i Cravalho as Sally Bowles— and Bebe Neuwirth as Fraulein Schneider, although I hadn't realized she was in this until I opened the playbill!— which was WILD to experience at 2 pm on a Monday. This production turned the entire theater into an immersive experience: all dim lights and pulsing music as you walked in, and down into an area where they had a pre-show performance of strange, surreal dancers, and then up to either the mezzanine seats (us) or to the ground floor, where the audience sat at tables around the stage, where the "prologue" performances continued, with the dancers interacting more with the audience. (The one that's stuck with me had a violinist and a dancer, and the premise of the dance appeared to be that the violinist could control the dancer by plucking the strings of his violin, and then the dancer seemed to figure out that, actually, he could control the violinist through his movements; the concept of one dancer puppeting another was a reoccurring theme.) AND THEN you sit and watch Cabaret, which in itself is A Lot to experience as, again, a Monday matinee.

Assorted thoughts: performed in the round, with a stage in concentric circles that rotated and raised/lowered. I haven't seen any version of this show before, so I don't know if this is just how it's usually done, but I liked the visual overlap between the "real" scenes and the thematically significant cabaret numbers: characters would linger on stage before or after they were "supposed" to be there, especially the Emcee. Adam Lambert was absolutely incredible. Alui'i Cravalho was also very good but had a tendency to SHOUT at the end of a PHRASE in her songs. (This is evidently a directorial choice; D. saw this revival previously, when Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin were in it, and said that Rankin did the same thing.)

- Gypsy with Audra McDonald as Rose, who is so much the selling point of the production that the marquee literally says "AUDRA GYPSY"— with good cause, because although everyone in this production is great, she's Audra frickin' McDonald; one of the reviews I saw described it as "a performance of a lifetime (yours, not hers)" and they were correct. I also haven't seen any other versions of this to compare it to, but D. (and various reviews) pointed out that it's more sympathetic to Rose than most productions. (Although, given that I've never actually seen any version of this, I was surprised by how many songs I recognized.) I liked how Louise's Gypsy Rose Lee persona was styled in a nod to Josephine Baker.