This was my theater week in New York city, so there's only one new film review, two from the archives and six plays, five on- and one off-Broadway.
Spirit Halloween: The Movie
If this scared you in the movie, you can go right to Spirit Halloween and buy one of your own.That's the whole idea of this film.
Some films set up expectations you dread having fulfilled. Others set up expectations they meet well. David Poag’s SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE (2022, Shudder) does both. As the title suggests, this film is largely a promotional vehicle for the Spirit Halloween chain. Three young teens break into one of their stores on Halloween night, where they awaken an evil spirit (Christopher Lloyd, mostly as a voiceover) that possesses various bits of merchandise while trying to take over one of their bodies. For the most part, that’s about as dreary as it sounds. There’s even an extended music video in which the three play with store items before the scary stuff kicks in. There’s a good side to the film as well. Early on, the main teen (Donavan Colan) is revealed to be facing two problems: he’s afraid of heights, and he resents his new stepfather and stepsister because he’s still mourning his father’s death. You can be pretty sure that he’s going to end up dealing with both issues — this is really juvenilia, after all — but it works because Colan and the young actors are pretty good. The film is at its best when the young people discover a basement beneath the store. The sequence creates a bit of wonder as they discover the remnants of a bulldozed orphanage and a cave containing a small cottage. Lloyd is mostly seen in the pre-credits sequence that explains why he’s haunting the place, and he’s so good at over-the-top villainy nothing else in the film can live up to it. There’s also a cameo by Marla Gibbs as one boy’s creepy grandmother because, you know, old people are scary. The film is highly derivative. The filmmakers have talked about going for the feel of THE GOONIES (1985) and MONSTER SQUAD (1987), and from the first sight of the young men riding bicycles around town it’s also clearly an attempt to cash in on STRANGER THINGS’ cultural capital. It’s far from offensive (though I prefer my horror films more on the edge), but it’s not total monkey dump and might please parents wanting a Halloween film to share with the family, particularly if they want to introduce their kids to the joys of B&E and vandalism. Since it was shot in Rome, GA, my Atlanta-area friends may spot some familiar names in the credits, though I’m wondering if the Doug Kaye listed as working for one of the production companies is the Doug Kaye I read plays with once a month on Zoom.
Spiral
Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman is worrying about the neighbors and with good reason.
The Shudder Original SPIRAL (2019) is a slow burn of a horror thriller with a lot of queer political resonance. Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and his partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), move to a small town with Aaron’s daughter. Aaron wants the small-town life, but Malik, a survivor of gay-bashing, sees signs of bigotry everywhere. Exacerbating his problems is his work ghost-writing the biography of a professional homophobe who ran a conversion therapy clinic. Kurtis David Harder and writers Colin Minihan and John Poliquin keep the plot open for most of the running time; you can’t be sure if Malik is really uncovering some strange cult or sinking into paranoid delusions, and Bowyer-Chapman skillfully limns the character’s descent. Hander has chosen to have the film’s visual style mirror Malik’s mental state, so there’s a certain flatness to the early scenes about Malik and Aaron settling into their little “sweater fag” paradise. The main issue is that the plot, once uncovered seems to make more sense symbolically than practically. Why do cults in the movies have such convoluted agenda for gaining supernatural power, and why do they always hinge on people’s being stupid? If Malik and Aaron would just talk about what’s going on, they’d sashay away like nobody’s business.
Shucked
by Robert Horn, Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally directed by Jack O’Brien
Corn? When did I eat corn?
Infectiously silly, this show has no deep meanings. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already. But as the sadistic zookeeper said, “It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” You have to be in the mood for jokes like “A grave mistake is burying grandma on a slope,” but there’s nothing wrong with that. The story of a con man visiting an isolated Southern town whose main industry, corn, has stopped growing is really a Restoration comedy, with a pair of constant lovers, a pair of gay lovers and a fool who carries the town’s manners too far. The female half of the gay couple, Lulu, has Tony written all over it, and though we didn’t get to see Alex Newell in the role, we did see an excellent understudy (sorry, no program insert, so I don’t know which of the three understudies it was). Jack O’Brien’s staging and Sarah O’Gleby’s choreography add to the joy and help showcase the bouncy score. Newell’s “Independently Owned” has gotten most play out of the score, but my favorite was the second act quartet, “I Do,” that tells you where the romantic stories are headed. I don’t know how well this will hold up. Right now the ensemble is very good at not carrying the obvious laughs too far, but I could see replacements turning it into a schlockfest. When it’s available, I’d expect a lot of regional productions.
Guttenberg! The Musicalby Scott Brown & Anthony King directed by Alex Timbers
Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells make a village.
How can one of the world’s worst musicals be so good? It can if it’s the very big play-within-a-play about two inept creators renting a Broadway house for one night (and hiring half of a New Jersey wedding band) to present their masterpiece to a group of Broadway producers. It’s clearly been my day for silly, only where SHUCKED was infectiously so, this one is aggressive about it. With Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad as the show’s creators and all its characters (thanks to a table full of hats with character names boldly written on them), it’s pretty much irresistible. In fact, it’s one of the few shows I’ve seen since COVID that made me forget I was masked (to protect my friends, chorus colleagues and cast mates). The creators joke that every musical has to tackle a serious issue (like having only half a face in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), so their show includes clumsy references to anti-Semitism. The overall production, however, is about learning that you can live on dreams. It’s also about the creativity that makes the hats come to life as a chorus, backup singers and, of course, a kick line. The script could go further developing the characters’ relationship. It writes a check in the first act that never gets cashed. But that doesn’t put a damper on the evening. Now I want to direct it in North Carolina, and I know just the two actors to do it, but I’m not naming names.
Sweeney Todd
by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, directed by Thomas Kail
How do you like your meat pies?
Thomas Kail’s production uses heavy shadows to create a mystical feeling for one of the greatest musicals ever written. At times, the characters seem to be rising out of the depths of our unconscious. It’s a stunning revival that still carries the original’s indictment of capitalism (ironic in a heavily capitalized production) while adding a post-colonial comment through the casting of Ruthie Ann Miller as the Beggar Woman and Daniel Yearwood as Anthony. Annaleigh Ashford is a very funny, very specific and clean Mrs. Lovett. She plays her as sex-starved, which works in a play about appetites. John Groban sings quite well and is wise enough to create ugly sounds when needed. But he isn’t always very specific, and he still doesn’t know how to create a transition. His “Epiphany” is more about bellowing than discovering a course of action, but then he comes around for a strong and buoyant “A Little Priest.” Gaten Matarazzo was out, but his understudy, Felix Torre z-Ponce, did a good job. There were also solid understudies filling in on Judge Turpin and Pirelli. It’s a great compliment to the production that when the intermission hit, I couldn’t believe we’d been watching the show for 90 minutes. It seemed lots shorter.
& Juliet
by David West Read, Max Martin and Friends directed by Luke Sheppard
Rock me, Juliet!
There was a definite disconnect between me and most of the audience at this performance. Where they knew many of the Max Martin songs and often laughed at the clever ways they were slotted into the plot, I was only familiar with a few of them. But then, a lot of the more sophisticated Shakespeare reference went right over their heads. Except for the man next to me, most seemed as thrilled as I was with the way the script and production drew on what we know of Shakespeare’s theatre and his personal life to insert a lot of queer energy into the whole. The premise is that Anne Hathaway attends the opening night of ROMEO AND JULIET and insists on a new ending that becomes a beginning as Juliet lives to find her own place in the world. There are a lot of great moments: using “I Kissed a Girl” for a gay love scene, Romeo’s funeral, attended by all the women and men he loved before Juliet, Paulo Szot busting some boy band moves. The plot is clever and engaging until it settles for easy answers at the end. The good performances also include understudy Rachel Webb as Juliet, Betsy Wolfe as Anne Hathaway (if they want to keep SWEENEY TODD running with a new cast, she could easily take over Mrs. Lovett), Austin Scott as a preening, very sexy Shakespeare, Justin David Sullivan as Juliet’s gay BFF and Philippe Arroyo as the man who catches her eye in Paris. Be warned, the show is very loud. I have friends who probably could not watch it comfortably. There area lot of well executed design elements, but I couldn’t help thinking how many small regional theatres could run for years on what it took to mount this show. Most of my favorite moments were simple and quiet: Anne Hathaway throwing a handful of glitter into the air in “Domino” and later advising Juliet on her love life at the start of “That’s the Way It Is” chief among them.
Here Lies Love
by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim directed by Alex Timmers
They've turned the Broadway Theater into a disco. Was it worth it?
I got to dance with one of my biggest current crushes Conrad Ricamora (not one-on-one, which might have been tragic considering my dancing skills and acrophobia; but he led one of the audience participation numbers mezzanine). And I wish I had enjoyed it more, not just for his sake, but also for the large representation of Asian actors in the cast. Based on a concept album (is this starting to seem familiar?), it’s a sung-through musical about a dictator’s wife, in this case Imelda Marcos, tracing her rise and fall (if you don’t know where this going, you might as well stop reading now). The problem is this isn’t even EVITA-lite. It’s more EVITA-anaemic. The anaemia is in the plot, which jumps from event to event with no time for becoming. Poor country girl Imelda Romualdez (Arielle Jacobs) marries rising political leader Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana), and suddenly she’s addicted to pills. He’s elected president, and suddenly they’re corrupt, and suddenly he’s cheating on her, and suddenly he’s a dictator, and suddenly he’s sick. There are some strong moments as when the Marcoses are on the campaign trail, and he keeps regulating her gestures until he realizes her gaucheness is winning the voters’ hearts. And the performances are all fine. But the whole is amped up so loudly it’s almost impossible to follow the lyrics. They’re distorted beyond comprehensibility. And as a result, there’s no clear sense of why any of this happens. There’s a solid number, “Order 1081,” about Marcos’ imposition of martial law, but my favorite was the final number, “God Draws Straight, when the DJ (Renee Albulario at this performance) who’s been screaming at us to dance for almost two hours, comes out with a guitar and quietly sings about the country’s move to democracy. It makes you wonder if the people didn’t overthrow the Marcoses because they just wanted a little peace and quiet.
Swing State
by Rebecca Gillman directed by Robert Falls
Bubba Weiler and Mary Beth Fisher make magic in the midst of Midwestern realism.
I don’t think I’m overreacting to the fact that this is the first straight play for me on this visit, but this tale of human connections dying in a dying world seemed utterly sublime to me. The widowed Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) tends 40 acres of prairie land she owns in rural Wisconsin. The wildlife and wild flowers are slowly fading under the effects of pollution, much of it from the farm next door. When her husband’s rifle and some tools go missing from the barn, the sheriff (Kristen Fitzgerald) suspects Ryan (Bubba Weiler), an ex-convict who survived an emotionally abusive father and alcoholic mother with the help of Peg and her late husband. But did he steal the rifle for criminal purposes or because he knows Peg is considering suicide? That’s not as grim as it sounds. Gillman has peppered the play with humor that grows out of character. It’s like Chekhov as he saw himself rather than as Stanislavksy saw him (look it up). Gillman gives everybody opportunities for dimensional work. There are no clowns or villains. Just people. The ensemble playing is terrific, and after five musicals it was a joy to hear natural, un-miked, undistorted human voices. The set is also a marvel of detail. The production is imported from the Goodman Theater in Chicago and represents them very well. The show has been extended, but there were empty seats at the Saturday night performance I attended. In a just world, this production would run to full houses for years.
Some films set up expectations you dread having fulfilled. Others set up expectations they meet well. David Poag’s SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE (2022, Shudder) does both. As the title suggests, this film is largely a promotional vehicle for the Spirit Halloween chain. Three young teens break into one of their stores on Halloween night, where they awaken an evil spirit (Christopher Lloyd, mostly as a voiceover) that possesses various bits of merchandise while trying to take over one of their bodies. For the most part, that’s about as dreary as it sounds. There’s even an extended music video in which the three play with store items before the scary stuff kicks in. There’s a good side to the film as well. Early on, the main teen (Donavan Colan) is revealed to be facing two problems: he’s afraid of heights, and he resents his new stepfather and stepsister because he’s still mourning his father’s death. You can be pretty sure that he’s going to end up dealing with both issues — this is really juvenilia, after all — but it works because Colan and the young actors are pretty good. The film is at its best when the young people discover a basement beneath the store. The sequence creates a bit of wonder as they discover the remnants of a bulldozed orphanage and a cave containing a small cottage. Lloyd is mostly seen in the pre-credits sequence that explains why he’s haunting the place, and he’s so good at over-the-top villainy nothing else in the film can live up to it. There’s also a cameo by Marla Gibbs as one boy’s creepy grandmother because, you know, old people are scary. The film is highly derivative. The filmmakers have talked about going for the feel of THE GOONIES (1985) and MONSTER SQUAD (1987), and from the first sight of the young men riding bicycles around town it’s also clearly an attempt to cash in on STRANGER THINGS’ cultural capital. It’s far from offensive (though I prefer my horror films more on the edge), but it’s not total monkey dump and might please parents wanting a Halloween film to share with the family, particularly if they want to introduce their kids to the joys of B&E and vandalism. Since it was shot in Rome, GA, my Atlanta-area friends may spot some familiar names in the credits, though I’m wondering if the Doug Kaye listed as working for one of the production companies is the Doug Kaye I read plays with once a month on Zoom.
Spiral
The Shudder Original SPIRAL (2019) is a slow burn of a horror thriller with a lot of queer political resonance. Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and his partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), move to a small town with Aaron’s daughter. Aaron wants the small-town life, but Malik, a survivor of gay-bashing, sees signs of bigotry everywhere. Exacerbating his problems is his work ghost-writing the biography of a professional homophobe who ran a conversion therapy clinic. Kurtis David Harder and writers Colin Minihan and John Poliquin keep the plot open for most of the running time; you can’t be sure if Malik is really uncovering some strange cult or sinking into paranoid delusions, and Bowyer-Chapman skillfully limns the character’s descent. Hander has chosen to have the film’s visual style mirror Malik’s mental state, so there’s a certain flatness to the early scenes about Malik and Aaron settling into their little “sweater fag” paradise. The main issue is that the plot, once uncovered seems to make more sense symbolically than practically. Why do cults in the movies have such convoluted agenda for gaining supernatural power, and why do they always hinge on people’s being stupid? If Malik and Aaron would just talk about what’s going on, they’d sashay away like nobody’s business.
by Scott Brown & Anthony King directed by Alex Timbers
How can one of the world’s worst musicals be so good? It can if it’s the very big play-within-a-play about two inept creators renting a Broadway house for one night (and hiring half of a New Jersey wedding band) to present their masterpiece to a group of Broadway producers. It’s clearly been my day for silly, only where SHUCKED was infectiously so, this one is aggressive about it. With Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad as the show’s creators and all its characters (thanks to a table full of hats with character names boldly written on them), it’s pretty much irresistible. In fact, it’s one of the few shows I’ve seen since COVID that made me forget I was masked (to protect my friends, chorus colleagues and cast mates). The creators joke that every musical has to tackle a serious issue (like having only half a face in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), so their show includes clumsy references to anti-Semitism. The overall production, however, is about learning that you can live on dreams. It’s also about the creativity that makes the hats come to life as a chorus, backup singers and, of course, a kick line. The script could go further developing the characters’ relationship. It writes a check in the first act that never gets cashed. But that doesn’t put a damper on the evening. Now I want to direct it in North Carolina, and I know just the two actors to do it, but I’m not naming names.
Sweeney Todd
& Juliet
There was a definite disconnect between me and most of the audience at this performance. Where they knew many of the Max Martin songs and often laughed at the clever ways they were slotted into the plot, I was only familiar with a few of them. But then, a lot of the more sophisticated Shakespeare reference went right over their heads. Except for the man next to me, most seemed as thrilled as I was with the way the script and production drew on what we know of Shakespeare’s theatre and his personal life to insert a lot of queer energy into the whole. The premise is that Anne Hathaway attends the opening night of ROMEO AND JULIET and insists on a new ending that becomes a beginning as Juliet lives to find her own place in the world. There are a lot of great moments: using “I Kissed a Girl” for a gay love scene, Romeo’s funeral, attended by all the women and men he loved before Juliet, Paulo Szot busting some boy band moves. The plot is clever and engaging until it settles for easy answers at the end. The good performances also include understudy Rachel Webb as Juliet, Betsy Wolfe as Anne Hathaway (if they want to keep SWEENEY TODD running with a new cast, she could easily take over Mrs. Lovett), Austin Scott as a preening, very sexy Shakespeare, Justin David Sullivan as Juliet’s gay BFF and Philippe Arroyo as the man who catches her eye in Paris. Be warned, the show is very loud. I have friends who probably could not watch it comfortably. There area lot of well executed design elements, but I couldn’t help thinking how many small regional theatres could run for years on what it took to mount this show. Most of my favorite moments were simple and quiet: Anne Hathaway throwing a handful of glitter into the air in “Domino” and later advising Juliet on her love life at the start of “That’s the Way It Is” chief among them.
Here Lies Love
I got to dance with one of my biggest current crushes Conrad Ricamora (not one-on-one, which might have been tragic considering my dancing skills and acrophobia; but he led one of the audience participation numbers mezzanine). And I wish I had enjoyed it more, not just for his sake, but also for the large representation of Asian actors in the cast. Based on a concept album (is this starting to seem familiar?), it’s a sung-through musical about a dictator’s wife, in this case Imelda Marcos, tracing her rise and fall (if you don’t know where this going, you might as well stop reading now). The problem is this isn’t even EVITA-lite. It’s more EVITA-anaemic. The anaemia is in the plot, which jumps from event to event with no time for becoming. Poor country girl Imelda Romualdez (Arielle Jacobs) marries rising political leader Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana), and suddenly she’s addicted to pills. He’s elected president, and suddenly they’re corrupt, and suddenly he’s cheating on her, and suddenly he’s a dictator, and suddenly he’s sick. There are some strong moments as when the Marcoses are on the campaign trail, and he keeps regulating her gestures until he realizes her gaucheness is winning the voters’ hearts. And the performances are all fine. But the whole is amped up so loudly it’s almost impossible to follow the lyrics. They’re distorted beyond comprehensibility. And as a result, there’s no clear sense of why any of this happens. There’s a solid number, “Order 1081,” about Marcos’ imposition of martial law, but my favorite was the final number, “God Draws Straight, when the DJ (Renee Albulario at this performance) who’s been screaming at us to dance for almost two hours, comes out with a guitar and quietly sings about the country’s move to democracy. It makes you wonder if the people didn’t overthrow the Marcoses because they just wanted a little peace and quiet.
Swing State
I don’t think I’m overreacting to the fact that this is the first straight play for me on this visit, but this tale of human connections dying in a dying world seemed utterly sublime to me. The widowed Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) tends 40 acres of prairie land she owns in rural Wisconsin. The wildlife and wild flowers are slowly fading under the effects of pollution, much of it from the farm next door. When her husband’s rifle and some tools go missing from the barn, the sheriff (Kristen Fitzgerald) suspects Ryan (Bubba Weiler), an ex-convict who survived an emotionally abusive father and alcoholic mother with the help of Peg and her late husband. But did he steal the rifle for criminal purposes or because he knows Peg is considering suicide? That’s not as grim as it sounds. Gillman has peppered the play with humor that grows out of character. It’s like Chekhov as he saw himself rather than as Stanislavksy saw him (look it up). Gillman gives everybody opportunities for dimensional work. There are no clowns or villains. Just people. The ensemble playing is terrific, and after five musicals it was a joy to hear natural, un-miked, undistorted human voices. The set is also a marvel of detail. The production is imported from the Goodman Theater in Chicago and represents them very well. The show has been extended, but there were empty seats at the Saturday night performance I attended. In a just world, this production would run to full houses for years.
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