The Good, the Bad, and the Painful

The reason one usually goes to a play festival is to discover up and coming playwrights and to get excited about shows that look like they can someday transfer to a commercial run. For instance, we saw Thrill Me at the Midtown International Theatre Festival before it became a commercial hit at the York Theatre.

With the exception of Inside Cherry Pitz (reviewed in our last column), this year’s Midtown Festival seems to be more about discovering actors than plays. For instance, the best reason to see Savior is to catch a potential future star by the name of Jeff Barry. By the same token, Charles & Diana is a disappointing musical but its two leads, Amanda Ladd and Robert Resnick give genuinely royal performances.

Then there are some total losses, like 21 Stories (which is 21 too many). And, unfortunately, a revival of Terence McNally’s It’s Only a Play features far too many genuinely painful performances. We’re not quite sure why an older McNally play would be in the Festival, but at least one actor is as good as his material: Michael Baldwin, who plays the waiter/actor Gus. Because so many of his castmates are playing way over the top, we’d have to guess that they’re victims of bad direction by John Capo.

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East to Edinburgh

Considering the built-in fringe nature of the shows that we’ve caught in this year’s expanded East to Edinburgh series at 59E59 Theatres, the quality has been outstanding. Except for a lumbering one-person show titled I Miss Communism, everything else has ranged from respectable to exciting. Here are two examples: Asking for It, another one-person show, starts off as a modestly amusing personal journey through the guilt-infested world of Catholicism but soon becomes a far more rangy piece that encompasses show business, AIDS, single-motherhood, etc. Well acted by its author, Joanna Rush, it is also tightly directed by Joel Froomkin, who gives the show a real sense of ambience despite its presentation in a black box theater.

The noted playwright Nicky Silver had a piece in this festival of productions heading off from America to the Edinburgh Festival. Like so many of Silver’s works, The Altruists is often riotously funny without necessarily being a well-crafted play. In this case, a group of well-intentioned fools, who have liberal impulses to help the needy, do quite the opposite when they get in a tangle. This is not, however, a play that is grounded in reality so its hyper-active comedy has its own verisimilitude – and it works, at least until Silver tries to wrap it up; the end becomes merely heavy-handed. Nonetheless, it was an entertaining and well-acted satire.

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Summer CineMania

If June and early July usually bring a number of big action film releases, the latter part of the summer is the time when smaller, art house-type movies start to appear. Here are a couple that TheaterMania readers will likely have a special interest in seeing:

The Aristocrats won’t be to everyone’s taste but once you know what it’s about, you’ll know if it’s for you or not. For those of you who read this column for nightlife info, you’ll get a special kick out of this one because you’ll know quite a few New York based comedians who are in it. And everyone is in it! Here’s the shtick: one hundred comedians tell the same incredibly filthy joke. Apparently it’s a famous old joke that goes back to vaudeville days. It’s structured so that it has the same beginning and punch line, but the middle is up for grabs — and that’s where the comedians prove their mettle. You won’t believe the lineup of famous comics who deliver the joke; they range from the ancient to the most contemporary. Once it opens, this documentary will likely have lines around the block and long threads on chat boards discussing which comedians scored best. Here is just a random sampling of ten comedians who are in the movie: Lewis Black, George Carlin, Judy Gold, Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Mull, Don Rickles, Harry Shearer, David Steinberg, Bruce Vilanch, and Robin Williams. The Aristocrats opens today.

John Turturro returns to the big screen as a director with, of all things, a musical love story called Romance and Cigarettes. All of Turturro’s past directorial efforts have revolved around working-class characters, and this one is no different — except that the characters burst into song. Well, not exactly; they lip-synch the songs that express their innermost feelings. Sounds like fun. And it will also be fun to see some of the theater folk whom stage and screen actor Turturro has cast in his movie. After you get past stars James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, and Kate Winslet, you’ll see some of our own stars, including Mary-Louise Parker and Elaine Stritch. Romance and Cigarettes is scheduled to open on August 19.

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[To contact the Siegels directly, e-mail them at siegels@theatermania.com.]