Worth the Waits

You would be hard-pressed to confuse a Tom Waits song with that of any other composer. When Waits gets romantic and lyrical, his melodies might be said to resemble Billy Joel’s but with a harder, sadder edge. Otherwise, his music comes in two major flavors — fierce and fiercest — but almost always with the underpinning of a deep melancholy. In that tension between the defiant and the defeated, Waits creates art.

Belly of a Drunken Piano, playing in the new Huron Lounge downstairs at the SoHo Playhouse, is an expansive two-hour revue in which Stewart D’Arrietta pays homage to Waits’s creativity, style, and ferocious intensity. The show comes by way of Australia — and, as any longtime cabaretgoer knows, anything from Down Under is probably something special (e.g., Judi Connelli and David Campbell). D’Arrietta, who had a previous success in his homeland with a show about John Lennon, approximates Waits in both voice and manner. Hoarse and raspy, he sings like a man in pain. The guy is cool — he’s even got one long sideburn — yet tough, wiry, and steely smart. D’Arrietta comes across as an old-time rocker who has been there, done that, and acquired some hard-won street wisdom in the process.

The music is played on an upright piano with the top torn open and is backed by the sad strains of a bowed double bass, the drive of drums being pounded, and the electricity of a wailing guitar. There is yearning in “Jersey Girl” and “The Heart of Saturday Night”, heartbreak in “Hold On” and “Invitation to the Blues,” fire in “I’m Big in Japan” and “God’s Away on Business.” It would have been nice to learn more about Waits during the course of the show, and you may wish that the volume was not quite so loud in order to better make out the lyrics.. Still, there’s something real and vital going on in the Belly of a Drunken Piano.

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Outstanding in the Field

The Fringe Festival is so large that any two people could have potentially seen scores of plays without any of them overlapping. Obviously, we can only vote for our “Best of the Fringe” based on the shows we saw. And the winner is: Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies. This was an exceptionally well-acted, sharply written, very funny piece about contemporary dating relationships; it has a quirky charm coupled with genuine affection for its characters.

We offer our congratulations to writer/director/co-star Matt Chaffee (who wrote himself one helluva swell role) and his good-to-great cast, especially Sangini Majmudar and Jenna Mattison. Following right behind Fluffy Bunnies, we also give high marks to The Irish Curse and The Miss-Education of Jenna Bush. These were definitely the highlights of FringeNYC.

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Tenor of the Times

Paula Heil Fisher, a noted Broadway and Off-Broadway producer, is trying her hand at filmmaking. She’s the writer and director of the new documentary Finding Eléazar: Portrait of a Tenor and a Role, which is scheduled to open in New York on September 16. Pulling back the curtain on the world of world-class opera, the film is an intimate portrait of renowned tenor Neil Shicoff as he prepares for what he describes as “the role of a lifetime” in the controversial French opera La Juive (The Jewess). The work was revived two seasons ago by the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since the Nazis banned it in 1936.

The movie offers rare access to studio recordings, rehearsal rooms, and late-night creative sessions as Shicoff moves from starring in a music video of the famous “Rachel” aria (directed by Sidney Lumet) to a live performance at the Vienna State Opera. The tenor faces up to his religion, his personal angst, and his mortality as he becomes Eléazar and Eléazar becomes Shicoff.

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