Scenes from ‘Arias With a Twist,’ featuring Joey Arias and the puppetry of Basil Twist. Photos: Carol Rosegg.
Plus: In ‘[title of show]’ it’s all about the creative process
The comedic and melodramatic “Bash’d”—billed as a “gay rap opera”—successfully reclaims hip-hop from its homophobia.
advertisement
advertisement
|
By Jonathan Warman
Friday, June 20, 2008
Arias With a Twist
It’s a little hard to judge “Arias with a Twist,” a show which brings Basil Twist’s magical puppetry together with drag innovator Joey Arias’s out-of-the-ordinary voice, which conjures Billie Holiday one moment and Yoko Ono the next. Because Twist and Arias mix genres and styles with abandon, whether it succeeds or fails depends very much on what yardstick you’re using to measure it.
As a drag show, you could easily call it legendary. When Arias first appears (after an intermittently beautiful but way-too-long semi-abstract puppet prelude), strapped to a moving neon circle, surrounded by aliens, belting Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” the effect is stunning. Equally effective: a dance with two funky, well hung devils; a hilarious sequence in which Joey Arias menaces Manhattan as a 50 foot woman; and the finale, a Busby Berkley-inspired extravaganza.
As a puppet show, it’s more of a mixed bag. Many of the scenes mentioned above owe a lot of their impact to Twist’s immensely creative visual imagination and his breathtakingly skilled team of puppeteers. But some images linger too long after they’ve made their point—Twist tends to use whole pieces of music where an excerpt is really what’s needed.
That said, it’s great to have downtown drag veteran Arias back after his six-year stint in Cirque Du Soleil’s “Zumanity,” and Twist always has something new to show us. A must-see for queens hungry for a buffet of twisted bohemian creativity.
“Arias with a Twist,” 9 p.m. Wed.–Sat., 11:59 p.m. Fri. & Sat. and 8 p.m. Sun. at HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Ave., $35-50, 212-352-3101, here.org.
Saved
I never saw the 2004 cult movie “Saved!” upon which the exclamation-less stage musical “Saved” is based, so I came to this show more or less a blank slate. From that perspective, this show boasts a solid pop-rock score (by Michael Friedman, a composer I want to hear more from), but too much plot by half. When book writers John Dempsey and Rinne Groff focus on the show’s heart, conflicted Christian good girl Mary (played with great spirit by Celia Keenan-Bolger), they get things very right. The further from that they vary, the more they tried my patience.
In “Saved,” Mary and her well-meaning but ultimately intolerant “BFF” Hilary Faye (Mary Faber) are starting their senior year as the purest of the pure in the senior class at American Eagle Christian High School. Mary’s boyfriend Dean (Aaron Tveit) tells her he thinks he’s gay—and then abruptly disappears from the plot (except the occasional mention as one among Mary’s many problems).
I wanted to know more about their relationship, and the relationship that develops between Dean and Mitch (Daniel Zaitchik, a terrifically talented performer who is underused despite playing three separate roles). Unfortunately, there are enough characters and plot for two movies, which means somewhere around four musicals. With some “kill your darlings” editing this could become a gem of a show (especially with that glittering score), but it’s a long way from that right now.
“Saved,” 8 p.m. Tue.–Sat., 2:30 p.m. Sat. & Sun. and 7:30 p.m. Sun. at Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St., $70, 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org/mainstage.asp.
Occupant
Now I can freely admit I really, really like two Edward Albee plays! First, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; now “Occupant” joins the list. It bears saying that neither is a typical Albee play: “Woolf” veered closer to naturalistic melodrama than he ever would again, and “Occupant” is the only play I can think of in which Albee depicts a real-life person, someone he actually knew.
That person is the great American sculptor Louise Nevelson (played by an almost unrecognizable Mercedes Ruehl). Instead of your typical bio-play, Albee gives us a subject who is cantankerous, colorful and evasive, and he doesn’t always tell us what we want to know about her. I think that Albee’s formal experimentation—one constant in his varied career—has sometimes been over-praised. His experiments don’t work at least as often as they do.
In “Occupant,” however, he’s really onto something. In trying to capture a charismatic and complex artist who had an outsized persona, he reaches for the texture of life events we might read about in a book, exploring how remembering them might actually feel for the person who lived through them
This work is also suffused with a great deal of affection, a quality that appears too rarely in Albee’s work. Ruehl also approaches this woman with an appropriately unsentimental type of affection, disappearing into the personality of a woman who was both supremely self-confident and riddled with doubt (something I think a lot of artists can identify with). Overall, “Occupant” is easily the most direct and engaging evening of Albee I’ve ever seen.
“Occupant,” 7 p.m. Tue., 8 p.m. Wed.–Sat. and 2 p.m. Sat. & Sun. at the Signature Theatre Company, 555 W. 42nd St., $20-$65, 212-224-PLAY, signaturetheatre.org/onstage.htm.
|
