Learning to love musicals

A good friend and fellow lover of theater (I'm pretty sure we were in a play together all the way back in 7^th grade) posted an article on Facebook about Hamilton and noted that the author's negative slant made him, at last, interested to see the show, as he has long hated musicals.

The thing is: I know where he is coming from.

For the longest time, I felt the same way. Why is the action stopping every few minutes for them to sing? People don't do that in real life, do they?

As a theatergoer, this didn't really make much of a difference to me. You can have your well-scrubbed singers; I'll be over here in this grimy found space watching some “real” drama.

Once I started actually writing about theater as my job, I knew that attitude wasn't going to make it. I had to meet my prejudices head on.

For me – and likely a lot of others who didn't “get” musicals – the breaking into song that broke the flow of the show. I wanted realism, damn it!

How did I change, then? Well, a lot of it was just careful study over decades of experience watching musical theater. That isn't the a quick-and-easy solution demanded by modern society, so here's another way to try. Do you like movies and television? Have you enjoyed the various Star Wars, Marvel comics, heck, courtroom dramas, political thrillers, or John Wick?

Those aren't realistic either. No one has laser swords in our world. Being exposed to radiation gives you cancer, not give you big muscles and turn your skin green. And the courts, boardrooms, and the mean streets of any city (that inevitably looks like Toronto) aren't at all like you see on TV. Yet we buy into them because we agreed to a contract with the art: If they are able to immerse us in their “reality,” we'll stay with them until the end.

Musical theater, then, is just another kind of reality for us to enter. There are plenty of rules to be followed and and twisted and broken, but they are there. And honestly, if you just accept the baseline reality – a world where people break into song when it is demanded – half the battle is won.

Of course, it's not just a matter of turning a switch on in your brain. There are easier places to start than others. Three hours of A Little Night Music or Les Miz may not be the best way to start. Also, I can't point to any running productions at present as putting dozens of performers in front of a full house of often august theatergoers isn't wise.

Still, there are easier places to start. Apart from having a phenomenal cast, excellent direction, and Kander and Ebb's cracking great songs, the filmed version of Chicago presents all of the musical numbers as fantasies in the mind of the murderess Roxie. The “real” world and Roxie's world are clearly delineated so you can be content to know that “Cell Block Tango” isn't really taking place in the jail. (Also, “Cell Block Tango” is seven of the most brilliant musical minutes captured on film.)

Keeping with Kander and Ebb, there's Cabaret. Except for one harrowing number in a mid-'30s German beer garden, all of the musical numbers are confined to the Kit Kat Klub, where they comment on the action of the drama, or offer texture to life in pre-Hitler Germany. (Also, you get “Mein Herr,” another few absolutely brilliant musical minutes.)

There are other examples, though maybe not as tailor made as these. The Hedwig and the Angry Inch film has its moments, but the effort to expand the story's world robs it much of the stage version's power. There, the show is presented almost entirely as a concert by Hedwig (one song is from the view of collaborator-turned-rival Tommy Gnosis, though still presented as a performance on stage).

If you dig into this, there are plenty of ways into the genre. Even Hamilton – which is rapped and sung throughout – is an easier jump than you might think. The show never makes any pretense of being a “realistic” portrayal of Alexander Hamilton's life or the founding decades of the United States. Then again, that's what theater is – people playing at reality to uncover the truth, even if that's told through an 11 o'clcock number.

Interstate explores queer life with pop score, plenty of heart

Photo by Rich Ryan

Interstate is a joyful, messy ride with a trio of characters trying to find their place. It’s at turns funny, tragic, heartfelt, and at times a bit unsure of its footing. Just like growing up, or being in a band. Or coming out.

Created by Melissa Li and Kit Yan, the world premiere musical now running at Mixed Blood Theatre takes us back to the now halcyon days of 2008, where an Asian queer band from New York City vans it across the country in search of their diffuse online audience.

Adrian is a singer who leaves, promising her girlfriend to stay in touch and her mother that she’ll get her law school application in on time. Dash is a poet who has become an online hero to other transgender folks looking for a community. He isn’t just out to see the country – he wants to stitch a community together.

As they cross the heartland, we see the impact the tour has on Adrian and Dash’s relationship, and the one they are having on their listeners. We see this primarily through Henry, a teenager transitioning to become a man; a difficult prospect in his small minded small town.

Li and Yan based the musical on their own tour from 12 years ago as Good Asian Drivers. There are a lot of touring stories here -- Interstate is a shared bill with a puppet show short of being full Spinal Tap – but they are often shown through the lens of gender and sexual identity.

That comes through especially in Kai Alexander Judd’s performance as Dash. The character is learning how to be a “man” on the fly, and has absorbed some less-than-savory lessons, which comes to a head in a South Dakota bar where he first, kisses his musical companion without permission, and then “man ups” against a couple of yokels.

The behavior shocks the pair, and it causes the kind of break-up drama you expect in a band story. Adrian, you see, has label suitors who want her as a solo act. The twists are somewhat predictable, but the end result is not. 

Much of that is down Henry, whose transition – which takes him from Kentucky to the queer Mecca of San Francisco – gives the story its real heart. Much of that credit can be laid at the feet of Sushma Saha, whose touching, nuanced performance gives all of the diffuse parts of Interstate greater focus.

Even when the show takes detours into internet trolls, bad reviews, and harsh audiences, it doesn’t lose its cross-country heart. The music is largely composed of everyday modern pop hooks that will fade from the memory by the time you get home from the theater, the lyrics – and the overall story – stay with long after the final bows.

Interstate runs through March 29 at Mixed Blood Theatre.

Frank triumphs again with The Convert

Photo by Tony Nelson

It’s been a decade since Frank Theatre tackled the work of Danai Gurira, but the wait for The Convert was more than worth it.

Frank’s 2010 production of Eclipsed was -- certainly in the mind of this reviewer – one of the best shows of that year. The Convert promises to be same for 2020. It’s a smart, heartfelt, and searing look at the toll colonialism has on the people where “civilization” has come.

The play finds us in Rhodesia at the end of the 19^th century, and in the comfortable home of Chilford, an African who has converted to Roman Catholicism. He struggles with money and his mission – to convert the souls of the villagers around him to the true faith.

Into this world comes Jekesai, a young woman hoping to escape an ugly, forced marriage to a man who already has more than half a dozen wives. Chilford takes her into his home, and discovers that she is a quick study, especially in matters of faith. Jekesai – renamed Ester – converts and engages in the same crusade of Chilford.

All around them, however, is unrest. The British have turned the landscape into mines and pushed the local men to work in them. Taxes have begun to crush the locals, who need to pay just to have a place to live on lands they may have occupied for centuries.

That boiling anger turns to the locals who have “sided” with the British, Chilford and Ester; and their Westernized companions Chancellor and Prudence. That anger eventually explodes, which brings the fragile lives these characters have built crashing down around their heads.

Photo by Tony Nelson

Like any play directed by Frank’s Wendy Knox, these are not simple characters and any messages you try to take away from it are fraught with contradictions and troubles. The key for The Convert is one thing that is missing: white faces. While there are no British portrayed on stage, you can feel their weight over all of the proceedings.

Gurira doesn’t paint the traditional African tribes as any kind of paradise (see the forced marriage above) but it is clear that what has replaced it isn’t any better, even if it did bring concrete floors, nice furniture, and cricket.

All of this is brought home by the terrific performances seen from top to bottom in the show. All of the characters are equally well rounded, even Warren C. Bowles’ Uncle – who seems to be just an ogre intent on ruining young Jekesai’s life at the beginning – shows more depth in his later scenes, while the seemingly civilized Chancellor (AJ Friday) shows a darkness that was always there, just beneath the surface. Other performances are equally fluid and rounded, especially that of Hope Cervantes (part of the Eclipsed cast from 2010) as Prudence.


Leads Yinka Ayinde (Chilford) and Ashe Jaafaru (Ester) are the heart of soul of the show. Ayinde shows us the confusion and doubt that lies just beneath the surface of his character, giving this devout man so much soul.

It is clear that Jekesai/Ester is the smartest character in the play, and Jaafaru plays that to the hilt. Her eyes are always soaking up the scene around her, and she makes it clear that her mind is always a few steps ahead of everyone else. All of this gives her final haunting speech all the more weight, as if we are listening in on a tale that has been spoken around fire pits and fireplaces since the beginning of time.

The Convert runs through March 15 at Gremlin Theater.

Satire runs deep in The Ugly One

Photo by Dan Norman.

We all know the bromides about beauty (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”; “beauty is only skin deep”). We’re told that those who pursue beauty are vapid, vacuous, or vane. Yet we flock to every new technique to tighten our stomachs, erase crow’s feet; or just consume endless programs about those who take self-improvement to the extreme (perhaps hoping to catch sight of a plastic surgery disaster or two).

In other words, Marius von Mayenburg is mining a deep vein in The Ugly One. And that produces theatrical riches in Walking Shadow Theatre Company’s deft production at Open Eye Figure Theatre and director Amy Rummenie.

The story of a “hideously ugly” man whose life is transformed – first for good, and then for something else – by being given a new face fits perfectly with Walking Shadow’s previous work, as the company has long explored ideas around identity and image.

Our “ugly one” is Lette, a research electrical engineer who has created a new… thing that will make things run better than before. He is all ready to deliver the news of the product at a trade conference when his boss and associate spring the news on him: His hideous appearance in no way can be connected with the new creation.

Disorientated and depressed, Lette looks into plastic surgery. More than a few nicks, tucks, and cuts later, he has a brand new face: One so beautiful it could sell the new electric doohickey to an Amish farming family.

At first things are great. Lette’s standing with his job and his wife go through the roof. He even attracts the attention of consumer electronics groupies (including a rich woman and her snide son who are engaged in activities that would make Aleister Crowley blush) on his journeys to different trade shows.

The good times come to an end when Lette notices his face on another man. And then another. And another. Soon, his beautiful face has become common, and – as last week’s news – Lette finds his status tumbling down once again.

While the play is loaded with rich satire, it’s the quality of the characters – and the performances – that makes The Ugly One more than a lost episode ofBlack Mirror.  Sean Dillon leads the way as poor Lette, who is not the most likeable of characters. Still, Dillon makes us feel the character’s pain, temporary joy, and final despair in a way that is nearly heartbreaking.

The rest of the cast (including nice turns from Edwin Strout and Julie Ann Nevill) doubles up for the various characters, with Corey DiNardo particularly good as Lette’s conniving assistant and the rich woman’s son who is able to see the world for what it is.

The Ugly One runs through Feb. 16 at Open Eye Figure Theatre in Minneapolis.