King Kong: Something awesome, something awful

When it’s all said and done in King Kong, the $35 million show opening this week on Broadway, the final bows – and biggest cheers – are saved for the dozen-plus performers who bring the 20-foot gorilla to life every night.

There’s no question that the show is an over-the-top spectacular whenever King Kong is on stage, whether it is battling a giant, prehistoric snake; dashing through a burning New York City with Ann Darrow on his back; or challenging a veritable fleet of planes trying to take him down from the Empire State Building.

It's the rest of the show that's such a downer.

It’s been a long journey for Kong to make it to this stage, starting a decade ago in Australia. There has been plenty of work since then, including an early version of the show produced in Melbourne in 2013.

Puppet designer Sonny Tilders took on the epic task of creating the massive marionette, which weighs in at around a ton. To bring the high-tech puppet to life requires plenty of on-stage help. A dozen performers manipulate his arms and legs, while a quartet, stationed in the off-stage “voodoo box,” control the facial features.

This also includes Kong’s voice, as one of the team handles his roars, which are enhanced to shift into the monstrous noise that comes out on stage.

The basic outline of the story has remained the same. A film crew, including young starlet Ann Darrow. head out to Skull Island. There, they find a giant monster. The monster is brought back to New York City and displayed like a circus animal. He escapes, climbs the Empire State Building with Ms. Darrow in tow. Biplanes shoot the gorilla down and we get the end.

There are differences in the details, however. Instead of being tossed between a giant gorilla and the film’s romantic lead, Ann is her own woman. In fact, there is no romantic lead to be seen.

While these changes can make for a more interesting story, their application on stage leaves plenty to be desired. Likely, it was going to be impossible for the production to top the moments when King Kong was on stage, but the rest of the show struggles to make any impression, let alone a positive one, whenever our simian friend is off stage.

Even though the creators won’t add this tag to the show, King Kong is definitely a musical. And while that could work with stronger material, the songs provided by Eddie Perfect pretty much pass in one ear and out the other.

Better is Marius de Vries’ incidental music, which blends traditional movie scores with electronic styles for sounds that help to drive the high action along.

The three human leads are also upstaged by their puppet colleague. Christiani Pitts brings some steel to Ann Darrow, but lacks the presence to take over this stage when needed. The massive set and high tech visuals swallow her up at almost every turn. The one time it doesn’t? When she has some quality time with Kong. There, Pitts clearly shows her skills as a performer, which helps to make Kong all the more real.

The same can be said for Eric William Morris (as filmmaker Carl Denham) and Erik Lochtefeld (as Denham’s assistant and Darrow’s confidant Lumpy). All three show signs that on another stage, their performances could carry the day, but they lack the outsized, operatic scale needed here.

Really, that’s the issue in a nutshell. We’re here for King Kong, and there’s too much time spent without him onstage. Obviously, you don’t want wall-to-wall monster, but a tighter, slimmer production would give us what we want without nearly as many distractions.

Photo by Bruce Silcox

Puppets of a different scale at Open Eye Figure Theatre

If you are in the Twin Cities and want to check out some puppets of a different scale, Open Eye Figure Theatre has brought back its signature piece, "A Prelude to Faust" for one final run.

First presented 20 years ago, Michael Sommers riff on the Faust legend helped to spark Open Eye as an ongoing theater. The show is loaded with the type of theatrical delights that have marked so much of Sommers' work. 

Tickets for the remaining performances are extremely limited, but the show has been extended to Nov. 18.

More New York: Head Over Heels and The Nap

I never expected to see Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney and The Go-Go’s sharig space in a Playbill, but Head Over Heels manages to merge two distinct creations together in unexpected and joyful ways.

So yes, this is a musical with the tunes of classic early ‘80s rockers The Go-Go’s at its heart. Instead of telling the story of the band’s rise to fame, creators Jeff Whitty and James Magruder went looking for a story they could weave and warp to fit into the music.

They went to Sidney’s Arcadia, and added their own particular twists to the tale. Here, the Arcadians have been happy for generations following their beloved beat. Warnings from the new oracle of Delphi (played by Drag Race participant and pop singer Peppermint) frighten the king Basilius so much that he takes the entire kingdom on a quest to meet their enemies in battle.

Meanwhile, both of his daughters are finding love in unexpected places. Youngest Philoclea has been wooed by the shepherd, Musidorus. He isn’t able to get entry into the court until he disguises himself as an Amazon.

As a woman, he is able to get into Philoclea’s inner circle, which includes her older sister Pamela and Mopsa, the daughter of the king’s viceroy. Those two are also falling in love.

So, lots of love is on the table, and we watch them fall in and out and in again. And the Go-Go’s are a perfect fit for the story. Their catalogue provides a nice selection of rockers, mid-tempo tunes and ballads that can be deployed to intensify emotions or underscore the action on stage. It could be Mopsa realizing she can’t be apart from Pamela during “Vacation,” or all of the characters with secrets promising that “Our Lips are Sealed.”

And the couples find love, or love again, by the end of the show. Mind you, it embraces a wide swath. There’s the old king and queen who have renewed their love, but there is also two women who have fallen into each other’s arms, and a man and his non-binary partner have reunited. Even one of the young lovers at the heart of the story has found that he’s really gender fluid, more than willing to embrace the female side of his personality.

So the show is a breezy confection with a serious, uplifting message inside. A perfect fit, I think.

The Nap

I left The Nap with a warmed heart, but also with questions that the new comedy from the creator of One Man, Two Guvnors doesn’t really answer.

The show takes us to modern-day Sheffield, where a young man has attempted to break out of a depressing, hard-scrabble life by becoming a professional snooker player. He’s found enough success to be in the upcoming world championships, but that has also attracted the wrong kind of attention from organized crime.

As Dylan (nicely played by Ben Schnetzer) attempts to focus on his upcoming match, the specter of match fixing arrives, as two investigators look into unusual betting patterns on one of the frames from Dylan’s last match.

That quickly takes Dylan down a rabbit hole of organized crime, led by longtime family friend Waxy Bush, who offers a tough choice for the next match: toss a frame, or his mother will be killed.

All of this may seem a little dark for a light-hearted comedy where the lead gets the woman of his dreams in the end. Suffice to say, there are more twists I won’t go into here.

And while those twists are eventually explained, that part of the plot doesn’t really come to a conclusion. Most of the characters wander off before the climatic finale round.

The bevy of eccentric characters are really what make the show work. Dylan is the relative straight man here, while his father is a failed businessman/drug dealer; his mother has attached herself to a walking Irish stereotype; And Ms. Bush runs her empire from a string of hair salons across Sheffield.

Strong, funny performances and the colorful characters help to cover for any of the lingering questions left by the script.

Girl from the North Country does Dylan right

I spent last weekend in New York City attending a short conference for the American Theatre Critics Association. Of course, the meetings also gave me a chance to visit Broadway and beyond. I'll have a string of posts this week about shows from the trip.

The first note I’ll make about Girl from the North Country, Conor McPherson’s bold new show that uses Bob Dylan’s songs in a jukebox musical like no other you’ve ever seen, is that the show got one vitally important detail right:

No matter the level of drama, angst or turmoil, no one is allowed to enter or leave the scene without being offered a cup of coffee.

It’s a small detail, but to anyone from the upper Midwest who has endured the “Minnesota goodbye,” it’s absolutely real.

That innate understanding rides throughout the musical, which sets up in a Duluth boarding house in the early 1930s.  The country has been ravaged by the Great Depression, and as the season turns from fall to winter, the desperation just gets greater.

Several storylines converge in the rooming house, and they find not so much illustration from Dylan’s songs, but personal, emotional and spiritual depth. While the songs are drawn from across 50 years of Dylan’s music, they are centered during the 1970s, an era when the songwriter focused so much on the soul.

Some of the most affecting tunes are drawn from Dylan’s “born again” albums from the later part of the decade, with “Slow Train” (from Slow Train Coming) a particular standout. Even the songs drawn from later albums offer up the same sense of the sacred and the spiritual.

And familiar songs get a fresh reading here. No one is attempting to replicate Dylan’s distinct singing style. That means “I Want You” can turn into a duet between a young drifting drunkard stuck in Duluth, and his once-girlfriend, who is off to the East Coast with her husband. The lyric’s intense longing becomes so much clearer when it is shared between two voices instead of one.

Of course, you need performers to pull all of this off. As you can hear in the above clips, the company is stellar from beginning to end. As you can hear above, Colton Ryan's drunken rascal and Caitlin Houlahan as the woman whose own dreams are being crushed by the reality of Depression living are able to coming together for four minutes of absolutely beautiful music.

And the version you see isn't the full staging. At the beginning of the song, Ryan's first few attempts are almost stuttered out, as if the character's own hurt means he can barely speak. Yet eventually, he is able to sing.

Girl from the North Country is a show of standout moments: “Hurricane” (sung by a young boxer who claims to have been wrongfully imprisoned) merged with a verse from “All Along the Watchtower”; the surreal tale of “Jokerman” taking on new dimensions in the dark, wet chill of a Lake Superior early winter’s night.

Really, what McPherson and the company have done is create a place for the characters that Dylan made real in his music to find a new home on stage. There is a story that all of these characters tell, but it is clear that this is just one stop on an endless journey like the two protagonists in “Tangled up in Blue” or any one of the hundreds of Dylan songs. Even after the final bows are taken, the stories keep going on.

Girl from the North Country runs at the Public Theater through Dec. 23.