That was an ecclectic weekend

Shows to be discussed at some point in the next few days: Cry Baby, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, and A Little Night Music.

Chronologically, then:

Cry Baby does not suck. I was actually pretty well entertained and didn't feel it a waste of my $54. It knows it is a fluffy happy show and doesn't pretend to be dealing in major truths about the human condition. Caveat: I have never seen the movie, so I have no idea how it is as an adaptation. The biggest issue is too much exposition. Nothing can kill a show like too much exposition. While the opener is a pretty good parody of "That was a real nice clambake", the next two songs serve only to introduce the two sets of characters and aren't as clever as they think they are. Tightening is necessary. Also, after that, songs often start out clever but the lyrics rather peter out partway through - some come back to a decent ending, but others don't.

I found I prefered the supporting cast to the main cast: Chris Hanke is adorable as the evil square Baldwin, who is so desperate to marry our heroine he frames his rival for arson. I don't have my playbill on me, but the girl playing Leonora, the schizo chick obsessed with Cry Baby, is terrific. Not only is the character the most entertaining in the show, but she plays her so well. Actually, Leonora isn't just the most entertaining character in the show, she's the most sympathetic character in the show. James Snyder as Cry Baby is slightly mis-cast vocally, IMO - his songs are mostly Elvis pastiche but he doesn't have the depth of voice for them. He goes higher and lighter in tone inappropriately, particularly at the end of songs. Good looking, sure, but not quite right.

Everyone else is just fine. The music itself is pastiche of all forms of the era, from barbershop to rock 'n' roll, with parodic lyrics. It's deliberately cheesy, hitting all the highlights of 1950s paranoid white middle class culture, but it has no real meaning in the end. The final song, however, is utter crap. Absolute crap. Pushing too far into the future with bad lyrics and it's just not good. It's not a strong, or entertaining, ending to the piece.

Couldn't find the stage door afterwards because someone on Broadway World typed the wrong street in there, so we were combing the 46th street side of the theatre in utter confusion before Kristin called her friend to ask where it was. So miss Andrew Call coming out (we wanted to joke with him about Andy totally being one to volunteer to be in the iron lung because it sounds cool), but arrive just in time to see Nick Blaemire and get the word on Glory Days: Previews start April 22 for a May 6 opening.

Met up with Seth for dinner and then headed to the Public for Drunk Enough to Say I Love You. Tremendously interesting piece. Perhaps more for me than for the casual theatre-goer since one doesn't do foreign policy at the LSE without doing special relationship, and the latter half, the crisis of conscience on Britain's part, fits right into the development context I've wound up in. What we're watching is the excitement - euphoria - of the staid man who has adopted family as a raison d'etre for lack of other options when he is suddenly presented with other options. (slightly heavy-handed here as family is obviously EU in the later scenes where Guy is considering going back to them and leaving Sam, though at times it could be construed as the Commonwealth, but rarely could it apply to the UN.) But the telling line in the whole piece is "God must have so much fun!" It's about the exercise of power - pure power - and how that exhilaration fades into desperation to maintain it. Sam needs power; Guy needs to be respected and needed, and he'll do anything for Sam, even putting up with his rages when the things he told Guy to do get done but somehow backfire because the plan didn't have appropriate contingencies or things just aren't happening fast enough. But eventually, the context of it all, the great waste of American consumerism compared to the great needs of the developing world, get to him and he manages to actually walk out. Except he comes back after all, because he can't really get along without the proximity to power, even after the bloom is gone. The piece is thematically chronological - it keeps shifting back and forth in time in terms of references, but the trajectory of Guy's relationship with Sam goes from Britain's desperation to remain relevant in the post-war years to the issues today of the Millennium Goals and the war on terror, with the end seeming, in a sense, to be about how Gordon Brown disagrees with the whole Iraq thing and yet isn't doing anything about it (though the piece is really more about Blair, since it's now a couple years old).

I'm not sure the production served the piece all that well. The piece is predominantly unfinished sentences, and I don't think these were handled terribly well. Some are meant to be interrupted, which didn't happen rapidly enough, while others are leading questions or deliberately leaving certain things unstated because they are obvious, and these didn't have the appropriate inflections. And the conceit of dropping props into the void when finished with them was a distraction, I thought. The rising sofa is somewhat useful, however, in showing how escape becomes more precarious the longer, and higher, the relationship goes. So that even escape isn't shown, really - it's the coming back, with Guy suddenly appearing again standing behind the sofa, while Sam is clinging to it in confusion, fear, and anger, that we see.

As I said, tremendously interesting piece. I'd like to go through the written script along with a bunch of my old foreign policy readings and really pull it apart.

So, after, we hang around a bit. Sam has people there. *facepalm* I'm rubbish with people anyway, but it's hard to just leave when one isn't certain one may ever have a chance to see him again. So we hang around a bit. After a while, it gets patently obvious that this conversation is going to go on for a long, long time. Lots of panicking, deep breaths, and we go over to politely interrupt because we are horrid people and utterly insane. Because we'd been hanging around too long to *not* do anything at that point.

I barely remember what happened and it doesn't seem real anymore, two days removed. We went over, made eye contact, I'm pretty sure I apologised for interrupting, said we were big fans of his work, and we just wanted to say how much we enjoyed the opportunity to see him on stage and appreciated the performance. Something like that. He was SO INCREDIBLY NICE about the whole thing. Seemed pleased that we had dared to say something, asked for our names and shook our hands (this is what the "raised properly" in my squeeing post on Saturday meant - he has a very nice handshake, firm but not crushing), said tonight's audience seemed very appreciative and into it, I said something about it being a tremendously interesting piece and briefly stated my academic background, he said something about spread the word to my development people, and we said goodbye.

I still feel rather awful for interrupting, but he was so tremendously nice and really seemed to enjoy that we bothered to say anything. And I desperately want to see him again, because dear god, it is amazing to see him on stage.

Will post about A Little Night Music later. Want to go into detail on that one.