Review
[title of show]
Vineyard Theatre
March 11, 2006
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
One of my recurring nightmares is being trapped in a room with aspiring performers who can't talk about anything other than themselves, each other, themselves, the entertainment world, and themselves. A friend of mine refers to these people as "the gnats of Broadway" and one can find an entire roster of them on theatre blogs like "All That Chat". Now that theatre festivals throughout New York City and of course elsewhere allow a number of these gnats an opportunity to grab at the brass ring, so many of these aspirants think they'll find their light on Broadway or at least their bulb on Off-Broadway. Two of them, Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen, with two others in tow, Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff, have found their way to the Vineyard Theatre with [title of show], an annoyingly self-referential piece taking Pirandello to the next level. At least Mr. Pirandello used his smarts employing this genre to make it about something substantial. This work is about cobbling together a musical for a festival submission that becomes a musical about cobbling together a musical for a festival submission and the subsequent re-cobbling of the musical after it takes off at the festival (because of all those gnats in attendance who can't seem to get enough of themselves) for producers which becomes a musical about re-cobbling a musical for producers and the gnats that love this sort of thing (being about themselves) and so on. When the two creators playing themselves (one of whom inordinately plays with himself) ponder things like will the audience think their music and lyrics derivative or their book self-indulgent and adolescent, as a member of that subsequent audience I wanted to scream "Yeeees!". They do give you the low-down on theatre speak.. y'kow, "left of center", "upstage", "downstage", "fuck", "shit" and as one creator asks the other if all he does is masturbate (see above), one can only think the whole show is nothing but masturbatory.
All that chat above aside, there are a couple of numbers that are clever, and even more clever, some in-jokes involving answering machine responses from B-list Broadway babies. Michael Beresse stages the show effectively and the performers have their charms, especially Jeff Bowen and Heidi Blickenstaff who seem to honestly question what it is their doing. In fact, by the end of the performance, Mr. Bowen seems honestly to be sick of himself.
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