Any idea how much money theatres waste on glossy, full-color brochures?

I got two of these mailers just yesterday from local theatres. Full-color, stapled booklets, with images "bleeding" off the edge - basically the most expensive thing you can print. One of them was sixteen pages long.  (My partner generally gets a copy of whatever I get, too, so that's four of them on the kitchen table, if anyone's counting.)  I won't mention who sent them, because everybody with a sizable budget sends them.

I'm just wondering how much money is going down the drain along with them.

Everyone thought that with the rise of the Web, transactions would become more and more paperless. Bills of all kinds certainly have, along with various tickets and other cash transactions. But somehow subscription advertisements, and just general get-out-the-word announcements, haven't. In fact they seem to have gone more paper-ful, if that's a word.  I could line a bookshelf with the full-color brochures I get in the mail every year, and that's not counting all the postcards and flyers.  It's an avalanche.

Perhaps they're cost-effective; indeed, market theory would insist they must be.  Handling print is just more seductive than scanning a screen, after all.  And we know most subscription audiences map toward the elderly, who aren't always computer-literate or screen-savvy.

Still, I wonder.  You could pay for a lot of actors, dancers and musicians with what it costs to put together a full-color, sixteen-page brochure (since most of these arts groups are non-profit, the mailing costs are minimal, but surely the design, distribution and printing charges are high).  Various people have railed quite a bit about the way marketing staffs and real estate have gobbled up money that might have gone as wages to artists, but so far I've never heard of anyone attacking this expense - or even attempt to reduce it.  Surely some current subscribers could be wooed with online blandishments - and surely the audience target could be reduced in other ways (I, for instance, really don't need to be tossing so much stuff into the recycling bin).

Just a thought.

Castle Perilous

Allyn Burrows and Melis Aker in I Capture the Castle.

Theatre people are always singing the praises of taking a risk.  Risk, risk, risk.  It's all about risk!

But there's nothing more painful than watching a large number of talented people take a big risk that doesn't pan out.  And I'm afraid that is basically what has happened up at Stoneham with I Capture the Castle (through Sunday only)  The cast is talented, the set impressive (and expensive!), the costumes and lighting evocative.  Even the music is memorable. But the play - adapted by Dodie Smith (of 101 Dalmations fame) from her own 1948 novel - is simply too flawed for anybody to put over, and there's something almost painfully Sisyphean about this talented crew's attempt to get the show moving.

In the end, artistic director Weylin Symes really should have been able to predict this, but I can also see how he might been blinded by the poetry of Smith's prose. This kind of bewitching romance held the British in its sway for much of the first half of the twentieth century: a hybrid of the pastoral and the gothic, it was basically a feminine coming-of-age story, yet also traded in benign fantasy and "fancy" - its characters encountered full moons, ruins, and crashing waves with astonishing regularity (often on midsummer eve or Hallowe'en), and were often quite sure they must have seen spirits or sprites, to boot.  The genre probably reached its fullest flowering in a charming handful of Michael Powell movies, but the novel I Capture the Castle is a pretty good avatar of the form, this time genially cut with a Shavian bemusement regarding bohemianism and social class.

Melis Aker as Cassandra

But you can't really power a play on atmosphere alone, and that's all Smith's got; she wrote several other fairly successful scripts, but I can't imagine how, her dramaturgical powers seem so puny.  Indeed, Smith is unable to structure even a single solid scene (nobody at Stoneham gets one); she telegraphs shifts in mood, and notional conflicts, directly (some confrontations are simply narrated by the heroine, who of course wants to be an author, at left), and shuffles her large cast back and forth at will, pushing characters through unlikely emotional hoops with little rhyme or reason.

So it's hard to care in the end who will capture this castle  (the play is about two poor British girls living with their lovably artsy family in a rustic ruin, which two rich, eligible American boys inherit - I think you can do the rest, and probably better than Dodie Smith could).  But everyone at Stoneham works so hard at being lovable - and Smith is, occasionally, quite witty - that the show is sometimes charming (if faintly so).  Local star Marianna Bassham, deploying a smoky alto that would have done Tallulah Bankhead proud, has the most fun with the trenchantly ditzy opinions of Topaz, the artist's model who now plays stepmother to the Disney-esque brood of James Mortmain (an intriguing Allyn Burrows), a once-great author now lost in the doldrums of writer's block.  Yes, "Topaz Mortmain" - this kind of play always features that kind of name, along with tongue-twisters from Greek mythology, so people often stumble over lines like "I never loved Melpomene, Ariadne, but I'm mad for Euterpe!"

Oh, well; I was glad to watch many of the actors Stoneham has assembled for this extravaganza, even if I winced at their lines.  It's been far too long since I saw the lovely Philana Mia, for instance - who really should be playing some Shakespearean heroine somewhere - but she was more than matched by newcomer Melis Aker (a senior at Tufts), who brought a rosy, vulnerable intelligence to Our Narrator, "Cassandra" (but who didn't quite limn the painful arc of her romantic experience, I'm afraid).  Alas, the girls' suitors were less compelling - Dan Whelton and Michael Underhill have given striking performances elsewhere, so I didn't understand quite why they failed to channel the vibrant American glamour Smith clearly intended.  But almost everyone else was in clover with the author's gallery of eccentrics, so I'll just list them all - Bernie Baldassaro, Charlotte Anne Dore, John Geoffrion, Joey Heyworth, Sarah Jones, Gerard Slattery, Meredith Stypinski, Sheriden Thomas, I wish you'd had a better play to be in.  Still, you couldn't wish for a better set to be in: Richard Chambers constructed an actual turret on the stage of Stoneham.  Maybe they can store it somewhere and bring it back if somebody else ever captures this Castle in a more stage-worthy play.

A classic classic at the Huntington

Waterston and Amato arm for their next lovers' quarrel. Photo(s): Paul Marotta.

If you haven't noticed (and why should you have?), the debate over new plays vs. classics has once again coughed to life in the blogosphere.  Of course the usual suspects (i.e., under-talented climbers) have piped up with the familiar arguments against producing the great plays - when, as everyone knows, their actual argument is that if classics once again are allowed pride of place on the stage, young playwrights will be forced to reckon with their standard (which is something they quite desperately do not want to do).

But don't worry - I'm not about to make an argument in favor of the classic theatre; instead I'm going to let the Huntington's current production of Noël Coward's Private Lives make it for me. Just see it and you'll understand what I mean; the heady buzz that it leaves the audience in tells you that a classic done right is its own argument - indeed, it simply levels the opposition.

But before you speed-dial Parabasis, I don't mean by this that theatres should abandon new work (far from it!).  The Huntington does both, after all (The Luck of the Irish was their most recent new-play success), and while artistic director Peter DuBois seems, well, disinterested in the classics, he has been careful to hire great outside directors to carry on that half of his theatre's mandate.  Hence we have recently enjoyed unforgettable productions of plays like Candide and All My Sons.

Perhaps somewhere DuBois understands that without the frame of the classics, new work has no context, or rather its context becomes television (which may be why so many new plays have begun to resemble cable).  Indeed, context is part of the reason classics continue to be central to every other art form; symphony orchestras, for instance, play Beethoven and Mozart because they define the reach - and limits - of their medium (at least so far).  When an orchestra launches into Beethoven, it is in effect stating "This is what we're aiming for; this what it's all about; this is what you can do with an orchestra." When a ballet company takes the stage in Balanchine, it is making the same kind of declaration. Theatres should do classic plays for precisely the same reason - and what's more, new playwrights should welcome the challenge and inspiration they provide.

Now mind you - after all those claims, I'm going to have to admit that Private Lives isn't actually a great classic; it's a minor classic (if a highly entertaining one).  And this isn't even quite a great production - it's only a very, very good production; and oddly, one that doesn't attempt to "re-invent" or "update" the text, but plays everything absolutely straight; in other words, this is a classic version of a classic. And yet everyone is celebrating!  It has critics doing handsprings, and on opening night, people were as bubbly as the champagne flowing through half the show as they surged into the night after the final curtain.  That's how powerful classics - even minor ones - can truly be.

The originals in the original production.

Although okay, I admit it - I do adore Private Lives.  Coward churned out many plays, songs, and entertainments over the course of his life - some of them only serviceable, some of them even dross, but a handful that may well live forever - or at any rate deserve to.  And Private Lives is one of those happy few.

Like most of classic Coward, it's a confession disguised as a cabaret act; and it is immortal because almost unconsciously, beneath all the sparkling quips and flip bon mots, the author reveals more than he ever meant to about his own heart - and certain conditions plaguing it that are probably universal.  He himself, of course, played lead Elyot Chase in the 1930 premiere, opposite muse Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda (he directed as well, and cast a rising young actor named Laurence Olivier as Amanda's new husband, Victor).  You get some idea of how perfectly matched Coward and Lawrence were as the warring old flames at the center of Coward's comedy from the following legend: when Lawrence first read the play, she immediately cabled "There's nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed!"  Coward cabled back at once that her own performance was the only thing that he thought would need fixing.

Ever since, Private Lives has been catnip to actors, but few have captured precisely the elusive chemistry that Coward and Lawrence brought to the roles.  And at the Huntington, I'm afraid, the trend still holds true: James Waterston (yes, son of Sam) is obviously miscast as Elyot; he lacks the sense of cheeky chic, the easy gloss of fabulousness, that we expect of a Coward hero.  Plus he seems heterosexual, when of course Coward was one of those male orchids of the 20's and 30's (Cary Grant was another) whose allure seemed to soar onto some higher plane, and make questions of ultimate orientation irrelevant (Lawrence had something of the same aura, and let's not get started on Olivier!).

Luckily, however, Waterston is a smart and accomplished actor, and he makes the wit work in his own appealingly spoiled way - and he makes us believe (and this is crucial) that arch as he may be, his love for Amanda is real.  And at any rate, his costar supplies enough luxe for both of them; Bianca Amato (at right) is practically the perfect Amanda - très amusante and yet a little world-weary too; more self-aware than Elyot but also more impulsive and exasperating; with a streak of the gamine in her soul, and a hint of boyishness as well (which would, in a more perfect world, balance Elyot's feminine hauteur).  What's more, she warbles (and Charlestons) like a dream.  I've seen several Lives - and one that cohered slightly more than this one, with both a brighter gleam and deeper shadows, too; but I've never seen a better Amanda, and I don't expect to; Amato is Amanda.

Together these two - with the help of director Maria Aitken (who herself once played Amanda) - exquisitely limn Coward's great theme (almost his only theme); the folly of living for, and to, the siren call of infatuation.  Elyot and Amanda are the type who can neither live with nor without each other; already divorced, we bump into them when they bump into each other, on their respective honeymoons with innocent new spouses.  Needless to say, their spark is rekindled (for who else could be more attractive?), they ditch the new bride and groom, and the rest of the play follows their impulsively renewed affair as it flares brightly, in a cocoon of delicious intimacy, then eventually (and inevitably) crashes and burns.

But before Coward lets you wag the finger, he brings those conventional, outraged spouses onto the scene, to play out their own emotional arc (from which, as usual for this playwright, the heroes simply escape again).  The joke, of course, is that this proves what is true of Elyot and Amanda is true, to some degree, of everybody; but the surprise here is how complex at least one of these figures becomes.  Autumn Hurlbert is perfectly good as the chirpy Sibyl, Elyot's spurned spouse; but Jeremy Webb (below, with Amato) makes something extraordinary out of Victor, who's generally cast as a quietly pompous prig.  Webb teases so much sophisticated, even noble, color from his final scenes with Amanda, however, that you leave almost wishing he'd been playing Elyot.  I've seen Mr. Webb before - and been impressed before, too; indeed, after this performance I have the feeling he may be one of the most gifted classical actors in America.  May the casting gods bring him our way again, and soon.

Well - do you really need to know more, or do you have your tickets yet?  The scenic and costume design, by Allen Moyer and Candice Donnelly, respectively, are quite smashing (as you can tell from these photos - the  scrims after Dufy are also just right, and the Parisian apartment, knowingly graced with a huge mirror, is particularly expert).  On the sidelines, local light Paula Plum does a droll turn - and nails a convincing accent - as Amanda's put-upon maid.  Meanwhile director Maria Aitken, whose subtle and intelligent work has become a staple at the Huntington, perhaps glides over the darker notes that Coward (almost unwittingly) strikes, but she doesn't try to obscure them, either; she clearly knows this play inside and out, and she lets you figure some things out for yourself.  Nor does Aitken make too much fuss over the slap Elyot delivers to Amanda (just after she has struck him over the head with a phonograph record); she conveys that no, this is not acceptable behavior, while acknowledging that with someone as essentially childish as Elyot, it's not so unexpected, either.

So you leave bemused by these people, but hardly morally impressed; and that's as it should be, too.  You may even find yourself teased by a certain trace of sympathy for this pampered pair - poor, divine Elyot and Amanda!  How barren their gorgeous lives must be!  And if you're like me, you may even want to spend more time with them.  For yes, I admit I'm paying this production my highest compliment: I'm paying to see it a second time.

Wild, but broken, Dreams

Denise Drago makes her move on Will Schuller in Your Wildest Dreams

Last weekend I checked out one of the final performances of my buddy Joey Pelletier's play Your Wildest Dreams, produced by Heart & Dagger Productions at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre.

Joey is a kind of playwriting dynamo - Heart & Dagger just put up another one of his scripts only a few weeks ago - and he has an endearingly gonzo attitude when it comes to his craft.  Indeed, he tosses off plays as if they were songs: Joey goes for it, gets it up there, and only then scans the fourth wall to see what (if anything) has stuck.

And not only is speed everything for Joey and Heart & Dagger, but experimentation is also a necessity.  So a typical Pelletier play is studded with choreography and stage pictures - devised by frequent collaborator Danielle Leeber Lucas - that sometimes patch holes in the plot, sometimes extend the action in a mode that's vaguely cinematic, or sometimes simply attempt to "get abstract."  Now this kind of thing can often be irritating, but it never is at Heart & Dagger somehow, because the troupe is never pretentious; nevertheless, their shows can be - well, a bit confusing.

And Your Wildest Dreams, in fact, was like a short course in the company's strengths and gaps.  The concept of the show was intriguing, and conceptually ambitious: Dreams was composed entirely of dreams, as experienced by eight different characters, most of whom seemed linked in a complicated set of relationships in the waking world, but who in their wildest dreams operated in very different, at times even fantastical, roles.

But perhaps the production's ambitions were almost too wild.  The key to conveying dream logic as dramatic action is to build in framing that explains the rules of said dreams (hence all that explicit exposition in Inception, which despite its confounding contradictions, operated by a simple set of conventions).  But Joey never clearly does this, so we're on our own throughout his various episodes, which he tries to structure as a web of interconnected fantasies and a functioning "queer vampire thriller," to boot.  This is rather a tall order - especially given the fact that the script juggles eight major characters, all of whom are sometimes seemingly their "real" selves, and sometimes their "fantasy" selves (i.e., as they might figure in someone else's dreams).

Oh, well.  I have to admit that half the time I was slightly lost, but the show was still punchy fun, off and on, and Lucas's choreography seemed better integrated into the storyline (and more clearly interpretible) than usual.  Slinky Denise Drago had the most impact as a seductive vampire (above), but Jenny Reagan, Amy Meyer and Kendall Aiguier also made positive impressions (in general the women seemed to fare better here than the men).  Sets and lighting were minimal, but at least the sound track was solid - Joey's got good taste in club music, and many episodes were at their best when channeling (however vaguely) the menace that floats just beneath the come-on of so many club tracks.  In the end, Your Wildest Dreams felt like a promising first draft - although it will take real discipline (and time and focus) to make it the stuff that dreams are made on.

Is there room for critics in a Market Society? (Part I)

Anton Ego, the morbidly epicene critic of Pixar's Ratatouille.

Since the seeming triumph of capitalism with the fall of the Berlin Wall, our modes of cultural discourse have, almost unconsciously, bowed more and more to the authority of the market.  Not that the collapse of that particular barricade was proof positive of any such historic consummation (whatever Francis Fukuyama - or Pink Floyd! - may have thought).  Indeed, capitalism has been as often on the ropes after "the Fall" as it was before.  The transition of the Soviet Union to the free market ended in an oligarchic shambles - while China became a pseudo-Communist (read: fascist) labor powerhouse; the market without the freedom seemed the new dispensation, frankly.  And since then, European nations have gone up to (or over) the edge of bankruptcy with frightening regularity, and 2008 demonstrated that Wall Street was only too happy to destroy the entire Western economy (indeed, they're happy to do it again).  But still, capitalism holds sway in the collective mindset as some sort of economic ideal.  Because, like, you know, the only thing that has "happened" since the Berlin Wall was 9/11 - and anyhow there's this cool new app for your iPhone.

A few trenchant writers have already begun to comment on this strange state of affairs, and have noticed that the progress of social thought, like the culture at large, has slowed to a crawl, while "capitalism" and "the free market" now occupy the sort of uncontested intellectual space once occupied by ideas like "the divine right of kings" and "the Virgin Birth."

But perhaps what is most troubling about our current mental predilections is that capitalism not only reigns supreme in the rarefied realm of pure economics, but has begun to infiltrate the discourse of our artistic culture as well.  More and more, popular art reflects the triumph of market forces.  And indeed, some thinkers have begun to worry that we may not be content merely to imagine ourselves as superheroes on the Web, but have already begun to imagine that we should become "citizens" of a "market society" in real life as well.

In such a society, every existing social norm, and every moral or value, is re-invented as an atomized exchange between free individuals - and so, essentially, all culture can be translated into metaphoric (or even literal) fiscal terms.  What's more, in a market society in its purest form, "freedom"all but requires that there be a price on everything, and that said prices serve as the only arbiters of behavior and lifestyle; indeed to doctrinaire libertarians, the yoke of what has come to be known as "monoculture" should be thrown off: there should be no social contract, no mores, no community judgments - and certainly no official punishments based on what are essentially historic (or aesthetic) criteria.

There's a lot to be said for this idea, of course; today it operates as the unconscious underpinning of much of the popular support for gay rights, as well as opposition to racism.  To my mind, however, such causes are (all too) easily justified by other intellectual traditions - but these very traditions generally require informed intellectual participation, something to which much of millennial society is opposed, and which technological cocooning seems to have rendered obsolete as social capital.  Hence by default the "market society" has become the unspoken foundation of much of our discourse - or what there is of it - even though in the end such a society is no recipe for liberal tolerance, as we naively imagine now.  Luckily for us, an immature, degraded version of Enlightenment ideals still molds the popular arena, like a benign shadow cast by the previous cultural consensus; but there's no reason why that should always be the case (and sooner or later, it won't be; indeed, we've already accepted the idea that corporations have First Amendment rights - and if an "enemy combatant" can be tortured, why can't he be enslaved?).

All of this, of course, would usually be beyond the bailiwick of this blog - only perhaps inevitably, the movement of these larger social wheels has put obvious torque on the mechanisms of a cultural sector I'm often concerned with - the theatre, and particularly the role of the critic therein.  This "torque" has generally taken the form of hostile - well, critique.  Even though everyone agrees that critics are on the way out, everyone it seems would like to get a kick in before the door slams behind them.

Now critics have always been under attack.  Always have been, always will be.  That's the way it is.  If a critic is not under attack, he or she is doing something wrong - or rather, he or she is simply not actually operating as a critic.  What's new about the latest round of assaults on the critical role, however, is that today not only are individual writers, or particular styles or modes of criticism, under censure, but the very idea of criticism is under attack.

Not, of course, in the abstract, for criticism is all but an unconscious mental response to every form of cultural representation; we're all critics, and all the time, too.  Indeed, people are more critical than ever privately.  No, the current conversation, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, revolves around whether there can be a valid public role for the critic.  Can there be a kind of accepted cultural "officer" in place at leading publications, or even in the blogosphere?  Or can we correctly assume that knowledge, sympathy and insight into an art form have no place - and deserve no special respect - in the discourse?

To the opponents of criticism, the answers to those questions are obvious.  For how, these partisans cry, can one opinion be given precedence over another?  After all, isn't everything just "apples and oranges," as the saying goes - and shouldn't everyone be left to their own taste?  Why and how could one opinion be more "valid" than another? The very idea is ridiculous on its face!

As is usually the case with naive arguments, however, this one dissolves under inspection.  Of course all opinions are equal; but we don't turn to a critic for his or her opinion, do we.   No, not really.  Instead we read criticism for its perceptions.  And does anyone really believe that all perceptions are equally valid, or even equally accurate?

Indeed, once we begin to ponder the question of perception, the canard of "All opinions are equally valid" immediately falls apart, or just seems beside the point.  Even the old saw regarding "apples and oranges" collapses - for only with our critical faculties can we tell whether an orange is really an orange, and not an apple painted orange.

So perhaps it's unsurprising that the fury often directed against critics amounts to a deflected, unconscious cognition of this fact.  People shrug off, in general, mere "differences of opinion," after all; but they grow angry when a critic illuminates facets of a work of art that they themselves were unable to perceive - when, in effect, they reveal what they thought was an orange was actually something else.  Or - worse! - that they themselves are something other than they imagine themselves to be.

A.O. Scott - not so far from Anton Ego.

Thus the recent dust-up over Times critic A.O. Scott's diss of The Avengers; to its fans, this blockbuster was simply a "wild ride" featuring all their favorite Marvel superheroes.  But to A.O. Scott, despite some "snappy dialogue," the film seemed "bloated," and "cynical;" indeed, Scott wrote, it was simply "a giant ATM for Marvel."  Which made many people very angry, even though this obviously was not a difference of opinion regarding "wild rides" - A.O. Scott admitted, in fact, that he liked a good thrill ride as much as anyone else; he shared the general opinions of his audience. No, this was entirely a difference of perception.

And unfortunately, part of what Scott perceived was that the people who liked The Avengers were simply easy marks, and almost mechanical in their tastes.  His review assumed, for instance, that even in  the arena of sensation-derived pop pleasure, cultural memory should count for something (he even wanly referenced Rio Bravo), and what's more, that other people had cultural memories, too.  He wasn't interested in getting on exactly the same roller coaster over and over, and didn't really understand why anybody else would be.  In short, he wanted the superhero tradition to develop, but instead felt it was exhausted - precisely because the people who built roller coasters now understood that the popular audience had become so stunted in its response that they didn't have to build in any new thrills.  No real cultural work was required; the "wild ride" could, and should, go faster and faster, but at the same time it could essentially stay in place.

But you see the problem; in a market society, you can't criticize the customers (so Scott had to to go through a ritual humiliation to appease his readership - see previous post), and cultural products can't have cultural histories, anyhow, because there is no more "monoculture" to have a history in (seriously - Rio Bravo??). So the only appropriate way to discuss movies, or plays (or books) is as discrete sets of sensations - like restaurant entrées.  There can be no "tradition," and so criticism can't be a component of a larger, shared conversation - we have tweets now instead!  Or at any rate that's what the new crop of "critics of the critics" have begun telling us, as I'll describe in the second half of this two-part series.

This is just painful

I came across this on Art's site. He found it on the Times site.

And it is so fucking stupid it makes me want to cry.

This sad excuse for a "conversation" seems to have been sparked by Samuel L. Jackson, whose career peaked in intellectual terms with Snakes on a Plane, and who famously dissed Times critic A. O. Scott on Twitter for himself dissing The Avengers, which was last weekend's multiplex fodder.  (Or was it the weekend before?)  Oh and in which Samuel L. Jackson paid some baadassss superhero who kicked asssssss.

Now, artistically - sorry, but I'm laughing already; I actually can't write a sentence that reads, "In artistic terms, The Avengers - " It's just impossible; it's too funny.  The Avengers.  Artistic.  Seriously.  I mean, are the Avengers the ones who are like mutants, which means they're like gay in comic-speak?  Or is one of them the actual new gay one, the Green Lamppost?  I mean gay is so hot in the graphic novel now.  Hot, hot.  Because you know - well, you know; because.  Because Obama.

But back to this sack of shit the Times posted under the rubric "Sweet Spot."  (Uh huh.)  Now I've never been a big fan of A.O. Scott, but he is not stupid, and he is articulate.  (And something tells me that the opinion of the ages will most likely align with his review regarding The Avengers.)  So you'd think he could strike a few intellectual sparks on this subject.  But the Times has teamed him up with David Carr, who thinks the Strokes are as culturally important as the Sistine Chapel.  (I'm not kidding, he actually says that.)  Now true, David Carr looks like he may have been around since, oh, 1512, so maybe he really knows whereof he speaks.  Or maybe Michelangelo is the only other fucking artist this fatuous idiot knows.  (You be the judge!)

But wait, there's more - and actually, here, I think, is the sweet spot of this "Sweet Spot." David is all broken up about how A.O. may have hurt Samuel L.'s feelings.  Because you know what?  David Carr got a bad review once (can you believe it?) - and it hurt!  Carr says this right into the camera, as if he were Charlton Heston laying down the law to Pharaoh - "It HURT!"  So 1-2-3 - awwwwwww.  We're sorry, David Carr.  AWWWWWWW.

Only you know what, David?  Sure, the reviews hurt - but can you say your critics were wrong?  'Cause just judging from this interview, they may have been right (you certainly suck here).

And I'm just curious what case you're actually making.  (Let's review!) Are you arguing that critics should not speak their minds - that is to say, are you a newspaperman arguing for censorship?  Are you seriously arguing that not hurting feelings is more important than free speech - as my kindergarten teacher insisted once, and quite passionately?  (Maybe you would have liked her!)

Or are you arguing that we should all pretend the Strokes are as good as Michelangelo?  Because deep in your heart you know that is an extremely foolish thing for a grown man to believe?

Or were you just paid to say all this crap because the Times saw an opportunity to suck up to the pissed Avengers audience, in the hopes they might suddenly decide to take out web subscriptions?  Oh, yeah.  As if!  Seriously, that's like the most pathetic scenario of all - that you could somehow come off as hip.  It's just - oh, what can I say.  The Times so sucks.

SpeakEasy rolls out Xanadu

At its best, Xanadu is highly a-musing; Photos: Craig Bailey

Once upon a time - perhaps as late as, say, 1980 - every English major in the Western world (and most college graduates) knew that "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree."  But today, for most 'liberal arts' majors (and we use that term advisedly), not only that line, but its entire, famously-unfinished source (not to mention its author!) is unknown; in the popular consciousness,  Xanadu refers not to a pleasure-dome, but to the notorious roller-disco-musical which Joel Silver and a slew of other producers unleashed on the world in 1980, in the process knocking Olivia Newton-John's booming film career right off its skates.

Xanadu - which I half-watched on cable many moons ago - actually has several dubious claims to fame beyond its nearly nonsensical plot (something about the Greek muses coming to earth to help open said roller rink).  The movie also derailed the renewed interest in big-budget musicals that tracked the success of Grease and Saturday Night Fever (which is kind of a musical); it also, rather sadly, showcased Gene Kelly's last turn on the silver screen.

And anyone who has seen it can tell you the movie deserves its rap as one of the worst musicals EVAH - not because it's so dumb (Grease is almost as dumb), nor because its songs are particularly bad (in fact its soundtrack, powered by the synth bombast of Electric Light Orchestra, was a big hit).  No, Xanadu was just made badly.  The script is klutzy, the cinematography indifferent, and the choreography almost bizarrely clueless (below).  It's a shining testament to the the sheer craft of more competent moviemakers, who can position and sculpt similarly weak material so deftly that it's palatable, even entertaining.


The cluelessly choreographed climax of Xanadu - don't miss the tightrope walkers!

Now - are you thinking what I'm thinking?  Cheesy but campy concept, a roster of pre-made hits: can you say gay juke-box musical?  Well, Douglas Carter Beane, the mastermind of The Little Dog Laughed and other Hollywood-Babylon baubles, certainly could.  In 2007 Beane repositioned the script for Broadway as an elaborate in-joke, with its central trope being its self-awareness of its status as the movie moment when pop culture jumped the shark, as the 70's pleasure-dome collapsed of its own weight before the Reagan revolution.  For what it's worth, Beane also pulled another 80's clunker, Clash of the Titans, into the mix - on which he actually relies for more plot points, it seems to me, than he does Xanadu.  (Although the distinction is really neither here nor there; both movies targeted the pleasure centers of the reptilian brain coiled within the human one, and both pretty much blew it.)

Beane's re-tooled Xanadu proved a solid hit in New York - but does impressing Ben Brantley or Charles Isherwood really count for much anymore?  Sorry, I don't think so.  I mean isn't the whole gay-theatre-for-straights thang itself a little campily dreadful at this point, and just waiting for its own meta-Douglas-Carter-Beane treatment by some wicked-smart hetero?

Which one's actually channeling Olivia?

Well, be that as it may - let's not push the self-conscious cultural meter any further along than we have to; but there's still an obvious problem rolling around in Xanadu - and that's Xanadu itself.  Beane does dodge its trudging storyline much of the time, but he can't skate past it entirely; it's still there, and you have to find a way to make it fun.

And the current SpeakEasy Stage production is some testament to just how hard that really is to do.  The company has pulled out all the stops this time around; they've reconfigured the Roberts Studio to accommodate a roller rink, and blown the budget on glamorously tacky costumes that look just right - they even hand out glow-sticks to everybody.  And the results are amusing, but never quite transporting.  It's hard to put your finger on precisely why this is so, but surely director Paul Daigneault's artistic signature has something to do with it; there's a kind of gently knowing control strategy, an unspoken commitment to deferred gratification, about his style that simply short-circuits the sexy stupidity of Xanadu.

Star McCaela Donovan almost personifies the problem.  This talented and lovely lady is a mainstay of the local scene, and for good reason - she nails every aspect of this tricky part, singing her heart out, roller-skating like a pro, and even pulling off a wicked Australian accent.  But she doesn't seem to be having all that much fun; with every entrance she lobs a chunk of glitter into the air, but somehow the gesture seems too ironically off-hand; you can always see her mind turning, and frankly, she shouldn't have a mind at all.  As her numbskull boyfriend, "Sonny Malone," the hunky Ryan Overberg (at right, with Donovan) has more the right idea (he channels Newton-John's dumb sparkle better than Donovan does), but there's only so much he can do in a role that's essentially reactive.  And surprisingly, for once the usually-reliable Robert Saoud doesn't get much loft in the Gene Kelly part, either.

Clash of the comic titans: Shana Dirik and Kathy St. George

Luckily, the supporting cast makes hilarious hay of the Clash of the Titans half of the show, where adaptor Beane has squirreled away the best of his bitchy quips.  The great Shana Dirik and Kathy St. George are probably the two funniest ladies in the city, and they go for broke here (at one point St. George literally locks her molars on the set), and whenever they're onstage, Xanadu suddenly does glitter with campy malice. And this dastardly duo gets strong back-up from castmates Kami Rushell Smith, Val Sullivan, Patrick Connolly, and Cheo Bourne, who have lots to do - and do it all well - but only occasionally get to bask in the spotlight.

David Connolly's choreography, meanwhile, is better than the movie's (it had to be), but perhaps - as was the case in last year's Drowsy Chaperone - it lacked its own distinctive profile.  As for the familiar songs - well, they lose something essential, I'm afraid, when stripped of the overdubbed churn of Jeff Lynne's original production; and you can't help but notice that the chorus of some of them ("I'm Alive," "Evil Woman," "Xanadu")  is really just the title repeated over and over.  Still, they're better than most of what you hear on Broadway these days, and the onstage band proved tight and punchy, effortlessly supporting Dirik and St. George's groove with "Evil Woman," and Donovan's sweet warble in "Have You Never Been Mellow?" And at such moments, the Roberts Studio suddenly did feel like a pleasure-dome - okay maybe not a stately one, but then could you really wave a glow stick in the air with Samuel Taylor Coleridge?