Curry On My Wayward Son

It ain't easy to find a good pun to go with curry but I, I am a master of the form, and, basking in the glow of dinner, I was inspired to rarefied pun-ish heights (I am the pun-isher).

Dinner was yellow curry with beef from Thai 101. Curry is not normally on my culinary short-list but, tonight, I was inspired. Inspired but not blind, I also ordered, as a backup, nice, safe fried rice. However, the curry, a bit sweet, a bit spicy, hit the spot so completely that the fried rice has been relegated to the fridge for tomorrow.

Those are some big shoes to fill.

My bigfoot post got a wee bit of attention which is cool. I really think that the bigfoot community needs to distinguish between the researchers whose undertakings are honest, scholarly, and those people trying to turn a buck, make a name, or just hijack the forum because they can. Maybe this whole to-do will push people in the right direction. We'll see.

Getting crabby.

I watched all four episodes of After the Catch yesterday, the last one when I really should have been in bed. I don't know why The Deadliest Catch captures my attention so completely but I am like an Opelio crab caught in its pot and I can't get out. After three or four seasons, you'd think all the tales have been told (and, honestly, they have) but I haven't tired of them. Not a bit.

Showtime.

My cousin, Paul, arrives this Friday to stay with me to start off his summer vacation. He wants to see a show but doesn't know what show to see. I get the feeling he doesn't actually like theater over much but he wants to do it because, as he said, it's a New York thing to do. Well, plenty of things are New York things to do, like taking a dump on the edge of a subway platform, dodging hobos, and bitching about gentrification. I told him to find a couple of shows he wanted to see. He's having a hard time coming up with anything. At $40+ a pop, even via TKTS, I figure he should see something because he wants to see it, not because he feels obligated to see something, anything, in the pursuit of the New York state of mind. (Where have you gone, Billy Joel?) I suppose we'll figure something out.

I'm going to watch Anthony Bourdain slough his way through Indonesia on the TV. I like his caustic brand of narrative - he's a man after my own heart. Plus, I've got nothing more to say (yeah, right).

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Big Mac

The set design for Rupert Goold's MacBeth is very spare. The white tiled walls, smooth black floor, and bare metal appliances envision a bunker, a prison, or an asylum- all fitting for this play of blood, madness, and war. The stage is left visible before the curtain, perhaps so that we can contemplate it's clean but cruel sterility before chaos comes to call it home.

My excitement and anticipation for the show had been rising ever since finally getting tickets for the play during the week. From what I could see, the show was completely sold out but I luckily managed to get what I consider to be a good seat: first row of the mezzanine, near the center. I'm not too far away and I get a good, clear view of the entire stage. When the play began with a thunderous bang (literally), I was ready to go.

I came to see Patrick Stewart as the titular thane and I wasn't disappointed. MacBeth is a man who succumbs to raw ambition and is consumed by it, from the inside out, even as he must reap its bitter harvest. Stewart easily navigated MacBeth's fluctuating states of being: strong and powerful, weak and fearful, crazed, calm and contemplative.

Stewart was matched with Kate Fleetwood as Lady MacBeth who provides the prod to push MacBeth to action and then becomes proxy for his madness. She was excellent also. I have no complaints about any of the cast*. They each do what the roles required. I must, however, give special praise to Christopher Patrick Nolan as Seyton and to the three witches, here transformed into nurses, whose physical but silent presences on the stage in key moments gave palpable life to the dark fates they had foretold.

While the play concerns itself with the power politics of medieval Scotland, the setting and costumes reflect a Stalin-era communist state. It's an interesting choice that works very well. It took me a few minutes of the first scene for me to reconcile the Shakespearian English to the much more modern look on stage but, once done, I was very comfortable with the fusion in styles.

By using a modern era, the play was able to use sound effects, such as artillery bombardments, medical instruments, and gunfire to accent the action, signal changes, or provide subtle ambiance. Images were also projected onto the back wall of the stage that heightened the drama. In particular, the video of blood flowing into water as Banquo's ghost arrived to confront MacBeth was an excellent use of the technique.

This was a great show and I'm glad I finally made time to see it. Playbill's Ruth Leon calls Stewart "the greatest MacBeth of my lifetime." While I don't have the points of reference to make that claim (this is the first MacBeth I've seen on stage), there is no doubt that Stewart puts on a riveting performance. His work, coupled with the rest of the cast, great stage, costume, and sound design, makes this a must-see play. I'm just happy I finally got to see it.

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* A cast-related note: in one scene, Lady McDuff (Rachel Ticotin) was speaking and I thought to myself, I swear that woman looks like Melina from Total Recall. Sure enough, when I checked IMDB this morning, there she was. The Playbill doesn't mention it, or any films at all. Do the actors create those bios or does someone connected to Playbill or the theater do it?

Saturday is MacBeth-turday

London 2007
Originally uploaded by TecWiz

Somehow, someway I had totally missed that Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart, was playing at the Lyceum. I had totally missed the stint at BAM and I would have probably missed this as well (it closes at the end of the month) if I hadn't been up around midtown several times the past couple weeks and walked by the theater.

Every time I walked past the theater I swore I would get a ticket "as soon as I got home" but every time I got home, I promptly forgot, and time started to slip away. No longer! I have finally made my stand at bought a ticket to the Saturday 8 PM show.

The reviews I've scanned through (I don't want to know too much) have been sparkling. I've enjoyed Patrick Stewart pre-Trek ("Camelyard! Camelyard!") so I am practically grinning from ear to ear in anticipation. This is quite feat, considering I'm sitting in my office cubicle and I'm not even halfway through the work day.

Passion Play

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Originally uploaded by catonahot...

There was a stretch during the second act of tonight's performance of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in which James Earl Jones nearly completely cracked up Terrence Howard. Jones's Big Daddy was explaining, through words and various gesticulations, his continued sexual virility and appetite on this, his 65th birthday, to Howard's Brick, his son. Something in Jones's emoting broke through Howard's resolve and his face cracked, against its will, and broke into smiles and swallowed giggles. Jones, encouraged, pushed harder and might have, under other circumstances, succeeded in breaking Howard completely. Howard was saved only by his character's relative lack of dialog.

The audience loved it. I loved it. It was part of the show, the experience implicitly promised by a marquee filled with big names. But the show can overshadow the performance and, tonight, it did. The middle of the second act turned abruptly from drama to unintentional comedy. How do you rescue it? It's almost impossible. Howard was able to recover in time to finish the act strong but that stretch of laughter undermined what was supposed to be a more serious confrontation between father and son.

Anika Noni Rose is an amazing Maggie the Cat. She's sultry and seductive and a force of nature. James Earl Jones was good as the patriarch of the clan but he felt too jovial, too jolly. His barbs didn't read as meanly as I think they were meant to. You can't help thinking him a nice old man, even though you're not supposed to. Phylicia Rashad played Big Momma well. If there is a problem with the casting, it's Terence Howard as Brick.

Brick is like the singularity at the center of a black hole: everyone is drawn to him, pulled into his gravity like planets spinning in orbit. To be effective, he has to have a presence, an attractive power that can convey some inkling into why all these characters are striving for his love, affection, and well-being while he essentially does nothing. Howard just doesn't have this presence. We want him to- after all he's a rising star in Hollywood. Because of that, we're drawn to him, we want him to fill up the stage even though he's on the periphery. Unfortunately, at least on this night, he couldn't.

The result is that the other actors, particularly Jones and Rashad, have to overcompensate to make up for this void that can't be filled. It also undermines Maggie's passion and devotion: it's hard to see even a shadow of what she sees, or once saw, in this man.

Despite these flaws, I enjoyed the play. Seeing James Earl Jones on stage easily made it a winning proposition for me. While he may have made Big Daddy too sympathetic, he was still a force on stage and everything I had imagined him to be. So the acting choices and execution may have been a bit off, so the action may have been blunted by some unlooked for comic relief, they put on one hell of a show.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Originally uploaded by catonahot...

Thankfully, mercifully, the work day is almost done. Tonight, I'll be at the Broadhurst Theater taking in Tennessee Williams's classic play, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Despite the NY Times's lukewarm review, I'm looking forward to the show, particularly James Earl Jones. I'm also keen to see Terrence Howard's stage work.

Oh, Those Tangled Webs

Marie Antionette
Originally uploaded by metermaid138

Saturday, I went with my sister to see Laura Linney in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. While our seats were less than optimal and a few staging directions puzzled me, I very much enjoyed the production.

We had bad seats. This was clear immediately. No matter how glamorous being seated in an orchestra box sounds, it's not. It's even more not when seated in the last row in the box and even more not given some of the staging decisions that were made. In the best case scenario, the view is skewed from being at one extreme end of the stage. In the worst case, the view is skewed and obstructed. We got a nice helping of the worse case.

I am no theater expert. I've gone to a fair number of plays over the years and more this past year since I've moved back to the city. What I know, mostly, comes from my friend Jennifer who had studied the theater. I do know that it's usually a bad idea to have all the actors sitting down at once for long stretches and that the actors shouldn't turn their backs to the audience. On Saturday, I saw both.

Part of the issue was, again, our seating. Being at one end of the stage, there was more opportunity to see things from bad, odd angles and, for whatever reason, the action was weighted to our side of the stage, making it worse.

That being said, there was one extended moment when Laura Linney literally had her back to the stage- there was no other action apart from her- that seemed a strange choice, at least from my view.

As for the sitting, there was quite a bit of it. It didn't so much bother me except that I was aware of it as a construct so it pulled me out of the play a bit. Most of the times, the sitting was not necessary to the action as I saw it. It was just a decision that didn't quite work for me.

Those issues aside, I really enjoyed the play. I won't go into the plot which is a massive tangle and, being a classic, needs no introduction or review. I will say that, being so dialog driven, it does require agile performances to avoid bogging down. Luckily, the actors deliver.

The whole cast was excellent. The two leads (Linney and Ben Daniels) provided the dramatic and dynamic energy to keep everything in motion. Linney, in particular was tremendous as the icy queen of romantic real politic. She was, after all, the reason I had come and she was worth the price of admission.

The production went for a very minimalistic stage design, making excellent use of minimal props that, while few in number, were enough to evoke the atmosphere and period of the action. I'm fascinated by stage design and this one did much with little. I really appreciated that.

Despite my few problems, I think Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a great play definitely worth seeing, just do yourself a favor: stay away from the box seats. You've been warned.