New Centerstage Review Up

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I’m glad I got to see a mainstage Strawdog Theatre Company play. They’ve been around for ages, which means they have more latitude than younger companies to dust off older scripts and see what they can do with them. That seems to be what they did with The Petrified Forest (see also their Duchess of Malfi coming this spring). I enjoyed the show, especially Caroline Neff, who always seems to contain about 2.5 times more energy and emotion than normal humans. Here’s an excerpt of my play review:

Squire looks at her pictures and asks her to read poetry, and next thing she knows, Gabby’s in love. The timing is inconvenient, since the end of the second act sees the infamous Duke Mantee (Jamie Vann) and his henchmen using the café as a rest stop on their escape from the law after a massacre in Oklahoma.

You can read the rest of the review here. It’s an enjoyable show, but not an earth-shattering one. A pleasant way to pass a couple hours in Lakeview.

Community, Where My Ladies At?

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Community is coming back! After a hiatus that had comedy nerds across the country weeping along to Arrested Development reruns in an attempt to fill the void, the show is back on March 15. I love this show for so many reasons: the jokes, the musical numbers, the complex callbacks, Donald Glover. It’s also a show with an uncanny eye for detail. Community subverts the conventions of any genre it tackles, while simultaneously celebrating those conventions. Characters wear ridiculous outfits, stories hang on the thinnest of premises, and yet the intricate plotting and consistent character development means that we wind up caring a great deal about what’s going on at Greendale Community College.

we all wish this was our college crowd

So it struck me as odd when I realized that with all the care that’s gone into creating and embellishing this fictional world, one aspect is severely underdeveloped. I’m not talking about the fact that we haven’t seen Shirley’s children outside of that one episode in Season 1, or that it’s Season 3 and Jeff isn’t even pretending to try to get back into his law firm anymore. It’s a sitcom; some facts just aren’t as important as the overall story and the jokes. No, I’m talking about the lack of ladies on the Greendale campus.

We’ve got the seven main characters (4 men, 3 women), two secondary characters (2 men–the Dean and Chang), and several tertiary characters (all men). I wouldn’t for the world suggest we lessen Dean Pelton’s presence, because Jim Rash’s portrayal is one of the funniest things on TV in the last decade. And it looks like they’re finding a balance with Chang, which is good, because a little goes a long way with that one [insert Chang’s self-referential joke about “the Chang” here].

The show does a good job of having characters recur in the background, to make the Greendale world feel more complete. But women outside that crowd show up as one- or two-episode love interests for the guys in the group, and then disappear. Tertiary characters: Duncan, Star-Burns, Leonard, Magnitude, Garrett, Neil… see a pattern here? Sometimes Vicki shows up, but she never gets much to say, whereas Magnitude has a catch phrase, Garrett plays pivotal production roles in Greendale promo videos, and Leonard is a well-known old crank.

C’mon, Dan Harmon et. al., let’s liven things up with some wacky women as regulars on the Greendale campus! Lord knows there’s plenty to be found at that wild and wonderful place.

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New Centerstage Review Up

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Last week I saw South Pacific at the Cadillac Palace downtown, and I have to say, I don’t think that musical has aged well. Or at least, the production I saw certainly hasn’t. Here’s an excerpt of my play review:

Aside from a few well choreographed numbers (“Dame,” “Honey Bun”), almost all the songs are sung hands at the side, staring straight ahead. Characters sit down randomly in the middle of songs, as if they’re too tired to make it through the whole number on their feet. The overall effect is of a tired and uninspired production.

You can read the rest here. I also wonder if it played as well as people remember when it first came out, because there are a lot of slow songs. The ratio of slow songs to fast is just way too high to stay entertaining for a full three hours of Broadway entertainment. Rodgers and Hammerstein definitely got the ratio better with Cinderella and The Sound of Music.

If you’re planning to see a touring Broadway production in Chicago this year, I’d say wait for another one. This isn’t the one to drop your hard-earned cash on.

ACAM: Vietnam – The Quiet American

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Graham Greene’s The Quiet American isn’t exactly what I meant when I said I’d do A Country a Month research. I do like to read fiction about the places I’ll be visiting, but I like it to be written by people from those places. It’s hard finding history books at CPS about Asia that aren’t written by white scholars from Britain and its former colonies, but at least the library has more options when it comes to fiction.

just Europeaning my way through Vietnam, don't mind me

But Greene’s novel was one of the ones on my shelf that needed reading, so I picked it up. And it was really good! It’s set during the French part of Vietnam’s decades-long war on its own soil against foreigners and sometimes against itself. Greene is concerned, as many mid-century novelists are, with the changing nature of power as it shifts from Britain to the United States. He’s also concerned with the many ways people can betray one another, and whether it is worth trying to be a good person in a war zone, and how love and friendship might fit in all this.

Greene’s protagonist, Fowler, is a middle-aged journalist prone to philosophizing about what Vietnam means, what the Vietnamese are like, what the French are like, what the Americans are like. So we see everything through his eyes, and through the eyes of a 1955 writer, and thus everything has that special glow of “benevolent” racism–the kind that sees nonwhites as childlike and just looking for guidance from wise Westerners. Greene does complicate this somewhat, alternately acknowledging and disregarding his girlfriend Phuong’s agency and intelligence, and speaking on equal terms with the man who reveals the nefarious plans of the “third way” group. He even seems to realize that Vietnam isn’t just a staging ground for Western political dreams or an escape route for disillusioned journalists. There’s real affection for the country and its inhabitants here, from the dedication at the front made out to friends living in Saigon, right through the story as Fowler travels the length of the country.

It’s a well-written story, and a good meditation on power, innocence, and betrayal. But The Quiet American is not a good way to learn about Vietnam as the Vietnamese live it or see it. So, moving on! Any suggestions?

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Book Progress

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Sometimes all it takes to do something you’d been meaning to do for awhile is to say out loud that you’re going to do it. I’ve seen my bookshelf for years and thought, “I really need to read everything I own, and not just let them sit there as decoration,” but it wasn’t til I changed the appearance of the shelf that I saw just how many books I own but have never read. I wrote last month that I was going to change that, and whaddya know, it worked.

The Before Picture

Since then, I’ve read four of the novels/short story collections on that shelf, and a Christmas present and borrowed book besides. It feels good! I’m not sure you can see my Goodreads reviews unless you have an account, but here’s a link to my Goodreads list in case you’re interested in what I thought of them.

How’s your 2012 reading list coming along?