Passing Strange, One Week Only

I hope everyone in the Bay Area has heard about Spike Lee's film of Passing Strange, Berkeley Repertory Theatre's production that went off-Broadway and then on Broadway for six months, picking up a number of Obie awards and others along the way.

Spike Lee filmed the final two live performances and also shot performances without an audience so the cameras had better access to the stage--and the film was won raves from Roger Ebert, the New York Times and Rolling Stone, among others.

Check out Passing Strange, playing for one week only from October 2 to October 8 at San Francisco's Embarcadero Center Cinema and Berkeley's Shattuck Cinemas (a couple of blocks from where the musical was born). It's also available on demand to Comcast subscribers.

Photo: Daniel Breaker as Youth in Sundance Selects' Passing Strange. Photo by David Lee/Sundance.

American Idiot Review

[Note: Minor spoiler alert.]
When I interviewed Michael Mayer, director and librettist for American Idiot, the epically hyped new Green Day musical that just premiered at Berkeley Rep, it seemed like his primary vision for the show was that of unrelenting action. It would be structured, shockingly enough, for a musical scored by a punk band, like a punk song—short, sweet and to the point, with nary a moment for the audience to take a breath, check their watches or think about what they want to have for dinner the next day (roasted pork loin with seared red chard and caramelized onions). In that respect, it would be an understatement to say that Mayer succeeded. In fact, the only time the show finds time to take a breath, about 15 minutes before the final curtain, everyone in the audience assumed it was over and gave a standing ovation before awkwardly returning to their seats as the next song began. From the show’s very first moment, the stage is so gleefully overstuffed with action you barely know what to focus on. People fly on wires, dance on beds, play guitar solos and hide in corners doing drugs. In a nod to Green Day’s late-'90s MTV ubiquity, a constant shifting of attention is required, but it’s a testament to choreographer Steven Hoggett that this over-caffeinated jumping around never feels especially disjointed. Even when the action hits a rare lull, the set itself, with every inch of its walls plastered over with concert posters, blown-up album covers and TVs constantly running clips is visually sumptuous enough on its own to more than hold your attention.

The show plays the band’s 2004 album American Idiot in its entirely with a couple B-sides from the European release and a song or two from 21st Century Breakdown, which was released earlier this year, thrown in for good measure. All of the songs received new arrangements courtesy of composer Tom Kitt, whose arrangement are generally improvements over the band’s originals. Kitt smartly foregrounds Bille Joe Armstrong’s effortlessly memorable vocal melodies, the singular aspect of the band’s sound that elevated them above their third-wave pop-punk peers (I mean, Rancid wrote some killers ones too but the odds of someone bringing Out Come the Wolves to Broadway are slim). While the new arrangements are smart and catchy, they lack diversity. Virtually every song fits into one of two categories: it’s either a bouncy, power-chord rocker or an acoustic ballad that gradually builds into a sing-along power ballad with nothing in between.

The plot, so much as it exists, tells the story of three friends reaching adulthood in the suburbs. One moves to the city, meets a girl, gets addicted to drugs, loses said girl, and then returns home. Another joins the army and is injured in Iraq. The last knocks up his girlfriend and spends the entire show sitting on a couch in a corner of the stage smoking pot and watching life pass him by. This description makes the plot seem more infinitely involved than it actually is. It’s nearly 20 minutes before anything really happens plot-wise and the most of the characters have about as much depth as a piece of construction paper, but that’s really beside the point. American Idiot, like a good punk song, isn’t really about story or character development. It’s about creating a mood, a particular sneeringly smirking aesthetic that’s immediate, urgent and, if all goes according to plan, as loud as is humanly possible.

In the interview, Mayer said he was nervous about what the band would think of the show. He was a huge fan and didn’t want to disappoint them. Sitting a couple rows in front of the band, I could see Armstrong silently mouthing the words to all of his songs as they were presented in a wildly different context from when he first recorded them. As the final curtain fell, a camera crew rushed to the band to catch them wiping away tears and applauding rapturously. At the end of the day, even though not performing, the show, and the circus surrounding it, is really all about them.

Photo of American Idiot courtesy of mellopix.com.

Advocacy or Cheerleading...Or Both?

The July/August issue of American Theatre hit my mailbox today, and I found an intriguing juxtaposition in its Letters section. I skimmed the page and saw Tony Taccone’s name as one of the letter-writers, and I knew right away he was going to take exception to the feature Karen D’Souza wrote about You, Nero, where she basically rehashed negative criticism of the South Coast Rep performance in a feature that in theory was supposed to be about the second production at Berkeley Rep. (For some reason, the May/June issue hasn't been archived online yet, otherwise I would provide a link.) Now, when I read Karen’s article, I thought to myself, Why would she be rehashing all this negativity—and some of it was fairly below the belt—in an article about new work for a magazine like American Theatre? Tony pointed out the same thing in his letter—that “instead of a thoughtful examination of this topic, the story read like a harsh review of the first production”—and he also went on to support his colleagues at South Coast Rep.

Another letter in the issue referenced a previous letter that took the magazine to task for the “negative tenor” of David Freedlander’s article about Danny Hoch and that said that the magazine should not publish articles that generate negativity. This letter-writer, J.T. Rogers, said, “Wrapped in [this] complaint is an idea I’ve heard put forward by many people in many theatres around this country: that this magazine’s role is to serve as a cheerleader for the work we do. Full stop…. My response to this is: Really?”

Naturally, this topic really interests me. While I personally think that Karen D’Souza went way too far in her article—and question American Theatre’s decision to print it as is—I do understand the fine line of cheerleading and relevancy. While theatre does needs advocates, when does advocacy stray into cheerleading and start doing more harm than good? To give a simplistic example: Say a theatre critic always reviews every show she sees favorably. While the theatre community may be thrilled, in the longer term readers may start distrusting the critic because they spent money on shows they thought were awful. So they stop going to the theatre. So, what was the point in cheerleading? (I guess so companies could have good clippings for the funders?) Now, in this example, I’m assuming the critic is praising shows that are undoubtedly awful, not shows that elicit a more subjective response. Like I said, it’s simplistic. It also isn’t entirely relevant to American Theatre or Theatre Bay Area, because we don’t print straight reviews.

This is the gray area. In these two magazines, which advocate for theatre, is even a hint of negativity completely out of place, or does it provide, in J.T.’s words, “a serious response to a serious piece of theatre rather than a hagiographic profile”? Even though most of us can admit that sometimes our work is not up to par for any number of legitimate reasons or that our risks sometimes fail, do we still think that the job of the industry magazines is to completely disregard these facts and cheerlead instead? Or should the industry magazines paint a more multidimensional picture of the production, the person, etc.? I suppose it’s a case-by-case basis, but it seems to me that Karen’s article could have been much more nuanced without losing sight of the complexities of working on a new play that just isn’t, well, working—as well as some of the solutions.