(Digital) Theater Digest - October 23, 2020
Hello theater lovers!
I won’t spend long on this preamble as we’re all aware of how much the world has changed since my last missive, March 5. With all sincerity, I hope you are doing well and staying healthy.
I’m so set in my ways about the magic of the traditional theater experience that I haven’t really covered the new forms theater has taken, but I wanted to flag a few shows for you.
Including my usual disclaimer below, as I think I have a few new subscribers:
As a rule, I won't be talking about any Disney/Fox shows. Since this newsletter is geared towards people in the entertainment industry, there's a good chance I won't like a show that you or someone you know was involved in. I'm sure that you/your friend put a lot of effort into your/their work! I've been in a few shows, I know how much work goes into putting on a show. But just as you're entitled to dislike TV shows your friends worked on, I'm allowed to dislike theater you/your friends may have worked on. I try not to be vindictive, but I also do make it clear when I don't think a show is worth the price of a ticket or the time spent watching it.
I won't be writing much/any synopsis in these blurbs, but feel free to check out other reviews for synopses! Or just check out other reviews in general! Keep theater journalism alive & well!
Each week, I'll remove everything that’s closed, and put ** next to anything that’s new!
Worth Seeing:
**Heroes of the Fourth Turning on Zoom. I just saw this tonight, and there are only two more performances, tomorrow at 2pm & 8pm ET (11am & 5pm PT). This is essentially the Playwrights Horizons production that was off-Broadway last year, with the same cast & creative team, albeit stripped down to its barest form, just performance and text. It’s a strange experience; both last night and tonight, there were about 2,000 people watching, yet each of us is watching all by ourselves (it’s on Zoom, so not something that you can easily put up on the TV for the whole family to watch). It’s about young Catholics in Wyoming who are politically conservative, which is the diametric opposite of who I am, personally. But the playwright, Will Arbery, draws each character with such nuance that they feel like the parallel universe versions of people I know in my own life. Arbery wrote the idea that would become this play immediately before the 2016 election, presuming Hillary would win, but when Trump won, he took the characters and expanded it out into a full play, set in 2017, after Charlottesville. It’s fascinating to watch in the lead-up to the 2020 election, but not in a way that makes me want to pull out my hair and scream at the TV, like the presidential and vice presidential debates too. It’s more of a portrait of how people I rarely interact with think and act.
Tickets here. Free, but a donation is suggested.
Good Grief on Audible. Full disclosure, this is a recording of a play and while I have not listened to the recording, it’s a recording of the Vineyard Theatre production of the show, which I saw two years ago in New York. This is one of my all-time favorite plays, and it was a fantastic production, so I definitely recommend checking it out if you’re an audiobook type of person! It is sad (as one would expect from the title), and while I don’t usually like sad stories, the playwright, Ngozi Anyanwu, writes so beautifully and balances tone so well that I don’t mind.
Download here.
A Mixed Bag:
American Utopia on HBO/HBO Max. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care for this one at all, I’m definitely not the target demographic for a David Byrne concert/spoken word show, but some of the musical performances are fun, and I’m sure this is a blast for Talking Heads fans. Spike Lee did a great job of capturing the energy of a live performance, and I found myself missing feeling safe enough to walk into a theater with a bunch of strangers and watch something that I didn’t ~get~ and then discuss all the oddities of the show with a friend on the way home. The barrier to entry for this one is pretty low for HBO subscribers, so why not check it out and see if you dig it?
Included with HBO/HBO Max subscriptions. Find it through your TV or their streaming app.
Upcoming shows I’m seeing:
Circle Jerk via Zoom (tomorrow night because there are only two shows left!)
The Journey online via the Broad Stage
What the Constitution Means to Me on Amazon Prime
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