Tricky Business

Cahn and O'Connor in Getting the Business.

Sometimes a play starts off with such bounce and pizzazz that you're certain the evening ahead will be a most delightful one. Alas, that was not the case with Getting the Business, a two-hander featuring downtown-theater luminary Susan Louise O'Connor. After a zippy opening, in which a woman with only the vaguest of credentials persuades a businessman (playwright Victor L. Cahn) to hire her as his secretary, this satire about the confluence of office and political politics gradually starts to sag.

Women on the Fringe

Onalea Gilbertson in Blanche.

Very pleased to have had the chance to review a couple of worthwhile shows at this year's New York International Fringe Festival, especially ones in which women play such prominent roles onstage and off. And, though I didn't realize it at the time, both originated in the great fringey country of Canada: The List, about a harried wife and mother's obsessive to-do notes, from Montreal; and Blanche: The Bittersweet Life of a Wild Prairie Dame, pictured above, a song cycle inspired by the story of a singer-composer-musician's grandmother, from Alberta.

Proms Night

Beechey and Andrews in My Fair Lady.

Caught the terrific BBC Proms My Fair Lady concert on Saturday, thanks to the wonders of Internet radio and the BBC. I planned to listen just for a bit at the beginning, but three and a half hours later, I was still there as Annalene Beechey's Eliza Doolittle made her way back to Anthony Andrews's Henry Higgins and they...what exactly? Lived happily ever after? Embarked on the beginnings of what would become years of on-again, off-again codependency? I'm too much of a romantic even to entertain the thought of their relationship spiraling into one filled with physical or verbal abuse, but given their dispositions (I can't see either one embracing couples counseling) and familial role models, it's a possible outcome.

As I listened to the broadcast--which was the entire stage show, accompanied by the John Wilson Orchestra playing the film orchestrations (and fully staged and costumed for those lucky enough to be watching it at Royal Albert Hall--I realized that I don't know the libretto nearly as well as I know the songs. Even though My Fair Lady is my favorite musical of all time, I have never seen a live production of it. I've listened to many recordings and seen the movie, but hearing just the words and music on Saturday made me notice little things about the characters that I hadn't before.

Like how dysfunctional the relationships that both Higgins and Eliza have with their opposite-sex parents are. Even after Eliza's father inherits a vast sum of money and he learns that she's left Higgins, he makes it clear that he won't be giving her any financial support. And Mrs. Higgins never once indicates that she's proud of her brilliant though exasperating son, only that she's embarrassed by him.

When I was younger I hated that Alan Jay Lerner changed George Bernard Shaw's ending by sending Eliza back to a man who treated her with such disdain. I've softened since then, especially if Higgins appears to have realized the error of his ways by the end (which in this instance I thought he had), and although I don't see a long-term happily-ever-after in their future, they should have a lot of fun for a while, and maybe through each other be able to heal some of the parental wounds they've been lugging around.

But please, don't anyone try to write a sequel. I'm perfectly content to let this sequence of events play out in my mind.

"Moins" Cirque

Cirque du Soleil: Zarkana

My feelings for Cirque du Soleil shows often mirror my feelings for green tea. Love the idea behind it, and want very much to love the thing itself, but I can only muster up a limited amount of pleasure from either.

Actually, I've enjoyed all the Cirque shows I've seen as I've watched them. What's not to love? They're gorgeously designed and the acrobatics are spectacular. But once you've seen a couple of installments and the format becomes familiar (I've seen five, including the current one, Zarkana, twice), the returns diminish, and what I saw evaporates from my memory.

That's because the plot and characters are only loosely defined ways to frame clowns and circus acts, and for me a little bit of those go a long way. And that's probably why I enjoyed the pared-down version of Zarkana that I saw a few days ago. It was cut from two and a half hours with an intermission last summer to 90 minutes with no intermission this summer. And I'm guessing this is the version that will take up residence in Las Vegas later this year. One thing that hasn't been shortened however is the price. How convenient!

Not that any theatrical experience should be priced on a per-minute basis, but if producers aren't spending as much money to present a show, they could passed the savings on to patrons. It's not as if Radio City Musical Hall was packed the night I saw it; the side orchestra sections were completely empty.

Love in War

Heidi Armbruster and Angela Piece in Love Goes to Press.

I haven't see the HBO movie in which Nicole Kidman plays pioneering war journalist Martha Gellhorn to Clive Owen's Ernest Hemingway, but I have seen the delightful comedy she cowrote with Virginia Cowles, Love Goes to Press, which is receiving a stellar revival by the Mint Theater Company. It bombed on Broadway in the '40s, probably in part because mid-20th-century New York wasn't ready for two female protagonists who weren't ready to give up their careers just because they found a good man. Anyone writing chick lit in those days was ahead of their time.

As She Likes It

David Furr and Lily Rabe in As You Like It

I can't wait to see where Lily Rabe's career takes her, but I hope it won't be too far away from the New York and the theater world she's become so much a part of. Her Portia in the Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice was exquisite, and I expect she'll be just as brilliant as Rosalind in As You Like It. She was certainly bubbling with enthusiasm for the show when I met up with her over the Memorial Day weekend.

Great Deeds

Conor Lovett in Title and Deed

You never know who you'll run into at the Signature Center. Tuesday night John Guare was there, to see either Title and Deed or Medieval Play, I imagine. He wasn't in the audience of My Children! My Africa! because that's the show I was seeing, and with the audience on three sides of the stage, he'd have been noticed. I did spot Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett, as well as Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis in the house.

During intermission I also spotted Will Eno in the lobby. Title and Deed, his 70-minute monodrama, which I'd seen a few days earlier, had already concluded for the night, and he was waiting for the actor who stars in it. He knew about the minor mishap that occurred the night I saw the show: About 15 minutes in, the stage lights went down, the house lights came up, and Conor Lovett, the performer, looked perplexed and bewildered. But having been fooled by One Man, Two Guvnors into thinking that a metatheatrical device was something that happened by chance, I wondered if this wasn't part of the play. Even after a young woman in a headset came into the house and explained that the fire alarm had been triggered but everything was fine and the show would resume shortly.

Lovett didn't wait. He stepped into the house via a ramp that leads from the stage and was able to pick up where he left off, though he certainly found a better rhythm when the lights returned to normal and he got back on the stage. (Will told me that the problem was smoke used in Medieval Play that got out of control.)

Title and Deed is another Eno gem that zings from quirkiness to profundity beautifully and effortlessly and before you even realize what's happened. "You look like you were just born. Most people get over that," is what the character in this play recalls an ex-girlfriend saying to him. Funny, but haunting, too.

I'm not that great at describing the plots of his plays, but themes are another matter. The soul's need to find a place of permanency in a world where everything is just temporary is what I'd say the play is about. Indirectly it relates to the economic crisis this country is in and yet is about so much more.