Wednesday, April 23, 2008

"Other Human Beings" should stay away from this mess!



I don't really know what to say about Glory Days the new musical taking up residence in Circle in the Square. Well actually I do know what to say, it's not quite ready for Broadway. The show, about 4 friends returning from a year at college to pull a prank at their old high school, but end up pulling the biggest prank of all, on themselves.

The story and characters are cliched messes, using stereotypes of what the writers think the characters are instead of exploring the truth in them. The characters could be rich and full, instead we are left with a gay one(Jack), a jocky one(Andy), an intellectual one(Skip), and one that doesn't want to grow up(Will). And we only get one dimensional versions of those characters. I wonder if it's just because I was so far detached from the story itself, having been out of high school for more than a year, and not really giving a rats ass about trying to seek revenge on the people who were mean to me in HS, that I didn't care, or was it the characters stunted growth on stage that made me not care. I think probably equal parts apathy and growth.

The songs, the songs, the songs, there is potential there, young Nick Blaemire has written some charming songs, and some songs overwrought with youth cliches(I know I keep using the word cliche, but to be cliche there is no other word to describe it). What Diablo Cody managed to do successfully with Juno Blaemire, falters here. The worst song was "We Got Girls" which was about how Will and Andy know the secret to scoring with girls, and how they have girls "by the balls". Then there are songs that have the potential to be fantastic messages of tolerance, anthems of empowerment, "Other Human Beings," a song sung by Andy and Jack, after Jack finds out Andy isn't okay with him being gay, and Andy calls Jack a faggot, and how you can't call people names, and how Andy lost a friend for life and how those shoes totally don't go with those pants, and how The Wizard of Oz is the best movie ever, and oh yeah other human beings don't treat other human beings like that. Or something.

I have to give some credit to Jesse Vargas for putting together such tight harmonies, even if every song sounded like it had been cut from RENT. The whole time I was expecting the cast to walk up to the front of the stage holding hands and scream "No Day But Today" while panning a video projector out across the audience. I understand the void that the closing of RENT is going to leave in lots of people's lives, but I don't think we should try to fill that void with something that is kind of like it, but not as good, and just kind of treat RENT like that ex-girlfriend/boyfriend that helped you learn about yourself and your love of musical theater. Because if you spend your whole life trying to fill that void, you're going to end up alone, comparing every show to the one that made you love musical theater. Three words for you let, it, go.

The performances were okay, given the weak material they had to work with. I wouldn't really say that there was one stand out performance, each character had it's moments Jesse JP Johnson as Jack seemed to be the only character that managed to go on any kind of journey at all, growing as a person. Steven Booth as Will got annoying, always bringing things back to "What they did to us in HS was terrible" us being the football team, even though we never fund out what they did to them, and I was kind of over his character within the first 20 minutes of the show. Andrew C. Call as Andy the jock, seemed to be hiding something, and it would have made me like his character more if he would have opened up, they even sang a song about how no one really knew Andy at all, because he was guarded, and that is exactly what I got from him, the show would work better if he had reveled something, it would have made me understand why he was friends with them in the first place, Mr. Call's performance was made up of spouting catch phrases such as "totes" and saying fuck too much, oh and talking about getting laid, it was less of a character of a jock and more of a caricature of one. Finally the only person in the cast whom I felt actually believed in what his character was saying Adam Halpin as Skip, he embodied his character's philosophy, and made me somewhat care for him, I don't know if it was because he was the only realistic character in the whole show, or if he just exuded something the other actors lacked, but his performance was the best.

This show is a jumbled mess. Granted it was only the first preview that I saw, but there needs to be some major rewrites to fix consistency problems in the script, one of the biggest inconsistencies that my friends and I noticed was how Andy reacted to Jack being gay. He was freaked out at first, then Will calmed him down and said for his sake let it go, and then in the next scene during a song, they were singing and looking like nothing was wrong, later when there is a scene with Jack and Will alone, Will tells Jack that Andy thought Jack had been lying to him, that never happened, and then it was brought up again later in "Other Human Beings". Little things like that. The writers need to flesh out the characters more in order for the story to go anywhere. And something needs to be resolved, and Will needs to grow as a person, granted it all takes place in a night, but you can have a character at least learn something. Will learned nothing, and was still as annoying at the end as he was at the beginning. Overall I feel that this show would be more suited to an off-Broadway stage, because like it's characters, it isn't quite ready for the big time.

1 comment:

jepoy said...

thank you for ur insight. we're premiering this show in SF in the fall...and all these reviews are awesome in helping me research my character for the show and how I can make it more effective.