American Psycho: A minimalist's guide to love and murder.

American Psycho is the latest entry in the sub-genre of serial-killer musicals.  I really wasn't planning on seeing this show but an interesting article in the Times inspired a ticket purchase. Based on the controversial novel by Bret Easton Ellis, the idea of this show is ridiculous from the get go. So it's strange that it made for such an engaging experience.

The producers embraced the strangeness at every turn, starting with the set (designed by Es Devlin); a beautiful, minimalist white living space that created tension just with the knowledge that later, someone will have to get the blood out. And there is definitely blood, including a nifty trick with a clear scrim, but I won't ruin that surprise. The set does delightful tricks throughout the show. Like in the second act when it transforms into a pool in the Hamptons that is so lux, so sleek, so sexy that those of us who aren't in the one percent can only look on longingly.

Of course, the set isn't the only star.  From the moment Benjamin Walker emerges as Patrick Bateman from a tanning bed and wearing only a pair of tighty whities, he is captivating and creepy. For the rest of the show, no matter how much you want to look away, you can't.  And Benjamin wasn't even my favorite performer in the show.  That distinction goes to Helene Yorke as the impossibly "superior" Evelyn Williams. A highlight is her performance of "You Are What You Wear," a snobbish rant dripping with luxury.

You can't talk about the cast without acknowledging that these actors are quadruple threats.  They're all perfectly talented at the singing, the dancing, and the acting.  But they're all also surprisingly comfortable doing all that in little more than underwear and a pair of hand weights.  Oh sure, Broadway actors tend to have sleek, handsome bodies.  But these are bodies that require hours at the gym.  These are physiques that actors perfect over months in order to star in some summer superhero blockbuster.  The extra physical refinements (along with some clever sex scenes) add to the sexuality of this show which only serves to heighten the tension.

So what about the music?  This isn't your traditional musical.  For starters, the voices and instruments are so processed, it sometimes feels more like a concert from an 80s synth band than from a theater on 45th Street.  But for the most part, Duncan Sheik's songs are likable and fueled by emotions, many of those emotions inspiring un-comfortableness.  That's largely what makes the music work. Still, there are moments when the songs turn toward the mundane and detracts from the spectacle.

I saw five shows this trip to New York.  American Psycho was a last, reluctant ticket. Turns out, it was my favorite thing I saw.  Sure it's not for everyone; I won't be suggesting my mom and her friends enjoy the Saturday matinee. But if you for a musical, theatrical shock, this does the trick.

A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder: A middleclass fantasy.

It’s already been a couple of months since my last visit to New York City.  And one thing that has stayed top of mind comes from an excursion to a Broadway show.  That show is A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.  (Book and lyrics by Robert Freedman, music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak, directed by Darko Tresnjak.) Maybe the reason I’ve spent so much time thinking about this show is that I bought the soundtrack so I’ve had lots of time to get to know the music better. With that additional insight, you realize there’s something else going on here.  Because as you start to understand the show and its lyrics, Gentleman’s Guide starts to deliver a big wallop of social criticism.

It’s misleading at first.  As my friend Kelly Hindley noted after seeing the show, “Gentleman’s Guide was like getting to eat a giant bowl of your favorite dessert with no calories—just pure frothy delightful enjoyment.” And it is enjoyably frothy. But with closer inspection to the themes and ideas expressed in the show,  I felt like the musical might be a commentary on the struggling middle class, a treatise on the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots.

The basic premise of the story revolves around Monty Navarro, who as the show opens learns that his dead mother was a member of Britain’s illustrious D’Ysquith family, although she was disinherited for marrying a common Castilian musician. As the story unfolds, Monty learns that there are just eight people in line ahead of him to become Lord D’Ysquith. Soon, Monty Navarro is finding it surprisingly easy to murder those that stand in his way.

So how does this show embrace themes of rich vs. the middle class.  There are a few ways ways.  Like the way it muses about the privileged.  Some songs are scathing critiques of how clueless and heartless the rich can be.  Take I Don’t Understand the Poor sung by Lord Adalbert D’ysquith, the current Earl of Highhurst.  Here’s just a brief moment from this delightful song:

I don’t understand the poor.

And they’re constantly turning out more.

Every festering slum

In Christendom

Is disgorging its young by the score.

I suppose there are some with ambition.

Say, the pickpocket, beggar, or whore.

From what I can tell

They do quite well.

They’re rising above

And its work they love.

But I don’t understand the poor.

And if that’s not enough, there’s my favorite character in the show, Lady Hyacinth D’ysquith who is perfectly proper and delightfully offensive.  She performs Lady Hyacinth Abroad in which she asks for philanthropic ideas of how she can compete with her rich society lady friends. First, she heads to Egypt to start an orphanage in Cairo. Lady Hyacinth’s hopes are that her largess won’t go unnoticed, “The sniping will be stilled, and the empire will be filled with homes for bastard children in my name.”

When Egypt doesn’t work out, Lady Hyacinth heads to India where she imagines her own leper colony. “When we arrive they’ll hobble out to greet us, their toothless grins would melt a heart of stone! And every dilettante, will envy me and want a colony of lepers of her own!”

Still not satisfied, Lady Hyacinth leaves for deepest, darkest Africa to civilize a village in the jungle. “It can’t take long to learn their mother tongue! Of words they have but six, and five of them are clicks, and all of them are different words for dung!” She gets in one final dig calling out Daisy Greville, Lady Hyacinth’s arch, society nemesis who seems to have cornered all the best charitable opportunities. “It’s Daisy Greville’s loss. She’ll never come across, a tribe of backward natives worse than mine.”

My friends and I love to imagine my inner old lady, Gertrude.  I think Gertie would love to be Lady Hyacinth’s middle-class friend, lunching together at fancy restaurants and then returning to tell friends how "horribly delightful Hyacinth is."

These songs lambasting the rich for their insensitivity and cluelessness about how real people live are a refreshing message for us middle class types.  Maybe that’s because I can imaging Donald Trump or the republican leadership humming songs like I Don’t Understand the Poor as they take their morning showers. But there’s an even sneakier middle-class message being delivered in Gentleman’s Guide. Let's all keep in mind that amidst all this frothy fun, Monty Navarro is a serial killer.  And yet, the audience is on his side the entire show. You kinda want him to succeed.  And even when he’s put on trial for one of the murders (the only one he didn’t commit), he gets off scot-free, as show ends happily and Monty settles into his new life of largesse. Of course, now he has to worry about his demise.

Now I know this show is a send up.  But the fact that the mostly middle-class audience laughed delightedly as one privileged rich old white person after another died says something about the issues we face in the world today, particularly the ever growing divide between the rich and the rest of us.  And while I’m sure plenty of the world’s uber wealthy enjoyed and laughed at this show as much as I did, the message delivered here should at least have them looking over their shoulders at an increasingly frustrated and growing society of poor and middle-class people.

New York in a nutshell.

I had a lot of fun traveling in 2013.  So much so that my posts about some of the best things I did are behind.  I just recently posted about my visit to the Saatchi Gallery, an event that took place last June.  And I haven't mentioned anything from a September trip to New York City.  Well, that's about to change.  On this first day of 2014, I'm combining my NYC activities in a single post.  Which means, it's likely to be a bit long.

Here is a representation of things I did in NYC:

I visited the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) to see a show called Against the Grain.
MAD has a habit of focusing on a specific material and building a show around that material. The museum has hosted shows featuring art made of paper, glass, and dirt. This year, they set their curatorial eye on wood.  And as usual, the results are surprising, thought-provoking, and just plain fun.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Mark Moskovitz's Facecord (2012, mixed hardwood) is a brilliantly deceptive bit of design. Look closely and you'll notice that this tidy wood pile is actually a domestic chest of drawers.

Mark Moskovitz, Facecord (2012, mixed hardwood)

Ai Weiwei is represented in the show with another of his works that might annoy preservationists. Here, the artist has rendered Qing Dynasty wooden stools useless by clustering them together.

Ai Weiwei, Grapes (2008, Qing Dynasty [1644 - 1911] stools)

Laurel Roth's meticulously carved and finished skulls are at once kitschy and startling for their beauty.  They are more ominous once you realize that the artist chooses to represent skulls of animals that are exploited for scientific knowledge (as in the piece) or as food sources.

Laurel Roth, Hominid: Chimpanzee (2011, vera wood, Swarovski crystal) 

Here's the perfect gift for the art lover/urban farmer in your life.  Hope Sandrow offers Coop LeWitt North (2012, stockade fence pickets, palram plastic sheeting).  Sandrow raises a flock of Padua chickens in Southampton, New York.  Her chicken coop is (re)constructed from a Sol LeWitt drawing from his 1982 series Forms Derived from a Cube.  There were video monitors that provided live feeds from the chicken coop.  For MAD's show, a 3/4 sized version of the coop was on view.

Hope Sandrow, Coop LeWitt North (2012, stockade fence pickets, palram plastic sheeting)

For sheer spectacle it's hard to beat Pablo Reinoso's Two for Tango, Fontainebleau Suite (2012, wood).  This takes the idea of ornate, hand-carved frames designed to embellish great works of art and turns it on its head, making the frame the work of art.

Pablo Reinoso, Two for Tango, Fountainebleau Suite (2012, wood)

Craftsmanship played an impressive role in this show with furniture makers demonstrating some deft skills.  I loved the simple elegance of Joseph Walsh's Enignum Shelf (2011, olive ash, white oil).

Joseph Walsh, Enignum Shelf (2011, olive ash, white oil)

Sarah Oppenheimer used existing architectural elements to great effect.  She cut through the museum walls and lined the holes with beautifully worked plywood.  The result reframed the views of the exhibit.

Sarah Oppenheimer, 615-2356 (2007, plywood, existing architecture)

You can't have a show about wood without showcasing chairs.  But the wooden chairs in this show were far from ordinary.  Two in particular stood our for me.  Christopher Kurtz's A(typical) Windsor Form (2011, steam-bent ash, white oak, pine, milk paint) is a surreal view of chairs that seem to be trying to escape the room.  And I loved Martin Puryear's wooden take on a big, cushy upholstered chair.

Christopher Kurtz, A(typical) Windsor Form (2011, steam-bent ash, white oak, pine, milk paint)

Martin Puryear, A Skeuomorphic Wing Chair (2012, staved and carved pine with maple legs)

The last piece I'll highlight from Against the Grain is Jeroen Verhoeven's Cinderella Table (2005, CNC-cut birch plywood [57 layers]). This work is a clash of technology and artistry.  The table is made with a computer-numbered cutting (CNC) system, the patterns for which were taken from hand crafted furniture pieces.

I saw a lot of Broadway shows.
What's a trip to NYC without a few shows.  Here's what I saw:

Kinky Boots.  This show won the Tony award for best musical.  It had the charm, heart, and edge of the movie it's based on.  And it had music by Cyndi Lauper. The movie is still better.  Bonus: I ran into Harvey Fierstein, one of the creators of the show, on our way into the theater!

First Date. If you get the chance, you should see this show.  It's unlike any Broadway musical I've seen.  The small cast is on stage for almost the entire show.  And the simple set almost never changes.  And yet somehow, it's as engaging as any show I saw this trip.

Spiderman. It's as bad as the reviews suggest.  Don't waste your time and money.  Unless you really want to get your photo taken with Spiderman in the lobby.

Big Fish. This show was good, not great.  Although we saw it in early previews so I'm sure they've fixed some of the problems. I would assume so since it's gotten some good reviews.

Matilda. The themes that run through this show and the astounding talent of the kid performers is enough to make it a must see for any Broadway fan.  I went to a matinee and Matilda's horrible parents and the evil Miss Trunchbull had an entire theatre full of kids laughing enthusiastically. It was fun.

I went to Madison Square Park for the summer installation.
I love the art installations at Madison Square Park.  Past highlights have included installation by Antony Gormley and Jaume Plensa.  This year, I saw Orly Genger's playful Red, Yellow and Blue, a whimsical work created from miles of painted rope.

 I hung out on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Visiting the summer rooftop installations at the Met has become something of a tradition for me. Past favorite visits include installations by Tomas Saraceno and the Starn Brothers. This year's installation was more somber and unsettling.  Imran Qureshi's The Roof Garden Commission is the first installation that is painted directly on the roof.  It is a mashup of traditional Islamic art and more contemporary action-painting techniques.  The work is a response to the violence that plagues the globe.  The splattered red images are both beautiful for their lovely floral motifs and horrific for their blood-like gruesomeness.

I saw James Turrell's amazing installation at the Guggenheim.
I've long had my eye on James Turrell.  As a fan of earth art, I hope to someday see his ambitious Roden Crater Project, a work he started in 1979 and is still working on.  It is being built in an extinct volcano near Flagstaff, Arizona.  His Guggenheim solo show was spectacular.  The early works were surprising for their simplicity and the effects the artist achieves using nothing but light.  However, the star of the show was a site-specific installation called Aten Reign which radically transformed the atrium of the Guggenheim.  This was pure art-world magic with a gently shifting palette of colored light that mesmerized and enchanted museum goers.

I went to Brooklyn. A lot.
I spent more time in Brooklyn than I have during any previous trip to NYC.  And it was all about spending time with friends, many of whom used to live in Salt Lake City, which made me like Brooklyn all the more.

My friends Sean and Katya took us to their super cool Brooklyn art studio.  As a wanna-be artist, it was a super fun visit.  They also took us to Brighton Beach for a delicious lunch at their favorite Ukranian restaurant, Cafe Glechik.  That was followed by a stroll through Coney Island.

I went to the new Barclays Center with my friends Mariela, Selly, and of course Felix to see Depeche Mode.  And all my pictures from the concert were awful.  So you'll have to imagine the fun and excitement.

Finally, my friend Kara took us to the Brooklyn Flea Market.  There were plenty of fun things to see.  I even bought a collection of strange, European advertising pins.

So there you have it: My trip to New York City summed up in a rather lengthy nutshell. Let's hope 2014 brings some equally exciting adventures.

This is one helluva boat ride.

A recent business trip left me with a few extra hours and nothing to do.  So I picked up a last minute ticket to see Anything Goes, winner of the 2011 Tony Award for Best Musical Revival.  On my last trip to NYC I tried to see this show but tickets were impossible to get. Needing only a single seat, it was easier to get a perfect center spot on the seventh row.

I'll start by making a distinction between the show (the actual musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, original book by Wodehouse, Bolton, Lindsay, and Crouse) and the production (directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshal with Rob Fisher as the music supervisor and vocal arranger).

The show isn't perfect. Most of the problems arise from the story and characters that feel a little insensitive in a modern world.  The Chinese characters are the best example.  Even though the book has been updated by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman, the cliched nature of these characters made me anxious.  But I get why the producers couldn't eliminate the characters from the story line. They're an integral part of the madcap cruise that proves Anything Goes.

There are also one or two songs that didn't live up to contemporary Broadway standards. Be Like the Blue Bird performed by Joel Gray as Moonface Martin felt forced and it wasn't just the performance. The gimmicky nature of the song feels, well, gimmicky.

However, that's not much to complain about.  Because Cole Porter's songs are just plain amazing. The lyrics are dizzying to the point that many songs put today's best rappers to shame. Songs like You're the Top, I Get a Kick Out of You,and It's De-lovely sparkle with so much wit and delight you can't help but smile through the whole ordeal.  And the songs live up to the shows name with references to sex, drugs, and scandal that would feel right at home on Entertainment Tonight!

Combine Porter's brilliance with a damn-near perfect production and you have a show-stopping delight.  Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney is spectacular.  She's super sexy, looks fantastic in the shimmering, sparkling, revealing costumes, and can belt a show tune so big and bold it conjures up the likes of Ethyl Merman.

Bill English as Billy Crocker answers Foster with just enough charm to make you like him and just enough "bad boy" to make him desirable. Even the secondary characters whose roles are mostly caricatures rise above the nature of the people they play to deliver standout performances. Jessica Stone as Erma is delightfully slutty, particuarly when she's fighting off an army of suitors in the riotous number, Buddie, Beware.

Let's talk chorus lines. This show was made for flashy, showstopping chorus lines and Anything Goes doesn't disappoint. Kathleen Marshall's choreography reminds us how much fun it is to put a bunch of talented dancers on stage and give them something magical to do. And those dancers! I'm convinced that everything in life would be better with the addition of tap-dancing sailors.When I'm deliriously wealthy I intend to hire and entire crew of tap-dancing sailors to follow me around and make life spectacular.

There is plenty more I could talk about like Derek McLane's simple, iconic set design and Peter Kaczorowski's ingenious lighting design which helped transport the audience not just to a cruise, but to a cruise in a time and place that has unfortunately past. I loved Martin Pakledinaz's costumers with their crisp whites and endless rinestones. I don't know who's keep the costumes so pristine and crisp but they're doing one helluva job.  Because at the opening of the show, everything was perfectly white, but after a night of dancing, many of those whites had blackened and wrinkled.

Anything Goes is pure Broadway fun with a brilliant streak of theatrical genius.

Sex, drugs, and chorus lines.

1970s San Francisco is the backdrop for Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and More Tales of the City.  It's also the inspiration for a new disco-infused, musical production inspired by the novels.  And the musical is almost as fun as the books.

I guess it would be hard for me to not like this show.  I'm a big fan of Maupin's crazy cast of characters.  I like musical theater.  As a teen growing up in the age of disco, I love the 1970s. And if that weren't enough, the music is written by Jake Shears and John Garden, two of the musicians behind one of my favorite bands, The Scissor Sisters.

Other things to like about the Tales of the City musical?  The set was fantastic, capturing the fun-house quality of San Francisco's Russian Hill. Betsey Wolfe as Mary Ann Singleton was a musical powerhouse with just the right amount of naivete.  Wesley Tayor was delightful and adorable as Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, just as he should be.

And what good is a musical without a showstopper or two.  Tales of the City delivers with two standout numbers.  There's Homosexual Convalescent Center where Michael and his boyfriend attend a party of snooty, older gay men.  With surprising lyrics and some delightful staging, this party in pink is a whole lot of gay fun. Diane J. Findlay's brilliant portrayal of Mother Mucca reaches absurd levels in Ride 'em Hard.  But it's not just the showstopping production numbers that give this musical its soul.  Paper Faces, performed by Mary Ann and the company is a lovely, emotional song about what we choose to show to and hide from the world. Tony Award winner Judy Kaye as Anna Madrigal ends Act I with another lovely, emotional performance of The Next Time You See Me.

Sure this show may need some tweaking, tinkering, and tightening.  But I agree with a lot of critics that this show is Broadway bound.  Although I'm not sure how kind the critics will be once it hits the Big White Way.  Let's hope New Yorkers will embrace this quintessentially quirky, San Francisco story.  You can count on me for a couple of ticket purchases.

A missionary among theater goers.

There's a definite possibility that I was the only actual returned missionary in the Eugene O'Neill Theatre for a recent performance of the hit Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, a show all about Mormon missionaries.  Still, it's obvious that Trey Parker, Matt Stone,  and Robert Lopez have done their homework.  They're surprisingly adept at capturing the realities of being a Mormon missionary, particularly since none of them have been on a mission.  Sure, they get a bunch of stuff wrong.  The way they represent the Missionary Training Center (MTC) is off by at least a mile but nonetheless hysterically funny.  The stuff they get right, they get really right.  As a return missionary, there a few moments that were freakishly accurate.


The show-stopping song, Turn It Off, about that "nifty Mormon trick" of ignoring troubling issues and putting on a happy face certainly rang true for me. Or how about Scary Mormon Hell Dream.  This satanic, chorus-line-inspired extravaganza is a riotous good time.  My favorite moment? The dancing coffee cups as a temptation.  Brilliant.


Which brings me to a few ideas raised by this show.  First, the calculated offensiveness of the show.  This is a musical designed to push buttons.  A lot of Mormons might be upset by the flippant way the creators treated their beliefs.  But skewering Mormons is just the beginning.  The Book of Mormon takes on everything from AIDS to female circumcision (I'm pretty sure this is the only musical that uses the word clitoris on multiple occasions) with a South-Park willingness to offend.  And while it's brilliant today, I wonder if this show will be as tolerable in the future.  I can imagine a time when some of the ideas expressed in this show won't be acceptable to a more politically-correct audience.  Although I was surprised at how relevant a sexist musical like How to Succeed in Business is in our modern world.


On the positive side, it's obvious that Parker, Stone, and Lopez love Broadway.  With toasts to Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Lion King, even the work of early musical-theater geniuses like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, this show is a little love letter to the Great White Way.


I also have to note how spectacularly The Book of Mormon communicates the style of Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  I approach most things with a eye toward visual art.  I appreciate artists that are informed by history, but create new and exciting work with an identifiable style. Stone and Parker have accomplished that difficult trick.


In the end, this is a story about faith.  About believing in something bigger than ourselves. And while The Book of Mormon may have a riotous good time at the expense of Mormons, it also reminds us that people who believe in things that might seem incredible, often accomplish miracles.  Maybe that's why it's so delightful.

Take off and landing without the pesky seat belts and tray tables.

Remember the days when you could smoke on airplanes and sexy stewardesses offered up coffee or tea?  I don't.  But I can imagine what it was like thanks to Broadway's take on a story that's also been the subject of books and movies.  It's Catch Me If You Can now playing at the Neil Simon Theatre and nominated for four Tony awards.

OK, Stewardesses probably didn't have as much sparkle and their skirts probably weren't as short.  But for a Broadway chorus line, I'm not sure you could ask for better inspiration than the stylized travel attire of flight attendants and pilots in the 1960s and 70s.  Add in a few sexy nurses, set the whole affair dancing, and it's hard not to like this stuff. 

Unfortunately, Catch Me If You Can is an endeavor in which the parts are greater than the sum.  There are some spectacular production numbers like Don't Break the Rules featuring Norbert Leo Butz as Agent Carl Hanratty and the chorus line which pretty much stops the show.  It's brilliant.  Hanratty was nominated for a Tony for lead actor in a musical.  Aaron Tveit who plays the real lead actor in this musical was not nominated and I think he was robbed.  Because I saw three musicals in three days all of which were about male leads.  And from my vantage point Tveit was the best.  Too bad Catch Me If You Can was the worst of the three shows. Otherwise, I think Tveit might have been nominated.

Yes this show stalls more than once.  But even if it was my least favorite Broadway show of the trip, I still left the theater happy I paid the nearly $150 ticket price.