The Lovely Wife & I had a pleasant evening in Pasadena last night, going to see 110 In The Shade at the Pasadena Playhouse and starting off with dinner right next door at the eyetalian restaurant where they "sing while you dine". Show tunes and Operatic arias. About what you'd expect from singing waiters. Like a dinner theatre pre-show. Some sing considerably better than others. One rather ancient woman with a warbly vibrato that you could throw a cat through and could not be heard over the heavily miked piano and the clink of silverware should, how can I be kind, retire...
As for the show...Let me start off by saying this play as always been magic for me...as either the RAINMAKER or 110. I loved it when I first saw the movie. I played Noah in a Dinner Theatre production with James Drury as Starbuck; and even though he was not my idea of Starbuck, the rest of the cast was superb and it was magic doing it every night. You could feel the magic humming in the audience. It was one of the best shows I was ever in. When I discovered the album, it was magic every time I played it and continues to be.
The show last night...though the book and the music are great...was not magic. It was the staging and the performances; not the material. While it was great to see this rarely done piece on its feet...I wanted more. It was just so bland.
I thought most of the casting was bland. Marin Mazzie was okay...though not a patch on Inga Swenson...Pop and the brothers, with the exception of Jimmy, were fine but seemed strangely miscast...or at least did not fit my image of these roles-- and that may be my own preconceived ideas. Jimmy was the only one that seemed to have any real poop. File had a good voice...though I hated his costume and his acting was just...bland.
Starbuck was by far the weakest link. Truly bland. No panache. While he got close in a couple of his songs, I felt his acting performance was weak. He was stoop-shouldered. There was none of Starbuck's bravura. He didn't know how to come on and take the stage. Strike a pose. Mesmerize you.
He spent his opening scene, continually juggling his hat and his hickory wand in clumsy little gestures as though he didn't know what to do with either prop. He certainly never took control of them and used them to any dynamic effect.
And about three times in the opening scene, for some inexplicably reason, he went through a prolonged ritual of trying to attach his hickory wand to his pants or his belt and kept missing, so kept making surrepitious little movements trying to affix it, instead of just stopping the way any normal person would, make a definitive movement and secure it. Or Hell, if it was such a nuisance, he could have just pitched it in the back of his truck which was right there. But his whole performance was marked by this tenative attitude and tentative movement. He was never bigger than life. He never strode across stage, he just sort of vaguely ambled hither and yon.
Of course, for this latter I fault the director. I hate directors who won't block! But just let actors sort of wander aimlessly across stage. That's okay in rehearsal for awhile, but eventually something must be set and blocking defined. Patterns and dramatic tension lines firm. I want what a director of mine use to call, "Pretty pictures, pretty pictures." Staging is as much about dramatic composition as it is about making actors look natural onstage. Starbuck looked anything but natural last night.
And the show started right off on the wrong foot for me. I wanted to hear, "Howdy, File!" "Howdy, Toby!" "Opening up the water tank?" and the introductory dialogue that I've heard on the record since the beginning of time. Instead he opens with the ensemble all onstage, going right into the opening number...and, boy, was there a major foul-up last night. I don't know whether it was the orchestra or the actors. But when the female chorus joined in, they didn't! You heard one or two unsure voices singing feebly like they had forgotten the words or were lost. It took File to get everybody back on track. Very bad start.
I didn't mind the added songs. Though it sounded like Starbuck's voice was giving out on Evening Star, very warbly at one point. Julieanne said that Lizzie was flatting, particularly in OLD MAID. My ear was not good enough to detect this, though I felt she rushed the power of that song.
Other little annoying things, why a pick-up truck for Starbuck and the necessity of changing of the lyric "you ride in your bright shiny wagon" to "rusty old pick-up"? Especially later when Starbuck in "come with me, Lizzie" sings "a rolling wagon is magic". So what is it? A wagon or a truck?
Another lyrical absence, I never heard the women singing,"File's coming; File's coming". This may have something to do with a very small chorus and stuff being dropped for them.
I must say the costuming and the set design didn't really thrill me either...It was a flat boring stage that left its principals with very little to do but stand around all the time. And someone should have made both File, who had an unshaven stubble, and Starbuck, who had one of those feeble mustache/goatee combos, both shave. File is a man who would be meticulous about things like that (I mean in his second scene, you see him mending his own shirt). And Starbuck's spotty face-hair just made him look more like a weenie.
And I loathe the microphones. The actors were overmiked, as was the orchestra. Very tinny in spots. And, I'm sorry, but those wires and little mics, no matter how hard they try to hide them, are always visible, making strange little bumps and discolourations on people's faces and any time I'm thinking about a mic, I'm taken out of the show.
The Playhouse is a beautiful, intimate theatre. Anyone who cannot easily hit the back wall there has no business being on a stage.
One last rather disturbing point. This show, despite my reservations, has gotten good reviews...at least the few I've seen...Both the LA Times and Backstage liked it. But the house on a Friday night was far from full. We sat it the front row of the dress circle (or gallery or whatever they call it) The two seats next to us were empty. And while they had clustered the rest of the audience in the center, huge swaths of the gallery were empty. Worse, down on the floor, from the second row on, you'd see two, three four seats empty. Half rows empty. And this was only from what I could see from my perch...God only knows how many seats under the balcony were empty. I know I called two days before and could have had floor seats in the fourth row back had I wanted them. This apathy does not bode well for the playhouse or theatre in general.
Great to hear the music and to see it finally onstage. But it weren't magic.
