PERFORMANCE DIARY

  
October 6 – Terrence McNally's The Ritz, which I’m reviewing for the Advocate. All I can say is that I’m glad none of the six people I invited to be my guest could go. My favorite part of the evening was yakking at intermission with Jesse Green and his husband Andy.

October 7 – The Beebo Brinker Chronicles at the Fourth Street Theatre is an adaptation by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman of three lesbian pulp novels by Ann Bannon. On a minuscule budget, the Hourglass Group production elegantly staged by Leigh Silverman managed the tricky task of portraying sympathetically and realistically the lives of tormented homosexuals in the late 1950s while also slightly sending up the melodrama of it all. Only Autumn Domfield as Beth couldn’t quite manage this balancing act, and it’s a shame because she has the central role. She’s the weakest link in an otherwise very fine cast that includes Anna Foss Wilson, perfectly poised as the stone butch heartbreaker Beebo Brinker, and the ubiquitous, ever-brilliant David Greenspan as a gay man who settles down with a lesbian wife. As my date Anne Cattaneo noted, “Wow, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a show in which David Greenspan gets the girl!”

October 8 – I’m really kicking myself for not having gotten it together to see Tina Landau’s production of Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0 at the Signature Theater, because I heard so many good things about it. I never know what to make of Mee’s plays as texts except that they often provide a suitably evocative and somewhat blank pretext for a visually oriented director. Such is the case with Hotel Cassiopeia at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, ostensibly a biographical portrait of the artist Joseph Cornell. The play says nothing particularly revealing about Cornell – it’s actually pretty bland and generic, but Anne Bogart makes of it a gorgeous (perhaps too sweet), dense pageant, evoking without ever quite imitating one of Cornell’s exquisite boxes. The climax of the evening was a five-minute wordless section choreographed to a beautiful piece of music called “In the Deep Shade” by the Frames, which I immediately went home and bought on iTunes. The program notes also turned me on to a group called Rachel’s, another lovely find.

see previous entry here