What's next for these Off-Broadway shows?
When most people think about Broadway, I'm afraid they still think about big musicals. No matter how shattering the dramas, it's the tuners -- the singing and the dancing and the moving scenery -- that tend to be the moneymakers and the ones most likely to tour.
But many of the most innovative musicals begin life, small and smart, in Off-Broadway incubators. Even more have no intention (or should have no intention) of transferring to mainstream commercial theaters. Of course, how does anyone predict? Don't ask me. If I were a producer, I never would have dreamed that "Spring Awakening," an alt-rock adaptation of a late-19th century German-expressionist drama, could catapult from the Atlantic Theater in 2007 to crash open preconceptions of what makes a Tony-winning international game-changer.
Right now, two unusual shows are attracting attention in theaters with track records for Broadway transfers. Both venues have had Broadway smashes, and both have transferred pieces that failed to attract a broader audience.
"No Place to Go" is at the Public Theater, home of musicals from "Hair" to the short-lived "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson." And "Now. Here. This." is at the Vineyard Theatre, birthplace of "Avenue Q" and the briefly seen "Scottsboro Boys," not to mention "[title of show]" by the same creators.
NO PLACE TO GO, Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555, publictheater.org.
I can't guess where "No Place to Go" will go when it ends its run April 8 at Joe's Pub, the Public's cabaret/supper club off the lobby. But I do know this odd and irresistible hybrid -- as much a high-concept lounge act as a low-tech musical -- has to go someplace. I really love this show, whatever it is.
Ethan Lipton, with his sad eyes and his downtown hip-nerdy suit and his comical mustache, stands on the tiny raised stage with three ace jazz-pop musicians he calls, with typical droll over/understatement, Ethan Lipton and His Orchestra.
Lipton, holding a hand mic, and with a major gift for musical storytelling, shares his regular-guy American tragedy about being a longtime freelancer whose company decides to move out of New York. That the company is moving "to Mars" matters less than the fact that he and his congenial band of co-workers have been told they can move or be jobless.
Despite the lack of benefits, Lipton has spent 10 relatively crazy-happy years in his work as an "information refiner" and appreciates waking up with a routine and a way to help support his wife, his dog and his cat. As he sings in his appealing jug-bucket talk-sing voice, "I got a place to go and nobody that I love goes there, too."
The show, commissioned with an encouraging grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, is the first Pub piece that has become part of the Public's regular season. The melodies are mostly jaunty old-timey ballads that focus on the pain of the educated unemployed with roots in the dust bowl and an awe for the accomplishments of the WPA. The music is infectious and virtuosic, if familiar. But his lyrics and his anecdotes capture both the universal dislocation of being out of work and the specificity of an artist trying to make a life in America today.
A new job will pay less, and the standards will be lower. All assumptions of "my life as I know it" are gone, as he puts it with an upbeat/offbeat grasp of the absurdity. "The thread is broken." If there is any sense in the theater world, a new thread starts for him right now.
NOW. HERE. THIS., Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St., 212-353-0303, vineyardtheatre.org.
From their New York Musical Theater Festival in 2004 until their Broadway premiere in 2009, the creators of "[title of show]" were developing this meta-project about writing a musical about people writing a musical while performing the musical. You're following that, right?
An Obie-winning hit at the Vineyard in 2006 and a theater-obsessives' favorite on a YouTube series on the web, this was possibly the ultimate let's-put-on-a-show musical. The inside-baseball humor, the sardonic attitude and the Cinderella story worked together for a quick and charming invention. I admired the originality but couldn't escape the feeling I was being manipulated by long-struggling talented people on a guilt trip.
The same quick and charming people are back at the Vineyard with their first new work since their all-consuming breakthrough. Hunter Bell, Jeff Bowen, Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff still wear street clothes, share their stories and, directed by Michael Berresse, sing harmless show-tune pastiche by Larry Pressgrove.
Where their first piece of what they call "autobiofictionography" welcomed theatergoers into an unknown world, this one harps on things I suspect everyone has thought about way too much.
As the title suggests, the message is to live in the minute. We should think about the wonder of a cosmos that, after "4.5 billion years," brought us together in that particular theater with these people. Also, they want us to demand "more life," a command we haven't heard since the last lines in "Angels in America."
The scenes are loosely structured around a field trip to a natural history museum. Attractive slides tell us when we are in the planetarium, the hall of dinosaurs or the hall of masks-- -- ou know, where the cast confesses banalities about the disguises they've worn since their childhood. The 100 minutes are disarming but also obvious, sentimental and sappy.
Bullying is bad. Appreciate your grandmother. Tell your father you love him, even when he won't say it back. A song asks "who I am, what I want, what will I be?" An after-school special, perhaps.
