After seeing the selected song from this musical on the recent Tony broadcast, I was left thinking that this show looks kind of lame. Its amazing how wrong a first impression can be. I loved this show. I cannot say enough good things about it. The plot was simplistic, romantic, and beautiful. The performances are flawless. The score sounds like a mix between Sondheim and Puccini. The soaring, sweeping, grand, lush melodies, sung by operatic yet warm singers, are breathtaking. Kellie O’Hara has a voice I could listen to all day long. Victoria Clark has found the role that she will be forever remembered for.

The set is a technical masterpiece. The columns, archways, and statues of the Piazza in Florence, Italy, move around as the characters walk around the scene. The direction, by Bartlett Sher, was most impressive. He had the challenge of directing within the three-quarter-round setting of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Not once did I feel as if the set or the action were directed anywhere other than right at me. I was sitting to the far right side of the stage, yet I feel like I never had to look at anyone’s back, and the way the set is always in motion, it feels like the scene always plays fully to the entire house. Quite an accomplishment.

I thought I would be bored by the simple love story, which, on paper, might read out to be rather maudlin. Yet the realism of the acting and writing fully pull you into the lives of these people, and it doesn’t seem melodramatic at all. What made it all the more realistic and less musical theatrey was the fact that so much of it was in Italian. Fabrizzio and his family speak very little English, so of course, their scenes would be sung in Italian. And like in good opera, you just know what they’re singing about. The staging and passion of the perfomances make it clear what they’re saying even when you can’t understand a word.

The show really plays out more like an opera than a musical. All the singers are clearly opera trained, although their acting is better than that of most opera divas. There are no dance numbers, no hokey laugh lines. The comedy comes in situations and character traits, not in slapstick or forced gags. This is really everything I look for in a musical. Adam Guettel really deserves his Best Original Score Tony, and I hope he goes on to write many more shows. I am glad that new scores are still being produced for singers, and for people who appreciate pure beauty in their theatre, rather than sheer spectacle. I’m sure that La Cage aux Folles and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are fun, but flashy costumes and a flying car don’t represent art to me. This musical is art, much like the art they admire within the city of Florence.

One issue I had was the fact that the character of Clara, who is brain-damaged, seems mostly coherent throughout the play. I needed to see more instances of her being incapable of taking care of herself. It would have made her mother’s overprotective behavior make more sense. You only see her behave like a handicapped person for a moment.

A must-see for anyone who has hope for the future of musical theatre as an art form, rather than as a commodity. Skip it if you loved Mamma Mia.

The Ars Nova Theatre on 54th St. and 10th Avenue may be annoyingly far away, but it produces some pretty great underground comedy. I had the opportunity to see a delicious little sketch comedy show entitled The Riot Act. A friend of mine, Adam Bloom, was featured in this group of talented comedians. The sketches and musical vignettes, were all, dare I say…quoteable? That is to say that I found myself repeating some of the best lines over and over and laughing, all the way back home. “Javier the Bull” was the story about a chronically depressed bull (a woman with a giant red bull head) and his human wife, and his trials and tribulations at his office, at which he frequently saves the company and is never recognized for it. Would make a brilliant sit-com. “Girls with Sandwiches” was a girl in a funny wig and a guy in drag also in a funny wig, talking about funny things while eating sandwiches. “Bono’s New Accompanist” was one part great Bono impression, one part, brilliant musical theatre accompanist/comedian, mix them together, and you’ve got funny messed-up U2 songs. “If I was a Spoken Word Poet,” parts one and two, were exactly what they sound like. Mockery of the art form, mockery of hip-hop culture, mockery of themselves. Risky and brave. “Positive Tourettes Katie” is a girl cursed with tourettes, except the things she says are actually lovely, nice, and positive. So when a guy she doesn’t like hits on her at a bar, she tells him to get lost, then her disease kicks in and she blurts out how she loves his eyes and thinks that they are soul mates. Her mixed signals equal comedy. SNL caliber sketch writing. The best piece in the show was the bit where the little gay boy sings a rendition of Alanis Morrisette’s “You Oughta Know.” He is at the wedding of his ex-boyfriend to his own cousin. I have never seen such rage, passion, and humor all mixed into one little sketch. Incredibly well performed. I laughed my ass off.

I really hope these people continue to create and perform together. The humor was reminiscent of The State and Upright Citizen’s Brigade. And I hope that these sketches and characters they’ve created will continue to be seen by more people than the ones that were lucky enough to catch this one-night-only performance.

My buddy Sunil hooked me up with comps to this Tennesse Williams classic, performed at Studio 54. I took my friend Rebecca Cohen who turned out to be an excellent theatre date. We must do it again soon. Unfortunately, this classic play has been forever ruined for me because of the genius Simpsons episode entitled, A Streetcar Named Marge, in which Marge plays Blanche DuBois in a musical version of the play. All the tenderest, saddest, most well acted moments were so brilliantly parodied on the Simpsons that I had a very difficult time taking the show seriously. That being said, I was still able to enjoy the production for what it was, which is a simplistic, bare-bones, well acted production of a classic play.

Natasha Richardson was great as Blanche, although her vocal tone and speech pattern sounded eerily similar to that of Vivian Leigh’s in the film of the play. They are both British actresses doing a Southern accent, so the similarity might be due to that. More likely, Williams wrote the dialogue of the character to have a certain lilting, singsongey, rambling quality (the chatty banter of a socalite turned lunatic) that comes across no matter who plays the role. Like certain Shakespeare roles; when the iambic pentameter is correctly followed, certain speeches will always sound the same. I thought she did a fabulous job with the role and was disappointed to see she didn’t even get a Tony nomination.

John C. Reilly, a brilliant film actor, comes across better on film. He has wowed me in all his film roles, and although he was good as Stanley, I wasn’t as impressed with him as I usually am. I think he was a bit miscast in the role. He doesn’t have that animal magenitism or charm that Marlon Brando was known for. Not saying only sex symbols should play the role, but it just didn’t make sense that Stella would chose him over her own sister. He wasn’t sexy, and they didn’t have great chemistry, so it really didn’t make sense why she would stay with such a buffoon. It indicates that Stella was exceptionally weak, however, that’s now how Amy Ryan chose to play her, so something was totally amis within the production. You really want to see and to understand why she stays with him, even after driving her sister insane, and in this production, I didn’t. He was way better in Boogie Nights. And Chicago. And everything else, really.