One New York Life

Ms. L and I had no intention of going to this but we wound up with free tickets. We’ll pretty much do anything for free which is why Free NYC and My Open Bar both rule.

I will admit to being a bit tentative on about this show. These shows using a bunch of songs to tell a story have a history of not being what I expected. When we went to see Movin’ Out a few years ago I was expecting a story about growing up in Jersey, getting shipped to Vietnam, coming home and getting high all the time, and eventual redemption. I got that — but it was a ballet. I was not expecting a ballet.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to find this wasn’t a ballet but more in line with what I was expecting Movin’ Out to be. It follows the history of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons from their inception in Jersey through almost the modern day using songs to highlight different parts of their lives. Frankie Valli, surprisingly, is almost a supporting actor in the whole thing. Tommy DeVito is really the lead of the whole thing and narrates it… sometimes from the sidelines and sometimes Zack Morris Style in the middle of the scene .

The Good

• The cast we saw was excellent. Our Tommy DeVito was part of the original cast and hadn’t left yet (he has since left as of 9/28/2008, which should tell you how long this post has been sitting in the “draft” section with bullet-point notes). The Frankie Valli was fantastic. I was never in to Four Seasons songs because I’m not in to falsettos, but the guy we had hit every note and could have been Frankie Valli.
• There was more comedy then I was expecting, including a whole bit with Joe Pesci. Pesci claims to have been present at the formation of the Four Seasons and appears as a character in the play. There’s a bit where Tommy deadpans to the crowd “Joe Pesci — yeah, ‘dat one” and the character enters talking in a Joe Pesci voice. It’s funny.
• For me, Broadway stuff is enhanced when you know the music. In this one, I could know the music without going out and buying a cast recording without knowing whether or not I’d like it. I already knew all the music and dug a lot of it. It should be noted that not ALL the songs are Four Season’s songs — just most. My Boyfriend’s Back, for example, makes an appearance. Almost all of them are songs you pretty much know whether you want to or not.

The Bad

• While I’m happy the dancing in the show was at a minimum (non-existent really) they could have given the guys a couple more moves while standing behind the microphone. They have a specific “move” that they did during every song and it became funny more than anything else.
• The crowd. I know, I know… Manhattan snobbery. I get that this show is well-supported by tourists and the like, but at one point a 45-year-old woman was screeching and helicoptering her coat over her head like a Terrible Towel. Maybe I don’t get it, but I didn’t freak out when I went to see a Pearl Jam cover band.

The Rest

Not the best show (Wicked) I saw in 2008, but a perfectly acceptable way to spend an evening and not be completely bored. My grandmother saw it in Vegas and loved it, so if you’re stuck for a Christmas gift and your grandmother’s visiting New York, go for it. I probably wouldn’t go again or recommend it as the one show you need to see if you’re in New York — but if the touring cast comes to a town near you and you want to spend a nice (Oh What A?) night with dinner and a show, go for it.

Funny story about this show. Ms. L’s birthday is in November. Last November, I gave her a “voucher” saying I would buy tickets for this show on the day of her choosing as her birthday present. I figured this would work out well because we were about to hit the holidays (her birthday’s 11/7) which is quickly followed by tax season. I didn’t want to buy tickets six months out because I hate doing that.

To make a long story short — sometime in October, they announced the show would be closing on January 18th, 2009 and I realized that we’d never gone and her new birthday was about to come up. So, while I saved money on last year’s birthday, I wound up buying double birthday this year. I did my job as a man and picked a day and said “this is the day we’re going” and, of course, I bought the tickets on the night of her company Christmas party. It’s never easy.

A quick plot summary — kids hit puberty in late 19th-century Germany.

The Good

• Some of the songs are really good. The problem is — it’s only some. It’s written by a more modern musician and it shows. There’s no real overarching theme that threads through the show to tie parts together. The musical listens like an album. That’s fine, but it listens like an album with a few really good singles (Mama Who Bore Me, My Junk, Totally F*cked, Those You’ve Known) with a lot of fluff and filler. There was nothing to grab on to and take from the show. When you leave Phantom of the Opera, you remember the overture.
• There were naked boobs! I wasn’t planning on it, but it was a pleasant surprise.
• It was very funny. If I went in to it expecting a comedy, I would have been very happy. They do the awkward teenagers discovering their bodies thing very well. The song My Junk is set around the various students in awkward situations — one has a stacked piano teacher he’s drooling over, one gay student awkwardly propositioning a confused fellow student, and the whole scene is set around a guy at center stage looking at an erotic postcard with a sheet over him while — uh — moving to the rhythm. It works out tremendously (intentionally) funny.
• The stage layout was tremendously unique. There were two or three dozen seats actually ON the stage at stage right and stage left. The supporting chorus singers sat in the crowd as students and occasionally would pop up when the time was right. I thought it was going to be distracting when I initially saw it but it worked.

The Bad

• All the show’s adults are played by one man and one woman. I understand why — the adults are really only small supporting characters — but I found myself occasionally confused about which person they were supposed to be at any given time. That isn’t to say the actors weren’t good, it’s just that there were times where they could have legitimately speaking as more than one person.
• I really didn’t like our Moritz. I don’t know if this is the choreography, but the actor wanted to be a rock-star a little too badly. He held the microphone on the stand with the base of the microphone to the side like Steven Tyler and seemed over-the-top even for Broadway. It just didn’t work for me. In his defense, I didn’t like the entire Moritz storyline which could have tainted him for me. By the way,
• I really didn’t like the entire Moritz storyline. The character kills himself because he fails out of school but the whole failing-out is stupidly arranged and badly told. He spends half the first act desperately freaking out about passing his mid-terms. He passes but the headmaster of the school decides that Moritz shouldn’t be promoted so they arrange for him to fail his final exams. They give no real explanation for this short of “everyone can not be promoted.” Uh, why? Especially since the lead character, Melchior, is explained as the rebellious and morose student hated by the headmaster. They let him go but conspire to expel Moritz whose only flaw seems that he’s jumpy and overly nervous? While he’s in the worst spot of his life, he runs across his old friend Ilse and they talk about old times and she invites him over for some “catching up” and companionship. He says no and then kills himself. But as he’s killing himself he’s talking about how he doesn’t really want to kill himself and should go see Ilse. But… dude… she just left and said she wanted to hang out?
• Then after the suicide, the story out of nowhere cuts to the girls talking about their eventual weddings as they tease each other about the boys in town. Then one girl suddenly goes in to a song about getting molested by her dad. Like — I understand that it happens, I understand that it probably happened more often per capita in the 1800s, but the song was totally out of place. Like, up to this point they’re delivering masturbation jokes and talking about vagina essays and erotic postcards. Then, surprise, we’re talking about a girl getting abused mentally, physically, and sexually by her father. The whole sequence is out of place and doesn’t fit with the rest of the story.
• We got a “this show is two years old and is closing in a month” cast. These guys were getting their Broadway feet wet. I’m not saying they were bad, but they didn’t blow my shoes off like the Les Miserables cast.
• The songs just weren’t solid top to bottom. While there were a couple of very fun standouts, the rest got lost in the shuffle. There’s something to be said that I walked out of theater humming the “There’s only us/There’s only this” tune from Rent. There was just nothing that popped out of this show to make me remember it.

The Rest

The musical is a pared down version of a play. Maybe the play describes some of the events with more detail. I found myself confused by the timeline and found a lot of the story threads rushed together and disjointed. The lead storyline was fine. Melchior and Wendla meet, make out, get pregnant, get separated, and one dies. I can appreciate that. I can even appreciate some of the side storylines, but there was no big tie-in at the end that brought it all together. Combine that with there wasn’t even a really a musical theme to tie the songs together and it felt more like listening to a concept album with live videos than a musical with a story.

They tried to sell this to New York as a Rent for the new generation. It could be like Rent if you took out Jonathan Larson’s ability to take the actual structure of a musical and modernize it with recurring themes and a storyline that all made sense at the end. Duncan Sheik (yes, the Barely Breathing guy) seemed like he took the play and wrote a soundtrack.

In retrospect, I find it baffling this won Tony Awards and took Best Musical in 2006. Looking at the nominees, I realize it wasn’t exactly a heavyweight Avenue Q vs. Wicked fight, but jeez.

I’m glad I got to see it before it closed, but it doesn’t get the Golden TDL Recommendation or anything.