B (9:44)
How do I describe this? The writers of the show are clearly into their main character, played by Eden Espinosa. They find her fascinating. She lived a Very fascinating life, a very rich life. You know, she married a Russian officer, I think, or like. Or like Russian upper class, I guess. I don't know. I'm. It's late, so my words are failing me. But in this show, the way that it is portrayed. Eden Espinosa starts the show off on a park bench in Los Angeles painting. And it's 1975, which I looked up on Wikipedia. And if that is to be believed, Lempicka did not live in Los Angeles at that point of her life. She actually lived in, I believe, South America by that point. She, you know, emigrated to the states in the 30s for reasons that we'll get to in a hot second. And then I believe in the 60s, moved down south. So, you know, if we're talking about historical accuracy here, which I don't really give two shits about, but. But because the show was so insistent on including as much of Lempicka's life as possible, that's something that I was like, why are we doing this? If you want to include so much, why are we changing this part? Unless Wikipedia is wrong, I don't know. But. So Eden comes out. Eden's on stage on this park bench painting, and she basically looks out at us and goes, you want to know how I got here, How I ended up here? And then they do a whole like bright star de aging moment. Someone today called it like the Titanique Selene pulls off her wig in his old rose kind of reveal. And already you're kind of confused because if you were to go into Lempicka as a totally blank slate, not having read anything about it, you would watch Eden come on stage and go, oh, do you want to know how I got here? And it's like, well, I don't know who you are. Who are you got here where? Immediately we don't get any insight or information about who we're dealing with. Even something perfunctory as a bit of exposition of, I was a very famous painter, I was a big deal, and if that is there now, after I've seen it, I apologize, but it wasn't there the night that I saw it. And we flash back to 1916, 1917, Russia. She's painting in a wedding dress and her mother, played by Beth Leavel, comes out and she goes, you're going to get paint on the dress. She goes, it's fine, I want to paint. Andrew Szymanski is her soon to be husband. We find out that she's probably with child when they're getting Married, because we do know that they've already banged, but it's implied that she might be pregnant already. They get married, she has the baby, he gets arrested because the Russian Revolution happens, although they never actually say it's the Russian Revolution, just somebody comes on stage, grabs Andrew some and drags him off stage. Eden Espinoza runs off stage in her wedding dress holding the baby, which is an image I will never forget, and then spends the rest of the song searching through Russia trying to find her husband, bribing different guards with jewelry because she has this mentality of we must survive, and then eventually allows herself to be raped by a soldier so she can get Andrew Szymansky out of prison. And they flee to Paris. And he's like, what did you do to get me out? And she goes, don't worry about it. That's all the first seven minutes of the show. I'm watching this going, this could just be act one. There's so much that we're just flying through. And that's kind of the case with Lempicka. Most of the time. There's a lot of plot that we just fly through. And then there are moments of Lempicka that we sit in, but they're not the moments that are necessary. And, you know, the music also is just very odd because it will be like. It will be Broadway pop one second, Les Miserables grandeur the next, and then like 1980s club kid techno music after that. Like, the opening number is very, you know, the How Did We Get Here And History's a Bitch and so Am I and let's Go Back In Time number that's very sort of sweepy, swoopy, you know, kind of music. And then we get into the Russian Revolution. Andrew Szymanski's in prison, Eden Espinoza's got to do whatever it takes to survive. And that's when we have, like, the hardcore missigon Chess music. Like, it was very Kim in Kim's nightmare being like, I'm the wife of a soldier. Help me, anyone. It's very. That. No, out of my way. It's that kind of intensity for five minutes straight. And then we get to Paris and everyone's like, vogue, vogue, vogue, vogue, vogue, vogue. And some scores are really good at intertwining multiple genres and making it feel like one whole tapestry. Caroline or Change is a show that does that very well. Great Comet, another Rachel Chavkin musical does that very well. And then other musicals give you kind of whiplash with the genres that they Incorporate. And for me, Lempicka is full on whiplash all the time. Every number is. So there are numbers that are in the same show, but they are far apart from each other. So you never have four numbers in a row that feel like they're part of one whole vision. They all feel like they're from different visions. Which is ultimately my biggest gripe with this show is that it wants to be so much, but it doesn't know which thing it wants to be the most. Because then we get to Paris and they're struggling to make ends meet because Andrew Szymansky won't work. And Lempicko wants to be a painter, and she's on the Seine painting with all the other painters. And Bethlehem Level shows up with an actor whose name I'm forgetting. Let me look that up. One moment, please. His name is Nathaniel Stampley. And I was actually talking to two gentlemen, the co hosts of Half Hour podcast today. And I asked them, when Beth Leavel came out onto the Seine to look at in Espinoza's paintings with her husband, did you for a moment think to yourself, oh, Lempicka is going to run into her mom now? And they said, yeah, Lempicka was not running into her mom. Beth Level was playing an entirely new person, but her hair and makeup were exactly the same. So you think it's she's about to run into her mom post revolution? No, she's playing a new character now. She's playing a baroness and her husband, the baron. And they see Lempicka's painting that we don't get to see. They just see her painting and they go, huh, You've got promise. Take this card, go to this art teacher. This art teacher is played by George Abood, I think is, how you say his last name. I'll learn it when I do the video for Instagram. But I think it's George Aboud. But they send her to him to learn how to paint better, you know, have vision, have a sense of style. And while that's happening, she's. I don't know, she's also trying to get other work to, you know, support her husband and her kid, who at this point has now grown up to be seven and is played by a teenage actress named Zoe Glick, who does a nice enough job, but, you know, I already kind of do not care for child actors. And in this particular show, her character remains seven the entire show, despite the fact that they spent almost 20 years in Paris. Like, her first time she comes out she's basically wearing a dainty June outfit. And she's like, mama, paint me, or Lempy, because, like, sit for me. I'm going to paint you. And then she just wears that same outfit or something similar to that outfit the rest of the show. Even though we go from like 1919 in Paris or like 1920 in Paris to 1936. And that. That aside, sorry, my brain is all over the place. I'm really trying to think this through. I think my video review for this will be a little better because I'll be. I'll have cleared out all my thoughts from doing this episode of the podcast, and then I'll be much more focused for the video, more focused than Lempicka, anyway. And so she goes to, you know, art school, and she's trying to work, maybe as a maid, doing all these other things every now and then. Andrea Samansky's like, how did you get me out of prison? And she's like, shut up. That was years ago. And she meets Amber Aman, who is a sort of sex worker, party girl. She is. If there's. If there's a somewhat concurrent theme with Lempicka, it's how people try to survive, I guess. It's not consistent, but it. It pops up quite a few times. No, Lempicka is the woman she becomes and does the things that she does to survive. And Amber Ammann is sort of the same. And Eden Espinoza sees Amber Ammon and immediately is like, I want to paint her, I want to fuck her. I got to do this. And Natalie Joy Johnson is, you know, a kind of passing through lesbian. She owns this. She works at this nightclub, and she eventually wants to own her own queer nightclub. And she passes through and makes jokes about, you know, vaginas. She has a joke to Beth Leavel when she first comes out. They're at this art gallery and she says to Beth Leavel, who's wearing a fur, she goes, I love that fur. I love beaver. And Beth Leavel says something along the lines of, you know, it's mink. And Natalie Joy Johnson goes, I know, and I love Natalie Joy Johnson. If you are a gay man in New York City who is into the theater scene or gay bar scene, chances are you've seen Natalie Joy Johnson cabaret. I have seen quite a few myself. She's even yelled at me through song on a drunken improv one night, sex shaming me, saying that I was very closed off sexually. And she's right. I basically am broken inside. But it wasn't what I was planning on that Saturday evening at Green Room 42. But that's the fun of Natalie, right? It's sort of like Patti LuPone at Les Mouche with nine bottles of champagne. And so it's so fun to see Natalie back on Broadway. And the night I was there, there were a small cluster of G in the mezzanine who are clearly there excited to see her. And I find that fun. She's sort of become like this secret gay icon in small circles in New York. That's fun. But we go back to the show. Now Eden wants to draw Amber. She keeps trying to find her. She keeps missing her. She and Andrew Samanski keep growing farther apart. And then, just as she finally gets a chance to draw Amber, she and Amber hook up in Eden's loft, where she paints outside of her apartment from her family. And of course, that's when Andrew Szymolsky comes to see her afterwards, and he's like, I want to make this work. I got a job. I love you. And she goes, oh, no, what do I do? And that's when she sings. Woman is at the end of act one, which I suppose is her artistic breakthrough. By being with Amber in a carnal sense, she's able to now paint women in a way that no one has before, which is bold and confident and sexy and seductive. At least that is what we're told. We never actually see it on stage. And even then, it's only said a little bit. And that's in Act 2. Because then in Act 2, Lempicka begins to paint more, and she. I guess she becomes far more successful. It's never really made entirely clear. We pass through a whole bunch of years. She and Amber Amon now are in a relationship, but she's still married to Andrew Simonsky. And even though he had just said at the end of act one, he wants to make it work, they are now fully separated. He has his own girlfriend. Meanwhile, Eden will only sort of be with Amber in certain safe spaces. They go to Natalie Joy Johnson's new queer club. But, you know, Eden won't parade Amber out in public because, you know, it's 1930 Paris, and even though Paris is a sexually liberated area, this is the 1930s, and, oh, by the way, it's Europe in the 1930s, so the Nazis are on the rise. And don't you worry, Lempicka, make sure you know about that, because every now and then, someone will talk about Hitler in third person, you know, oh, that joke just became Chancellor Things like that. And of course, Lempicka's art teacher is now sort of siding with Mussolini and the fascists, and he's becoming, you know, kind of wild and crazy and. And whatnot. And Lempicka has this big art show that her daughter tries to sabotage because her daughter is jealous that Lempicka is spending all of her time with Amber Am, but that doesn't really amount to anything. And then she and Andrew Szamotsky have this big fight, and Andrew Szman, and she tells Andrew Szamotsky, I had sex with a guard to get you out of prison. Basically, I was raped so you could be free. And to him, it's as if she had told him, I burned down an orphanage so we could go camping. And then she and Amber Amon break up. And then fascists start taking over Paris and Basic. Then Beth Leavel comes out, the baroness, and she goes, I'm dying, so paint me so my husband will have a painting to remember me by. And Beth Leavel does really, you know, a wonderful job just selling that number, but it does come so out of left field for me. And then she walks off stage in Espinoza, turns to the audience and she goes, the Baron and I made a good couple. And I go, wait, you and the Baron got together? Apparently they married, they moved to the United States. Lempicka then kind of became irrelevant for a while. And then in the 70s, right before she died, she had a major resurgence. Somebody found a bunch of her paintings in, you know, some warehouse or loft in Europe, and, you know, they sold a bunch of her canvases for millions and millions of dollars. She had this resurgence in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s. According to Wikipedia, in the musical, it happens right before she dies. I believe in Wikipedia. They say it was the 60s and 70s. You know, she became a go to artist to go on the walls of a lot of movie stars and Hollywood producers home. So they sold for a lot, a lot of money. And then, you know, coffee table books about her and all this stuff. And that's sort of how the musical ends. But it's all in a flurry. Like everything I just said, everything happens in a flurry. We don't get a song where Lempicka is questioning her own sexuality when she meets Amber Amon. Am I queer? Am I a lesbian? Am I actually bisexual? Am I just a lesbian for this one woman? What does that even mean? Do I still love my husband? Is it just because my husband and I are going through a rough patch? Am I inspired by Amber Amon, or am I in love with Amber Amon? None of these things are ever questioned. They're never. No one dives into them because they've got so many other things going on in Lempicka's life. They want to talk about that. They want to show. They want to show the Nazi uprising. They want to show her rise in the art world. They want to show her daughter again for some reason. They want to show how Andrew Szymansky is going through shit. They want to show that Beth Leavel is going to die in two months. They want to show that Lempicka, you know, sells jewelry or buys jewelry, that she's a survivor, that she, you know, is becoming an icon, that she's becoming irrelevant, that she becomes an icon again. We want to show how Natalie Joy Johnson works at a bar, then buys a bar, then the bar gets destroyed by the Nazis. And I don't know why we need all of it, because we don't spend enough time with any of it. And therefore, it all seems irrelevant. It all seems kind of shallow. And again, because the show, the whole production really doesn't have a point of view. It's just going for big, broad swings and style. There's no vision. You know, the set is basically a whole bunch of metal stairs done at an odd angle almost. It's like an M.C. escher painting. But it's just one of the staircases or two of the staircases from different parts of the painting. And certain things will sort of fly in and out, usually two different screens that will give you glimpses of whatever Lempicka has painted and they're showing. And then at the end of the show, they do this big reveal of a couple of her paintings. But they do them to scale. They do them at realistic scale, not theatrical scale. So if you're sitting in certain parts of the audience, you're not going to be able to see the paintings. And what made them so impressive, supposedly so impressive anyway? They have one platform that slides on and off all the time. That's supposed to represent her apartment, it's supposed to represent her loft. It sometimes represents a bedroom. They have a car that comes on once or twice. You know, Chavkin is a director who I've always admired because she is so good at using a space creatively and every square inch of a theatrical space. And even if I'm questioning what it has to do with story, I never question that the taste level is there. And this was the first time with her where I kind of questioned the taste level. The aesthetic of the show made no sense to me. The main characters all wear relatively period appropriate costumes, but the ensemble are all in heavily stylized, implied costumes for the era. It's, you know, half Paris, gender bending of the 1920s and then like half Madonna, express yourself music video. And I don't, and I don't know why, unless it's to connect the art world of then to the art world of now or just the art world of the 80s. But again, the show doesn't stick with that. It doesn't really stick with anything ever. It's just a lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall and occasionally a noodle might stick, but it's sort of. It's very scattered and it comes out of a lot of mischances, in my opinion. Now, I've spoken to quite a few people who have all really liked this show. Some of them are listeners of the podcast or people who follow me on Instagram. I've had two friends who really liked it. I gotta say, everyone else I've spoken to has not primarily people in the industry. I'm talking about actors, I'm talking about music directors, people who not only work on Broadway, but have worked with many of the people involved with this show in past productions. And it's not, it is not scanning well with a lot of people. There's a lot of people feel the way that I do, which is that it's a very confusing show. And for some people, that actually works for them. They like the idea of big bold swings on stage, whether they hit or not. And listen, that's part of the reason why I love Diana, right? I've talked about this on the podcast many a time. Diana, for me is a two hour masterpiece of being nothing but strong and wrong. But that's not really Lempicka. Lempicka has a lot of moments that are strong and wrong, but it's not two straight hours of it. There are moments where you can see what they're trying to do and how it could possibly work, but it's too sandwiched between two wild moments that you have no idea what's happening. And so anything that is actually quality in the show or well realized. It's hard to see the forest for the trees. At least it was for me and for honestly, quite a few people. Positives the score for all of its identity issues. For me, it is a fascinating score and clearly the writers are very creative. They have an ear for melody, they have an ear for energy and theatricality. It's just about reining yourself in and being precise. If you're going to do a wildly eclectic score, you have to have a reason for it. You have to make sure that everything ties together in a way that it feels like it's all part of one world. That's something that Dave Malloy does brilliantly with Great Comet. It's what Tesori does brilliantly with Caroline or Change, you know, Hell, I'd even say it's what Sondheim does really well with Sunday in the park with George. Not all of that score sounds the same all the time, but it feels of that world. It didn't feel of the same world for me. In Lempicka, it is mostly well sung. Amberman sings fantastically. She's got a lot of energy. I would argue she's in a different show from Eden Espinosa and Andrew Simonsky. Andrew Szymansky also sounds fantastic, but he's kind of given a wet blanket of a role and he carries it out how he's asked to carry it out. The role is just nothing. He has no personality. Once he gets released from prison, he basically becomes a dud. And I don't know if that's to make Eden's choice of wanting to be with Amber more forgiving for an audience. They're like, well, of course she's going off with Amber Iman. Look how awful her husband is. But that doesn't give him anything to play. And Beth Level, while wildly underused, does make the most of her stage time. She can land a one liner like nobody's business. She is in wonderful voice. Eden Espinosa in the lead role. You know, Eden is a very earnest and passionate actress. She is. You cannot claim she's not giving it a thousand percent. The role of Lempicka is very confusing in this show. Her motivations, her wants, they're all kind of flipping on a dime based on whatever the next scene requires. And this is called out by Andrew Samansky at one point when they have a fight in Act 2 about sort of the hypocrisy of her hating that he's got a girlfriend. And he's like, you got a girlfriend. But that's not a theme of the show, of how Lempicka is a hypocrite all the time, how she has standards for other people, that she doesn't meet herself and refuses to be held accountable for her actions. That's not ever something that's a theme for her character. That's just something that kind of Pops up once or twice in Act 2. And that's got to be hard for Eden to play. So she's just kind of riding the train as earnestly as she can on a vocal level. You know, it pains me to say this because we famously know Eden is to be one of the best Elphabas of all time, according to the marketing for Lempicka. And listen, you know, you watch those videos of her in her prime during Brooklyn and early Wicked days, and her voice is absolutely bonkers. And there is a lot of heft to her voice. Now the problem is, is that when she goes above like a C or D, I want to say, like when she goes really high, that's actually when her voice is at its best. She doesn't really sustain the notes terribly well, but she'll hit them and it'll be very nice and clear. It's when she goes lower than that. And to be clear, you know, an A or B is not a low note for a female singer. That's a very chesty area to be singing in. And that's where a lot of the score for Lempicka lives. But that is when Eden is kind of off vocally. She's. I hate to say this, she's under on a lot of the notes. She's flat on a lot of the notes. And it doesn't do us any favors to not acknowledge that because this is a very music heavy show and when your lead is off pitch a lot, even if you want to get swept up in the aesthetic, if you want to get swept up in the eclectic music, it's hard with that. Music is a very chemical reaction. And when there's one component that's slightly off, we can't get that same reaction that we want. Of course, there were people around me who were having wonderful reactions, so what the fuck do I know? Anyway, that is sort of where we're at with Lempicka. I will not be this harsh on my video, but to be perfectly honest, I kind of found the show to be a bit of a disaster. It's just so. It's so unsure of what it wants to say about her, what it wants to be about her and what it just wants to be as a show, what kind of style it wants to be. There are so many things that happen in it that each thing could be its own 30 minute segment if you expanded it and dove into it deeper. In fact, I believe there was a play about Lempicka that was in LA in like the 80s and 90s and was in New York for a little bit. I believe that play is like four and a half hours long. And that makes sense to me. I believe the play is called Tamara. And it makes sense to me that it'll be that long because she lived a very full life and there are so many things you could explore. But if you try to cram all of it into a musical, which is a very economic genre of storytelling, nothing will feel good or thought through. On that note, we have the heart of Rock and Roll. And before we get to the heart of rock and roll. Sorry, let me say that again. But before we get to the heart of rock and roll, let us take a quick break. Billy, I'd like to dimmer with you. How do you mean? You're the top. Yeah, you're an arrow caller. And we're back. Okay, so the Heart of Rock and Roll is a jukebox musical using the song catalog of Huey Lewis and the News. This is a show that has kind of been under the radar for a lot of people. It had an out of town tryout at the Old Globe with Matt Doyle and Katie Rose Clark. I had not heard really anything about it from out of town. I had friends who had done workshops of it and they enjoyed themselves, but no one really remembered much about it since then. The word from friends from the dress rehearsal and very early previews was not terribly positive. But I do have it on good authority that they have done a lot of work on this show in previews, mostly to tighten it, which makes a lot of sense because this is a show that. That is aiming to be fun and dumb. And the only way you can get away with that is if the show is right and tight. And as I mentioned before, I am all. I'm a big fan for silly. You know, I can watch Soap Dish as many times as I please. I love Sex and the City. I've been very vocal about how much I love Mamma Mia. You know, if you're gonna be dumb, be smart about how dumb you are. If you want me to turn off my brain, you got to do all the work. And the thing is, the surprising thing is the heart of rock and roll is quite a bit of that. They do a lot of the work for you. They are relatively smart about how dumb they are. It has its flaws, some of which I think could be fixed relatively easily, some of which can't just because of its very existence. But there's a lot of fun to be had there. Let me start with a couple of things that I think are just very easy fixes. The plot of Heart of Rock and Roll is essentially, Corey Cott used to be in a band, and due to daddy issues and the fact that the band wasn't going anywhere, he gave that up and started working for this packaging company owned by John Dossett that he runs with his daughter, mackenzie Kurtz. And Corey Cott is a bit of a screw up. Tamika Lawrence is the head of HR for this company and he screws something up so he gets fired. But he's on a warpath. He's got a plan. He's going to do a working girl. He's going to be a Tess McGill and sort of fake it till he makes it. And to this convention that John Dossett and MacKenzie Kurtz are going to be at in Chicago, this, like, packaging convention or whatever where he's also getting this award. John Dossett and Corey Codd's like, hey, Orville Mendoza is this Swedish millionaire who has this furniture store that's about to sweep America called Idea Get It. Like ikea. I'm going to get his business. And he does. And there are other complications with that, but, you know, when it comes to stories about business, it's really hard for me to totally stay focused. Like the moment you mentioned Quarterly Reports, I'm like, wait, no. There are other plot lines as well. In addition to this convention, Mackenzie Kurtz goes to Chicago and finds out that it's also her reunion, either high school or college. I can't remember. Her best friend from her childhood, Zoe Jensen, is there with her husband, and she goes, married life is weird. And I have a baby now. We're gonna have fun. By the way, your ex, Billy Harrison Tighe is here, and he's still a snack. You should date him. Billy Harrison Tighe is a traditional 80s villain. The whole show takes place in the 80s. It's very much an homage to the fun and silliness of those 80s movies. Like, you know, Better Off Dead or Weird Science. Earth Girls Are Easy, The Sarah Jessica Parker flop that I Love. Girls Want to have Fun. No, it's very much in that kind of style. And so he's very much a. A yuppie villain, you know, wearing collared shirts and sweaters and, you know, doing acapella with an acapella group from their school. And he's definitely trying to get after mackenzie Kurtz. I don't know why she doesn't give him any indication that she likes him still. Also, mackenzie Kurtz's character is a bit of a Disaster. She's just always got anxiety. She's not terribly fun to be around Mackenzie. And that's intentional. Like, that's what the character is supposed to be. She kind of grows out of that by the end of the show. And Mackenzie Kurtz does a good job with that. I think she go to Annaleigh Ashford, Corky in act one, being like, the her we're me. And I think you can tone that down a bit just because, you know, if you play it not real, but if you don't comment too much on the comedy, we will laugh harder. And there's no greater example of that than Billy Harrison, Tai and Tamika Lawrence, who. They do not comment on the comedy. They play weird characters earnestly, and that makes us laugh and also like the characters more. The other issue I have with the show is, you know, ultimately, in the end, there's a big conflict because Corey Cott's band gets back to him and they perform, and then all of a sudden, the band is starting to blow up, and he has to kind of make a decision of which one he wants to do. He ultimately decides to go into the business with Mackenzie Kurtz, you know, work with her, be in love with her, and, you know, the band will go off and do their own thing. And it does sort of lean into that 80s trope of like, yeah, forgive up on your dreams, contribute to corporate America. But I would have loved it if, when he had his conversation with Tamika Lawrence, because he eventually has his decision to be made in the end, when the band is like, hey, we found this letter from your dead dad from beyond the grave. And this is, weirdly, yet another musical to do that. But that letter ultimately is what moves him to go back and do the business. And I would have loved it if he and Tamika Lawrence, because they have a scene, they're sort of buddies in the show. If she had said to him after he performed at the band and he signs a contract to go back on tour with them and do this record while also signing a contract to get promoted for John Dossett. If Tamika Lawrence was like, do you actually want to go back to perform? I'm sure it was lovely being with your friends again, but did it feel as good as it did the first time? Or do you just want to do the band stuff? Or are you tempted by the band stuff because somebody wants you now? Because that happens a lot with people, right? Where they get disillusioned by the thing that they used to be passionate about, and then when people pay attention to Them, they mistake that for, oh, I actually really love this. This was my path all along. It's like, actually, no, you're still not thrilled with what you're doing. It's just now people are maybe paying you a bit more money to do it. And I would have loved it if Corey Cott was like, you know what, you're right. It was so much fun to sing again. I loved being with those guys. It wasn't as good as I remembered. I kept thinking on stage, all these ideas I had for the business, is that weird? And Tamika Lawrence could be like, yeah, it's weird, but, you know, if that's your dream, do it. Because your dream doesn't just have to be art. And your dream can also change over time. And I wish that that sort of where he comes to the conclusion at the end, that's not where they want it. That also might be a little too, like, human, you know, that might be too human journey for them. They might be like, we want to keep it simpler, cuter, campier, and that's fine. The other two things about the show, I will say the show wants to be sort of a scrappy, campy underdog. It kind of wants to be like the Wedding Singer, but even more kind of dumb. Off Broadway, like an oh, Mary Cola Scola kind of thing. And there are some things in the show that land that really well, including a fantasy sequence that I don't want to spoil too much. But they also want it to be a big Broadway musical. And I don't think you can be the kind of show this wants to be, have the tone that it wants to be on a large stage like the James Earl Jones, which, like, is not the size of the Gershwin, but for an 1100 seat theater, that theater feels quite spacious. And they try to scale up the show with a semi large set. They try to fill the space that way. They have choreography by Lauren Lettero, who also did Tommy. And her choreography, like in Tommy, in my opinion, is way too much. Again, for a show that's trying to be very tongue in cheek. Her choreography is very big, big, big, kick in the face, kick in the face, high energy. Watch all these things that the cast can do rather than stay in line with the, you know, with the environment that the show is trying to live in. If you are on social media, you might have seen the video of the, you know, bubble wrap tap dance that they do. And I know a lot of people watch that and like, the fuck is this in. In the sense of what kind of Tone the show is setting, it makes sense. Again, the show is definitely going for silly, so doing something silly like that would make sense. The two issues with it are, one, the execution is flawed because while it's a fun idea to use the popping of bubble wrap as a tap sound, it's just not a clean sound. So it doesn't execute as well as you want it to. And I don't. In that part, I don't think is necessarily a Lauren Lotaro problem. I'm not sure any choreographer would be able to make tapping on bubble wrap clean enough to really land. But also, if you're gonna do that in the same way that, you know, Stroman does rope with Slap that Bass, you gotta introduce the bubble wrap a little sooner. You know, it happens in this expo scene. And some of you are listening to this. May be watching my video for Heart of Rock and Roll. At the same time, being like, Matt, you're kind of saying the exact same things you say in the video. Well, I recorded the video earlier today, so a lot of this is just fresh in my brain. Sorry. Not sorry. But. So they're in this sort of, like, expo at the convention. Mackenzie Kurtz and John Dossett. And so, you know, one booth has packing peanuts, one booth has cardboard boxes there, One booth has the bubble wrap. And we don't ever see it really. We don't ever see it used in the scene or anything like that. It's not. We don't get, like, a Chekhov gun with it earlier on. So we're aware that it's in the room that it can be used. And we don't ever see it being used for its actual purpose. We just have it roll out in the middle of the number. Mackenzie Kurtz accidentally walks on it, and everyone's like, oh, my God. Hear that sound? And if we're gonna do it, if we're gonna do the gig, I think it's best to at least introduce it earlier in the way it's supposed to be used. So then when you do do it for the tap dance, we can be like, oh, fun. Look at this thing. We watched being used in the normal way earlier now, being used for this fun musical theater way. But, you know, I don't think that's ever gonna happen. I don't think they're gonna do that. There are obviously some more cuts they can make again, make it right and tight. I think they can introduce the bandmates of Cory Cotts a little sooner. They come to open the show at the very beginning in this Sort of fantasy sequence. And then we don't see them again for like almost 30 minutes. We're dealing with the business stuff and Mackenzie Kurtz's high school stuff. And then they show up towards the end of Act 1 and Corey Cott reconnects with them and they perform. And so we don't ever really. I mean, I didn't feel anyway, any kind of conflict about which side Corey Cott was going to choose, the business or the band? Because we spend more time with the business. So it's like, well, clearly that's where we're going to go. And so I would have loved it if we could have maybe taken the beginning of the first. The band chopped it off and moved it like 20 minutes earlier. Done in a scene transition where they say, we miss Corey Cott. Oh, I actually did send him a tape of our old stuff the other day just to see if he could get nostalgic about the old days. And then the next time we see them is 15 minutes later and it's Corey Kot showing up and like, hey, man. Just keeping them fresh in our brains. And the actors who play them are all very fun. You know, it's John Michael Lyons, it's Raymond J. Lee, it's F. Michael Haney, and they're all very fun, very talented actors. I enjoy them all immensely. I mentioned this in my video. I keep. I always think about the way John Michael Lyons says in Exile and Gayville in a strange loop top. If it goes there, huh? Maybe looking for a gym buddy. Lol. Also his agent. The agent for Usher. Very fun. We've got an exciting project, especially for you. He's just, you know, he's a fun actor. I enjoy him and I like seeing him on stage. That's really all my major notes. Oh, there's also like a bit where MacKenzie Kurtz kind of saves the business in Act 2, but we don't see that happen, which is fine. We don't necessarily need to. But it would have been nice to have a little hint that that's what was going to happen if, you know, she could have a 15 second moment with Orville Mendoza again during a scene transition where he catches her eye and she's like, please don't leave. I got a proposition for you. And they go off stage and then we find out in the final scene, I saved the day. Because we don't have that first part, we just have that last part. And it would help to have little things like that. And I think that's something that you could very Easily incorporate because the scene change has already been teched. So, you know, just put that in there and add an extra spotlight or something. But that's just my. My two cents, because I do think that the show is actually quite a lot of fun. It's more clever than it has any right to be, if not all the time. Often enough, I think that it is very well cast. Everyone does a good job in it. Again, Tameka and Billie, in my opinion, walk away with the show. I think the music is very well arranged. And I don't know Huey Lewis and the News very well. I know a couple of their songs, but I found the songs to be well incorporated into the show. They didn't feel stuffed. You know, I think the opening number is kind of not lame, but just. It doesn't live up to the fun silliness of the rest of the show. It's a bit sloppy, it's a bit rudimentary, which may not be the right word, but it sounds right. It's them doing Hip to Be Square and the packaging company. And it's just not as clever of a number as many other numbers end up being. But, you know, I digress. I also think Act 2 still feels a little padded. In a perfect world, they would cut two numbers and, you know, get to that third act a lot faster. That's not going to happen. People are going to a jukebox musical to see the Huey Lewis numbers. They're not going to cut more Huey Lewis numbers. What else? In a perfect world, I also think the show would be 100 minutes and at New World Stages. And that's not me negating its quality. It's me just saying, once you get into a Broadway theater, the expectation from an audience changes. Even if it's a bridge and tunnel crowd who just wants to hear Huey Lewis numbers. They have an expectation of what a Broadway show is supposed to be, which is not the fault of Heart of Rock and Roll. I think all a Broadway show has to be is good. I don't care about the scale. But they're trying to be a big Broadway musical while also being a scrappy underdog. And I think they should be in a smaller theater. It should be a smaller set. It should be a shorter show. But all that said, I still had fun. I still think there's a lot of cleverness here. And maybe I just have had a lower bar this season because it's been quite underwhelming for me. But I still have seen things this year and I've been like, no, not not this one.
