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Sleuth Hurts: A depressed detective stars at Signature.
American musical theater has some good things going for it. That much is evident in the pair of musicals that opened at Arlington’s Signature Theatre last week. Schools like Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, University of Michigan, and Catholic University are churning out actors who can sing. Composers are writing artsy but hummable tunes. And some theaters, like Signature, are willing to invest significant money in new shows.
But are they investing in the right shows? That’s the common-denominator question still lingering three years after its Glory Days transferred to Broadway, closing after just one underwhelming night. Now Signature is billing its fall premieres as an American first: a duo of literary musicals running in repertory. The Boy Detective Fails was converted by the novel’s author, Joe Meno, while Hunter Foster took on Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
From a production-values standpoint, Signature gave The Hollow and Boy Detective equal treatment. With the exception of the leads, cast members and musicians pull double duty, and Signature made some wise and versatile hires. The costumes, scene, and sound design are outstanding, no easy feat given that crews have mere hours to change over between shows.
You’d think a classic American ghost story would hold more promise than a quirky 2006 novel about a 30-year-old former gumshoe. Turns out, The Boy Detective Fails is the better of the two, but—and this is a pretty big but —the subject matter and staging may scare audiences away.
Boy Detective opens with the best children’s-theater montage you’ll ever see. Amid cheery chants of “Billy Argo, Boy Detective!,” the cast darts between miniature buildings that dot the stage. The trio of adolescent sleuths chases rogue librarians and shady clerks with their outsized magnifying glasses and flashlights, making the front page every time they nab another diamond bandit.
Then the music slows, takes a minor-key turn, and, we’re told, hometown hero Billy Argo goes off to college, leaving his younger sister Caroline (Margo Seibert) at home to lose her virginity and slit her wrists.
This is rather graphically—if imaginatively—depicted. As Seibert unties her ponytail and disrobes, members of the ensemble wave bloody nighties on sticks, all while softly singing “Abracadabra.” Measures later, Billy gives the razor a less-successful go, and he’s packed off to the St. Vitus Institute for the Mentally Ill.
Holy mother—which of these musicals is the horror show? Do not, under any circumstances, bring the kids. But you do need to bring someone who appreciates the whimsy of children’s theater. Director Joe Calarco uses obvious props to convincing effect—for example, the helium clown balloons and eerie lighting that create the aura of a toy factory. The whole cast is costumed in a cartoonish palette.
Our depressed hero is released from St. Vitus 10 years later, in a bow tie and blazer and carrying a suitcase full of Ativan, Anafranil, and Seroquel.
Stephen Gregory Smith is not playing a very charismatic character, which is inherently problematic if you’re playing the lead in a musical. It’s not until 60 minutes in that we are shown (rather than force-fed) evidence of Billy’s prenatural powers. “You took the C train!” he tells his boss at a toupée telemarketing center, noting the tar on his shoes and the feathers in his fake hair.
Finally, we get it: Billy’s secret to sleuthing is OCD. At intermission, I overhear theater patrons debating whether they preferred Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. On cue, Act 2 opens with a genius toe-tapper featuring former child detectives Dale Hardy and Violet Dew. Billy confesses that his goal is to solve one last mystery and then stab himself. Violet nods empathetically and says, “He’s on medication.”
Hmm. Anyone thinking of another recent musical that rode waves of anti-anxiety meds to Broadway? Next to Normal, the Tony-winner that passed through Arena Stage, worked because the rock anthems functioned as a cathartic release. “I Miss the Mountains” was a believable bipolar ballad. But a childlike waltz about kleptomania? That’s creepy.
Which is not a fair characterization of Adam Gwon’s music. The score is Boy Detective’s strongest suit. It’s through-composed, with nearly two hours of music underscoring the dialogue. Gwon and orchestrator Andy Einhorn strategically recycle their own themes and keep a variety of Nickelodeon-friendly music coming. Everything’s piano driven, but layers of harp and winds keep the score light and colorful.
Ultimately, the problems facing Boy Detective may be more pragmatic than dramatic. How many people in Washington can there be who want to see a surrealist musical—even a pretty good surrealist musical—about a suicidal, grown-up Encyclopedia Brown?
Saturday’s attendance proves my point. The Boy Detective matinee was less than half-full, while the evening show of a beautifully produced, poorly constructed melodrama sold out.
The Hollow follows in the neo-Romantic vein of Light in the Piazza, Jane Eyre, Little Women, and other Masterpiece Theatre-grade musicals. That last clunker starred Foster’s sister Sutton, and you’d think big brother might have learned a lesson in How Not to Adapt 19th Century American Literature. Admittedly, Irving’s story is slim. Hunter’s solution was to thicken the plot with rape, infidelity, and religious controversy.
The result? Half Spring Awakening, half The Crucible: The Musical! I’m not arguing for verbatim adaptation, just pointing out that potentially good material got dumped in the Hudson River, including a country dance led by a “negro” fiddler.
Ichabod Crane (Sam Ludwig) is portrayed as a charming Connecticut atheist who brings secular tales like Gulliver’s Travels to a sleepy town of pious Dutch Americans. In both narratives he’s come to serve as village schoolmaster, though in Irving’s story, Crane was a devout dork who carried around Cotton Mather. His clever guise for wooing most-eligible-damsel Katrina Van Tassel (Whitney Bashor, here) was teaching her Psalmnody.
I’d call this scenario God’s gift to writers of musical theater. Instead, Ichabod and Katrina sing an inexplicable duet about a mermaid. (“No home on the land, alone in the sea, this mermaid lady of some court forever will be.”) This, and so many songs in the show, sound like Disney rejects.
The exception is a reoccurring setting of Irving’s own epigraph, featuring fantastic choral writing for the ensemble. Give the cast a lot of credit. Both the men and women are asked to sing awkwardly out of their range. (That’s fixable at a world premiere). Everybody’s dressed their post-Colonial best, thanks to costumes by Kathleen Geldard. The sets are spooky-minimalist with cool sound and visual effects. (Round House Theatre called. Can they borrow the burning books for Fahrenheit 451?) Sparks aren’t flying for the leads, however. Ludwig should smolder. Instead, it’s the audience who falls for the lovely soprano. Bashor is sincere and convincing in a show that’s, as the title unwittingly suggests, rather hollow.
We never see the murderous Hessian, just hear his horse snorting in the foggy wings. Signature’s creative team deserves a lot of credit for pulling off a well-funded doubleheader. But finding a story and developing a show that will draw audiences for all the right reasons? That’s still a specter of a musical, floating somewhere offstage.
Our Readers Say
Who is this person reviewing this show? I have never read a more ignorant or unintelligent review in the City Paper. Which is the horror show? They both clearly are! Just because the name of "The Boy Detective" leads you to believe that it is a children's show, you must remember the last word of the title..."Fails". They are both surreal horror in their own right.
And as far as finding an audience, not many shows find their audiences in Washington before press openings. That is where people like Miss Ritzel come in. They are there to offer constructive criticism and say what worked well and what did not, but not in a sensationalistic way that attempts to neuter both works. This endeavor by Signature was to give birth to 2 brand new and ground breaking musicals. These musicals are just starting out, like even "Oklahoma!" did in out of town tryouts many eons ago. New work should be nurtured and guided, not urinated on and dismissed, as new work is the future of American Theatre. Especially new and innovative work. Many years ago, no one had seen anything like Sondheim's work, and dismissed it. New works should be handled with a nurturing care, not chucked down the dustbin with yesterday's trash. Why? Because without growth and risky endeavor in these lean economic times, we will be left with revivals of Oklahoma! and Candide to fill our theatrical seasons. So the responsibility of a critic is to be that God-Parent that is willing to encourage the good things and point out what could be better in their development. Because guess what? Damning and dismissive words from a critic only hinder a theatre financially. That leads to doors shutting in these times. When doors shut, critics are out of work. These shows will hopefully continue to evolve and grow elsewhere on their journey. DC is not the final resting place of either of the shows, nor is the purpose of the critics here to "stop" or "kill" the show before it can learn and grow. What ever happened to constructive criticism?
In closing, one only needs to google the reviews of these two wonderful young bratty works to see the polarization in reaction. From "this is the best" to "this is the worst". But in the final analysis, I would rather attend theatre that can illicit this kind of response. When you leave the theatre and just say..." ok.", then the theatre has failed you. These two brilliant and innovative pieces await your analysis, audience members. Do not let the likes of these critics craving a "negro fiddle player number" or wanting a leading character who is supposed to be on 3 different kinds of medication to be more "charismatic". See the shows with an open mind and write back on this thread after you do.
Ha! As soon as I wrote that post, I knew someone would go through the trouble of actually defining the two. And when you find out who this poster is...well...lets just say he is going to chew on some eucharists:)
After being called pretentious by Ms. Ritzel (apparently in part for repeatedly referencing the existence of Milton’s work in a play about the Devil, if you can imagine – but none of the lines derived their meaning from, or hoped to communicate a reality about the characters’ conflicts through, a working knowledge of Milton’s text), and after reading in her subsequent review of Venus Theatre’s current production that the playwright was ‘over-schooled’ (and has been awarded a Fulbright – a detail only included in the review as a set-up to illuminate the irony of a celebrated intellect making a mistake), I began to wonder whether Ms. Ritzel was defensively hostile to intellect. I researched other reviews she’s written for City Paper, and found a piece from earlier this year in which she makes herself the subject of the review past the point of relevance, past even the point of comic structure, adding a disquieting sense that she is the subject (or at least the object) of all her thoughts.
In addition to slashing at intellect she is inconsistent. I was taken to task for including in my play a line for a film-maker-character that referenced a film and a line for an actor-character that referenced obstacles and objectives. Don’t write to stereotypes, okay. (It was only one line each, in a play long enough to be called a ‘slog,’ but okay). And yet, the Venus production was taken to task for a. presenting a pole dancer who did not move as all pole-dancers move (‘even off-duty’ pole dancers: Ms. Ritzel demonstrates a taste for anthropological generalization worthy of Alice falling down the hole, a generalization in this case belied, at least for me, by a friend of mine who both pole dances and walks like a puppy), b. for showing a drunk with a soak’s capacity (no one can stand up after x amount of alcohol), and c. for presenting a non-stereotypical tenure track (another friend of mine, who has her BA from Harvard in Astrophysics and her PhD from Stanford in Cognitive Psychology, listened to that sentence from the review, began to laugh, and then rattled on unpunctuated about all the reasons why people in her experience didn’t get tenure in the time they might have expected given their alma maters).
So, drop her inconsistent assertions of over-generalizing ‘fact’ along with my unhelpfully unsubstantiated unnamed friends. What’s left? A critic who doesn’t understand that you watch the play that was written: why is this playwright telling me about someone who can drink vodka for hours? What does the playwright want to say by including a character whose thinking and expression are grounded in his vocation? What might I as an audience member take away from seeing a man gouge out his own eyes after sleeping with his own mother? I mean, not that anyone would do that.
It’s not surprising that Ms, Ritzel fails to watch in the simultaneously educated and receptive frame of mind so ideal in a critic. She betrays a quite unprofessional tendency to jump to conclusions, and to jump very early. Her review of Something Past . . . starts off, in its opening line, on the high note of being conscious of the fact that Longacre Lea rents space (with no other affiliation) from Catholic University, and modulates to repenting (haha) of her prejudgment because the space the company performs in is old and close to a community of nuns: the review in the first place was tainted by derision and then by pity (and the Catholic taint never washes away: there is no question raised by the play even faintly comparable to the incendiary and juvenile ‘Did the Jews kill Jesus?’ as she suggests). Then in the review of the Venus show she says that one of the first thoughts that occurred to her as the given circumstances became clear was ‘it’s more fun to watch Richard Gere take Julia Roberts to the opera than watch a hooker and a professor, played by amateur actors, sit around talking about Dostoevsky.’ Anyone who thinks that in the first five minutes of a show should close his or her notebook and leave the authoritative and public expression of theatrical evaluation to, well, someone else, and not just because watching with your mind closed leads to such intriguing mistakes as describing as ‘atheist’ a character who, at a critical juncture, prays on stage at the center of the action.
So that’s my rant, undoubtedly pretentious, possibly failing to be (or all-too-sadly being) the rant that all artistic directors, even off-duty artistic directors, would write in these circumstances. It’s not aimed at a change in Ms. Ritzel, which would be silly and arrogant, but at mapping the critical habits and biases of someone who looks like she might be around for a while. Then when her next review occasions another round of reader/audience member/artist frustration such as Stanford’s here, we can laugh it off, chalk it up, choose your cliché, and then flip the page and read the other City Paper review that week by one of those three smart guys whose critical writing is exemplified by this final anecdote:
The great Joy Zinoman teaches a directing class at Studio. The semester I took the class one of my fellows directed a scene from As Bees in Honey Drown, in a style unlike anything we’d seen. We all sat there in quiet horror, sure that the director was going to get a sheet of critical notes long enough to take us past midnight. Joy did not make a speech about what ‘must’ be the style of that play, she did not tell us ‘people don’t act like that’ or even ‘no one in that play would act that way.’ She said ‘okay, what would we call that style? I’d call it Kabuki comic book.’ She then only criticized the work insofar as it didn’t fulfill that style, and proceeded to work with the student on making it the most thoroughly realized Kabuki comic book version of As Bees in Honey Drown as anyone will ever see.
Yes, I have seen both shows and I have to respectfully say that I agree with Ms. Ritzel in not enjoying the works, but also agree with Ms. A's assessment that the review could have been written in a much better form and with more insightful depth. I am not sure what answering the question of what other people were saying after the show will do, as it’s not like I go around gathering the opinion of my fellow audience members, but as in each and every production that is put on, there will be supporters and detractors. There a millions of people who walk out of Mamma Mia each night floating on a cloud made of ABBA and sequins, but to others the show feels like a slow death. As always you’re definition of a good or bad production is up to your own feelings, preferences, tastes and the like. This one review, whose rudimentary sentiments have been echoed by other outlets, and apparently the handful of people who walked out at intermission at each show I attended, should not cause such vitriol towards her personally just because she didn’t like, again, a new work. Again, there is a difference of furthering the future of the American Theatre, which I think is a larger debate not able to be handled in this forum, and in the idea that anything new should have a protective bubble around it. Again, you didn’t answer my question. You state, “New works should be handled with a nurturing care, not chucked down the dustbin with yesterday's trash”. I agree in theory with this, but if it is only deserved. I have seen more new work in this town of people trying to further the American Theatre, by presenting pretentious bullshit, using hackney devices (screens for sets, abstract sound designs, industrial elements) that basically showcase one thing, a director or company jerking off to thought of how adventurous they are, or how new they are, or how brave and daring they are. They openly say that audiences and critics just don’t get the work because it’s too new and on the fringe of what is normal. Is it possible that anew work can be a piece of shit? That’s all my point is. And as far as the Eucharist comment, that is a totally, albeit awful, inside joke between me and Ms. A, which is why it was addressed to her.
"The Times critics present themselves as advocates for consumers, and not as advocates for the theater itself. Unlike Clurman, Ken Tynan, say, or even Frank Rich, who could be withering but always managed to let it be known that he was passionate for new voices, passionate for promise, and uncompromisingly rigorous. I would submit that they do not necessarily add incentive to the already tendentious struggle that playwrights face in trying to make a life in the theater. Nor is that really their job. But there is a slight whiff of disconnection in Charles' essay... When the gentlemen who write for the New York Times pen this piece, which happens every seven years or so, like clockwork, wondering why so few playwrights are sticking around, it cannot be denied that they are part of the reason why. Fortitude depends on the writer. Stamina is up to the playwright too. Having a thick skin - essential...I suggest that the Times critics re-read Tynan, for instance, who was funny and could be ruthless, but was always on the side of the artist, and never innocently hid behind the pretense of being in the hire of the cultural wing of Consumer Reports."
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