TV: Fringe

See, FOX? This is how good a sci-fi show can get when you don't cancel it midway through its first season, or shunt it around from timeslot to timeslot through a second season. Fringe has become, for me, appointment television, and you can read why over at Slant Magazine.

THEATER: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Retelling the rise of Andrew Jackson, our nation's seventh president, as a rock musical is a daring choice--to be expected of writer Alex Timbers (of Les Freres Corbusier) and musician Michael Friedman (a genius with the Civilians)--and one that befits the "people's president," a man, played by the angsty Benjamin Walker, who wears tight tight jeans and talks about some serious serious shit. This is Andrew Fucking Jackson, but though the musical points out the dangers of all that populist energy--the genocidal relocation of Indian tribes, the constant Supreme Court censures, the outlandish conduct--Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson falls prey to that same erratic fervor.

The first half of the show (which runs without intermission) comes across with the exaggerated satire of Matt Stone and Trey Parker (both Cannibal! and South Park): when Jackson's mother dies of cholera, she is struck down with the sound of an arrow's twang; after the rest of his family dies, Injuns do a mock ballet. And just wait until the doily-wearing, high-pitched politicians--John Quincy Adams (Jeff Hiller) and Van Buren (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) stand out--come out with their evil laughs. These events are recklessly narrated too by a nerdy and gushingly hormonal Storyteller (Kristine Nielsen), who is detested by the cast, much like a device from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and later killed. (Into The Woods got there first.) The play cherishes its outlandish moments, too: when Jackson meets the woman who will be his wife, Rachel (Maria Elena Ramirez), the two sing about inappropriate metaphors, all while bleeding themselves (a medical cure back in the day) and then pouring the blood all over one another. Look at us, look at us, look at us, it shouts; change, change, change; we're different. Not so, however: there isn't a single thing here that Spring Awakening didn't do better, nor Rent before it.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is already packed full of significance and--in its populist, tea-party mania-- relevance, but the show always feels like it's reaching for laughs. It's not until the latter half of the play, once Jackson's on his way to office, that the excesses are purged from its system, revealing the a strong backbone of raging songs: one which details the removals of Indian tribes with the assistance of Black Fox (Bryce Pinkham), and his anthemic 1828 campaign song, "Better Off Dead," which keens for action. There's also a great song and dance that sums up the political chicanery by which Jackson lost the 1824 election--despite winning more popular and electoral votes than the other candidates.

It's a vivacious history lesson, one that earns the term it coins: "Emocracy." But it's an unwieldy play in need of a stronger director than Alex Timbers--after all, how can he be expected to fairly edit his own text? Jokes land all over the place, and even the charismatic Walker rarely connects with the audience--even when he jumps down and flirts with the front row. His voice has an absurd range, but within the show, he mainly sticks to squealing about the unfairness of the system and then whipping out a gun and threatening to do something about it. His wife dies, his presidency seems to falls apart, we don't ever see his re-election, and yet we still know very little about Jackson. Perhaps that's appropriate for our era of Celebrity Politics, in which populist candidates like Palin go largely unvetted and can't be figured out, but it makes for a bloodless night of theater.

THEATER: Office Hours

Photo/Richard Termine

The once mandatory "Western Tradition" college course, which covers the classics from Homer to Shakespeare, is the subject of A. R. Gurney's Office Hours. Like that class, which taught students to think for themselves about how Plato's musings on evil might apply to a post-Hitler world, or helped them to see how Thucydides's writings on Athens vs. Sparta might be applied to a prideful U.S.'s rivalry with the USSR, Office Hours features a wide array of interesting morsels--most of which are lost in the sprawling distraction of the course itself: ten short vignettes, featuring a total of twenty-eight different students and teachers (played by an ensemble of six actors) in just over eighty minutes. Yes, there's at least one class, student, or teacher that will stand out--that's pretty much how definite college was for most of us--but most of it unaffectedly goes in one ear and out the other.

Gurney's too pat: each scene cleanly relates a canonical author with the office scene. And while his choice to set the action in the late '60s is a wise one--there's a very active, rebellious student population (not to mention, to designer Jessica Pabst's delight, a stylish one)--it goes largely untapped by director Jim Simpson and his cast, save for a few awkward references sexual harassment. Here's a stubbornly straightforward example: Angelina (Katherine Folk-Sullivan), the only Italian-speaking professor in the English department, loves Dante. So much, in fact, that she winds up giving a new teacher, Betsy (Louiza Collins), a first-hand lesson as she carries on an affair with Lenny (John Russo) in front of her. They're the tortured lovers, Paolo and Francesca, and because Gurney knows most of us aren't scholars of The Inferno, he is forced to have Angelina awkwardly explain the connection to us.

The same thing happens again and again: an angry former student, Ross (Tommy Crawford), confronts the teacher (Andy Gershenzon) whose failing mark forced him to go to Vietnam, which is interesting, albeit too much of a hastily drawn to sketch to be convincingly acted. A few moments later, though, another teacher (Turna Mete) walks in--quoting liberally from her lessons, as she is wont to do--and neatly resolves the situation by pointing out that Ross doesn't need to study King Lear: he's already living that life. (To be fair, Gurney's absurd resolution to the scene scores a few points for being ballsy.) These connections aren't just stifling, they feel cheap, especially since these great works have been liberally plundered in far more depth and to far greater effect. Admittedly, Gurney's not pretending to stoop to anything other than comedy--but he's thwarted there, too, since he spends so much of each scene giving a miniature lecture. (For instance, a teacher accuses her student of plagiarizing her essay on Aeschylus, but doesn't mind as their academic trial will resemble that of The Eumenides.)

Do the few outstanding scenes balance an otherwise slight evening of theater? Not entirely. The best--and not incidentally the least modeled of the set--follows a gay professor of St. Augustine who is forced to inform an gay student of his that he fears to be his mentor in anything other than a professional setting, lest he succumb to hormones of his own; it's a surprising, heartfelt scene that reminds us what the Bats--the resident ensemble of actors at the Flea--are capable of doing when the material provides them with the chance to do so. Gurney's Office Hours has tackled the Great Big Ideas, but it has floundered in trying to find them purchase on such tightly scripted comparisons and loosely comic ground.

[N.B. Like it or hate it, Office Hours is a bit of a showcase piece for the Bats, as each actor gets the opportunity to play at least three different characters--though some are harder to tell apart than others. In that fashion, the show actually has two rotating casts of six Bats; this review is based on the performances of the HOMER CAST. The DANTE CAST includes Bjorn Dupaty, Wilton Yeung, Maren Langdon, Holly Chou, Betsy Lippitt, and Raul Sigmund Julia, but otherwise uses the same script and set.]

THEATER: microcrisis

Photo/Web Begole

Michael Lew's microcrisis begins with an honest plea from Acquah (the always welcome William Jackson Harper), a small Ghanian business owner looking to borrow 200 Cedi (about $120) for his burgeoning cellular phone service. (He sublets his expensive phones, which have monthly plans, to local villagers who pay him for each call.) He is paired up with an equally earnest American intern, Lydia (Lauren Hines), who quotes directly from Citizen Trust's brochure as she explains how their non-profit microloans work (with only 2% interest for operating costs). It's an important scene, devoid of greed and full of laughs, courtesy of Acquah's garrulous humor--"It is a joke," he frequently howls--but mainly because it sets the scene for all the perversion that follows in the wake of Mr. Bennett (a magnificent, Rahm Emanuel-like Alfredo Narciso). It's not long before the naive Lydia is being wooed by the corruption of Bennett's "money bomb" distractions (to say nothing of the constant Klonopin and Lunesta). It is a joke: the kind that's funny both because it's true and because it's so heavily exaggerated, as Lew and director Ralph B. Pena stage a new financial crisis.

Don't be fooled by the unibrowed, bacned, insecure securities rater for Moody's (Jackie Chung), nor by the choreographed movements of Frankfurt (Harper), the racquetball-loving Charmain of the New York Fed. Try not to laugh too much at the slovenly teen genius, Randy (David Gelles, deftly channeling Justin Long) and his emotionally glitchy loan-making CPU (Chung). Understand that while this may be the sort of show that takes a '60s style dance break around a craps table in Monaco, it does so purely because Lew knows exactly what he's talking about--if his characters were any less distorted, the audience members might sniff out Goldman Sachs and rush the stage. The foundations of Lew's work are as solid as the safety-deposit-box walls of Clint Ramos's set, which swing in and out to reveal the various back rooms in which Bennett begins to deregulate his bank, leverage his money, turn the loans into CDOs that he resells as investments to the lenders, and bumps the interest rates up to 12 and eventually 30 percent.

There is, however, too much filling. Lew gets carried away with his juvenalia, and while the multi-cast ensemble is talented enough to keep the manic inflation in check, the end of microcrisis lacks a serious leg on which to stand up for victims like public-school teacher Mrs. Chavez (Socorro Santiago). The nastier bits of fallout still work, and there's one hell of a final scene, but it doesn't fire on all cylinders. Think of it as the lovechild of Aaron Sorkin and Michael Moore: rapid-fire stunts that nonetheless get the efficiently caustic message across. And while greed may not be good, microcrisis's satire of it is at least entertaining.

THEATER: Mrs. Warren's Profession

One of the safest, most boring revivals ever, Doug Hughes's stab at Mrs. Warren's Profession (or should I say "stabbing of") makes a better argument for director's theater than anything Ivo von Hove has ever done. After all, whether or not you liked Hove's version of The Little Foxes, at least you'd feel something, which is far from true about Hughes's production. With shows like this on its schedule--Pygmalion wasn't much better--it's no wonder that Roundabout aims for star-studded casts--how else to foist something so unimaginative on Broadway than to use Cherry Jones as bait? It hardly serves even an educational purpose, especially since the sight-lines--especially from house-right--and the struggling accents mask so much of George Bernard Shaw's writing, leaving behind only the shrill cries of the most melodramatic of moments.

Sally Hawkins and Cherry Jones do make a fairly good team as the young, studious Vivie Warren and her loose--literally--mother, Kitty, and their reconciliation in Act II serves as a nice counterweight for their big throw-down in Act IV. There's some nice mugging from Mark Harelik, too, who plays Sir George Crofts, Kitty's unscrupulous business partner. But these stand out only against the blandness of Mr. Praed (Edward Hibbert) and Reverend Samuel Gardner (Michael Siberry), personifications of dead air, and the cardboard motives of pretty much everyone in the play, especially Frank Gardner, who is wooing Vivie for her money--something all too obvious from the lack of chemistry, emotion, or anything resembling craft exuding from Adam Driver (who was equally terrible a few years back in The Retributionists).

Nor is Mrs. Warren's Profession a play that can handle slight measures--like Scott Pask's awfully cheap-looking exteriors and optically unnerving interiors. It has not aged well, not simply on account of the lethargic pace, but because the subject material--disapproving daughter discovers her mother is an international madame--is so morally dated. At least Gypsy threw in some pizazz and attempted to unpack a few emotions in the mother-daughter relationship; Shaw's play expects the "taboo" subject to be controversial enough to carry the play. It's not, and that makes the lengthy monologues in which character's justify and condemn the sex trade all the more tedious.

Compared to the modernized visions of Brief Encounters or Sunday in the Park with George (Roundabout does well with imports, apparently), it's hard to call Mrs. Warren's Profession anything other than a lazy mess. For a good time, don't call this number.