Oh, good God. Or Gods, given the subject matter. What a dirty trick to play on the actors.
Dyskolos (The Grouch) by Menander dates from 316 A.D, when it won first prize at the Lenaian Festival (sort of an ancient Greek fringe festival). It is a reasonably straightforward (and short) farce in which a noble youth is stricken by Pan with love for the daughter of the title character, a misanthropic farmer who verbally and physically attacks anyone who speaks to him. The youth needs to get past the father to the girl. Hilarity ensues, but is kept relatively down-to-earth, grounded in realistic human reactions. No characters turn into something weird that might cause an audience member sitting near me to disdainfully mutter “Jesus Christ!”
Book by Jack Helbig, music & lyrics by Mark Hollmann (Urinetown), Wild Goat is “inspired” by Dyskolos. Meaning that some of the characters and an incident or two are retained and the rest is invented by the show’s creators. Similarly, they seem to have done away with the first “n” in Menander’s name, figuring that it wasn’t all that necessary and that a play could get along just as well with Meander. And meander they do.
Let me do the cast first (in a polite way), because the cast was magnificent. Highly talented and working their asses off.
Amy Steele as the daughter (here named Myrrhinne, pronounced Maureen by one of the narrators) is a stage-lighter. The stage lit up when she was on it. Steele has a lovely sense of stage movement. When most of the characters are pulling on a large rope, she was the one throwing her whole body into the motions.
Nancy Kolton as Xanthippe (a bossy widow) has the belting dowager thing down pat. Powerful voice and perfect casting. She really knows her way around a character.
Stephanie Herman plays a bratty sister, an airheaded Aphrodite and a goat. She makes a terrific, funny goat, which is one of the few times I’ll be using “funny” in connection with this show. Herman got every nuance possible out of every character she played.
Michael Buonincontro as the noble youth is a fine singer, strong actor and excellent dancer.
Tony Calzaretta started out making me think of Ed O’Neill on Married with Children, which was very disconcerting but I got over it. He has an extremely strong voice and does everything that could be done with the part.
Terry A. Christianson and Michael J. Henry as the Narrators (and others) are highly entertaining.
There is some gorgeous choral work, courtesy of Musical Director Jeremy Ramey. Director Donna Steele and choreographer Cynthia Hall get everything they could possibly ask for from this cast. So let’s get on with discussing what this terrific cast is asked to do.
The audience laughed exactly three times during the whole show. Several musical numbers were enthusiastically applauded; most were applauded dutifully because of the little “ding” button cuing that the song had ended.
Composer Hollmann made his bones with Urinetown, with its central story of a twenty-year long drought and water-profiteering. What is the story grafted onto Dyskolos? The ancient Greeks are suffering from a twenty-year long drought. I’m not kidding. The Grouch has the only water and sells it at exorbitant prices. When someone complains, they are told, “You’re lucky he isn’t charging you to pee.” This is the kind of self-adoring crap that killed Mel Brooks’ later movies, throwing in “It’s good to be the king” whether it belonged or not. The onstage water drought isn’t as damning as the backstage imagination drought.
The music is disappointing. And this is from someone who loves Urinetown with an obscene passion. The first several songs just lay there. They’re well sung; they’re tuneful; but the lyrics are mediocre. Two songs in a row finish with a kick line. The Grouch’s ballad of parental justification, “Someday You’ll Understand” comes close to being good. The melody is lovely and it’s well-sung by Calzaretta. But the lyrics are “meh”. “Grounded” is the first song to approach the liveliness of Urinetown’s score, mainly because it’s a first cousin to the “First Act Finale” of Urinetown, using the same rhythmic device. The “Wild Goat” number with Herman in a goat costume was cute.
The second act opener, “Drip Drop” is Wild Goat’s variation (ripoff) of “This Plum is Too Ripe” from The Fantasticks – very jazz-bluesy and entertaining, even if moving the story along musically is a forlorn expectation.
“Easy”, for the quartet of Greek Gods who are flung willy nilly into the action for no other reason than to stretch Act Two to half an hour, is the last good song of the show, albeit not the last song. The problem is that the script can’t decide if it wants to be a farce or have deeper meaning – so the songs try to walk on both sides and end up going nowhere. Good music comes when the script has a strong point of view that the composer can build on.
Most of the score is neither fish nor fowl. Let’s get to the script. The script is not fish.
Jack Helbig is the playwright. The word means a “wright” (builder) of plays. Jack Helbig constructed this play. The building materials (a classical comedy by Menander; a Tony winning collaborator like Mark Hollmann) are top drawer, but Helbig’s tools are deficient and his workmanship is shoddy. He literally has no clue about play construction. Menander’s original goes off on tangents (a fussy cook trying to borrow a pot from the Grouch), but Wild Goat is all over the map.
The Well Incident, which wraps up Menander’s show, here is the Act One climax – which means we have a long way to go with little material available. Menander’s Well scene is, in script construction terms, “Act III” – where incidents take a crucial turn that shoot toward the climax. In a musical the “Act III” point should happen midway through Act Two. “Luck Be a Lady” in Guys & Dolls is where Sky changes the direction of the plot by winning souls in a crap game. It’s the “Act II” climax that spins into “Act III”. If Helbig applied his Wild Goat construction to Guys & Dolls, Sky would sing “Luck Be a Lady” ten minutes before the end of Act One. Hence the bickering Married with Deities who are tossed into the Act Two mix just to fill up time that was wastefully spent in Act One. The construction is inept.
Punchlines are identifiable as such only because the rhythm of setup-build-punch is so familiar to theatregoers, not because anything funny is ever said. The use of narrators is structurally klutzy here; narrating to set up the play is fine (but lazy). Using Reader’s Theatre to tell the entire story means you’re incapable of doing so through dialogue and stagecraft.
Anachronistic jokes are occasionally thrown in with no setup and no payoff. “Men are like busses!” the Grouch says. “If you miss one, another’ll be along in a minute.” “What’s a bus?” asks the daughter. “I’ll tell you later,” the Grouch snarls wittily, to the absolute indifference of the audience. Avoiding a punchline is not a punchline in and of itself. Helbig thinks that repeated mentions of the phrase “dramatic irony” are funny.
Helbig can’t build a story, can’t tell a joke and can’t fashion an intelligible musical basis out of a farce for the composer to work from. The dearth of anything remotely humorous was breathtaking. Wild Goat is like the perfect script – in the Bizarro World.
Am I being hard on Helbig & Hollmann? You bet. When the lights came up, I was furious on behalf of the actors – so proud to be in a World Premiere by a Tony Winner, throwing their hearts, souls and considerable talents into the plan, but being given nothing to work with. It was like watching a World Series championship baseball team showing up for the game and being given a softball, a two-by-four for a bat, some sandbags for bases and told to go play ball. It was a rotten thing to do to them. The actors, production staff & musicians were top-notch. They deserved better than this.
The show (originally titled Complaining Well) has been bouncing around in staged readings since the late 1980s, until Hollmann hit it big with Urinetown and acquired coattails for Helbig to ride upon. According to a feature article in the Daily Herald, “Helbig got permission to totally reconceive Complaining Well, while Hollmann offered to write a new score for the show if he liked the new treatment.
“‘It was delightful to go through the script and put big Xs through the scenes that were awful,’ Helbig said. ‘There was a real sense of liberation to cutting away anything that I did not like.’”
Would that I could have borrowed his pen and script for half an hour.
Information here: http://www.steelbeamtheatre.com
Dyskolos (The Grouch) by Menander dates from 316 A.D, when it won first prize at the Lenaian Festival (sort of an ancient Greek fringe festival). It is a reasonably straightforward (and short) farce in which a noble youth is stricken by Pan with love for the daughter of the title character, a misanthropic farmer who verbally and physically attacks anyone who speaks to him. The youth needs to get past the father to the girl. Hilarity ensues, but is kept relatively down-to-earth, grounded in realistic human reactions. No characters turn into something weird that might cause an audience member sitting near me to disdainfully mutter “Jesus Christ!”
Book by Jack Helbig, music & lyrics by Mark Hollmann (Urinetown), Wild Goat is “inspired” by Dyskolos. Meaning that some of the characters and an incident or two are retained and the rest is invented by the show’s creators. Similarly, they seem to have done away with the first “n” in Menander’s name, figuring that it wasn’t all that necessary and that a play could get along just as well with Meander. And meander they do.
Let me do the cast first (in a polite way), because the cast was magnificent. Highly talented and working their asses off.
Amy Steele as the daughter (here named Myrrhinne, pronounced Maureen by one of the narrators) is a stage-lighter. The stage lit up when she was on it. Steele has a lovely sense of stage movement. When most of the characters are pulling on a large rope, she was the one throwing her whole body into the motions.
Nancy Kolton as Xanthippe (a bossy widow) has the belting dowager thing down pat. Powerful voice and perfect casting. She really knows her way around a character.Stephanie Herman plays a bratty sister, an airheaded Aphrodite and a goat. She makes a terrific, funny goat, which is one of the few times I’ll be using “funny” in connection with this show. Herman got every nuance possible out of every character she played.
Michael Buonincontro as the noble youth is a fine singer, strong actor and excellent dancer.
Tony Calzaretta started out making me think of Ed O’Neill on Married with Children, which was very disconcerting but I got over it. He has an extremely strong voice and does everything that could be done with the part.
Terry A. Christianson and Michael J. Henry as the Narrators (and others) are highly entertaining.
There is some gorgeous choral work, courtesy of Musical Director Jeremy Ramey. Director Donna Steele and choreographer Cynthia Hall get everything they could possibly ask for from this cast. So let’s get on with discussing what this terrific cast is asked to do.
The audience laughed exactly three times during the whole show. Several musical numbers were enthusiastically applauded; most were applauded dutifully because of the little “ding” button cuing that the song had ended.
Composer Hollmann made his bones with Urinetown, with its central story of a twenty-year long drought and water-profiteering. What is the story grafted onto Dyskolos? The ancient Greeks are suffering from a twenty-year long drought. I’m not kidding. The Grouch has the only water and sells it at exorbitant prices. When someone complains, they are told, “You’re lucky he isn’t charging you to pee.” This is the kind of self-adoring crap that killed Mel Brooks’ later movies, throwing in “It’s good to be the king” whether it belonged or not. The onstage water drought isn’t as damning as the backstage imagination drought.
The music is disappointing. And this is from someone who loves Urinetown with an obscene passion. The first several songs just lay there. They’re well sung; they’re tuneful; but the lyrics are mediocre. Two songs in a row finish with a kick line. The Grouch’s ballad of parental justification, “Someday You’ll Understand” comes close to being good. The melody is lovely and it’s well-sung by Calzaretta. But the lyrics are “meh”. “Grounded” is the first song to approach the liveliness of Urinetown’s score, mainly because it’s a first cousin to the “First Act Finale” of Urinetown, using the same rhythmic device. The “Wild Goat” number with Herman in a goat costume was cute.
The second act opener, “Drip Drop” is Wild Goat’s variation (ripoff) of “This Plum is Too Ripe” from The Fantasticks – very jazz-bluesy and entertaining, even if moving the story along musically is a forlorn expectation.
“Easy”, for the quartet of Greek Gods who are flung willy nilly into the action for no other reason than to stretch Act Two to half an hour, is the last good song of the show, albeit not the last song. The problem is that the script can’t decide if it wants to be a farce or have deeper meaning – so the songs try to walk on both sides and end up going nowhere. Good music comes when the script has a strong point of view that the composer can build on.
Most of the score is neither fish nor fowl. Let’s get to the script. The script is not fish.Jack Helbig is the playwright. The word means a “wright” (builder) of plays. Jack Helbig constructed this play. The building materials (a classical comedy by Menander; a Tony winning collaborator like Mark Hollmann) are top drawer, but Helbig’s tools are deficient and his workmanship is shoddy. He literally has no clue about play construction. Menander’s original goes off on tangents (a fussy cook trying to borrow a pot from the Grouch), but Wild Goat is all over the map.
The Well Incident, which wraps up Menander’s show, here is the Act One climax – which means we have a long way to go with little material available. Menander’s Well scene is, in script construction terms, “Act III” – where incidents take a crucial turn that shoot toward the climax. In a musical the “Act III” point should happen midway through Act Two. “Luck Be a Lady” in Guys & Dolls is where Sky changes the direction of the plot by winning souls in a crap game. It’s the “Act II” climax that spins into “Act III”. If Helbig applied his Wild Goat construction to Guys & Dolls, Sky would sing “Luck Be a Lady” ten minutes before the end of Act One. Hence the bickering Married with Deities who are tossed into the Act Two mix just to fill up time that was wastefully spent in Act One. The construction is inept.
Punchlines are identifiable as such only because the rhythm of setup-build-punch is so familiar to theatregoers, not because anything funny is ever said. The use of narrators is structurally klutzy here; narrating to set up the play is fine (but lazy). Using Reader’s Theatre to tell the entire story means you’re incapable of doing so through dialogue and stagecraft.
Anachronistic jokes are occasionally thrown in with no setup and no payoff. “Men are like busses!” the Grouch says. “If you miss one, another’ll be along in a minute.” “What’s a bus?” asks the daughter. “I’ll tell you later,” the Grouch snarls wittily, to the absolute indifference of the audience. Avoiding a punchline is not a punchline in and of itself. Helbig thinks that repeated mentions of the phrase “dramatic irony” are funny.
Helbig can’t build a story, can’t tell a joke and can’t fashion an intelligible musical basis out of a farce for the composer to work from. The dearth of anything remotely humorous was breathtaking. Wild Goat is like the perfect script – in the Bizarro World.
Am I being hard on Helbig & Hollmann? You bet. When the lights came up, I was furious on behalf of the actors – so proud to be in a World Premiere by a Tony Winner, throwing their hearts, souls and considerable talents into the plan, but being given nothing to work with. It was like watching a World Series championship baseball team showing up for the game and being given a softball, a two-by-four for a bat, some sandbags for bases and told to go play ball. It was a rotten thing to do to them. The actors, production staff & musicians were top-notch. They deserved better than this.
The show (originally titled Complaining Well) has been bouncing around in staged readings since the late 1980s, until Hollmann hit it big with Urinetown and acquired coattails for Helbig to ride upon. According to a feature article in the Daily Herald, “Helbig got permission to totally reconceive Complaining Well, while Hollmann offered to write a new score for the show if he liked the new treatment.
“‘It was delightful to go through the script and put big Xs through the scenes that were awful,’ Helbig said. ‘There was a real sense of liberation to cutting away anything that I did not like.’”
Would that I could have borrowed his pen and script for half an hour.
Information here: http://www.steelbeamtheatre.com
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