Theater and Theater reviews, broken glass and tiny pursesd
Sometimes I go to the theater and wonder if I'm seeing the same performers the reviewer saw. Jim and I were in the audience for 'Collected Stories' at Manhattan Theater Club last night. It featured Linda Lavin and Sarah Paulson. Originally, when I heard that Linda Lavin was doing the play, I wasn't very optimistic. She's really good with brittle one-liners, but I don't like her for much else. However, the critics generally applauded,and we're subscribers, so we went.
What a dead performance, from both of them. Although, in a two-hander, you only need to have one dead performer to make both look comatose. To be fair, the plot is not surprising, nor is the theme, the hand-off of one artistic generation to another, that unusual. But when we saw it in the late 1990s with Maria Tucci, she gave us the feeling that something was at stake. Lavin gave us the feeling that she missed her calling as a whiny Jewish-mother stereotype. Boring, boring, BORING. Nothing at all was at stake, no last-scene drama in the drama, no feeling of irrevocable breaks in deep friendship - nada.
The reviewer who seemed to agree with us was Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal, but he doesn't like Donald Margulies's plays at all anyway, so it was hard to separate the review of the play as written from the review of the performances.
Anyway, a wasted evening after a tough work-week for us both.
I'm in the market for a new wallet, because of the tiny Dooney and Bourke bag I bought at that thrift store last weekend. The one I got at Filene's Basement is too wide, so I have to return it. Grump. I do like the bag, and I also want to see if I can walk around carrying less. We all seem to act like turtles in this town, carrying our houses on our backs.
Lowering the blinds against the afternoon sun, I knocked over one of those fluid-filled visual thermometers, the kind with the colored balls suspended to indicate different temperatures, and it shattered all over the floor. I saw it happening, but couldn't react fast enough to avoid the crash. Didn't even like the thing - I should have given it to a thrift shop years ago. Oh well. As long as I don't step on any glass fragments, I'm content. I wonder what kind of fluid is in that thing? It smelled vaguely icky, like benzene or something, but didn't seem to harm the wood floor any. I'll wait for the sink-hole to open up tomorrow morning.
For those of you who have undertaken the adventure of motherhood, Happy Mother's Day.
What a dead performance, from both of them. Although, in a two-hander, you only need to have one dead performer to make both look comatose. To be fair, the plot is not surprising, nor is the theme, the hand-off of one artistic generation to another, that unusual. But when we saw it in the late 1990s with Maria Tucci, she gave us the feeling that something was at stake. Lavin gave us the feeling that she missed her calling as a whiny Jewish-mother stereotype. Boring, boring, BORING. Nothing at all was at stake, no last-scene drama in the drama, no feeling of irrevocable breaks in deep friendship - nada.
The reviewer who seemed to agree with us was Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal, but he doesn't like Donald Margulies's plays at all anyway, so it was hard to separate the review of the play as written from the review of the performances.
Anyway, a wasted evening after a tough work-week for us both.
I'm in the market for a new wallet, because of the tiny Dooney and Bourke bag I bought at that thrift store last weekend. The one I got at Filene's Basement is too wide, so I have to return it. Grump. I do like the bag, and I also want to see if I can walk around carrying less. We all seem to act like turtles in this town, carrying our houses on our backs.
Lowering the blinds against the afternoon sun, I knocked over one of those fluid-filled visual thermometers, the kind with the colored balls suspended to indicate different temperatures, and it shattered all over the floor. I saw it happening, but couldn't react fast enough to avoid the crash. Didn't even like the thing - I should have given it to a thrift shop years ago. Oh well. As long as I don't step on any glass fragments, I'm content. I wonder what kind of fluid is in that thing? It smelled vaguely icky, like benzene or something, but didn't seem to harm the wood floor any. I'll wait for the sink-hole to open up tomorrow morning.
For those of you who have undertaken the adventure of motherhood, Happy Mother's Day.