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Slow Growth: If/Then, reviewed for Architect

Chris Klimek

The other characters in If/Then spend a lot of time talking about how awesome Idina Menzel's character is.

The other characters in If/Then spend a lot of time talking about how awesome Idina Menzel's character is.

In 2009 I attended a lecture by Jack Viertel, a theatre-critic-turned-producer, elucidating the structure of Broadway musicals. Actually, "lecture" doesn't really reflect what an intimate affair this was. It was more like a musical-appreciation lesson, held in the home of Sasha Anawalt as part of the NEA Institute fellowship for arts journalists writing about theatre that she oversaw. Anyway, Viertel broke down the way these shows work the way screenwriting guru Robert McKee deconstructs commercial movies. He even had musical theatre performers on hand to sing samples of each type of song he described as he detailed its emotional and/or narrative function within the show.

I’d seen only a handful of musicals at that time. I was fascinated to learn what a complicated and tradition-encumbered form it is, and how many different moving parts must to cohere just so to make something that, done right, looks and sounds effortless.

I thought of that lecture last week as I was watching If/Then, the new Idina Menzel-starring musical from the writers of the Pulitzer Prize-and-Tony Award-winning Next to Normal. The show is getting a limited test run here in DC before it opens on Broadway in March. A lot of it doesn't work, but the experience of watching a big, complicated show in draft form was fascinating. Because the character Menzel plays is an urban planner by trade, Architect magazine commissioned me to review it. You can read that piece here

The Little St. Nick Lowe, or (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Boughs of Holly?

Chris Klimek

Nick Lowe tells me he "was sort of snobby" initially when his label approached him about doing a Christmas album.

My interest in Christmas music could not be called casual, and I've long admired the songwriting of Nick Lowe, the onetime Jesus of Cool. So his first -- and probably last, but who can say? -- holiday album, Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family, is pitched squarely at me. I talked to him about it for Sunday's Washington Post. 

It's my first Post byline in a good while. Nice to be back.

I Still Wish I Were Blind: The Often Terrible Album Covers of Bruce Springsteen, revisited.

Chris Klimek

That's The Boss's imminent album up there, all right. Over at NPR Monkey See this morning, I ask why it -- like pretty much every album Springsteen has made in the last 30 years (except for The Ghost of Tom Joad) -- must have such a terrible, awful, no good, inexpressive and irreducibly goddamn fugly cover.

I wrote a similar, much longer piece examining the covers of Springsteen's entire official catalog five years ago, after the horrific cover of Working on a Dream leaked.

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More Plays About Gatherings and Food: (Half of)The Apple Family Plays, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

Ted van Griethuysen, Elizabeth Pierotti, Sarah Marshall, Kimberly Schraf, and Rick Foucheux inThat Hopey Changey Thing. (Photo: Teddy Wolff)

The Studio Theatre has two of Richard Nelson's four Apple Family Plays, the last of which had its world premiere at the Public Theater in New York only last Friday, in repertory. The two at Studio are That Hopey Change Thing and Sweet and Sad. My review of both is on Arts Desk now, and will show up in print in next week's City Paper. Happy Thanksgiving.

(Invasion) Hit Parade: Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, annotated.

Chris Klimek

Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, Friday, Nov. 22, 2013. (Francis Chung for DCist)

Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, Friday, Nov. 22, 2013. (Francis Chung for DCist)

Has it really been more than two years since I last saw Elvis Costello play and felt compelled to write footnotes, basically, on all the curiosities in the set? The calendar does not lie. I've seen Costello perform probably 20 times since 1999, but I'd never seen him do a headlining solo set, as he did Friday night at Lisner Auditorium.

Because no one demanded it, I posted some notes over at DCist, where it's been so long that I don't even have my own login anymore. The post features great photos by Francis Chung, who took the one above. For an overview of the concert, the great and good Dave McKenna captured it well in his Washington Post review.

Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Woman in Black, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

I quite liked Keegan Theatre's production of Susan Hill and Stephen Mallatratt's ghost story The Woman in Black. No arts section in this week's City Paper, so my review is web-only.

Kinky Reboots: Mies Julie and Bondage, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

Hilda Cronje and Bongile Mantsai in Mies Julie. (Rodger Bosch)

My reviews of Mies Julie, a South African August Strindberg update, and Bondage, a 1992 David Henry Hwang play from locals Pinky Swear Productions, are in today's Washington City Paper.

While their origins and scale differ, it's useful to compare the productions to one another. Both plays use the sexual negotiations of an interracial couple as means of discussing the troubled racial histories of their native lands.

Bondage reminded me of David Ives' Venus in Fur, while Mies Julie recalled uncomfortably a slavery-era exploitation flick from 1975 called Mandingo that's come up lately in discussions of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave. I don't imagine that's what adapter-director Yael Farber was going for, but nothing exists in a vacuum.  Anyway, read.

It's About Time Somebody Called Richard Curtis on This Shit

Chris Klimek

That's disingenuous. Plenty of critics have called Richard Curtis on the way his new movie About Time cheats already. My take, which you can read on Monkey See now, is somewhat unique, I hope.

Backstory: I saw About Time on vacation in Leicester Square in London about two months ago, several weeks before it opened here in the States. (Fancy!) With the exchange rate being what it is, two tickets cost me the equivalent of $50 -- double the freight of a first-run movie here in Washington, DC. I would've been steamed to spend that much on a film I disliked. As I suspected I would, I enjoyed the film unabashedly, but I felt even guiltier for liking it than I'd felt for liking Curtis's other sappy movies, especially Love, Actually, which was particularly egregious. About Time's handling of its time-travel conceit was just so lazy and... unfair.

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