Theater Review Revue

Eurydice
ACT Theater
Average ticket price divided by run time: $0.61/minute.

Sarah Ruhl writes fairy tales which, like all fairy tales, are light
and colloquial until you run across their jarring moments of truth. The
effect is akin to picking up a My Little Pony

and discovering that it’s anatomically correct.

Eurydice modernizes the myth of Orpheus (Trick Danneker) and
Eurydice (Renata Friedman): They marry, she dies, he hunts her down to
the underworld and is told she can follow him back to earth—if he
has enough faith not to turn around and look for her on the way. He
looks, of course, and she disappears forever.

Ruhl colors around the outlines of the myth with her lyrical images.
Eurydice descends into Hades—from the theater’s ceiling—in
an antique elevator that rains inside, while blinking uncomprehendingly
through a clear plastic umbrella. The elevator music? “Raindrops Keep
Fallin’ on My Head.” She meets her father—the grizzled, anguished
Mark Chamberlin—in the underworld and, having lost her memory,
thinks she’s in a hotel. So he slowly, tenderly rigs her a “room” out
of string. Ruhl’s language is also buoyantly poetic. The father tells a
story about riding a horse and lassoing a car. “I was working on a new
philosophical system,” Eurydice explains of her time on earth. “It
involved hats.”

The design, by Matthew Smucker, turns the stage into a drained
swimming pool, littered with leaves and paper. The direction, by
Allison Narver, suffers only one major failure: the lead character’s
voice. Friedman is an expressive actor, gangly and relaxed in her body.
But her voice is high and strangled, like she’s speaking from her
throat instead of her gut. (Friedman had the same problem in The K
of D, at Balagan Theatre last month.) It’s a common problem in
green actors, but it’s difficult to imagine how Friedman got through
NYU’s Tisch School and several regional and off-Broadway credits
without a director coaxing her voice into a broader range.

Shrek the Musical
5th Avenue Theatre
Average ticket price divided by run time: $0.42/minute.

Hey everyone who isn’t Helen Keller! Since your eyes and ears work
properly (ha, ha—I’m just playin’, HK!), I’m sure you’ve all
noticed that over the past half a year or so, Seattle has been all
fucking atwitter! Haven’t we? Oh my gosh. With all manner of
“going green” puns and ogre jokes and bus ads and hundreds of thousands
of words in the daily papers? All about Shrek the Musical‘s
pre-Broadway debut at the 5th Avenue? Because this is the single most
exciting and important event in the history of Seattle! Right, local
historians? Guuuys? Helloooo?

Don’t get me wrong. Shrek the Musical is unavoidably
pleasing, in that big-budget, high-gloss, no-stop-left-unpulled
Broadway-musical way. The book, by Pulitzer Prize–winner David
Lindsay-Abaire, is funny, minus some horrible—but not
unexpected—cutesy shit. (Pinocchio: “I’m wood! I’m good! Get used
to it!” Uuuugh.) The costumes are sparkly and the performances
(particularly Sutton Foster as Princess Fiona and Christopher Sieber as
Lord Farquaad) are finely tuned comic perfection. But seriously, do I
have to look over in the middle of the show and see, a few seats to my
left, the fucking mayor? Shouldn’t he be, I don’t know, battling
gang violence somewhere? Is this really such a historic civic
event?

Before the show, a reviewer from another publication—who was
wearing several shawls—told me how excited she was to see the
show’s “technology.” Especially the “technology” used to turn Sieber
(reportedly, a tall person) into Lord Farquaad (a dwarfy dwarf). “We’re
close enough to the stage that I bet we can really see how it works!”
she said. “Oh!” said I. “Technology! Yes, that will be
interesting.” What would the technology be, I wondered? A ramp? A
complicated series of mirrors? A piece of theatrical stage magic so
wondrous I couldn’t even begin to imagine it?

Um, not exactly. The “technology” was Seiber walking on his knees.
With stuffed legs strapped to his thighs. Like Dorf. It was
Dorf-nology. (Now Dorf the Musical—that’s something
I could get atwitter about.)

Gutenberg! The Musical!
Strawberry Theatre Workshop
Average ticket price divided by run time: $0.28/minute.

Theater mocks its own conventions all the time, from Hamlet to Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. But it’s rare when the jabs are so
consistently funny that the experience doesn’t feel like a badly
conceived in-joke. Gutenberg! The Musical! is the story of an
energetic but inept playwright named Doug (Troy Fischnaller) and a
sexually repressed musician named Bud (MJ Sieber) performing a staged
reading of their awful musical about Johann Gutenberg and his printing
press. It may be the funniest thing on a Seattle stage this year.

Doug and Bud are antic, unselfconscious fools who switch between 20
or so characters—by donning baseball caps such as “Bootblack,”
“Woman,” “Other Woman,” and “Anti-Semite”—while their poorly
researched plot destroys itself to musical accompaniment. Gutenberg
sings about the pain of being one of the only educated men in Germany
(while one of his fellow men “cradles his dead baby in his illiterate
arms”). The lyrics are as bad as some of the dreck that passes for
entertainment in New York: “The sun is rising in the east/I smell bread
rising ’cause of yeast.” The pair apes all the bloated Broadway
conventions, including the longing midplay number inexplicably
performed on a rooftop, and the “charm song” assigned to a minor
character so producers can “get a famous person to play a really small
role.”

The humor is broad, occasionally nasty, and consistent throughout
the first act, delivered with big, shit-eating “let’s-put-on-a-show”
grins. The second act falters a bit—Doug preemptively comments at
the beginning of the second act that “second acts are boring”—and
cannot sustain the rat-a-tat pacing of the first. But audiences should
leave Gutenberg! with sore faces from laughing so hard for so
long.