I got distracted by database fiddling and didnt notice what time it was until 7:15. Usually Google pops up a window about 20 minutes before I need to leave for something in my Google Calendar that has a location but it didnt happen - dont know why. By the time I got my car moving the time Google Maps estimated meant I would get to the theatre for Pippin at 8:01, but fast driving on 280 shaved off several minutes, so I thought I might get away with it. Then traffic slowed to a crawl on Taylor Street as only four or five cars per green light made it through an intersection. When I finally got up there i saw somebody was having a much worse evening than mine - there was a downed motorcycle and a stopped car and a bunch of broken glass. I have to assume that didnt go well for the motorcyclist. Yikes! I popped twenty to park right across the street from the theatre, got into the balcony at 8:10, having missed Magic to Do, halfway through the first iteration of Corner of the Sky. Darn. I saw a touring production of the original Pippin in Los Angeles (with Elayne Pelz, I think; Ben Vereen impossibly magnetic as Leading Player) in the late 70s and fell in love with the show. Fosse made a production for TV Pippin in the early 1980s with Ben Vereen, William Katt, and Martha Raye. (I still remember, as a youth looking up the real Pippin (Pepin) in the Brittanica and discovering that his grandma was known as either Clotilde or Bertha of the Big Foot.) It made a lot of changes from a conventional musical - occasional use of bad language, frequent fourth-wall breakage, Fosse choreography, and it was about a young man who wanted fulfillment in doing something extraordinary. The black humor of the war stuff seemed fresh; the music was surprisingly contemporary. The little crowd I hung with in LA then used to have a holiday party and I would rent the VHS tape of Pippin and bring it and wed watch it - several years in a row. (Probably well past the interest of at least some of the other people in the group, although I dont think thats why they moved away.) But I havent seen it in almost 30 years. The revival - which has an impressive cast, including Sasha Allen (my favorite in her year on The Voice) as Leading Player, which she dispatches very well, John Rubinstein (who was Pippin on Broadway 40 years ago) as Charlemagne (with added precision knife throwing), and Lucie Arnaz as Clotilde (very fit for 63, and not only rockin a corset top but hanging from a trapeze). Storys the same, scripts pretty much the same, songs the same. Fosse had a dance show (as youd expect); theres still some of his very recognizable choreography in this version. But the underlying metaphor is circus and magic, not so much song and dance. Theres tumblers, hanging trapezes, knife juggling, knife throwing, etc, etc, all very impressive, and the chorus costumes have been reconceptualized from the bizarre mime-influenced things into circus-influenced things. If you havent seen the show before, its worth seeing. The circus thing means theres always something to look at; many of the performances are very strong. (I think Vereen managed a tad more menace than Allen does, but shes still a total package.) Im not sorry I saw it, but I have to say it didnt feel particularly fresh. Some of the circus stuff kind of gets in the way of the points of the songs. (Kudos, though, to the movement artists portraying farm animals and the costumers who made Medieval chicken costumes; that sequence was terrific and new.) At this point the bad language is really so what. Some of the music - especially instrumentals for dance numbers - is enough of its time to be very period specific, particularly the way the brass is used.) Jabs at war and a jab at the church arent daring in the slightest. Sometimes groundbreaking things dont look so impressive after the ground is already broken. True for me this time. Rivers belong where they can ramble, but you cant step in the same river twice.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 07:29:25 +0000
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