You Say Fronkensteen...

Eric Grode was the critic at Broadway.com until the fall of 2005, when he graciously ceded the job to me and took the head-critic post at The New York Sun. So I found this contrast diverting: While today's reviews for Young Frankenstein are mostly mixed to negative, Grode's is by far the most scathing. His lead:

As Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom learned to their detriment, even the most witless musical comedy can make a bundle. The shameless hucksters at the center of Mel Brooks's "The Producers" found this out when "Springtime for Hitler," their toe-tapping salute to der Führer, became the toast of Broadway. Bialystock and Bloom...may have been crooks, but they weren't fools: They knew that "Springtime" was a crass, unfunny turkey. What's Mel Brooks's excuse vis-à-vis "Young Frankenstein"?

Meanwhile, back at Broadway.com, another Main Stem pundit had this to say:

It's definitely the best show I've ever seen.

Which to believe, dear reader?

Looking Up Out West

Three of my favorite theater companies are on the West Coast, and though I have no way to witness their work firsthand, I'm still enough in the loop to get vicariously excited about what they're up to.

First there's the Evidence Room--which I remember primarily as a place, that amazing warehouse on Beverly Blvd., where I spent many an hour not only as a (mostly) happy critic but as a musician in the insane late-night happening The Strip (and which was, in the spirit of full disclosure, the site of a send-off party for me when I left Back Stage West in '03), but which is in fact an independent company which previously hung its hat in Culver City (I remember those days fondly, too) and which this weekend opens up a co-production with the Unknown Theatre of Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life. In some alternate universe, I'm there at the opening with the proverbial bells on. (For the record, that amazing space on Beverly is now in the hands of the Bootleg Theatre Company.)

Second is Cornerstone Theater Company, longtime resident of downtown's L.A. artist loft district, which recently joined forces with a loft developer to give prospective tenants a look at the Barker Block live/work spaces. I'm not in the market for a live/work space in that neck of the woods, but I would love to have seen what odd, cool flights of improvisatory fancy were taken by Shishir Kurup, Page Leong and Bernard White (pictured above), or by Peter Howard (pictured below with an actress with whom I'm not acquainted). I was tipped off to this tantalizing but not-open-to-the-public event not by the theater company itself but by a publicist pal who's also flogged similar theatrical-real-estate events in the past. Another downtown L.A. blog has more details.

Finally, there's Oregon Shakespeare Festival, taken over last year by Cornerstone founding director Bill Rauch, which has begun rehearsals for the first season of programming programmed by Rauch--a new Bill of fare, if you will. I received heartening notice that The Clay Cart, a Sanskrit epic, has kicked off rehearsals with blasting bhangra music. It's the first non-Western classic to be staged at the Bard fest (it will open in Feb. '08 at the Angus Bowmer Theatre), but the play isn't new to Rauch: An adaptation called The Toy Truck was Cornerstone's first community production when the company relocated to L.A. in 1992, which is also when I met them.

I send whatever good vibes I possess on westerly winds. Break legs, taboos and box-office records as you will.

Ross & Ratliff

Just finished reading this great back-and-forth about music, genre and performance between one of the Times' resident polymaths, Ben Ratliff (did you read his "America's Music" piece on megachurch music, or his piece on marching bands? Next, I'm half-expecting a piece on the social economics of Muzak) and Alex Ross, whose The Rest Is Noise I'm eagerly plowing through (and whom I'm hoping to catch this weekend in my near-hood).

Ross raises some of the usual anxieties/hopes about the future of criticism in the Internet age, while Ratliff raises some challenging, fascinating meta-issues about music and performance culture. He quotes Robert Levin, a Harvard pianist and musicologist:

I think the most important thing in performing a piece of music, and likewise, even more so in the listener's apprehension of what's going on, is a sense that anything that's happening could have been something else.

Profound stuff--and, I think, a key insight into the potential energy of every live performing art.

Struck

Dude at the bowling alley was my 310 partner at USC film school (do they still have 310?).

Chutzpah!

A priceless lead in Robert Kahn's Young Frankenstein preview, in which Mel Brooks gets testy about his profit participation:

"What am I, a robber baron?" Mel Brooks barks into the phone from his Upper East Side apartment. "I'm giving you a performance to enjoy. I deserve whatever the hell I can get out of it...For writing half the book, all the score, being around to assist the actors, do I not deserve it?" Brooks continues.
He rips into a list of earlier Rialto flops. "After 'Shinbone Alley' - stay with me - after 'All American' starring Ray Bolger, after four or five Broadway shows where I worked for two or three years and didn't get a paycheck, am I not entitled to 24 percent of the show, if it is a big hit?"
He's winding down now. "My argument is: I supply. If the stuff is really memorable, then I deserve a fair share of the profits ... if indeed there are any."

There are also some great bits about the extent to which Roger Bart is and isn't stealing from Gene Wilder. Read the whole thing.

Kennedy's "Murders"

My review of Adrienne Kennedy's deeply odd, haunting sliver-of-memory play, The Ohio State Murders, is here.

Fred Thompson, "The Best Man"

Will Pasadena-based NPR station KPCC now have to give equal time to rival candidates now that LA Theatre Works is broadcasting a radio-theater performance of Gore Vidal's The Best Man starring Sen. Fred Thompson and Marsha Mason? Just asking.