Tony follow-up thoughts

So, obviously, In the Heights won big on Sunday night. But even if it hadn't taken home the top prize, I suspect it would have seen a major box-office bump after the telecast, thanks to Miranda's endearing and attention-getting acceptance speech and their terrific musical number. I rewatched it last night, and the camerawork drove me crazy (as it usually does) -- Andy Blankenbuehler deserved that Best Choreography Tony, but you couldn't tell from all the random close-ups and cuts on TV. When multiple people were singing, the cameras didn't know what to do. I think that's a good time to show the whole stage, but what do I know. Still, in spite of how badly it was shot, the number came across really well: it featured most of the cast, and it gave new audiences a solid picture of what the show is about, what it looks like and how it sounds. And it was exciting.

By that same token, Passing Strange missed out in a big way on Sunday, and not just because its only win (for Best Book of a Musical) wasn't shown live. I've been turned off all along by the attitude I've heard from Stew and his fellow creators in interviews -- a lot of "we don't really belong on Broadway" and "we're not really doing a Broadway musical" stuff, which comes off, to me at least, as not terribly grateful, and also ignorant of what "Broadway musical" really means (as opposed to what people not actually involved in the world of Broadway musicals sometimes assume it means). A lot of people, at TWoP and elsewhere, have been hearing it the same way, and what we saw (or didn't see) on the Tonys didn't help: Stew being unprepared to give a speech when he won his award; Stew wearing goofy glasses when his Leading Actor in a Musical nomination was announced. But the musical number was where Passing Strange really failed, I think. Yesterday, commenter Mariusky said, "I totally do not get Passing Strange." I felt the same way, honestly, right up until I actually saw it (I promise you'll hear about that soon!). I'd heard good things, but I couldn't get any idea of what was so special about it from what I'd read or seen. And if I hadn't seen it before the Tonys, I wouldn't be in any more of a hurry now, after seeing that number. (I was similarly underwhelmed by "Mom Song" when I saw it on the "Tonys Preview Concert" last week -- but then, that whole thing was underwhelming at best.) They did a cutting of "Amsterdam" -- I think? -- that didn't tell much of the story, and made the music seem repetitive and the staging haphazard. It was high-energy, but it didn't seem polished, and it didn't really show off any of the performers as well as it might have. I don't know what I would have done if I had to produce Passing Strange's Tony performance, but it wouldn't have been that.

The evening's other big loser, despite a few major wins, might have been Boeing-Boeing -- its Best Revival of a Play Tony wasn't even broadcast, and nothing during the show, including Mark Rylance's baffling "speech," gave TV audiences any clue what the show is about or why they should want to see it. Meanwhile, Xanadu won nothing, but made the most of the opportunity. Their number represented the show perfectly, and Cheyenne Jackson's powerhouse performance has so many people chattering about him, his ears will be ringing for days. Way to work the system, Xanadu.

Tonys Without Pity

Last night was actually a bit of a disappointment, from a would-be snarky recapper's perspective... because from a theatre-lover's perspective, this year's Tony telecast was pretty satisfying! The winners weren't all my personal choices, but none were undeserving, either. And some of the numbers actually looked and sounded pretty good! Still, I did my best to cover the event with a jaundiced eye for TWoP:

8:04: Why, it's host Whoopi Goldberg, wearing an inappropriate costume! Once so unexpected, and now so comfortingly familiar! Much like Julie Taymor's staging of The Lion King!

Check out my recap of the evening's highlights and lowlights at Television Without Pity. And let me know what you thought about everything, either in the TWoP forums or here in the comments!

Tony night!

Happy Father's Day, everybody, and Happy Tonys Night! I managed to squeeze in trips to all of the "Best Musical" nominees, and a few nominated plays, in time for tonight's telecast, and in retrospect I think it's been a pretty exciting year on Broadway. You might not be able to tell from what you see on TV tonight, but fortunately I no longer have to depend on television for my Broadway fix.

There are a few categories where I'm torn, and a few more where I'm expecting my personal picks to lose out. But you'll hear about all that later. Tonight I'll be recapping the highs and lows of the broadcast for TWoP -- I'll let you know when it's up, so we can trade notes! In the meantime, enjoy the show.

UPDATE: My TWOP recap is here.

My greatest service to humanity

It's happening again! The search for the four-letter, three-vowel "Shakespearean troublemaker" is leading record numbers of Googlers to Restricted View. I wonder, is it the same syndicated puzzle, appearing anew in places from Potomac, MD, to North Liberty, IA, to McCordsville, IN, to Chillicothe, MO, to Apopka, FL, to Dodge City, KS, to Grapevine, TX, to Cebu City, Philippines? Or did another puzzle reuse the clue?

I welcome my new crossword-puzzle-doing readers. I'm glad I (or at least my commenters) could help you fill in those stubborn boxes. And once again I pose the question to you all: is it cheating to Google a crossword clue? Levi says yes. What say you?

My scheme is working!

This morning, someone in Bristol, England, reached this post of mine via this search. I'm guessing this is your first crossword puzzle? Remember this one, friend, because it's going to come up a lot: EMU.

From such great heights

A few days ago I was talking to a friend about In the Heights, which I'd just seen. "It feels really...fresh," I told him. "That's just what so-and-so said," he replied. Another friend and theatre enthusiast came along a minute later and heard us mention the show. "I liked it!" he said. "It's really fresh."

There's a reason that word keeps coming up. A new musical on Broadway that isn't a direct or indirect attempt to recreate the success of something else, full of sounds, sights, faces and subjects that you don't expect to find on a Broadway stage! In the Heights is all that, and it feels completely new and borderline miraculous. And it's all the more amazing that Lin-Manuel Miranda (who wrote the songs, came up with the concept and plays the central role) and the rest of the creative team have managed to make something fresh out of such familiar ingredients. There's one other word I've heard applied to this show in casual conversations, and that word is "formulaic." And make no mistake, the book of In the Heights is as old-fashioned and formulaic as they come. But somehow that doesn't take away from the exhilaration of seeing this show come to life onstage -- in fact, the show's reliance on tried-and-true storytelling and musical-theatre convention provide a solid footing for its more inventive elements.

The show is set in New York City, but not the fantasy, once-upon-a-time New York of On the Town or Wonderful Town or even West Side Story. It's set in a neighborhood that feels totally authentic and totally current, populated by people I could have seen on the subway this weekend, heading for the Puerto Rican Day parade. Miranda's music collects the various sounds of that neighborhood, Latin music and hip-hop and people shouting in Spanglish, and turns them into a vehicle for telling a story. Yes, the book can make the Washington Heights block in question feel a bit too much like Sesame Street, but the music, the set, the costumes, the dancing all have an up-to-the minute rawness that makes the characters hard to resist.

Compared to Miranda's accomplished and inventive score, Quiara Alegria Hudes's book underwhelms and underperforms, but she has managed to salt the dialogue with Spanish in a way that usually feels authentic, rather than stiff and hokey. The plot is largely predictable, and most of the major plot points are telegraphed noisily long before they occur. There are a few surprising twists, moments when the plot seems poised to shoot off in a new and unanticipated direction, but they fizzle out almost as quickly as they occur. I don't want to give anything away, but there's a moment when it becomes clear that one character is about to come into some major luck, but you don't know who. I assumed the rest of the show would make much dramatic hay out of the difficult question of which character most deserves it. But...it didn't; the revelation in the second act was practically an afterthought. So that was weird. But if the dramatic structure is weak, the other creative elements make up for it. Andy Blankenbuehler's choreography is magnificent. Most of the actors are wonderful, particularly Miranda himself and the two female leads, Karen Olivo and Mandy Gonzalez. The show would have a much greater emotional impact if all of the casting were as strong, but there are a couple of major weak spots. Carlos Gomez, as Kevin, is distractingly amateur; the first time he's left alone onstage he actually looks a little terrified by the prospect of singing his solo, and he's even less convincing when he's just a member of the ensemble (once, after singing a few lines during the first-act finale, he dropped character and started to walk offstage before the spotlight on him had even cut out). And I was completely gobsmacked when I found out, after I got home from the show, that Olga Merediz is Tony nominated in the role of Abuela Claudia. Every time she was onstage I felt like I was watching a high school play -- you know how there's always one heavyset teenager, eager but not very talented, who puts on an ill-fitting wig and paints some crow's-feet around his or her eyes and plays the show's resident elder? That's what her performance reminded me of. A nervous 16-year-old in a padded blouse playing Mrs. Brownlow in Oliver. A more commanding, controlled presence in either or both of those roles would help to make the plot as compelling as the choreography.

The show occasionally raises the specter of gentrification, redevelopment and class resentment, but wisely keeps any representatives of that world offstage. There are no outsider characters, no villains, for the residents of this neighborhood to react against, which prevents the audience from dividing into Us and Them. Everybody in the theatre identifies with Usnavi and Nina and Vanessa and the rest, without thinking about it; the familiar formulas are a way in for those patrons who, as the opening song jokes, never go above 96th Street. Meanwhile, there were a couple of large groups of kids there who looked like they might have come from Washington Heights -- or somewhere north of 96th -- the night I saw the show. I passed them on my way in to the theatre, as they were tittering with excitement; I heard their delighted bursts of laughter when they caught a joke in Spanish, or a reference to their country of origin, or a whiff of romance between the leading characters; I saw them clustered around the stage door, hoping to meet their new heroes, on my way home. And I could feel their energy throughout the performance, as they discovered how electrifying theatre can be; how it can illuminate your own experiences, how it can surprise you and make you laugh and cry and think; how amazing it is to watch super-talented performers acting, dancing and singing right in front of you. It doesn't matter what part of the city, or the world, you come from -- to see that version of New York life, of American life, on the Broadway stage is refreshing; and to see it celebrated on the Broadway stage is thrilling.

P.S. In his review, Michael Feingold does a lovely job of putting all this in the context of musical-theatre history.

UPDATE: I wrote a professional review of In the Heights for Commonweal (subscribers-only). To read other Restricted View posts about the show, click here.

I'm infected

In the midst of my trips to a number of nominated shows, I found time for a second trip to see Cry-Baby. I remain bewildered by the lack of enthusiasm I've seen, at least in the reviews I read, for the quality of the songwriting in this musical. The first time I saw it, I went in prepared to cut it some slack; I wasn't expecting genius, and I was willing to settle for anything better than what passes for an "original score" over at Legally Blonde. But no slack-cutting was necessary. There were no sloppy punctuation or grammar errors, or lyrics where unstressed syllables fell on stressed notes, or "witty" list songs that lacked anything approaching wit, or musical passages lifted directly from preexisting songs, or "rhymes" that are not rhymes, or any of the other distracting tics I have seen songwriters get away with on Broadway recently. The second time, having been surprised by the dismissive comments in the reviews, I went in thinking I might have been too easily impressed the first time. But I found the score every bit as enjoyable as I'd remembered -- more, in fact, because the writers have made a few changes since then, and they're all good ones. The performance of Cry-Baby I saw last week was an improvement in nearly every way over the one I saw back when they were just starting previews.

Oh, why doth time so quickly fly?

I am trying to make good on my vow to see as many Tony contenders as I can before the big night, and that's been keeping me so busy I haven't had time to blog about it. I'm hoping to fix that between now and next Sunday. Some other stuff I've been busy with: Work! Same old same old for the moment, but that may change. And jogging! I'm sticking to my brand-new, lightweight exercise "routine" so far. My route is short and my endurance underwhelming, but I'm feeling proud of myself. ("That was quick!" said our doorman, when he saw me return, sweaty and flushed, not very long after I'd passed him on my way out. Good thing I'm not trying to impress him.)

Also, this weekend I went back to campus for my five-year college reunion. The husband and I just took the train in for a day, which was plenty for me. Seeing a lot of familiar faces in a familiar space was certainly fun, but it seemed like something was missing, namely all the other people who were around, and who were my friends, during my time in college -- the people in the three classes before and the three classes after my own. Some of my favorite people from my Yale years were slightly older or younger than I, and were therefore not members of the class of 2003, through no fault of their own. So they weren't in attendance this weekend. There were other people around, of course, from other classes that ended in 3 and 8 -- but since the reunions are spaced in 5-year increments, there's no way you'll run into anyone from another class that overlapped with your own. So they were all strangers (and there's a weird tension between the 10-year and 5-year reunion attendees: you find yourself squinting at the person coming toward you, trying to decide whether you know him, and then you realize he's not from your class and you get scowly because you wasted time and energy on trying to recognize him). However, I am fortunate in that one of my abovementioned favorite people not in my class actually lives in New Haven, so the husband and I skipped the "class dinner" and had dinner with her instead. I guess you could say we beat the system. (I guess you could also say we paid for our dinners twice. But I prefer not to think of it that way.)

And speaking of favorite people, I'd like to thank Stephen for calling my attention to this video, which combines two of my very favorite things: Charlie Bit Me and Jason Robert Brown. Enjoy.

Is a Puzzlement

Yesterday, this blog received the most pageloads of any day in its illustrious history. Never has Restricted View been accessed so many times in one 24-hour period, not even at the height of the great Colapinto Explosion of June 2007. (Can you believe it's been a year? Yet I will never tire of the traffic that post brings me.) This means, of course, that I should consider switching to an all-crossword-puzzle-answers, all-the-time format, since that, and not obsessive, unsolicited arts criticism, nor complaints about my struggles with the Postal Service, is what the public wants. The statistics speak for themselves.

I don't make a habit of checking my stats the moment I get up in the morning, I swear, but I happened to do so yesterday, and I was amused to see a handful of people scattered across the country ending up here via the same weird keyword search. I love to ponder what makes people search for the things that bring them to me, and how disappointed they must be when they get here -- see this old post for more on that phenomenon -- and so when I figured out what was probably inspiring this mass-Googling, I posted to that effect and forgot all about it until after lunch, when I checked in with StatCounter again and was astonished by my high visitor count. Perusing the visitor history was a strangely heartwarming, it's-a-small-world-after-all moment. I had hits from Akron, NY; Barrow, AK; Charleston, IL (motto: "The other Charleston!"); Martinez, GA; Beaver Dam, WI; Blunt, SD; Flower Mound, TX; Liberty, MS; Longmont, CO; Shakopee, MN; Tonganoxie, KS; Winston-Salem, NC; Ontario; British Columbia; and Trinidad and Tobago. All of you working on the same puzzle, which I found here, thanks to a comment from Stephanie of Ottawa. (By the way, 62 across is "Albee.")

Companies whose employees visited (or whose neighbors used available wireless to visit) include Bond, Schoneck & King in Syracuse; Ernst & Young LLP in Secaucus; Freemon Shapard & Story in Wichita Falls, TX; and Jones Day Reavis & Pogue, Richmond Breslin LLP, and Goldberg Weisman Cairo Ltd. in Chicago. Not to mention Sears Canada, Inc. and Jewish Vocational Services, both in North York, Ontario. Also WishTV-210 in Indianapolis, and something called "Iron Horse Safety Special" in Plano, TX.

Institutions of learning that sent visitors my way include NYC Public Schools, Brooklyn; Joan And Sanford I. Weill Medical College And Graduate School Of Medical Sciences Of Cornell University, Brooklyn; Grasso Votech, Groton, CT; Waterford Public Schools, Waterford, CT; University Of Missouri - Kansas City; Medical College of Georgia; University of Chicago; and Georgetown Technical in Georgetown, SC.

And official-sounding outfits whose employees are not above the occasional crossword include the Dept. of Veterans' Affairs in Los Angeles, CA; the U.S. Army Medical Information Technology Center in San Antonio, TX; the Board of Police Commissioners in Plano, TX; the County of Westchester in White Plains, NY; and the City of New York (nyc.gov) in... San Antonio, TX? Whatever, StatCounter.

Anyway, those of you who actually like my theatre-related ramblings and/or diary of Martha Plimpton sightings don't have to worry; I'm not really going to start blogging about crossword puzzle clues, exclusively or at all. But I may start embedding likely hints in my posts just to drive up traffic, in the hopes that some of you puzzle fans will like what you find here and keep coming back. I promise it won't become intrusive (flightless bird; thirteenth president; Wizard of Oz remake The___). Meanwhile, I am wondering: Have I exposed the dark underbelly of the world of North American syndicated-crossword-puzzle-solving? Do you puzzledoers consider it cheating to Google tricky clues? Or is that part of the process? After all, Google isn't always a silver bullet; you still have to hunt for the information you need. (Especially now that they've decided to automatically "correct" your spelling for you, instead of just asking whether you want them to... I hate that, Google. I hate it so much.) What do you think: Is a crossword puzzle an open-book exam?

P.S. The Republic author; "Thanks," to a Parisian; Not "hither," but ___.

Crossword clues

StatCounter tells me that so far this morning (and it's only 7:30), my blog has had five hits, from five different heartland locations, by people searching for the phrase "Shakespearean troublemaker." Are you all doing a crossword puzzle? If so, does it make you feel better to know that you're not the only one who Googles the clues when you get stuck? Anyway, I haven't seen your puzzle, but I'm pretty sure the name you're looking for is "Puck." Let me know if I'm wrong!

ETA: Turns out I was wrong... Four letters, yes, but it's not Puck (which I'm guessing is why SO MANY of you are ending up here in your search for help!). Check the comments below for the answer you want.