Channing Gray: This is Not the Show You're Looking For

Channing Gray is back with a review of Trinity Rep's Paris By Night that is as inoffensive as it is indifferent. That is, until the penultimate paragraph, when he unwraps this jewel of a reassurance. It glitters with tactlessness and curiosity:

And for those who are not big on guy-on-guy relations, not to worry. This is not a racy show. There’s very little face-to-face contact, and nothing like simulated sex or hard-core leather-bar action.

(Thank God, the doyens of the East Side exhale; if I have to sit through one more hard-core leather-bar musical at Trinity I'm just gonna puke.)

I love how this paragraph builds to an erotic climax, gratuitous and trivial. Don't worry about this show, he says; I'll give you something to get all bunched up about. From "guy-on-guy relations" to "leather-bar action," the paragraph swells with its own heated concupiscence. There are so many honest, discrete ways to say what he's trying to say, but Gray has an irrepressibly carbonated imagination. So it's not enough to write--as though even this were necessary--that the show is basically PG-rated; he has to vividly describe the salacious show from which Providence would have to be protected by his warning. But in the process of approving the show's character he actually impugns its provenance and genre: he limits the show by association. I suspect Gray was trying to allay theater-goers' concerns, but his effort is leering and disingenuous.

Therefore, as a service to the people of Providence, I offer a comprehensive, alphabatized list of all the other things that are not in this show: avacados, bears, cars, data, everything not related to the love story between Sam and Buck, flocks of geese, Gary Hart, Heart, imprisonment (except for the metaphysical, symbolic kind), Jell-O, karate, lassos, maps indicating Paris's numerous leather-bars, narcotics, origami, parakeets, quintuplets, Reaganomics, severed heads (!!!), terrorists, underpants, verandas, whipping of hot hot men with a cat o' nine tails and then tying them to a bed and going CRAZY on them all night, xeroxing of data, yogurt, zebras (duh).

These things were also not in such plays as Antigone, Much Ado About Nothing, and Death of a Salesman. (Oklahoma! did have lassos and, possibly, underpants, so it's not on this list.) Now you can decide if Paris By Night is really the show for you.

Blithe Spirit Review Round-Up

Channing Gray loved Blithe Spirit. It's not the usual "humdrum, nose-in-the-air Noël Coward," he says; this production takes us on a "dazzling romp into the world of martinis and cucumber sandwiches." Martinis and cucumber sandwiches? That's right: you're in Coward Country now.

Louise Kennedy at The Boston Globe writes rapturously about it as well.

James Merolla at The Sun Chronicle was less impressed. He sees 67 years of movies about ghosts and spouses draining the "zing" from the experience of seeing Blithe Spirit.

However, the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout, the presumptive ace in this hand, thought it was just terrific. The show, he concludes in contrast with a South Pacific revival, is "enduringly fresh." His review, brief and brisk, is a fun read.

Blog Spirit

I saw Blithe Spirit at Trinity Rep this evening; I'll have a review up in a day or two. My first impression is that the show is clever and jaunty enough to be fun but not smart enough to provoke--it's sharp but it has no traction.

Here's Channing Gray's review of 2nd Story's Orpheus Descending. We agree in our appraisal of the show--a tough play well acted--but not in how to write about art.

On Relevance

Wow. Here's Lou Diamond Phillips on Camelot, now playing at the Providence Performing Arts Center (PPAC).

“People say King Arthur, how does that apply to anything that’s happening today?” said Phillips. “But we are on the verge of an election. We are going to pick a new leader. And Arthur created the Round Table to bring peace to the land and bring about a better society.

“There is so much in the play that speaks to that. Audiences have heard it and responded. We stop the show on occasion with applause based on some of the things Arthur has to say.”

Measuring relevance must be about the least interesting or useful way to consider a work of art--especially in terms as bizarre and incongruous as [Diamond] Phillips's, or as glabrous as the estimable Channing Gray's.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Trinity Consortium's Figaro on Thursday. I hope it's utterly irrelevant.