The Daily Escape:
Wild Azaleas at sunrise, Blue Ridge Mountains, VA – May 7, 2023 photo by Susan Anton
Wrongo and Ms. Right spent most of the weekend in NYC where we saw two Broadway plays, “New York, New York” and “Fat Ham”.
New York, New York is set at the end of WWII. The story is about a down-on-their-luck cast of characters who have come to NYC to chase their dreams. It has some really strong points: Loved the choreography, the highlight of which is seeing a group tap dancing on the steel girder of an unfinished skyscraper. There’s also a nighttime snowfall in Central Park, and multicolored umbrellas seemingly floating in a rainstorm. The dancing scenes reminded Wrongo of “An American in Paris” which he saw in London and loved.
The scenery, dominated by towering fire escapes is very interesting and evocative of NYC. However, the male lead Jimmy, played by Colton Ryan, doesn’t have a voice that’s up to the role, although he is a versatile musician and has a nice sense of physical comedy. The female lead, Francine, played by Anna Uzele who played Catherine Parr in “Six” has a very good voice and was truly the star of the show.
The play doesn’t meet musical expectations. Despite having songs written by the legendary John Kander (“Cabaret” and “Chicago”) and co-written with Lin Manuel Miranda (you know, “Hamilton” and “In the Heights”). The tunes simply don’t deliver any real emotion to the audience.
It finishes with a rousing big band version of the signature tune that has the audience singing along. Sadly, for Wrongo, that was the highlight of the show.
Fat Ham by comparison, is a winner. It’s a contemporary riff on “Hamlet” set in a backyard somewhere in an unidentified part of the American South. This Black family includes a gay young male college student who is unsettled by his mother’s decision to marry the brother of her recently deceased husband, who was murdered in jail.
Some of the themes in Shakespeare’s play are quickly evident. But the play uses comedy and a few plot twists to challenge the family’s history of violence. In winning the Pulitzer, Fat Ham was described as:
“…a funny, poignant play that deftly transposes ‘Hamlet’ to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility and honesty.”
All of the above. The actors frequently break the fourth wall, letting the audience know how they feel about the drama being acted out on stage. Fat Ham refers to its main character: Juicy is queer, Black, and is taking online classes at the University of Phoenix.
Juicy’s father Pap appears as a ghost just before the cookout celebrating his mother’s marriage to the father’s brother Uncle Rev. Pap tells Juicy that he was killed in prison on the order of Uncle Rev and tells Juicy to kill Uncle Rev in revenge. Like Hamlet, Juicy is moody and sarcastic, but he isn’t particularly committed to murdering Rev. He acts like his father has asked him to do a chore he never plans to get around to.
Ultimately, Rev conveniently chokes to death on a pork rib, so Juicy didn’t have to lift a finger.
The play is about secrets that stay hidden because of guilt or shame. The ones that you keep for fear of ever being found out to be what you think is a more disgusting version of yourself.
It turns out that in the end, everyone acknowledges that several family members in addition to Juicy are gay. They come to terms with their failed expectations of each other as well. Ultimately they’re all liberated from the personal stories that keep them from being happy. The play ends with a splashy finale, including a confetti cannon, with one character channeling Rick James.
Wrongo recommends seeing Fat Ham if you are able to get to NYC.
One quibble is that all of these characters appear to have lived their whole lives with unfulfilled dreams that largely get fulfilled at the very end of the play.
Only on Broadway do we see people who can be released from their personal conflicts so easily.
Time to Wake Up America! We’re already a few days into what promises to be a difficult week. There’s a lot going on, and it can be hard to focus on just one thing. But Wrongo thinks we should be focusing on the Debt Ceiling and whether those bums we’ve elected have any interest in solving the problem.
As the clock ticks down to the moment when the US suffers a politically engineered default on its debt, let’s hope that the President and the Congress can defy partisanship and come up with something.
To help them wake up, here’s “Manic Monday”, written by Prince. It was a hit for the Bangles in 1984. Here they perform live in 2008:
