Tag Archives: act theatre

Arts & Entertainment, Music

The Love Markets Give Weimar the Slip

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The Love Markets (Photo: Laurie Clark)

At the end of The Love Markets‘ first set, for their rendition of Angie Louise‘s ribald anthem “My Little Wiener Schnitzel,” singers Nick Garrison and Louise began tossing sticks of meat into the crowd, and butterscotch kisses, and the gentleman adjacent to me sprang suddenly to life, waving briskly, then settling back dejectedly when he realized no treats were forthcoming for the balcony row.

“I knew we weren’t going to get any,” he told me. “They’re not aerodynamic enough.” I was almost tempted to challenge him on that statement, but the song was starting, and its beer-hall-polka rhythm would soon have everyone swaying in their seats. Besides, isn’t that exactly the kind of thing you hope will happen at a cabaret? All irony had vanished, for a second: STICKS OF MEAT! UP HERE!

Very much like Weimar, I imagine.

We were all in the Bullitt Cabaret at ACT Theatre for this sold-out, one-night-only show (like MacArthur, The Love Markets plan to return: keep an eye on their upcoming gigs calendar), with cabaret-style tables on the main floor, and bar stools along the balcony. On stage, it was all black slips (they reappeared in lavender for the second set) and berets, treating you to the experience of seeing Dave Pascal with a trademark bass player’s deadpan thousand-yard gaze and a drooping shoulder strap.

The Love Markets were born from the aftermath of 5th Avenue’s production of Cabaret a few years ago, when Garrison and Louise decided the cabaret must go on. Backed by Rob Witmer on accordion, Dave Marriott on trombone, Pascal on bass, and Chris Monroe on drums, Garrison and Louise simply sing, with occasional time-outs for between-song banter, which is when you learn that Garrison’s niece, when she was two, looked “just like” Marion Clotillard as Edith Piaf, so Garrison taught her to go around clutching her head and shouting, “Marcel! Marcel!”

Nick Garrison and Angie Louise (Photo: Laurie Clark)

Songs in the repertoire are by Kander & Ebb, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, Friedrich Hollaender, Piaf, but also by Leonard Cohen, Janis Ian, and Angie Louise herself. If it takes a certain chutzpah to put your songs in the mix with Weill, Louise’s efforts come off very well. Partly, this is context: Cabaret would normally bring you music (and concerns) of the day, and Louise’s “Ballad of the Housing Bubble” is a terrific tune that feels very right, uniting eras in outrage over banksters and fleeced sheep. “Banks of the Lake Wannsee” is a meditation on the arrival of something called “leisure time,” abruptly lost as Germany went to war–even on a first hearing it’s powerful.

Garrison’s tenor and Louise’s alto make a unique combination, with Louise swooping down for low notes. Both are relatively big-voiced compared to pop singers, and technically and stylistically adept. They adopt and discard different vocal mannerisms, and accents, depending upon the song. They seem to sing from a sense of each song’s character; sometimes that’s winking double entendre, sometimes it’s the displaced-refugee angst of Eisler’s “To the Little Radio.” For fans of Garrison, his “La Vie en rose” is probably worth the admission.

In the end, the only thing missing was the steady clink of glasses in a real nightclub (no table service at the Bullitt). That’s not just because I like cocktails, but because the evening’s war-weary, poverty-burdened, prostitute-laden, gay-anthemed lyrics don’t feel the least bit remote, the way The Love Markets sing them.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

ACT’s New Voices Showcase is the Real Glee 3D

The Love Markets

It’s summer and things are supposed to be quiet theatrically, but not at ACT Theatre. If you have a $25 ACT Pass, this August must feel like a golden age.

You no doubt already saw Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (our review), maybe popped in for Ian Bell’s anonymous memoirs Seattle Confidential, then last night was the show tunes showcase New Voices, August 17 is short film showcase Rawstock (featuring women filmmakers Karn Junkinsmith, Michaela Olsen and Bri Meyer, and Kristen Grey-Rockmaker), and the 19th brings back Nick Garrison’s neo-cabaret The Love Markets, performing Summer Nacht.

But wait, as they say, that’s not all. Still to come is the Icicle Creek Theatre Festival, with staged readings of In You for Me for You by Mia Chung (“two sisters from North Korea escape one harsh and unforgiving reality only to enter another very foreign world”), directed by Sheila Daniels; and  The Whale by Sam Hunter (“a poetic, disturbing and strangely beautiful journey through the life of a small-town shut-in named Charlie”), directed by Andrew K. Russell.

Last but not least, there’s The Beebo Brinker Pulp Cabaret, inspired by the Beebo Brinker pulp fiction series and set in a 1950s Greenwich Village underground gay-bar “rife with pin-ups, intelligent burlesque, live music and an interactive cast.”

If you can make $25 go further than that, you are the Warren Buffett of theater-going. New Voices, by the way, is a one-night-only experience, but they will return this December, and I am here to tell you that if you own even a single CD of a musical or have a ticket stub to Glee 3D, this is your night. Circle the next showcase in red on the calendar.

I walked in, as per usual, a little vague on what to expect. I guess I thought it’d be something like Village Theater West, singing workshop songs. That was enough to tempt me downtown, but in fact the program included Diana Huey (just back from The Glee Project semi-finals), Ryah Nixon (through with a year of touring with 9 to 5 The Musical), Vicki Noon (Wicked, Mamma Mia), and Louis Hobson (Next to Normal, People in the Picture).

18 songs were on the program–many in the bouncy, up-tempo rock musical “key” and making use of a seemingly newfound affection for profanity-studded lyrics. The Bullitt Cabaret was teeming with ingenues and Dauntlesses, and their proud parents and theater friends. (Both shows sold out.)

Musicals are the great over-sharers, aren’t they? Something about bursting into song in public goes over better if that’s, in fact, what you expect from having hung around with people cast in musicals. They really do that. Many of the songs opted for simple interior monologue, or could easily have been pop songs (more anthemic than dramatic). Disney musicals have really done a number on subtext.

But more than a few were stand-outs: the Lowdermilk/Kerrigan “Avalanche” flipped the metaphor movingly; Chris Jeffries “America” was gorgeous, with a descending figure on the cello that sticks in you and aches with loneliness; Kitt/Yorkey “Hey Kid” (aka “Hobson’s Song”) wryly observed reluctant fatherhood; Burkell/Loesel “I Really Really Love You” pulled no comic punches in its ode to stalkers; and Withers/Jackson “Old Mr. Drew” took TMI to searingly nonchalant heights.

In between songs, host Brandon Ivie hopped onstage and purred his way through frequently hilarious and always amiable introductions, with R.J. Tancioco pulling Paul Schaefer-like duties at the piano. Sadly the program doesn’t list who sang what, or I’d be able to regale you with who was brassy and who sounded like caramel.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

In the Other Room, or the vibrator play Electrifies ACT

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Mary Kae Irvin as Annie, Deborah King as Mrs. Daldry, and Jeff Cummings as Dr. Givings, in "In the Next Room, or the vibrator play" by Sarah Ruhl, at ACT Theatre (Photo: Chris Bennion)

In her 2009 work, playwright Sarah Ruhl had the recipe for the perfect title: vague, yet it tells you exactly what it’s about. As directed by ACT mainstay Kurt Beattie, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (running through August 28) is an “uproarious” comedy of manners about a woman’s place, the industrialization of the female body, and the twinning of technology and pleasure.

For the most part, In the Next Room is a light-hearted Victorian romp. In “a prosperous spa town outside of New York City, perhaps Sarasota Springs, [at] the dawn of the age of electricity; and after the Civil War; circa 1880s,” kindly Doctor Givings takes care of women (and the occasional man) who have been diagnosed with hysteria, using his new medical instrument, the Chattanooga vibrator—a real device, mind you—to reduce their anxiety and tension via violent, shuddering paroxysms. But what of the good doctor’s wife? Doesn’t Mrs. Givings deserve to get a good paroxysm every now and again too? The answer, of course, is yes, everyone should receive mind-blowing full-body orgasms on the regular. Except the Victorians! Socially scandalous wackiness ensues.

It’s not a perfect play, and compared to the recent staging of Ruhl’s first work at StageRIGHT, both the play and ACT’s staging are a little too on-the-nose. Brendan Kiley is right when he says that “Ruhl will never be known as America’s subtlest playwright.” Take the doctor’s surname “Givings” as a prime example. Oh COME on. Adding to that, Matthew Smucker’s otherwise awesome and dexterous set—conveying the simultaneous activity within two rooms without doors or walls—is marred by the inclusion of a birdcage hanging over everything. Yes, yes, a woman at this time was a bird in a cage, Ive read Ethan Frome and The Awakening in high school too, thank you very much. There is a wet nurse subplot that doesn’t add much besides a further comment on the treatment of women’s bodies as machines, and the play closes on a scene that’s a lesson in show-don’t-tell. All that being said, half the fun of seeing this work at a mainstream theatre company like ACT is the audience reaction: for whatever reason, faked orgasms onstage set them all atwitter.