Review - Leap of Faith

Hi everybody!  I’ve got a jam-packed theater week coming up!  I’m getting tired just thinking about it!  ;)   Last night, I saw Leap of Faith via a TDF ticket.  My seat was great, about twelve rows back, on the side/off-center aisle.  Word of warning: it is FREEZING in that theater!  Thank heavens I had a trusty scarf with me!

Well, really, all I need to say about the show is—Raul Esparza wears leather pants.  Thumbs up.

Thank you.  I hope you enjoyed the review.  J   OK, OK, I’ll go on.  But Raul is beyond hot. 

Anyway, I had a good-enough time at the show, but I think it could be a whole lot better.  I’m not sure the framing device that they’re using really works; it might make more sense to just tell the story chronologically.  But maybe not.  I don’t know.  I’m actually puzzling over why the show wasn’t totally successful for me.  I like the basic premise.  I like the actors.  The songs (by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater) were fine, though (oddly enough for a musical) I think there may be too many of them.  At least, there are too many songs that sound alike.  The gospel numbers all ran together for me.  I preferred the gospel music in Menken’s Sister Act to this, though Leap of Faith’s quieter numbers, away from the revival tent, were quite nice.   There were a couple of times, though, where I understood and agreed with the sentiment and placement of the song, but I didn’t like the actual song.  Does that make sense?  And at intermission, I found myself humming “Skid Row” from Little Shop, which may mean I got a generic Menken feel out of this music.

Apparently, the earlier production that they did of Leap of Faith in LA caused the producers to bring in Warren Leight as a co-librettist.  I generally like Warren’s work, but I didn’t really get a sense of him here.  The book was pretty generic.  And though I appreciated the script’s not going with the “laughline-a-minute” technique that a lot of movies-to-musicals use, I could’ve used a bit of a lighter touch.  And more character development.  We’re thrown a lot of character information and are just supposed to run with it.  One or two more book scenes might’ve helped with that.  As it was, I didn’t really get engaged until about fifteen minutes before the end of the first act.  That’s a long wait.  The second act works better, I think, because there are more character songs and less gospel songs.  I will say I was moved at the end – even though you can see the ending coming a mile away (I didn’t see the original Steve Martin movie).  I was also a tad confused with the character monologues (which didn't really illuminate the characters) - some of them seemed to take place in the 'now' and some seemed to be in the 'then,' which I found odd.  Perhaps it's because I wasn't fully on board with the framing device...

I thought the direction was pretty disjointed – actors seemed at times to be wandering around the stage aimlessly and without a sense of space co-existing with the set design.  The choreography was hot and cold for me – I really liked a couple of the group numbers, but I didn’t like the choir choreography.  And I hated the costumes.  HATED them (well, except for the leather pants, of course).  And I’m normally not one to really notice costumes.

The cast was excellent, starting and ending with boyfriend Raul.  He’s just electric and has a wonderful character arc and lovely chemistry with his co-stars.  His 11:00 number is amazing.  He owns the stage and this is really his show, all the way.  I think he flubbed some lyrics towards the end of the show, but charmingly kept going until he was back on track.  Jessica Phillips (who took over for Brooke Shields from the LA production) is fine as our leading lady, though she could use a little more character development.  Her big solo in the second act is terrific, though.  A friend of mine from undergrad is making her Broadway debut in a small role, so hooray for her!  I got pretty choked up seeing her beautiful face on that stage.  Leslie Odom Jr as the rival evangelist was terrific, as was Kecia Lewis-Evans as his mom.  I also thought the boy playing the disabled son, Talon Ackerman, was quite good.  Maybe that character is the way into the story.  Hmmm.  Let me think on that…

So, to sum up, I had a perfectly pleasant evening, watching tremendously talented people share their talent and work their butts off.  If the material wasn’t yet quite up to their talent, well, ok.  I hear they’re still working on the first act, so maybe Warren can find a way to strengthen those characters without slowing down the story.  The show doesn’t open until April 26, so there seems to be time to tinker.  I will take a leap of faith with Warren.  :)  But Raul, and those leather pants, are rocking the house.  


Happy Easter!

To celebrate Easter, I present some of my favorite shots of flowers or other Easter-y type poses.  Have a happy day, all...

Happy birthday to my angel boy!

Where does the time go???  How did my sweetheart get to be twelve years old?!?!  But, he is, so let's celebrate with some photos of the handsomest boy in the world.  You are welcome to sing "Sunrise, Sunset" or "The Way We Were" in the back of your minds...  :)

2012 Humana Fest, Part Two - the food

Of course, because I'm me, when I'm in a new town, I like to try lots of different restaurants.  I would never eat out so much around home, but when I want to sample as much of a town as I can, that rule goes out the window.  Even with our teeny tiny per diem.  :)

The restaurant I really wanted to try was 610 Magnolia, with executive chef Edward Lee, who was just on Top Chef: Texas.  I thought he was terrific on the show.  But, of course, the restaurant was fully booked for the times I had available.  Next year, as soon as we decide we're going to Humana, I'm booking a table there.  First thing.

When we arrived in Louisville, we were starving, so we wandered around a bit until we found Dish on Market.  We didn't really have a lot of choices - quite a few restaurants are closed between lunch and dinner.  Dish on Market was a pub-type place, with a pretty good menu.  I didn't want to eat a huge meal, since we were going to do a meeting for work later in the evening, so I just got a fried egg and cheddar sandwich.  What really sold the sandwich to me, though, was that it was served on a pretzel bread croissant.  OK, yum!  I love pretzel bread and I love croissants.  I figured the combination would be a winner!  And it was!  Though the bread could've been a tad saltier.  The homemade chips were also yummy, as was the sweet tea.  I had a lot of sweet tea on this trip.  Our server was quite sweet and wanted us to come back for the live music later that night, but we just didn't make it. 

Our boss had a lot of travel agita that day (he flew out of a different airport), so he was desperate to get dinner right away after our meetings were completed.  The hotel concierge tried to get us into 610 Magnolia, but it was impossible.  So we ate at Blu, the Italian restaurant in the hotel.  It was quite nice.  The homemade foccacia was delicious, as was the antipasti platter (I was sad to miss out on the delicious-looking prosciutto, but the mozzarella and the balsamic vinaigrette were nice).   The malbec wine I got was also delicious.

My main course was a tad disappointing.  I got the rigatoni in vodka sauce.  I have to say the sauce was pretty bland, and so were the cherry tomatoes and the eggplant inside.  Plus, everything in the dish was so soft.  There needed to be another texture somewhere, I think.  I actually ended up taking a little bit of the crust from my work chum's pizza to add a little crunch.  I think I would've preferred the dish with a regular tomato sauce, which I was going to ask for, but forgot.  Oh well.  Next time.  The restaurant itself was lovely and our server was excellent.  If we go back, maybe I'll try some fish.  Another work chum got the salmon and said it was great.

We ate the breakfast buffet in the hotel the next morning (sorry, no photos), which was quite nice.  They had delicious biscuits and I got an omelet at the omelet station, plus some very nice fresh fruit.  We worked through lunch, but then ate dinner at a very fun place, Doc Crow's.  Another work chum commented that it would be a good idea to eat BBQ since we were in the south, so I made a reservation at Doc Crow's which was 1) a BBQ place, and 2) near the theater since we had to be back in a couple of hours for more shows.  I was worried it would be crazy, since we would be there at the same time as the Louisville/Kentucky basketball game, but we were in the dining room in the back and away from the bar and the TVs. 

We started with some DELICIOUS fried green tomatoes.  Oh my, they were good.  A crispy breading, with still-firm sweet and tart green tomatoes.  Delicious.  They were served with a yummy remoulade.  I also got a very tasty margarita on the rocks.  I don't normally have a drink right before seeing a show (especially after having seen three other plays!), but I thought a cocktail was in order.  :)

Even though I had a fried appetizer, I still wanted to get a po' boy.  They had a combination oyster shrimp sandwich, served with yet another delicious remoulade.  I also got some hush puppies, which were tasty, if a little spicy for my tastes.  Thumbs up on the po-boy.  I even put some of the housemade tomato-based barbecue sauce on the sandwich - that may have made it inauthentic, but it sure made it tasty.  The restaurant also had a vinegar-based sauce on the table, but I forgot to try that one.  Darn it.  Next time.  (We were going to go back there for lunch the next day, but they're closed for lunch.  Darn it again.)   And, if I still ate meat, I would've gotten their dessert called Wilber's Sundae, which had cinnamon pork rinds and candied bacon atop bourbon praline ice cream.  Oh. My. God.  No one else was brave enough to try it, darn them.  How can a vaguely-vegetarian person live vicariously through others if they won't order the dessert with cinnamon pork rinds?!?!  Oh, the humanity!!!  ;)

I met a dear pal from undergrad for breakfast the next morning.  She drove me to a place I'd heard about from a lot of people, but since our work crowd didn't have a car, I didn't think I'd get to try it.  Hooray for college pals with cars!  Lynn's Paradise Cafe has been featured on the Food Network several times, apparently.  Bobby Flay has done a couple of 'throwdowns' there, but I haven't seen those episodes.  I'll have to keep my eyes open for them.  The restaurant is adorable and quirky, with a very fun menu.  There are disco balls, and really fun lamps all around.  I liked it there.  Of course, I became the boring one and just ordered eggs with biscuits, because I love me some biscuits and can never get them in NYC.  I also ordered a side dish of fried apples.  YUM.   Thumbs way up for the food and for the fun shop attached to the restaurant.  I bought some souvenirs, along with a tiara cookie cutter for myself!  Look for some tiara-shaped cookies in the near future...

We snuck out and got some pizza for lunch at Impellizzeri's.  The pizza was ok, nothing special.  We ordered the thin crust pizza, but the crust wasn't really very thin.  I'd hate to see what the regular crust pie looked like.  Their sweet tea was quite good, though, as were their breadsticks.  Tons of butter and garlic - just the way I like them. 

[OK, you're thinking that all we did was eat, right?  Not really - we also saw a lot of plays. :) ]

For dinner, I made a reservation for our group at a nice place called Proof on Main.  It's inside a very funky hotel and art museum.  There's something to look at everwhere you turn.  Even the trip to the bathroom is an experience.  The restaurant has a very nice cocktail list, but I couldn't decide which one I wanted, so I got a glass of falanghina.  It was delicious.  Even though we had had pizza just a few hours earlier, I went ahead and ordered the soft shell crab for dinner.  It was DELICIOUS!  It was fried in a light tempura, on top of gnocchi, mushy peas and a carrot reduction.  I really loved it.  It was light and yummy and didn't make me feel full at all.  Everyone seemed to like Proof, so I'm glad I picked it.  Their dessert menu wasn't anything to write home about, though, so we didn't try any.  Again, next time.

Oh, and to end the evening, we went to the Maker's Mark Bourbon Bar.  I had my first mint julep, which was yum yummy.  If I hadn't had to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning, I would've had two.  :)  The trip was a lot of fun, both theater-wise and food-wise.  I'm looking forward to heading back to Louisville next year.  To end, I'll add some Louisville-local-flavor photos.  Enjoy...

2012 Humana Fest, Part One - the shows

I spent last weekend in Louisville, KY, for the Humana Festival of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  We went for work to the Industry Professionals Weekend.  It's a whirlwind weekend, seeing all of the shows in the festival, along with the one-acts, in two days.  Whew!  It's a marathon, but ultimately so fun and worthwhile.  It's nice to see so many industry people in one place, plus it's gratifying that the local folks are so excited about new plays and new play production.  It is always a very uplifting weekend.

I'm happy to report that the shows this year, on the whole, were much more interesting and exciting to me than in the past.  I thought there was more of an eclectic point of view, with different stories that I hadn't seen before.  The acting, directing and design were again top notch.

I think my favorite play was Lisa Kron's The Veri**on Play.  It was certainly the most fun.  Lisa has put together a script dealing with the craziness of modern life, especially the growing impersonal aspect to customer service.  Everything she went through was completely recognizable, from the wackadoodle procedures of foreign ATMs and wireless phone company's customer service representatives.  The play is realistic, yet also a complete farce, with chase scenes, one actor playing identical twins (even in the same scene!), maniacal CEOs and an oddball support group.  I laughed a lot and also found some stuff to think about.  The original music by Jeanine Tesori is terrific, too.  I'm sure the show will have a future life (I saw a couple of NYC producers at the performance).  The script could maybe be trimmed a bit in the middle, but, all in all, thumbs way up from me.

I also enjoyed How We Got On, by Idris Goodwin.  It tells a story completely unknown to me about the beginnings of rap in Detroit, through two kids in a suburb, trying to get on the tv show Yo MTV Raps.  The performers were fantastic, especially the gal playing the DJ.  There was just a lot of verve, excitement and fun in this piece.  It was the last play we saw, and although I was tired, it woke me up and kept me fully engaged throughout.  I really liked it.  I think this play and Lisa Kron's play were my favorites.

Death Tax, by Lucas Hnath, was our first play.  I enjoyed it a great deal as well, though I think the last scene could use some work.  The characters were really well-developed and the dialogue was realistic and interesting.  The use of repetition was particularly well-done.  I remember seeing a Law and Order episode about sort of the same topic and found it really interesting.  This point-of-view about the subject matter was really interesting, too.  The play was a great start to our weekend.

Next we saw Eat Your Heart Out by Courtney Baron.  I really liked it, too, though, again, I feel some trimming could really help.  Here we have a modern story about how everyone's life touches everyone else.  We've certainly seen this kind of story, but I thought this one was done well, using contemporary references like online dating, international adoption and teenage angst to good effect.  The actors were really great in this piece, too.  They all hit the right notes, from the humor to the pathos.  There was a nice balance and I was very engaged (I thought I knew the way the play was headed and I was so upset, but then it went someplace else, which was a relief).

The other two full-lengths, The Hour of Feeling by Mona Mansour, and Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboard by Greg Kotis, were less successful for me.  The former needed more dramatic conflict for me to be fully engaged.  I did enjoy the premise and the actors very much, plus the lighting and sound design were first-rate, but the way the story played out just didn't grab me.  I'm sure it's my problem and not the play's, because the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.  Using poetry as a metaphor for politics is very provocative and I do wish the play had revealed itself to me.  Oh, and the lead actor is my new boyfriend.  Yay.  I'm sure he's thrilled.  :)

The Greg Kotis piece was just not my cup of tea at all, which is not his fault at all.  It was a satire/farce about cannibalism.  So, if you know me at all, you know I was out as soon as the cannibalism was revealed.  When a play contains either vampires, pedophiles, serial killers, big bugs or cannibals--NO STOMACH FOR IT.  I spent a lot of the play with my eyes closed.  But, again, the rest of the audience was really digging it.  So...take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

The 10-minute plays were fun, though they didn't seem to be extraspecial to me.  The intern piece, Oh Gastronomy, was hit or miss, with more hits than misses.  It had over 25 little vignettes, all dealing with food.  I will say that if you have a play where baking brownies is done on-stage and the audience can smell it, you should really pass out brownies to eveyone.  Thank you.

To sum up, I'm very glad I went to Humana this year.  I'm happy to say that the plays' subject matter was more compelling to me than in year's past.  The new artistic director will begin putting his stamp on the festival beginning next year, so I look forward to what he brings to the table.

Tomorrow:  the food of Louisville... ;)