Theater Review: “Romeo + Juliet: The Jellicle Ball” Sashays Its Way to Broadway; Grover’s Corners Retain Its Power in Latest “Our Town” and “The Big Gay Jamboree” is a Big Gay Romp Off-Broadway

Romeo + Juliet (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Broadway: Romeo + Juliet 
At Circle in the Square Theatre 

A big welcome to what I’m dubbing Romeo + Juliet: The Jellicle Ball to Broadway. Unlike many revivals that highlight the playwright’s name (Arthur Miller’s Death of Salesman, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog), William Shakespeare seems more like a jumping-off point than the author of this energetic, youthful production by the deconstructionist and busy director Sam Gold. Gold’s adaptation feels like a high school senior’s dissertation of the play that focuses on odd moments (the nurse’s monologue about her child) and totally disregards bigger moments (like the fight with Paris at the end of the play) to fix his thesis. This would be fatal if it wasn’t obvious from the start that this production was less about the text and more of the spirit of two households whose feud trickles down to their children, all of high school age, where animosity and hatred are well-worn jackets. 

Film Reviews: “Memoir of a Snail” Is an Inventive and Heart-wrenching Animated Film for Adults, While “High Tide” and “We Live in Time” Give Their Respective Love Stories Some Gravitas

Memoir of a Snail (c) IFC Films

Review: Memoir of a Snail 
In Cinemas 

If I were to take a stand and declare Adam Elliot’s stop-motion Memoir of a Snail as the best animated film of 2024, then I would have to battle fans of Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot, of which there are many. I concede that Robot does indeed have the better animation, with its dueling glorious nature vistas and a vision of a tech-dominated world, but Snail, painstakingly rendered in a somewhat bleaker animated vision, has the better story. Like Elliot’s remarkable earlier films, the Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet and the underrated feature Mary and Max, Snail centers around an imperfect protagonist. Her name is Grace (a wonderful Sarah Snook, channeling the cadence of Hannah Gadsby), an Australian woman who, at the start of the film, mourns the loss of a friend and, as tradition, releases one of her pet snails into the garden while narrating her life up to this point. Her mother died in childbirth and her father is a failed, alcoholic street magician, so her only lifeline is her brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who would do anything, as when he is asked as a young boy to give blood to save his sister and he says yes, even though he believes he would have to die in order to do so. This kind of charming kids’ logic is pervasive throughout the film, especially when the siblings are separated, and Gilbert goes to live with a religious family and Grace goes to a couple whose extracurricular activities are too delicious to spoil here. Their separate journeys and occasional letters to each other make up the bulk of the film, both full of heartache and strife but always with a hint of (possibly pointless) optimism. Along with Elliot’s inventive animated vision, the film’s biggest assets have to be the quirky but always engaging score by Elena Kats-Chernin and the vocal performance of Snook (Emmy-winner for Succession), which, like the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mary, is both heartbreaking and joyful. Other outstanding voice performances include the invaluable Jacki Weaver and a smooth Eric Bana. Elliot also does not shy away from the darker aspects of human existence (Grace’s relationship with snails may be a symptom of a more serious underlying condition), so it is definitely not a children’s animated film. But in the battle between the slick Robot and the scrappy Snail, I believe the snail wins this year’s animated race by a slow, but wide, slimy mile. 

Theater Reviews: Writers Struggle With Integrity in “McNeal” (Novelist), “Safety Not Guaranteed” (Journalist) and “Yellow Face” (Playwright)

Yellow Face (c) Joan Marcus

Broadway: Yellow Face 
At the Todd Haimes Theatre 

Playwright David Henry Hwang has written for different genres from opera (Alice in Wonderland, The Fly) to musicals (Tarzan, Aida), usually adapted from various mediums. For his own personal works, the medium he adapts from his own life. Like his last musical, Soft Power, in Yellow Face, which is having a splashy Broadway revival after premiering Off-Broadway in 2007, the main character is DHH, and even if the story may veer into the fictional, it always seems to be inspired by real events in Hwang’s life. There are two major events in Yellow Face, and if you look at the playwright’s Wikipedia page, they did happen: Hwang (played with quizzical fun by Daniel Dae Kim) was one of the major players in the 1990 Asian American actors protest of Caucasian actor Jonathan Price playing an Eurasian man in the musical Miss Saigon and how that brouhaha lead to him writing his play Face Value, which was a flop, closing before it opened on Broadway. What isn’t as well known is that the actor cast as the Asian lead in the Boston try-out of Face Value was a white man named Marcus G. Dahlman (Ryan Eggold, in full clueless mode), which would be quite the egg on DHH’s face if it comes to light. 

Theater Reviews: Four Engaging Off-Broadway Musicals Deal With Varied Themes Like Revenge (“Medea: Re-Versed”), Faith (“See What I Wanna See”), Children (“That Parenting Musical”) and Musical Theater Itself (“Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song”)

Medea Re-Versed (c) Carol Rosegg

Theater: Medea: Re-Versed 
At the Sheen Center Frank Shiner Theatre 

For us New Yorker theatergoers, we probably take for granted the caliber of our acting community. But every once in a while, a production takes an audience’s collective breath away with how a company of actors can blow our minds when we least expect it. At first, I assumed The Red Bull Theater and Bedlam’s production of Medea: Re-Versed would be the umpteenth reimagining of Euripides' play in which the vengeful Medea wreaks havoc on her cheating husband by (a 2,500-year spoiler alert) killing everyone he holds dear. But walking into the Shiner Theatre to three musicians (Siena D'Addario, Melissa Mahoney and Mark Martin) slowly strumming and beat-bopping at a hum level was intriguing, and by the time the show actually starts with the rap verse intro by the leader of the chorus (a charming Luis Quintero), we are hooked, especially when he reminds us “ya’ll the kind of people who came here to see a tragedy.” Luis Quintero's adaptation is full of fourth-wall breaking comments like these (especially when he warns us at the start about audience participation). 

The Interested Bystander’s Oscar Predictions: September 2024

The Room Next Door (c) Sony Pictures Classics

It’s that time of year again. Award season? No. Predicting award season? You betcha. Most of the names below will not be familiar to you unless you went to or followed closely to the film festivals this year. From Sundance and Cannes to Toronto and Telluride, these films got good reviews, got picked up for distribution (except one) and will be released before the end of the year. I am basing all my predictions to those reviews and if the films will fit into the Academy’s taste. I have some wish-dicting, too, since we’re still early in the process. I mean, Aubrey Plaza in My Old Ass has the problem that no one has it on their radar, but it would be great for Plaza to get an Oscar nomination. And if you think the title might turn people off, what about Nightbitch, the new Amy Adams movie? Other films are about a prostitute, the Catholic Church, incarcerated criminals, Bob Dylan and the Witches of Oz. 

Enjoy.