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Thursday, June 21, 2007
‘The Jammer’ @ Dad’s Garage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “The Jammer” Grade: B-
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Through July 14. $9-$24. Dad’s Garage, 280 Elizabeth St., Atlanta. 404-523-3141, dadsgarage.com.
The verdict: Roller derby play captures the hard-knock nature of life.
On the surface, Jack Lovington appears to be a bumbling fool. But there is poetry in his soul — and a trinity of conflicts piercing his heart.
There’s his girlfriend, Aurora. He thinks she’s beautiful, but his acquaintances call her “dog face” and wince at the sight of her photograph. There’s the Catholic Church, which has become an anchor for this orphan who works in a cardboard factory and moonlights as a taxi driver. And there’s his new love, which is fast pulling him away from his more sacred motives. Jack, as he confesses to his parish priest in the opening moments of “The Jammer,” has been Shanghaied by the thrill of roller derby, and he is about to embark on a journey that will take him far from his Brooklyn comfort zone.
Jack’s dilemma is the central premise of playwright Rolin Jones’ “five-stridin’ valentine” to skating, which Dad’s Garage is staging as “a violently funny roller derby drama.” To its credit, the production finds resident ham Tim Stoltenberg as Jack, a character who brings to mind Ignatius Reilly, the outrageous wiener vendor in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Ridiculous to the extreme, Jones’ play is a prototypical tale of initiation in which a naif character goes on a ramble to discover the world and in the process acquires his education.
True to form, director Kate Warner reaches for the most lunatic and depraved impulses of the ’50s-era script, with its procession of eccentrics: salty-tongued derby competitors, fast-talking sports announcers, desperado skating impresarios and dysfunctional clerics. When it comes to vomit, venereal disease and violence, nothing is off limits here. So if you’re thinking of taking your young skating aficionados to this show, you’ve been dutifully warned.
“The Jammer” is scabrous, hard-core, fascinating and funny.
The skating sequences are vintage Dad’s shtick: a combination of nimble actor-athletes and cardboard cutouts that get moved around by ensemble extras. It’s also chock-full of good performances that luxuriate in the essential weirdness of the material: Luis Hernandez as pigeon-petting Father Domingo, Randy Havens as commentator Bert Fineberg, Tiffany Morgan as femme fatale Lindy Batello and Enoch King as derby boss Lenny Ringle.
Unfortunately, some of the New York patois and ethnic dialects are a jumble of indecipherable speech. As much as you enjoy this 90-minute show, you may also find yourself wondering if the nuances aren’t buried in the collision of jokes and outsize showmanship. A little more restraint would heighten the emotional contours of this see-sawing comedic adventure.
Jones, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” is a virtuosic and original storyteller who seems as interested in the quiet questioning of the heart as the cacophony of nonsense that exists in the outside realm. A roller-derby rink may not be the most obvious place to conduct an investigation of grace. But as it turns out, skating is a nifty metaphor for the rough physics of life. Soaring, falling, then getting up again.
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THIS WEEK, WENDELL PICKS A MOVIE: “ShowBusiness”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MOVIE REVIEW
“ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway” Grade: B+
Documentary. Directed by Dori Berinstein. Rated PG for language and some sexual references. At Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema. 1 hour, 42 minutes.
The verdict: Bright lights, big drama. A delectable trip down Broadway.
Hindsight is 20-20 irony in Dori Berinstein’s new documentary about the 2003-2004 Broadway season. Take that choice moment when a pair of unknown musical-theater writers greet Boy George as he sneaks a cig outside the stage door of Rosie O’Donnell’s $10 million bomb, “Taboo.”
One of the young composers is star-struck by the flamboyant ’80s personality. Boy George, done up in ridiculous drag for his performance as club creature Leigh Bowery, is polite but slightly tuned out, so he barely notices when his fans mention they have their own little Broadway show playing down the street.
That would be “Avenue Q,” the naughty “Sesame Street” sendup that scored a Tony Award for best musical, even as “Taboo” went up in flames without a single Tony but with all the bitterness, backbiting and controversy that typify the Rosie touch.
For “ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway,” Berinstein couldn’t have picked a juicier or more important year to follow with a camera. Besides “Taboo” and “Avenue Q,” the film also chronicles with admirable objectivity the expensive commercial hit “Wicked” and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s lovely but static “Caroline, or Change.”
While the “Wicked” producers boast about their $1 million-a-week box office during the brutal cold of winter, you can see them literally get fatter and fatter. And even the critics predict the “Wizard of Oz” back story will be a shoo-in for best musical, a la “Hairspray” and “The Producers.”
But the victory of the quirky puppet show “Avenue Q” over the jaw-dropping spectacle “Wicked” was a watershed moment that paved the way for unlikely hits such as “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and this year’s sexually explicit “Spring Awakening,” which won the Tony for best musical.
“ShowBusiness” had no agenda but to record a straight-up account of the drama-within-the-drama, and the piece is a valentine to theater geeks everywhere.
Insiders will eat it up, even if there’s not a whole lot of new information, and savor such revelatory moments as Kristin Chenoweth saying she wants to be green like her “Wicked” co-star Idina Menzel — or Alan Cumming explaining to a fortuneteller who Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is. “Did he die?” the clueless clairvoyant says of the “Raisin in the Sun” lead actor, suggesting that not everyone follows showbiz like showbiz people do.
The camera catches it all: Director George C. Wolfe getting snippy with a child actor during a “Caroline” rehearsal. Boy George saying he had to restrain himself from punching out New York Post theater writer Michael Riedel, whom we get to see in perpetual gadfly mode. “Caroline” star Tonya Pinkins staging a comeback after losing custody of her children. “Taboo” star Euan Morton sporting a Scottish flag under his kilt on Tony night — and looking beaten-up and teary after the show closes prematurely.
But at the end of the day, the billion-dollar Broadway industry wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans if it weren’t for the fans. Live theater inspires the same magic, intensity and fanaticism as sports.
It may be hard to muster much excitement over “Wicked” producers Marc Platt and David Stone’s showing up at a CD signing to announce how their numbers “just keep climbing and climbing.” But there’s something about the red-faced blond boy choking back tears as he queues up to get autographs from the “Wicked” cast that you just can’t shake. Now that’s an indelible image. That’s what it’s all about, kid. That’s show business.
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