The Official Ace Musical Thread- Page 4

[somuchtodo]

Posted: 8/31/08 at 3:09pm

How was last nite?
Updated On: 10/21/08 at 03:09 PM

[musicalmaster703]

Posted: 8/31/08 at 3:40pm

Can't stop listening to the demo

[jordangirl]

Posted: 8/31/08 at 10:28pm

Last night and both shows today were amazing. :) It's stabilized a lot even just in three shows. I think it's finally found its voice. :)

Updated On: 10/26/08 at 10:28 PM

[DianaSLamar]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 1:09am

Hey guys who are unsure of the show....check out the spot on youtube.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKhjLf238YE

It's AMAZING.

[massofmen]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 2:38am

this looks horrendous. The lead guy can barely sing.

[bwayfan4ever2]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 4:23am

Thought the boy sounded good. That's about it.

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 9:20am

Ok, we all know I love this show, but...

Trust me...this is definitely a show that cannot be summed up in a 3 and a half minute youtube clip. It's a journey with some twists and turns that you have to watch unfold to really get it.

And I don't know who you're referring to, but Dalton Harrod, the little boy, is really the "lead guy" and he is amazing.

But anyway...

Updated On: 9/1/08 at 09:20 AM

[massofmen]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 12:14pm

not the little boy,
the guy who is standing on a high platform with flight gear on "singing".

[exedore]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 1:32pm

That would be Jim Stanek having an incredibly off performance. The man can sing, for the record - he was totally awesome in Jacques Brel and did the best that was possible with what he was given in Lestat.

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/1/08 at 8:37pm

I had no speakers in the hotel so I couldn't hear. But yeah, he was having a very off night. And he's not the lead guy. Really the kid is the primary character throughout the show. Jim's in parts of the first act and a couple of places in the second, but he's usually much better than that.

The funny thing is, there are already some changes from that promo reel. LOL.

[Sigma60]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 9:32am

I saw "Ace" on Friday night. I'm not going to critique the details of the show since it's still in previews. I would like to comment on the overall premise of the musical, though, since that's something beyond changing.

"Ace" is one of the most contrived musicals I have ever seen. What kind of mother would believe it is best for a son to think his father just abandoned him? What kind of mother, when faced with the potential of losing custody forever unless she acts quickly, would delay addressing the situation while doing investigative journalism? Why tell the story in bits and pieces? Does she really think that her ten year old son needs witnesses and documentary evidence to believe her?

This is the kind of musical you can only enjoy if you don't think about it too much (or at all). I mean, the timelines don't make sense. Because the writer needs the son to be a child of a WWI casualty and be persuaded to join the military because of Pearl Harbor, that means he didn't get his degree in 5 1/2 years of college. Further, the son manages to get married, enlist, do basic training, flight training, and then arrive in China in just over three months? Plus, the big conflict between wanting to build airplanes versus fly them is artificial. Lots of people involved in designing aircraft in that era were also pilots (e.g., Howard Hughes).

Not everyone needs logic in their lives, and there are some great performances by talented professionals in this show. Still, even in you aren't consciously thinking about all of these factors, I think at some level the artificiality of the premise does impact the experience and undermine the show for many fans. These are considerations that aren't going to be easily fixed by adding a number or rewriting a scene.

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 12:47pm

What kind of mother would believe it is best for a son to think his father just abandoned him? What kind of mother, when faced with the potential of losing custody forever unless she acts quickly, would delay addressing the situation while doing investigative journalism? Why tell the story in bits and pieces? Does she really think that her ten year old son needs witnesses and documentary evidence to believe her?

Trust me...there are a LOT of mothers who lie to their children about the circumstances of their birth, today as well as in the 40s and 50s when the show takes place (it is NOT modern-day, so you have to take that into account as well). They lie for various reasons ~ in an effort to protect them, in order for the mother to cope, sometimes just because they honestly think they have no other choice. I teach in the public schools and trust me, if you think what goes on there is outrageous, you don't even want to know.

In this particular case, you really saw the two examples of how wartime mothers dealt with their husband's deaths at the time. There were not the resources available now to those grieving a loss ~ at least not to the degree. The women tended to either a) idolize and worship the child, pushing the child to be as the father was (as you see with Ruth) or b) shut down and not let the child in, sometimes wanting nothing to do with them, often lying to them about their father (as we see in Elizabeth). In Elizabeth's case it's clear that she does not want to turn into Ruth. She saw what Ruth did to Charlie "Ace" and does not want to repeat that mistake, so she swings in the opposite direction.

As far as the investigation, in a way I think that was her way also of coping with what had happened. From the severity of her breakdown it's clear she never dealt with Charlie's death. By putting all the pieces together, and at this point she's probably told the other story so much she's forgotten them herself. And why in pieces? Because she was having to trace back as well. Better to have Danny get SOME communication from her rather than one fell swoop. And the witnesses and documents do provide evidence. I think she realized that he was going to be upset when he learned she'd lied to him about his father, and having that evidence DID in fact give him something to fall back on ~ if not then, then later ~ because as he says, she lied to him so why should he believe her.

I'm not advocating lying to children as a rule. Far from it. But I'm trying to explain how from a psychological standpoint, everything that happened in the show does make sense. It's not as contrived as you may think.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 12:48pm

Is Alice Ripley or Emily Skinner in this musical?

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 2:02pm

Emily.

And I have never said it's perfect. But. The basic elements are plausible and not uncommon for that time period.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 2:03pm

OK, I figured that's why you were posting books in these threads.

[somuchtodo]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 2:08pm

Emily Skinner is fabulous. Funny, flustered and touching as the foster mother of 'Danny'.

Sigma - The mother, Elizabeth (played by the wildly talented Jill Paice), was trying to protect her child from repeating the mistakes of the past. I didn't find the story unrealistic.


Also, 'Ace' left for the pacific before Pearl Harbor.

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 4:02pm

somuchtodo, he enlisted AFTER Pearl Harbor. That's when Ruth was telling him he didn't have a choice. The squadron he joined was over before Pearl Harbor, but he was in the university when it happened.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 4:35pm

Heads up!

Julianne Moore and Vanessa Redgrave To Star In Houston, Texas Revival Of THE RINK.

Bus trip from NYC only 28 hours. Get your tickets now!

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/2/08 at 6:20pm

Ha. Ha. Very funny Foster. What did I ever do to you?

Besides help you out with calling out some of the grammatical errors that pop up, that is. Occasionally at your request.

Updated On: 9/2/08 at 06:20 PM

[PK2]

Posted: 9/3/08 at 4:52pm

First, I was planning to see this show because I will be in DC in a couple weeks. After researching more, I just realized that Richard Oberacker is also the composer for the musical 'Journey to the west'.

Has anyone here, who like Ace: The New Musical, seen Journey to the west? I like to hear your opinion in term of the music.

I'm not sure that I will see ACE now because I did not like Journey to the west at all, especially the music, when I saw it at NYMF.
Updated On: 9/3/08 at 04:52 PM

[BumpwithBalloons]

Posted: 9/4/08 at 1:36am

Signature's 'Ace' Doesn't Earn Its Wings

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 4, 2008; Page C01
An aircraft will never reach the stratosphere if it takes on too much baggage. And neither, it seems, will a musical.

The instructive case in point is "Ace," Signature Theatre's new show about an angry kid and model airplanes and a long-absent father. And a mother who's tried to kill herself, and an angst-ridden foster couple, and a mystery involving grandma's diary and aerial combat and schoolyard bullying and wartime male-bonding and storytelling as a source of healing and flying as a metaphor for personal freedom and . . .

And, and, and. In concert with director Eric Schaeffer, composer Richard Oberacker and his lyrics-writing partner, Robert Taylor, have conceived a vehicle both pretty and pretty contrived. It's as if none of them could bring themselves to decide exactly what "Ace" was supposed to be about -- or maybe in the process of tweaking and tinkering, they simply lost track.

The venture certainly attracted the magnitude of acting and vocal talent that stamp a first-string Signature project, with the participation of the likes of Emily Skinner, Christiane Noll, Jill Paice and Jim Stanek. The smoothness in evidence is such that anyone contented with the glossy exteriors of inoffensive and well-sung musical drama might find that "Ace" fills the superficial bill. With some judicious trims, in fact, the aviation-themed "Ace" might be a candidate for long-term showcasing at a venue such as the Air and Space Museum.

But a slew of classy actors -- and a few strategic injections of schmaltz -- cannot disguise the show's shortcomings, its laboriously incremental plotting and a passel of characters too schematically rendered to be taken to heart. It's a measure of how hard it is to warm up to many of them that an audience falls so instantly and madly for a pint-sized actress named Angelina Kelly, playing the secondary role of playground busybody Emily.

Never mind that precocious little Angelina, in glasses that make her eyes look as large as plums, is preternaturally cute and funny. (Lucy, of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" fame, is doubtless in her future.) From the second she enters partway through Act 1, Angelina's character feels solidly, incontrovertibly alive. It helps that she's apportioned a comedy number, "Now I'm on Your Case," that allows her adorableness quotient to spike.



Skinner, seen to delightful effect last year in Signature's zesty "Witches of Eastwick," brings a becoming fragility to another supporting part: that of a woman of deep empathy desperate to be a mother. Notably, too, Noll, Paice, Stanek and Matthew Scott apply ear-pleasing lung power to Oberacker and Taylor's generic-sounding ballads and conversation-mimicking song fragments.

Unfortunately, though, many of the performances are pushed to the side in the relentless march of exposition. The setup is straightforward enough. In 1950s St. Louis, a distraught woman named Elizabeth (played by Paice) has tried to commit suicide. As a result, her agitated 10-year-old son, Danny (Dalton Harrod), has been taken from her by a well-meaning social worker (Florence Lacey) to live with a deserving local couple (Skinner and Duke Lafoon) who have been aching to adopt.

What follows puts the musical on a dubious, fitful course, in which the recovering Elizabeth traces the history of her own sadness by uncovering the diary of her now-dead mother-in-law (Noll). For reasons that might be baffling even to a forensic psychiatrist, Elizabeth decides to send, via the social worker, installments of the diary -- along with models of vintage planes -- to Danny so that he can learn the truth about his parents' early lives. Although why this information was withheld, and what the stories are supposed to offer to him, are not the kind of questions -- at least in "Ace" -- that usher in a whole lot of dynamic possibility.

The questions do, however, provide a rationale for elaborate flashbacks to earlier decades and the courtships of Danny's parents and grandparents, as well as to the combat heroics of Danny's granddad (Stanek) and father (Scott) -- the latter's nickname giving the show its title. Time is color-coded in "Ace"; while the palette of Robert Perdziola's '50s costumes is all shades of gray, the people in the past are decked out in such Necco-wafer colors as wintergreen and orange. (Possibly because to Danny, the history his mother slowly parcels out to him is far more intriguing than his present.)

Choreographer Karma Camp helps to ensure past and present commingle fluidly on Walt Spangler's clean, mechanistic set, dominated by a pair of towering steel structures that are meant, in "Ace's" cover-the-waterfront approach, to signify the soon-to-be-built Gateway Arch and the tails of fighter planes. A metal slab also rises center stage to become the cockpit of the grandfather's plane, from which Stanek belts the hummable Disney-movie-esque anthem, "In These Skies." (And on a balcony behind the stage sit the 13-member orchestra, expertly conducted by David Kreppel.)

As the unfolding events curlicue ever more digressively into the travails of relatives barely known to Danny -- who, by the way, is played with a disarming lack of affectation by Harrod -- the musical seems to travel further off course. Is this child really supposed to know how to absorb all this complicated data and curb his anger? (At one point in Act 2, we're taken in a bebop number even farther afield, to the campus where Elizabeth meets Ace and sings about her ambition to have a "nationally syndicated column." "Mencken! Winchell! Clemens and Pyle!," she sings, ticking off her journalistic idols.)

Somehow, we sense in Paice's other scenes that the spiritually broken Elizabeth never attained the distinction of distaff ink-stained wretch. Although it does seem she is a whiz at collating. Even so, as "Ace" demonstrates, an investment in organizational skills is no guarantee of producing a great story.

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 9/4/08 at 3:21am

I saw ACE at the Old Globe. It seems like it still needs some work, but I'm really rooting for them on this one. There's enough good material to make it an amazing show. I hope they can work out the kinks. Did they cut "Call Me Ace"? That would be pretty depressing. I noticed it's not listed on Theatrical Rights Worldwide, but neither is "Now I'm On Your Case" so I dunno what's going on with all the changes.
Updated On: 9/4/08 at 03:21 AM

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/4/08 at 4:24am

Yeah, "Call Me Ace" is not in there. Probably because it's not dream sequences anymore.

But "Now I"m On Your Case" definitely is ~ and it's adorable.

[musicalman2]

Posted: 9/4/08 at 7:33am

From the Post review, the show sounds messy, albeit with some apparently good performances.

Also sounds like the show needs massive revision, possible elimination of some characters or subplot to avoid being unwieldy.

Can anyone who has seen the show comment on what Peter Marks says. I am seeing the show next week so can't do that.

[jordangirl]

Posted: 9/4/08 at 7:53am

I saw it this weekend and did not find it to be as disjointed as he stated. From talking with cast, creative, and cast parents about what it was like earlier in the week, it almost sounds to me like he saw it before he was officially supposed to, because it did take a little while for it to "find its voice" from their reports.

I am not saying and have never said that it's a perfect show, it has its issues ~ specifically the scene/song on the university campus he mentions. It doesn't fit with the rest of the show, and when the two (Elizabeth has one and Charlie "Ace" has one) get combined, they really do not fit harmonically or metrically. But I definitely found it much more cohesive than he did. (And I also think Angelina deserves better than the backhanded compliment he gave her AND that Dalton is extremely believable as Danny, anger and all. Given that Marks found him to have a "lack of affectation", I would have to say Marks hasn't spent much time around emotionally disturbed kids because as I see them in my job every day, I can safely say Dalton nailed it.)

Now, I will stop before this becomes any more of a "book" as I've been accused of writing. Apparently some people don't understand that discussion happens with more than yes or no answers.

Updated On: 9/4/08 at 07:53 AM