#1
Posted: 12/24/08 at 1:42pm
My friend and I nabbed a pair of tickets to Boeing Boeing on TDF last week for last night’s performance (They were Balcony-Right, Row E for those curious). I immensely enjoyed the show, and after investigating the video preview available on BWW can say that (almost all of) the current replacement cast continues to convey these characters beautifully while the remaining OBC actors continue to grow in nuance and comedy.
Mark Rylance is who I am most referring to when I say “nuanced.” His Wisconsin accent and ho-hum attitude is so fabulously flat. From what I can tell, he has taken his character even further into the mundane. He actually reminded me very much of a Cirque du Soleil clown in the way he moped around the stage for his first few scenes of the show, very much like Slava’s clowns over at the Hayes. He has an amazing gift for timing and, especially in his scenes with Christine Baranski, can also hold the audience in the palm of his hands in moments of silences.
Ms. Baranski is hysterically sharp and exasperated in the role of Berthe. There’s not much to say here other than her sharp-tongued French-woman is fabulous and accurate! I’m dying 1000 deaths that I can’t see her as Charlotte in “A Little Night Music.”
Paige Davis was as bubbly as you would expect a former “Trading Spaces” host to be. She was shm-acting quite a bit which came off a bit awkward in the first scene, but her later scenes as the sultry temptress were hysterical.
Rebecca Gayheart was the revelation for me this evening. My only real memory of her acting would be in (edit) “Urban Legend” when she played the *spoiler* deranged killer (sorry to ruin the ending of a decade old C-horror movie folks) */spoiler.* Her Gabriela was outstanding. Having spent 4 months in Rome last spring, I can personally attest to the accuracy of her Italian woman. I especially loved in her first scene when she yelled at Robert like a fiery Italian, a fire I certainly witnessed there for myself.
Missi Pyle was, of course, outstanding. I have had a longstanding love affair with her ever since the fight scene in “Bringin’ Down The House” so I was excited to see her last night. She dove head first into extreme character-acting and brought the accent to such a heightened vernacular that it had my friend (who studied in Germany) and I in stitches.
The “almost all of the current replacement actors” clause from above unfortunately applies to Greg Germann. HEADACHE! I was so happy to see that he wasn’t around for the larger chunk of the middle of the play. His incessant howling and screaming throughout the first scenes were not only unrealistic, but obnoxious. Not that this comic farce really requires any sense of reality, but his uncontrolled screaming would have surely alerted the other fiancés, if not his neighbors, of what was going on. I just kept trying to picture in my head how Bradley Whitford would have delivered the lines. I was also trying to figure out where, from the text that was put in front of him, he would have derived such a delivery. I hope he has a good vocal coach because he will surely develop vocal nodes from simply screaming like that 8 shows a week.
Overall an side-splitting night at the theater that I was very happy to catch before going off the boards. Now I’ve got to find myself a bootleg of the London cast to see how things came off over there…
Mark Rylance is who I am most referring to when I say “nuanced.” His Wisconsin accent and ho-hum attitude is so fabulously flat. From what I can tell, he has taken his character even further into the mundane. He actually reminded me very much of a Cirque du Soleil clown in the way he moped around the stage for his first few scenes of the show, very much like Slava’s clowns over at the Hayes. He has an amazing gift for timing and, especially in his scenes with Christine Baranski, can also hold the audience in the palm of his hands in moments of silences.
Ms. Baranski is hysterically sharp and exasperated in the role of Berthe. There’s not much to say here other than her sharp-tongued French-woman is fabulous and accurate! I’m dying 1000 deaths that I can’t see her as Charlotte in “A Little Night Music.”
Paige Davis was as bubbly as you would expect a former “Trading Spaces” host to be. She was shm-acting quite a bit which came off a bit awkward in the first scene, but her later scenes as the sultry temptress were hysterical.
Rebecca Gayheart was the revelation for me this evening. My only real memory of her acting would be in (edit) “Urban Legend” when she played the *spoiler* deranged killer (sorry to ruin the ending of a decade old C-horror movie folks) */spoiler.* Her Gabriela was outstanding. Having spent 4 months in Rome last spring, I can personally attest to the accuracy of her Italian woman. I especially loved in her first scene when she yelled at Robert like a fiery Italian, a fire I certainly witnessed there for myself.
Missi Pyle was, of course, outstanding. I have had a longstanding love affair with her ever since the fight scene in “Bringin’ Down The House” so I was excited to see her last night. She dove head first into extreme character-acting and brought the accent to such a heightened vernacular that it had my friend (who studied in Germany) and I in stitches.
The “almost all of the current replacement actors” clause from above unfortunately applies to Greg Germann. HEADACHE! I was so happy to see that he wasn’t around for the larger chunk of the middle of the play. His incessant howling and screaming throughout the first scenes were not only unrealistic, but obnoxious. Not that this comic farce really requires any sense of reality, but his uncontrolled screaming would have surely alerted the other fiancés, if not his neighbors, of what was going on. I just kept trying to picture in my head how Bradley Whitford would have delivered the lines. I was also trying to figure out where, from the text that was put in front of him, he would have derived such a delivery. I hope he has a good vocal coach because he will surely develop vocal nodes from simply screaming like that 8 shows a week.
Overall an side-splitting night at the theater that I was very happy to catch before going off the boards. Now I’ve got to find myself a bootleg of the London cast to see how things came off over there…
Updated On: 12/24/08 at 01:42 PM
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