#1
Posted: 1/1/18 at 10:10pm
Anyone catch the first preview? I'm a big "Happy Endings" fan, so I'd be interested in checking it out.
#2
Posted: 1/1/18 at 11:45pm
First preview is January 9, so we still have about a week. I, too, am interested in this one.
#3
Posted: 1/2/18 at 1:48pm
Oh my bad. For some reason I thought the sign said the first! #cannotsee
#4
Posted: 1/10/18 at 7:57am
Any reports from last night?
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#6
Posted: 1/11/18 at 7:05am
I'm sure that's real helpful, Ice-T.
There's a pretty negative short review over on the other site, for anyone interested.
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#7
Posted: 1/12/18 at 11:34pm
Negative is a very appropriate word. Frankly I thought this was awful.
I immediately thought of this as a poor-man’s SWEAT. It deals with a crumbling factory town and mayor (Adam Pally) and his friend (Anna Chlumsky) who has an idea to (literally) paint the town red as a way to draw tourism back to the town. Needless to say this does not quite go as planned.
I won’t give away all of the twists and turns here (if you can call them that), but there are a large amount of subplots regarding racism, conceal and carry (??) and more. Essentially, it’s all overstuffed, that feels at once overwhelming, but at the end of the 95 minutes, not very satisfying.
I was somewhat disappointed in Adam Pally sadly. As a big fan of Happy Endings I was looking forward to seeing him onstage, but I feel he is mismatched to his character and mostly comes across as stiff and wooden. Anna Chlumsky is a delight and has some nice chemistry with Pally in the first scene, but it feels like her character is constantly being re-written for the rest of the play. Poor Becky Ann Baker is sadled with an underwritten character that did little to engage me.
The set is a bit clunky (and largely monochromatic) and frankly the play could have lost 20 minutes in scene changes alone.
Sadly this is a clunker. The audience was pretty tepid in their response. You know you are in trouble when the biggest response of the night when approximately an hour into the play, the lady behind me said, “Oh it’s the girl from Veep! It’s been driving me crazy!”
#8
Posted: 1/22/18 at 7:40pm
We saw this on Saturday, took advantage of the "2 for 1" tix @ $69/each, bought a few days prior, as there really weren't many other options on or off B'way for Saturday, and we were in town for Hangmen that night (Excellent!). We've always done well at 2nd Stage, and figured we'd give this a shot.
The first hour of this had potential. The story had promise, the cast was decent (although I agree that Pally was kind of wooden), and the sets were OK. The last half hour just went nowhere. The ending was one of those "I guess this time the lights went off because it's over" kind of endings, with a little bit of applause, but only half hearted. Nothing was settled, no lessons were learned, nobody learned anything or had any fun or anything. It's as if the playwrite had a deadline and just quickly wrote the last 20 pages to fill an order or something, without giving it much thoughts.
#9
Posted: 1/22/18 at 11:11pm
It was not good. I love Adam Pally but I agree with everyone else. The play seemed to play into unnecessary stereotypes and then tried to address them in way that called out those stereotypes but it didn't work and I was a little bit offended (I am usually offended by nothing). I have a lot of questions about what purpose a lot of the plot points and characters served but I have a feeling there is no answer. Eugene Young was the best person in the cast, in my opinion, and he has a fairly small part.
I left feeling uncomfortable and confused in a bad way, not a "hmm this gives me a lot to process and think about" way.
I left feeling uncomfortable and confused in a bad way, not a "hmm this gives me a lot to process and think about" way.
#10
Posted: 1/23/18 at 12:13am
Yet another one of those off-kilter, scattershot pieces that for some inexplicable reason seem to capture the fancy of our repertory companies. This one isn't as painful as the most egregious examples of the genre, but it isn't very good either. Frankly, I've had quite my fill of the whole lot of them.
In this, a pushy urban planner convinces a nebbishy mayor to paint the business district of his town cardinal red in order to revitalize the place. How this sad sack of an individual could be the mayor of any place other than a miniature electric train village is one of the many questions this play fails to answer satisfactorily.
Updated On: 1/23/18 at 12:13 AM
#11
Posted: 1/28/18 at 11:08am
I'm looking at catching this one (despite everyone's reviews..lol). Anyone know the run time?
#13
Posted: 1/30/18 at 1:34am
Awful. Boring. Pointless. I don’t know why this was produced. Messy and meandering script. Bad design. Bad direction. I don’t know why we needed so many secondary characters or subplots or why every man in town was into this particularly woman.
#14
Posted: 2/6/18 at 11:19pm
I absolutely hated this, 90 minutes felt like a lifetime. I honestly can't remember the last play I saw where the characters were so insufferable. I wish there was an intermission after the first 45 minutes so I could have gotten my stuff and fled. There was so much happening in this play that went absolutely nowhere, nothing had a resolution and each scene seemed so disjointed from the next. I can usually find at least something positive in every play I see (even the bad ones) but here I am stumped.
#15
Posted: 2/6/18 at 11:28pm
Agreed. Who reads this sh*t and passes it on? So many worthy playwrights.
#16
Posted: 2/16/18 at 8:57am
This was absolutely terrible. It's dramatically inert, nothing is fleshed out or makes any sense, and Anna Chlumsky's character is absolutely insufferable. I don't recommend this to anyone. What was 2nd Stage thinking?
A little swash, a bit of buckle - you'll love it more than bread.
#17
Posted: 2/16/18 at 9:13am
This play hints at lots of good ideas but doesn't give any of them actual substance. Immigrants moving (and possibly restoring the economy) an old rust belt town? White guilt as a result of this? Crippling debt? Young politicians? All interesting ideas that went nowhere. Plus, Anna Chlumsky's character being truly insufferable. Adam Pally's was pretty bad too, but at least he had a few good jokes.
The playwright was like "oh we've got hundreds of ideas in the play, but we have to end it! Let's throw in a gun!" Give me a break... Thank god I only paid $30 for this.
Updated On: 2/16/18 at 09:13 AM
#18
Posted: 2/16/18 at 9:36am
Eek. I love the cast and was thinking of catching the matinee on Wednesday. Now you guys are making me rethink that decision.
Anyone know if Adam or Anna come out to stage door after the matinee?
Anyone know if Adam or Anna come out to stage door after the matinee?
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