Coraline: Preview Thoughts

Anyone else feel free to post your thoughts on this thread.

I saw the performance yesterday - Sunday. First off Rondi Reed was in the audience, so that was kind of cool, but anyways, onto the show....

Jane H. is giving a marvelous performance. She's so spot on as a child that I never once thought, "Why is this old lady standing up here pretending to be a child." She captured the essence of a precocious youngster perfectly. I'd say see the show for her performance alone.

The show as a whole was interesting. It wasn't a typical musical, but the way they incorporated all the music made from found objects was very interesting and it totally worked. The story sort of dragged for me and there were moments when the 100mins felt like 8 hours but when it worked, it really worked. The "theater is fun" moment was great. I think the show could have been aided by a company with a bigger budget. It really needed some sort of scene change or "stage magic" to capture us, but their were some great directing moments like with the "falling" part.

The set was interesting. It has signs of "Spring Awakening," which is kind of surprising for this show. But it works. Although, I'm not sure what the significance of all the pianos is? Maybe I missed that line?

I liked the book of the show a lot. I thought he captured the smart alecky nature of a child perfectly and I loved how some of the lines were used to indict place like "Now I'm outside." It was kind of funny and it worked perfectly given their budget and design scheme.

The only person I didn't care for was the book writer playing "The Other Mother." Nothing he did really worked for me. He seemed to give off this air that what was he was doing was marvelous, but it wasn't. He just didn't have that OOMF to make the part work for me. This might be weird, but he kept a lot of spit in his mouth, so a lot of his lines came off with some slur or something. And he gives this random speech in the middle of the show that doesn't work at all. And his falling bit, is a little bit long, and the joke doesn't quite land, but I'm sure that will be fixed. I wish they had put him on stilts or something because Jane is essentially taller and bigger than him, so I wasn't afraid for Coraline for a minute. She could have punched him and ran.

Any other thoughts?

There wasn't a song list in the program. The songs weren't really "songs." Most weren't more than a minute or two. It's kind of hard to explain. It's more experimental than I was expecting, but really interesting and the music was very well thought out.

And yeah the playbill is actually really cool it in its starkness. MCC is smart with the way they do their playbills. They don't do color playbills, but their black and white playbills always look sort of stylish and whatnot.

But the Lucille Lortel is such an ugly space. I can't imagine something like "Reasons to Be Pretty" in that theater.

No, I know that! But, I'd expect a set designer to be able to design other things besides a brick wall with neon lights!