I posted this elsewhere, but here it is again...
The show is glossy, well-performed, and well-produced. The lights went on and off efficiently. The performers do their best.
It is not based on the Todd Solondz film of the same name. It is about a group of New Yorkers trapped on a subway car who find out that they are all dead, and have about 90 minutes to choose which moment of sublime happiness from their pasts they want to spend eternity in.
No, really, that's the plot. And it doesn't exactly get any better: the characters are a batch of cliches, and by time the show is over we know everything the creators of the show want us to know about them: there's a hyperactive interracial couple (she's Asian, he's Jewish), a gay black man (two birds with one stone there, he's also an interior decorator, believe it or not), an Ann Coulterish radio host, a heartless lawyer, an hispanic bike messenger, a female fashion-industry wannabe, and some old lady in a wheelchair. There's also the train conductor who has, of course, His Own Tale to share with us.
It isn't bad enough that they're all dead. They have to have a little group therapy session, too. And we have to watch. Intelligent design my ass.
The show is easy New Age type pablum, the kind that I'm surprised made it onto a stage at all. And the sentimentality of the proceedings masks some really icky moments. The gay character decides to spend his eternity at the deathbed of his AIDS-afflicted lover, while the Conservative Bitch character (played beautifully by the sublime Joanna Gleason who can get laughs out of thin air) chooses to spend eternity blowing Mick Jagger in a 60s club. The absolute tastelessness of this choice on the part of the show's creators just beggars description, and I'm going to have to take a minute to put down exactly why it pisses me off so thoroughly.
No character ever comes alive as anything other than a stereotype. We aren't given real people here, just a batch of ciphers with assorted tics that make them identifiable as Comic Relief Over-Sexed Latino Guy, Mean Ann Coulter Bitch With A Well-Disguised Liberal Past, and most unforgivably, for me at least, the Big Cuddly Gay Buddha. As played by Ken Page, he's a big pudgy black man whose testosterone seems to have called it quits after producing that lovely baritone voice. He's quick with a one-liner but still completely unthreatening, even allowing the Conservative Bitch character to get the last word in a way that no self-respecting 'mo would ever do. Seriously, I started to expect him to call people "honeychile." As noted, the creators would have me believe, that this character chooses as his Eternal Happy Time what seem to be his last moments with his dying lover. The Conservative Bitch Lady reveals that she was once (gasp!) a LIBERAL, and finally settles on a specific election night (the night Eugene McCarthy lost) when she went to drown her sorrows at a 60s nightclub and wound up in a bathroom stall giving head to Mick Jagger (we know it is the 60s because of the suddenly psychedelic lighting and the bellbottoms the chorus suddenly appear in). After some misgivings, she gives in and reverts to her youthful wild freedom loving self and runs off to enjoy a joyful happy eternity for a woman who has spent so much of her life being, on the evidence the play supplies us with, a woman even Ann Coulter would think was too damn mean.
So there you have it. The gay guy gets an eternal vigil at the deathbed of an eternally dying loved one, the conservative bitch gets an eternal celebration of freedom, the freedoms she herself would deny to others.
Now this might work, if it felt like any serious legit examination of different ideas of happiness were actually going on, rather than the mere coughing-up of tired cliché material. But there's nothing like that here. The AIDS- patient is wheeled on, tears are jerked, and he's wheeled off again to make room for the next bit of poorly written psycho-drama to unfold.
The show blows. It blows CHUNKS.
There's more to it of course. Some elements from Albert Brooks' DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (some really outrageously contrived stuff about second chances, god forgive them all) remain.
It can't be a surprise to anyone that I disliked this show. It is just nothing like my cup of tea, and I can respect that folks are going to like it. If I'm going to have to deal with dramatic visions of death, I'll take the revival of Ionesco's brilliant EXIT THE KING, which makes this HAPPINESS drivel look like the well, the drivel it is. The oblivion into which Rush's King Berenger disappears is far more interesting and feels far more truthful, than anything on display in this musical parade of crap.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick
My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/
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