Was that shortest preview period ever! It just seemed like it opened yesterday!
Well I didn't want to get into it, but he's a Satanist.
Every full moon he sacrifices 4 puppies to the Dark Lord and smears their blood on his paino.
This should help you understand the score for Wicked a little bit more.
Tazber's: Reply to
Is Stephen Schwartz a Practicing Christian
"Farrow is familiar as a complex, long-time celebrity and thus has a persona one thinks one knows even though she’s acted only very rarely over the past decade. But at the Booth, you start to see that her main gift is exquisite control over everything: text, character, audience, the whole shooting match.
LuPone is Farrow’s co-star in “The Roommate,” a play I’ve seen twice before, once at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and later at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. It’s a simple structure. Farrow plays Sharon, a naive, divorced, 60ish woman who lives outside Iowa City and has decided to take a roommate to cut down on costs. In prior productions, Sharon was played as a traditional gee-whiz Midwesterner, more naive than most. Not this time. Farrow suggests from the start there is a lot more going on, locating this character somewhere between potluck suppers and the world of sister wives. And yet she still makes sure that you fear for her wellbeing at every moment."
"Though LuPone and Farrow remain compelling throughout, they are not done any favors by O’Brien’s heavy underlining. Sharon’s naïveté (she wonders whether Robyn, a vegan, can eat carrots) is pushed toward dopiness at the start; her disappointment toward pathos at the end. (But Farrow does pathos exceedingly well.) LuPone’s Robyn has the opposite trajectory, arriving in full dudgeon (and we know how well LuPone does dudgeon) yet departing with an unlikely lesson in her heart."
"Before the play begins, its title appears in pink block letters splashed across the back wall. When the play begins, its stars walk in side by side, and the big pink text on the wall changes to show us their names in capital letters almost as tall as they are: MIA FARROW & PATTI LUPONE. They half-smile politely. They receive applause. They leave. Lights up, music down, they come back, and the play gets going.
One could easily argue that O’Brien is simply dealing with the inevitable: People are going to clap for Mia and Patti, so let’s just get it over with. But it does matter. Because “let’s just get it over with” is no kind of first event. Nor is “clap for the celebrities.” If this drop of water reflects the whole ocean, what it’s showing us is that we’re being set up for a superficial encounter: Appreciate the presence of these two famous actors, laugh when they say something funny, and watch them get whisked away in their Uber Blacks afterwards. (Seriously, I’ve never seen actors flee a theater so fast; my show companion and I had been standing outside the Booth for what felt like 30 seconds getting ourselves in order before the applause went up and the SUVs pulled past, one with a Patti-focused vanity license plate … so I guess not an Uber after all.)"
It seems like a lot of these reviews want the play to be more than it is. It's a Fish in the Dark-type lark that's not saying anything especially profound, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining. Love all the praise for Mia though
"It is too early in the Broadway season to call something the worst. That caveat aside, “The Roommate” is the saddest spectacle of wasted talent on Broadway since Andre De Shields played a gorilla in “Prymate” in 2004."
‘The Roommate’ Review: On Broadway, an Odd Couple in Iowa
Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow star in Jen Silverman’s funny, moving Broadway play about a brash New Yorker who leaves the city and moves in with an innocent Midwesterner.
"Portraying women who are written as polar opposites—straight and gay, rural and urban, naïve and wised-up—Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone find a lovely symbiosis, both for their characters and themselves, in “The Roommate,” a bright, funny and delicately moving comedy by Jen Silverman about, more than anything else, the rocky ground of more-than-middle age, and both the rich rewards and the perils of loneliness that it may bring."
"Silverman has some astute and unsettling things to say about the invisibility of older women in our society, and how that could be a superpower in the right (or wrong) hands. The Roommate is not exactly the feel-good comedy of the year, but it will make you laugh and think a little harder about whom you discount in life — at your own peril. It may also make you want to give your mother a call. You never know what kind of trouble she might be getting up to."
With the Celebrated Jack O’Brien Directing Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, Jen Silverman’s ‘The Roommate’ Is in the Best of Hands
While the action follows not unfamiliar formulas, the playwright traces the bond forged between the characters with a piquant wit and gentle, compelling insights. Both are beautifully served by the players under O’Brien’s sharp direction.
"But these two deeply seasoned actors—Farrow is 79 and LuPone is 75, though their characters are somewhat younger—transcend the schematics of their roles. LuPone is justly celebrated as one of our great musical-theater divas, and here she reminds you that she can also be highly effective in nonmusical parts. She is convincing both as a tough nut and a cracked one; her Robyn has just enough hurt behind the necessary toughness. Her function in The Roommate is largely supportive, however; the play is essentially Sharon’s story, and Farrow tells it masterfully: Her voice spans octaves to dazzling effect, and she positively glows as she peels behind Sharon’s mild mannerisms to reveal an exultant shrewdness. While Farrow has been funny in the past—her diction-class scene in Radio Days is priceless—she is not an actor we associate primarily with comedy, which makes her triumph in this role all the more all the more satisfying. What a delightful surprise. "
"It is too early in the Broadway season to call something the worst. That caveat aside, “The Roommate” is the saddest spectacle of wasted talent on Broadway since Andre De Shields played a gorilla in “Prymate” in 2004.""
DAMN! Robert went DEEP in the vaults for that Smackdown…
Check out my eBay page for sales on Playbills!!
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"One could easily argue that O’Brien is simply dealing with the inevitable: People are going to clap for Mia and Patti, so let’s just get it over with. But it does matter. Because “let’s just get it over with” is no kind of first event. Nor is “clap for the celebrities.” If this drop of water reflects the whole ocean, what it’s showing us is that we’re being set up for a superficial encounter: Appreciate the presence of these two famous actors, laugh when they say something funny, and watch them get whisked away in their Uber Blacks afterwards. (Seriously, I’ve never seen actors flee a theater so fast; my show companion and I had been standing outside the Booth for what felt like 30 seconds getting ourselves in order before the applause went up and the SUVs pulled past, one with a Patti-focused vanity license plate … so I guess not an Uber after all.)""
WTF is she talking about (besides apparently now reviewing the actors’ car service)? Is she saying she was out in the street “getting herself in order” before the end of the show and she heard the applause start, and that while the audience was still clapping the stars sped away in their vehicles??
What a weird, weird paragraph from one of those critics who always need to try and show us all that they’re the smartest person in the room.