Getting Hitched to NYMF with "Marrying Meg"

The New York Musical Theatre Festival has been around for 26 years now.  Among the more illustrious NYMF alumni are shows like Altar Boyz, Next to Normal and [title of show].  So I have no excuse for never having gone to one of the festival productions.  Except for a bad case of festival phobia.  Festivals offer so many choices that I suffer the symptoms of Stendhal syndrome and by the time I've recovered my senses it's too late to see any of them.

But this year, I discovered the Broadway Bullet podcast and its host Michael Gilboe provided such terrific previews of 21 of NYMF's 30 full productions, complete with two musical selections from each (click here to hear them) that I was able to summon up the courage to overcome my trepidations.  And so on Saturday afternoon, I went to see my first NYMF show: Marrying Meg at the Theatre at St. Clements on West 46th. 

Why that one?  Well a large number of the Festival shows tend to be spoofs or variations on campy monsters, vampires and other goofy ghouls and the horrors of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein have left a bad taste in my mouth for those.  A few NYMF productions are imports sung in foreign languages (like the Korean My Scary Girl and the Spanish Anjou) and others sounded like outtakes from somebody’s Guitar Hero sessions.  But I liked the musical excerpts I heard for Marrying Meg and its creator Mark Robertson, a Scot with an easy sense of humor, came across in Gilboe’s preview as a nice guy who, as he says in his program notes, simply wants to make the audience smile.  Which he did.

Marrying Meg is based on Scottish playwright Alexander Reid’s 1950 play The Lass with the Muckle Mou.  It combines two folktales to tell the whimsical story of a medieval troubadour who’s struggling to write a ballad and a nobleman’s daughter who can’t find a husband because she has such a big mouth. Robertson has tweaked the story to draw a comparison between troubadours and their modern-descendants: celebrity journalists.  And he’s added lots of funny songs (plus a couple of ballads, although those aren’t his strong suit).  

The result is no more than a really good children’s theater piece.  But that was fine with me because I once studied with two co-founders of the Paper Bag Players. I know how hard it is to do good theater for kids and how important it is to do it well so that they grow up thinking that going to the theater is a cool thing to do.

There were six little girls sitting two rows in front of me (since all NYMF tickets are just $20, it cost less for all of them to see Marrying Meg than it would have for one of them to see Shrek) and they were delighted, sitting literally on the edges of their seats as one of the reluctant suitors was taken to the gallows after refusing to marry the nobleman’s daughter. It was fun to watch kids enjoying a witty and entertaining show that didn’t feel the need to show how hip it was by throwing in gratuitous profanity (although it did succumb to some fart jokes).

It’s too late for you to see it because the musical’s four-performance run ended last night.  And  the show is unlikely to be picked up for a larger production but I’m writing about it anyway because it’s my first NYMF show. And because it made me see how valuable the festival can be for theater folks who want to experiment with musicals (something that can no longer be done in Broadway's high-stakes arena), for theater lovers who want to see the genre grow and for the theater fans of tomorrow like the kids at Marrying Meg. So go see a NYMF show before the festival ends on Oct. 18.  You may even see me there.  

Forgoing the Fringe

I could blame it on the fact that I live on the Upper West Side and most of the shows for the New York International Fringe Festival are all the way downtown. Or I could fess up to the fact that while I can appreciate simple staging (shout out to David Cromer’s Our Town) I have an admittedly snobbish preference for shows with more polished production values. Or I could even invoke the tropical weather that has caused my favorite activity this past week to be lolling on the terrace—a glass of crisp rosé in one hand, my new Kindle in the other (I’ve been having a dandy time clicking through “Supporting Player," Richard Seff’s memoir of being an actor and agent in the Golden Age of Broadway during the 1950s and 1960s and I wish more theater-related books were available for downloading).

But the truth of the matter is that we're one week into the Fringe Festival and I haven't seen any of its shows because there are simply too many of them for me. Deciding which ones to see is too much of a crapshoot: with snake eyes likely to be more common than boxcars. So I’ve contented myself with reports and reviews about the festival. The invaluable nytheater.com has reviews—or previews—of all 201 shows (click here to read them). The New York Times chimed in yesterday, focusing mainly, although not solely, on a 75-minute revival of the 1967 musical How Now, Dow Jones (click here for that). But if you’re still trying to decide what to see, then your best bet might be the list the helpful folks at Critic-O-Meter have put together, grading the most talked-about shows of the festival (click here to check it out).

So go (there's a whole week left) enjoy yourself (tickets are generally around $15) and if you don’t run into me at any of them, know that I’ll be toasting your adventurousness.

The Tiny Pleasures of "Summer Shorts 2"

It’s festival season in New York. And that means adventurous theatergoers are in the midst of a summer-long smorgasbord of new and avantgarde plays and musicals. I made it to The Bacchae at the Lincoln Center Festival but passed on its Beckett trilogy. I missed the Summer Play Festival that showcased emerging writers and directors at the Public Theater last month but I’m planning to catch at least one show in The New York International Fringe Festival that started last week. I confess I don’t know anything about the American Living Room’s performance arts fest currently at the Here Arts Center but I’m looking forward to the New York Musical Theatre Festival that starts next month. And last night, my buddy Bill and I went to the first half of Summer Shorts 2, the festival of eight new short plays that is running through Aug. 28 at the 59E59 Theaters. (Click here to read a roundtable discussion with four festival directors.)

This is just the second year for Summer Shorts but it’s clearly caught on because the performance we attended was sold out and the hum of self-satisfaction that's always detectable at a cool event vibrated through the crowd. Almost as if to confirm the show’s hip status, a recording by the eternally-hip Miles Davis played over the sound system as audience members settled into their seats and later while the two-person stage crew changed props between scenes.

There are two programs of plays being performed in Summer Shorts 2 and the one we saw, Series A, includes works by the playwrights Leslie Lyles, Eduardo Machado, Neil Koenigsberg and Roger Hedden. Their works range from a tragic monologue to a four-person social satire. All four were nicely directed and, for the most part, ably acted but, as Bill observed, none seemed any more substantial than the kind of character studies you might find being performed in just about any acting class.

Which doesn’t mean they weren’t diverting. The crowd-pleaser was Koenigsberg’s On A Bench, an encounter between a young affluent man (David Beck) and an older working class woman (Mary Joy) who meet on a bench across the street from the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. But I was most taken by Amy Irving’s performance in Lyles’ The Waters of March which almost connected the dots in a lightly etched tale about a failed lounge singer and made me curious about what Lyle might do on a broader canvas.

Curtain time at Summer Shorts is scheduled for a fashionably late 8:15 and our performance was over around 9:45, allowing enough time to get home and catch a little of the Olympics on TV, a bonus that both Bill and I welcomed. After all, even the most ardent theater lover can appreciate aquaman Michael Phelps’s quest for eight gold medals, the debate over whether the pixyish Chinese female gymnasts are underage and all the other dramas that are grabbing the spotlight in Beijing.