Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

Mumbling Wins Oscars!

My first article for The Daily Beast came out today. To find it, click here.

Is The Hangover Really The Most Successful R-Rated Comedy Ever?

See my new post at Slate's culture blog, Brow Beat, by clicking here.

Listen to me on NPR's "On the Media"

This weekend I am appearing on the national NPR program "On the Media" to discuss how characters using cell phones affects the way stories are told in entertainment -- also the subject of an article I wrote that appears in the Los Angeles Times tomorrow. You can listen to my segment here:

 

You can also download the podcast of the entire program at www.onthemedia.org, or listen on the radio (I'm in the last ten minutes of the program):

Los Angeles:

KPCC 89.3 Sunday 6 PM-7 PM

New York:

WNYC-AM 820 Saturday 7 AM-8 AM

WNYC-AM 820 Sunday 3 PM-4 PM

WNYC-FM 93.9 Sunday 10 AM-11 AM

Washington, DC:

WAMU-FM 88.5 Saturday 4 PM-5 PM

Miami:

WLRN-FM 91.3 Saturday 4 PM-5 PM

Click here to find the broadcast time in other cities.

Pretty funny lady

Click here for my interview with Jenna Fischer ("The Office," "Walk Hard") for Metromix.

Objects of Affection

Check out my first article for Metromix, a new network of websites owned by the Tribune Company. Metromix is similar to Citysearch in that its sites are all about things to do in a particular city, but its focus is on arts and entertainment. The article is on Metromix sites nationwide, but for a link to the article at the Los Angeles site, click here.

Note that two films were originally on the list but didn't make it because photos could not be found: "Royal Wedding," the 1951 MGM musical in whcih Fred Astaire dances with a hat rack, and "Le Ballon Rouge," a.k.a. "The Red Balloon," the French short film about a balloon that follows a kid around Paris.

The Lost "High Fidelity" Souvenir Program Essay

I thought I'd post what could become an artifact of theater history: the lost souvenir program essay for the Broadway musical "High Fidelity." The show closes prematurely, after only 18 previews and 14 regular performances, and the souvenir program was never actually printed. I got the job because  I wrote the book about "Avenue Q," which has the same producers as "High Fidelity." Note that this essay is a first draft that did not go through the revision process, so it was not approved by anyone involved with the show.

"High Fidelity" has no castles, chandeliers or helicopters. It has a bed in an apartment and a record store full of musty old albums. And it’s not about kings, phantoms, soldiers or revolutionaries. It's about a guy obsessed with music who gets dumped by his girlfriend.

Though most musicals take place in the past, in far-off lands or in fantasy worlds, "High Fidelity" is set in Brooklyn in 2006. It’s about people like you and me, with everyday problems and everyday obsessions. Their girlfriends and their boyfriends. Their apartments. Their jobs. Making money. Making love. Getting drunk.

The show owes this vision to the novel "High Fidelity," written by Nick Hornby, a master at articulating the angst and absurdities of contemporary life.

The musical is “very much the world that Nick Hornby had created,” says David Lindsay-Abaire, who adapted the novel into the book of the musical. “His prose is so full of irony, and so lacking in sentiment. He undercuts sentiment on every page of that book in a hilarious way.”

“I almost hate to say this but I’m going to: It feels to me like ‘'Seinfeld': The Musical,’” says Walter Bobbie, the director. “'Seinfeld' was a glorious celebration of just ordinary lives being lived.”

In many musicals, a man and a woman see each other and they are instantly in everlasting love. "High Fidelity," on the other hand, acknowledges the complexities of devoting oneself to another person. After Rob, the main character, gets dumped by his girlfriend Laura, he spends the rest of the show trying to win her back and figure out why his romantic relationships always go wrong.

“I’m married happily, but I spent a long time searching for love, and going down the wrong roads and being ridiculous about the whole thing,” says "High Fidelity"’s lyricist, Amanda Green. About Rob and Laura, she adds, “They aren’t effusive and they aren’t lovey-dovey, but I really feel the ache that he has for her and the ache that she has for him.”

“Some of my favorite love songs are the types of songs that don’t necessarily come out and say ‘I love you, you’re everything to me,’” says Tom Kitt, the show’s composer. “They talk about love in a very human way, a way that everybody experiences.”

Many of the songs in "High Fidelity" convey small, subtle feelings that many of us have felt but are rarely expressed. “Ready to Settle” rationalizes the benefits of a rebound one-night-stand. In “It’s No Problem” Rob’s anxiety-ridden friend Dick puzzles over how to tell their friend Barry that Rob and his girlfriend broke up. “I Slept With Someone,” in which Rob proclaims, “I slept with someone who slept with Lyle Lovett,” is a fresh take on celebrity worship.

While writing the songs, Kitt and Green drew on their own personal musical influences, including The Beatles, The Who, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Carole King, Carly Simon, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, U2, Radiohead, Fountains of Wayne, Stephen Sondheim and, yes, Lyle Lovett. The characters express themselves through songs that evoke artists whose albums could be on their shelves, such as the Indigo Girls in “Ready to Settle,” Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in the song “Conflict Resolution,” in which Rob fantasizes about beating up Laura’s new boyfriend, and Bruce Springsteen, who appears in Rob’s fantasy and sings with him on “Goodbye and Good Luck.”

“We were like ‘Well, if Rob wants his life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song, what would that song sound like?’” says Kitt.

Though Lindsay-Abaire is also married and lacks Rob’s loafer qualities, he connects to the character though the universal idea of obsession. “He’s obsessed with vinyl, he’s obsessed with these ex-girlfriends — he’s really great at the past and really awful at dealing with the present,” says Lindsay-Abaire. “I have a lot of friends who are slackers and stuck in arrested development, and are refusing to enter adulthood.”

For the book scenes in "High Fidelity," the creators wanted to bring a “theatrical anarchy” to musical comedy, says Bobbie. “We wanted to be able to smash time.” An example is the fantasy sequence in which Rob acts out three different versions of his confrontation with Ian, Laura’s new boyfriend.

"High Fidelity" sets its record shop in an unspecified, run-down area of Brooklyn. To create a sense of place, Lindsay-Abaire drew on his experience growing up in the working class neighborhood of South Boston and moving to the Carroll Gardens area of Brooklyn in 1992, when it was nothing but bodegas, cheap knickknack shops and Italian social clubs.

“I know where he is,” says Lindsay-Abaire of Rob. “I know the people who walk by those windows.”

Anna Louizos’s set design reflects the musical’s rough-around-the-edges quality. The middle of the stage opens up like a toy box and the backdrops shift back and forth like a Rubix Cube, underscoring the unpredictability of the characters’ lives. The set also reflects their gritty surroundings. Many musical sets are sleek abstractions of real life locations, with few props to get in the way. But Bobbie realized that since his characters had massive album collections and hung out in derelict neighborhoods, things had to look a bit messy.

“We had to fill the stage with the detritus of their lives,” says Bobbie.

Though it breaks from tradition in many ways, "High Fidelity" is the latest in a line of musicals about existential urban unease that includes landmark works such as "Avenue Q," "Rent" and "Company." "High Fidelity" also draws inspiration from older musicals about city life that were — when they were written in the mid-20th century — set in the present. These musicals include "Wonderful Town," "On the Town" and "Bells are Ringing," which were co-written, perhaps not coincidentally, by Green’s father, Adolph Green.

Ultimately, "High Fidelity" manages to capture its time and place while also tapping into timeless themes. It’s about Peter Pan growing up. It’s about pursuing true love. It’s about a man learning how to live with a woman and conform to the demands of adulthood without losing the part of him that makes him who he is. In fact, Rob is an apt metaphor for "High Fidelity" as a whole. The show gives you everything you expect in a Broadway musical comedy — funny characters, catchy songs, thrilling staging and a touching love story — while hanging on to the real-life, contemporary quality that makes it unique.

Who Told You You're Allowed to Rain on Her Skit?

I did my first piece for New York Magazine's web site, which was just redesigned. Check it out here.

The Onion

I had a headline in The Onion this past week, the  Jan 17-Jan 23 issue. I didn't write the article, but I thought up the headline. To check it out, click here.

Political Play: The Best Anti-Bush Shows Take Him Seriously

From TheNewRepublic.com

You know New York theater is obsessed with politics when Much Ado About Nothing includes an impersonation of Paul Wolfowitz. Brian Murray, playing the constable Dogberry in the summer New York Shakespeare Festival production in Central Park, licked his hand before fixing his hair, which he said was inspired by the deputy defense secretary's comb-slobbering scene in Fahrenheit 9/11. (Michael Keaton used a simlar gesture in Kenneth Branagh's film version but, considering the political climate, it was hard not to immediately think of Wolfowitz when watching Murray.) There have been so many shows in the last few months intent on tearing down the Bush administration that they've even run out of titles--Patriot Act, Patriot Acts, and Live Patriot Acts: Patriots Gone Wild. Many were timed for the Republican National Convention, but, a month and a half later, the goods just keep on coming. Eat the Taste, about John Ashcroft aspiring to turn his life story into a musical, recently opened Off Broadway. A.R. Gurney's Mrs. Farnsworth, about a middle-aged woman who got pregnant by George W. Bush long ago, began a third run at The Flea starring Sigourney Weaver. And Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy has had readings at various venues.

But skewering a president through theater--regardless of how easy a target he might seem--is not as simple as it looks. Most shows are so busy flinging their tomatoes or indulging in clever gimmicks that they skimp on standard dramatic conventions, such as complex characters and compelling stories. The most successful shows accomplish their task rather counterintuitively: They take their target's point of view seriously.

A prime example of a musical comedy that uses this strategy to its advantage is The Passion of George W. Bush. The show went up at the New York Fringe Festival this summer and is getting an election-eve presentation at Joe's Pub on November 1. Spoofing the title of the Mel Gibson film was not only a brilliant publicity stunt--at the Fringe, the catchiest and most outrageous titles get the most press--but a brilliant storytelling concept as well. The show deftly theatricalizes the Bush story by drawing out its time-proven heroic archetypes and subverting them.

In the musical, Bush starts out as a deadbeat drug user and a failed oil businessman. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove peg him as an easy target, and, through religion and good political coaching, they mold him into a president who's a front for their nefarious ends. Bush continually analyzes his transformation and looks to God for guidance, before he realizes he's been deceived and sets the record straight by using his 2004 convention speech to resign from office.

Book and lyrics writer John Herin said that he, fellow writer Adam B. Mathias, and composer Alden Terry made a conscious decision to play against their personal feelings for the president by making him a sympathetic moral hero, rather than a cowboy caricature, in order to give the show an emotional arc. "If it had just been a bitter attack from the start, it would have just gotten old really fast," said Herin. "There always needs to be someone that you're emotionally invested in and someone you really care about. It allows you to make all the subsidiary characters really nasty and despicable."

Herin said he tried to view the president through the eyes of Bush's supporters. "They're so sold on his moral character that they think that any bad policies that emerge from his administration are not his fault, that he was misled by his advisors," Herin said. "We tried to embrace that viewpoint and show how ludicrous it is. We decided to give him the benefit of the doubt to the extreme." As the title implies, the musical conflates Bush's life with the Christ story, an archetype used by many musicals, such as Jesus Christ Superstar and The Who's Tommy. Personal awakening, transformation, a steady rise, and a quick fall are all perfect elements for musical theater, in which songs must accompany a character's significant revelation or change. But, as Herin implied, his Bush story adds twists to the archetype. Bush's disciples are betraying him from the beginning, and the God figure, Cheney, is an unqualified villain.

The Passion of George W. Bush plays on the connections between Bush's story and that of the prodigal son, a paradigm derived from a parable told by Jesus in the New Testament: A young man runs off to laze away, responsibility-free, before returning home to claim his family title. It's a staple of art, high and low: Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Simba in The Lion King, and Shakespeare's Hamlet and Prince Hal, whose connection to Bush lent timeliness to Lincoln Center's production of Henry IV and the New York Shakespeare Festival's Henry V, both last season. Again, however, the show toys with the heroic archetype. At the beginning, Bush's father is portrayed with the caution and mediocrity his last name implies, in one song counseling his young son to be "like a Bush": honest, humble, and gentle. But when the younger Bush returns from the wild days of his youth, instead of following his father's worldview he gets sucked in by Cheney's, which mixes religion and aggression in a way that bewilders and torments the younger George.

Another twist in the play is the inspired choice to cast George's more level-headed brother Jeb with a black actor, Charles Browning. It provides a sly comic twist that equates the close-mindedness of racism with the foolhardiness of elevating such an ordinary man to the presidency. Jeb's scenes are reminiscent of musicals such as Hairspray, Big River, and Caroline, or Change, all recently on Broadway, in which the situations that white characters see as frivolous games, the black characters recognize as serious problems. Here that attitude becomes comedic via Jeb's deadpan sarcasm. "Who woulda thought I'd be governor?" Bush muses rhetorically. "I give up," Jeb replies.

Among the many plays that are taking George Bush seriously is Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. In the first scene, Laura Bush prepares to read to a group of dead Iraqi children. While Holly Hunter, in the reading I attended, plays Laura as a caricature of obliviousness, her portrayal sets up the second scene, in which a more realistic Laura, now played by Cynthia Nixon, confronts Kushner himself (played by Hunter) about his portrayal of her. That second scene demonstrates that Kushner understands Laura and George Bush's point of view toward Iraq, such that he can later tear it down more credibly. The technique softens, but also justifies, the bit of fun had in the first scene at the First Lady's expense.

A.R. Gurney's play Mrs. Farnsworth concerns a middle-aged woman who shows up to her creative writing class with a true story about how Bush got her pregnant and then forced her to have an abortion. It's a juicy gimmick, but it wouldn't be the same without the villain--the very conservative Mr. Farnsworth, who manages to be even-tempered and dignified while barging in to put a stop to the story-writing, in contrast to Mrs. Farnsworth's nutty vehemence.

Another standout is the documentary play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, still running at the 45 Bleecker Theater. Sharing a stage with haunting jail cells and fellow prisoners reading the Koran, characters based on real prisoners talk about the indignities they endured in their many months at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The tales are from the prisoners' point of view, but they're told simply, not adorned with any commentary. The U.S. government does speak--through its actions--and what it says is quite disturbing.

This philosophy of understanding your enemy is perhaps why a couple producers of recent political theater insisted they were more interested in grappling with the issues than in targeting a party or an individual. "We're not doing it as a specific critique of this administration, but as our creative response to, and to call attention to, injustice," said Alan Buchman, head of the Culture Project, which produces Guantanamo. Political and moral issues, as The Passion of George W. Bush and other shows demonstrate, can't be examined unless you treat your opponent as someone who believes what he's doing is right. Even if what he's doing is slobbering on his comb.