It was recently announced that after a six-year run on Broadway, the raunchy puppet musical Avenue Q will be closing on September 13. While it’s sad to see such a brilliantly funny show close, it did have a great run and is one of those rare success stories of a show that started small in an Off-Broadway theater, then went on to achieve greatness on Broadway (even beating out the musical behemoth Wicked for the Best Musical Tony in 2004). Seeing as it’s formatted like an episode of Sesame Street for adults, it seems appropriate to share the lessons I learned from Avenue Q:
* It’s OK to wonder what I’m supposed to do with a B.A. in English.
* Women of all ages, and even those made out of felt, wonder whether a guy likes them likes them, or just plain likes them.
* If everyone could just admit that they’re a little bit racist, it would be so much easier for us all to get along.
* I’m not alone in getting a schadenfreudic thrill from letting the elevator doors close on someone who’s running to catch it.
* It’s OK to sometimes wish you could go back to the life you had in college, as long as you eventually realize what a loser you would be going to college at your age.
* Saying you have a girlfriend in Canada is a lie told not just by straight men.
* The Internet is now, and will always be, for porn.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, or just completely naïve about how teenagers actually live, but I find television shows about teens who live and behave like adults sort of disturbing. In between all of the cocktail parties they attend in designer clothes, the endless stream of sexual partners, and the heavy drinking and drug use I wonder, “When do these kids get to actually be kids?” Granted, I grew up with a somewhat overprotective family in Middle of Nowhere, USA, so maybe there was an entire subculture of my peers who adopted this “live hard, die hard” way of life, but the major dramas my friends and I dealt with were trying to get into R-rated movies and how to tell our parents we got a “D” on a science test.
Despite my aversion to these teens-as-adults shows, based on several recommendations and critical acclaim, I decided to give Skins—a British series about teens in Bristol—a chance. After renting the first two seasons, I have mixed feelings about the show. There are some of the same annoying clichés you’ll find in any number of American series, but there are some things that the show got just right. I was pleased to see that the actors in the show were actually teenagers (and not overly glamorous ones), unlike the “teens” in most American shows, who are played by overly made-up 20-somethings. These actors look just like the type of kids you’d expect to see in a Bristol school; they’re awkward, they have acne, they have questionable haircuts, the boys are lanky and goofy-looking, and the girls wear ill-fitting clothes and amateurishly applied makeup. But while they don’t look like adults, that doesn’t stop them from living lifestyles beyond their years.
The first season of Skins seems to exist to merely shock you. It focuses mainly on Tony, the ringleader of the group of friends mainly due to being the best looking and most charismatic of the bunch. He’s dating the blindly devoted Michelle, who he regularly cheats on and tells has uneven breasts, and is best friends with his lackey Sid, the dork of the group who wears glasses and a knit cap at all times and is, tragically, still a virgin. Each episode highlights a different member of the entire group and the various trials they face; one has an eating disorder, one has parents who are getting divorced, one is gay and his best friend has trouble accepting that, one is abandoned by his mother, and the list goes on with nearly every teen drama staple touched upon, including having an affair with a teacher and crushing on your best friend’s girl. And of course there is plenty of drinking, drug use, and explicit sex scenes to both keep you entertained and wonder what the parents in Bristol are doing, since raising their kids is obviously not a priority.
The second season tones down the shock factor a bit and focuses more on heavy emotional issues, allowing the show to shine as a teen drama rather than a teen soap opera. Tony is recovering from a major accident that leaves him both mentally and physically impaired, causing a struggle for Michelle and Sid who both want to stand by his side while he recovers, but also feel the need to live their own lives. The entire gang is preparing for exams and to go on to university, which causes tension as they realize they’re all growing up and some will be moving on and others will be left behind. There’s even the death of one of the major players to deal with, which is felt and processed deftly by each of the other characters.
There is a third season of Skins that brings in a new generation, lead by Tony’s hard-partying younger sister, Effy, but it’s not out on DVD yet. I’ll probably rent it once it’s available, though I’m sort of disappointed that I won’t get to see where the first generation of Skins is going. While I kind of disliked them and resented their hedonistic lifestyles in the first season, they grew on me in Season 2 when they proved they were capable of doing more than getting high and emotionally manipulating each other. Perhaps in a few years there will be a reunion for the first generation and we can see what they’re like when they actually are adults. Though after witnessing the debauchery of their unsupervised adolescence, would anyone want to see them survive the normal things in life like finding a job, struggling to make ends meet, or getting married? While their teenage way of life may have been unrealistic, there’s no denying it was a lot more entertaining than watching Tony try to get a mortgage will ever be.
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earle Haley
My Review: After Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed, we’re all in agreement that Martin Scorsese and Leonard DiCaprio make excellent movies together, right? The two men team up together again for Shutter Island, and it’s this collaboration alone that makes me at all interested in a movie that looks like it will scare the crap out of me.
I’ve never been a huge fan of scary movies, with a few key exceptions (Silence of the Lambs still manages to enthrall and horrify me). In ShutterIsland, DiCaprio is a US Marshall (utilizing the same lowbrow Boston accent he had in The Departed) who with his partner (Ruffalo) is investigating the disappearance of a patient at the dilapidated ShutterIsland mental hospital in the 1950s. The missing woman appears to have completely vanished, and as the two men’s investigation digs deeper into the bizarre world of ShutterIsland, horrible things begin to happen and it begins to look unlikely that they’ll ever be permitted to leave the island.
On the surface, it seems like run of the mill stuff: Man goes to “haunted” asylum, man goes crazy, man becomes prisoner himself. But I’m willing to give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt, as I’m sure he has something much more than that in store for us. Plus I have a strange sort of fascination with the mental hospitals of years gone by; they were inhumane, sadistic, torturous, and scariest of all, completely real. The sort of horrors that those who were deemed “insane” used to go through trump any supernatural or otherworldly thriller you can name, and in the hands of DiCaprio and Scorsese, I’m intrigued to see what Shutter Island has to offer.
Would I Pay For It?: Barring any truly horrible preview reviews, there’s a good chance I’ll go see this in the theater. At the very least, it’ll definitely make its way to my Netflix queue, if only to avoid the increasingly annoying trend of people bringing their babies to my movie theater. Can’t you check that thing at the door along with your coat?
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Heather Graham
My Review: It would be really easy to dismiss The Hangover as just another “men behaving badly in Vegas” movie, but you’d be missing one key element; it’s a friggin’ hilarious “men behaving badly in Vegas” movie.
The premise is simple and borders on cliché: Four guys from California head to Las Vegas for one last hurrah before one of them gets married, looking forward to binge drinking and irresponsible gambling, and the dimwitted one of the bunch even shouts “Road trip!” on the way there. Then they wake up the following morning with a trashed suite, unable to remember a thing from the previous night, and find a live tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and the groom-to-be missing. And then the cliché ends as they use various clues to piece together what exactly happened that night and where their missing quartet member is.
The funniest moments in The Hangover are the surprises that happen along the way, so I won’t spoil anything that happens. As the hungover trio pieces together what happened the previous night I was expecting each occurrence to be tied to another, like one of Law & Order’s mysteries of the week, but the fact that everything seems to have been just a random series of events adds to hilarity and absurdity of the entire movie. Like me, you might find yourself wondering, “Well, how did they go from X to doing Y, and then end up at Z?” But save yourself the trouble of making sense of it all, and chalk it up to simply, “Hey, it’s Vegas!” By the end of the movie, most of the mysteries have been satisfactorily solved, and while the chronology of the entire night may not make total sense, it’s still one hell of a “Road trip!”
Bottom Line:The Hangover is one of the best and most consistently funny adult comedies I’ve seen. Even the presence of a screaming baby in the theater wasn’t able to detract from my enjoyment of the movie, and that’s saying something.
Starring: voices of Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, Bob Peterson, John Ratzenberger
My Review: In its 10th movie release, Disney-Pixar manages to do it again. Not only is Up visually stunning, but the story manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming, often in the same moment. A bit of sentimental plucking of the heartstrings is nothing new for a Disney movie, but I found Up to be more emotionally wrenching than any of their previous offerings (and that includes when Bambi’s mother was shot).
The movie opens with a montage highlighting Carl and Ellie’s life together, from meeting as children, to marriage, to old age. Both are wannabe adventurers who dream of traveling to a mystical waterfall in South America, and when it becomes clear that they are unable to have children, they begin saving for their big adventure. But as it so often does, life gets in the way, and as the car needs new tires and the house needs a new roof, their adventure fund dwindles, and Ellie passes away before the trip ever happens. Now a crotchety old man, Carl decides to make the trek to South America on his own rather than be forced into a retirement home, and does so by floating his house there with the aid of thousands of balloons. Unfortunately, Russell, the over-eager scout of some sort who wants to earn his “assist the elderly” badge, was coming to help Carl at the time of takeoff and becomes an accidental stowaway on the trip. Once they finally touch down in South America, Carl gets to have an adventure, though it’s slightly different from the one he always imagined.
While the Disney-Pixar movies have always been a bit less juvenile than the Disney animated features of days gone by, I was surprised (but happily so) by some of the mature themes Up touched on. There’s the implication of infertility when Carl and Ellie are unable to have children, the loss of a spouse when Ellie dies, the questionable treatment of the elderly when Carl is nearly forced from his home, and a villain who apparently kills innocent intruders out of pure paranoia. If it hasn’t been made clear already, Disney-Pixar isn’t kid’s stuff, and parents should duly note the PG ratings attached to their movies. There are message boards all over the Internet with parents whining about “how am I supposed to explain the concept of infertility to my 4-year-old?” My response: Why did you bring a 4-year-old to a PG movie? Disney-Pixar already killed Nemo’s mother, had Syndrome attempt to assassinate the Incredible children, and dealt with abandonment issues in Toy Story 2; they’re making family movies for thinking families with older children. And I hope they keep up the good work.
Bottom Line: The latest in a long line of homeruns, Up is another excellent offering from Disney-Pixar. But be sure to slip a tissue in your pocket before you go. If you don’t at least tear up during the opening montage, you may be a sociopath. Thank god for those 3D glasses; not only are they fashionable, but the easily hide the fact that a 29-year-old is sobbing during a cartoon.
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Raúl Esparza, Audra McDonald, Julie White, Jay O. Sanders, Hamish Linklater, David Pittu, Michael Cumpsty
My Review: The Public Theater kicks off its annual Shakespeare in the Park celebration with one of Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night. Before attending, my knowledge of this play was limited—a shipwreck, cross-dressing, and many comical errors were all I knew of it—so I was thrilled to be lucky enough to score a pair of tickets through the Public’s virtual line. Especially after spending the better part of last summer trying to get tickets to the production of Hair, but alas to no avail.
As with most of Shakespeare’s works, trying to summarize Twelfth Night in a few sentences is no easy task. Viola washes up on the shores of the pastoral Illyria after surviving a shipwreck, which she believes has killed her twin brother, Sebastian. Not wanting to be a woman wandering about alone in an unfamiliar place, she disguises herself as a boy, calls herself Cesario, and offers herself as a servant to the Duke, Orsino. Orsino pines for the Countess Olivia, who has no interest in his advances, so he sends his new page Cesario to win the lady’s heart for him. Which of course means Olivia falls for Cesario, not knowing he’s really a woman in disguise. And Cesario has fallen for the Duke, but is unsure how to proceed since he thinks she’s a man and she is working in his service. And naturally, Sebastian has actually survived the shipwreck, and is wandering about looking exactly like Viola does in her disguise, which causes all sorts of problems and misunderstandings. While all of this is going on, there are plots involving a group of clowns led by Olivia’s perpetually drunken uncle and her scheming maid which are far too complicated to even begin to explain.
Anne Hathaway leads the Shakespeare in the Park cast as Viola/Cesario, and while she is primarily known as a movie actress, she certainly holds her own here (and she must feel the pressure to do so since she shares the same name as Shakespeare’s wife). She actually studied stage acting as a child at the PaperMill Playhouse in New Jersey, but having to perform alongside such Broadway stage veterans as Raúl Esparza and Audra McDonald has to be intimidating. Esparza is Duke Orsino, who is actually only onstage for a handful of scenes, but they manage to find a way to have him sing, which was incredibly gratifying for those of us in the audience who were already familiar with his swoon-worthy voice. McDonald is his unrequited love, Olivia, who is at her hilarious best when blindly throwing herself as the disinterested Cesario; she certainly makes it clear that Olivia is a woman who never takes “no” as an answer.
While Viola, Orsino, and Olivia are commonly acknowledged as the primary parts in Twelfth Night, the bulk of the play belongs to the clowns. Jay O. Sanders plays Olivia’s drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch, with all the gusto and bravado you would expect from a truly stupid fat man, which is exactly what Toby Belch is. His constant, and just as stupid, shadow is Sir Andrew Aguecheek, played by Hamish Linklater as a hilariously fey and cowardly man. Rounding out the trio of mischief makers is Olivia’s maid Maria, played by Julie White, who is no stranger to handling roles of women with a mean streak and a biting tongue. As Malvolio, the steward who falls victim to the tricks of these three, Michael Cumpsty is probably the most accomplished Shakespearean actor in the entire cast, easily making Malvolio both pompous and comically tragic. Rounding out the cast is an ensemble of musicians, led by the cruelly blunt fool Feste, who provide a soundtrack of Irish/Scottish minstrel music throughout the play, creating a perfect Shakespeare evening under the stars.
While this performance of Twelfth Night is well-performed and highly enjoyable, it’s not without its problems, though I’m not sure if that’s the fault of this production or of the Bard himself. Certain scenes lag as they continue to play long after the audience has already figured out what is going on, which makes me wish they hadn’t chosen to adhere so faithfully to Shakespeare’s script. There’s also the Malvolio storyline, in which he winds up falsely imprisoned due to the scheming of Toby, Andrew, and Maria. Once all is revealed, he is left a broken and humiliated man, but it’s all treated as, “Oh well, our prank was all in good fun. This is a comedy after all!” But Malvolio’s humiliation isn’t meant to detract from everyone else’s happily ever after, which they celebrate in spades as the production closes with a joyful song and dance, and love reigns supreme in the end, just as Shakespeare intended it.
Bottom Line: While Shakespeare in the Park is free to attend, getting tickets can be a hassle, unless you relish camping out in Central Park overnight to be at the front of the line the next day. There are precious few things I would be willing to spend the night in the park for, but luckily the Public Theater now offers a small number of tickets daily through a virtual line you can join on their website. Twelfth Night is a lovely production and easily lends itself to being enjoyed in an outdoor theater on a warm summer night. So try your luck on the virtual line, which is how I got my tickets, or if you’re truly devoted, you may want to give the actual line a try, and I will continue to marvel at how some New Yorkers are willing to live like a hobo for a day all in the name of getting something for free.
Atmosphere: Candyland come to life. The shop is small, but brightly lit and candy-colored, with all of Eleni’s delicious treats on display under glass. There is also a selection of bulk candy for sale, as well as pre-packaged sets of cupcakes, cookies, and brownies. There are a couple of small tables and chairs for enjoying a snack there, or there are several other seating options within Chelsea Market.
My Review: If you’ve ever been wandering around 9th Avenue down in Chelsea and came across a building that looks like it was designed by a drunken basket weaver, it’s actually the Chelsea Market. Originally a Nabisco cookie factory, the building has since been converted into an indoor marketplace that offers a variety of fresh produce, meats, baked goods, and other assorted treats, as well as housing businesses like the NYC Food Network headquarters on its upper floors. One of the Chelsea Market tenants is Eleni’s, a bakery that is the perfect stop for something sweet.
Eleni’s Chocolate Ganache cupcake is giving my old favorite, the Dragon Devil’s Food cupcake at Batch, a run for its money. It’s simply a chocolate cupcake, with vanilla buttercream filling, and topped with a chocolate ganache frosting. But the chocolate used is so rich and flavorful, it’s clear that Eleni’s only uses the best ingredients. And the amount of frosting used on these cupcakes is much more generous than at Batch, which is causing my old #1 cupcake pick to slowly be bumped down to second place.
Eleni’s Red Velvet cupcake was a bit of a letdown, since traditional buttercream frosting is used rather than cream cheese frosting, which is what most bakeries use since it compliments the somewhat odd flavor of red velvet cake best (is red velvet a sort of chocolate flavor? I’m still not sure how to describe it). The cake part was good; very moist and flavorful. But I definitely prefer my red velvet cake topped with a slightly tangy, slightly sweet, cream cheese frosting.
The Oreo Madness cupcake was a lot better, with its brownie cake base, topped with crumbly cookie bits and mini marshmallows (which get gooey and toasty in the baking process), followed by buttercream frosting and half of an Oreo cookie. Don’t even tell me the calorie count, because I don’t want to know. Also delicious in its simplicity is the Coconut cupcake, which is available as either a chocolate or vanilla cupcake, topped with vanilla buttercream frosting and coconut flakes, which tastes like a better version of a Hostess Sno Ball.
Bottom Line: Chelsea Market is a fun place to visit if you’re a foodie, and Eleni’s makes the trip all the more special. The cupcakes are available in a variety of flavors, all delicious (at least based on the ones I’ve sampled), and I have it on good authority from others that the brownies there are worth the price, too. And ever since my stop there, all I can think about is how long is a respectable time to wait before going back for another Chocolate Ganache cupcake? Probably at least a couple of days, right?
