Mayday Parade Brought Energy to the Take Action Tour

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 23 May 2010 02:33

Written by Sam Leon

A packed House of Blues (8430 West Sunset Boulevard) buzzed with electricity on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010, where the Take Action Tour  (running Spring 2010 ending in Dallas, Texas, Mar. 2) hit the Sunset Strip. Stereo Skyline, There For Tomorrow, and A Rocket to the Moon played three quick sets.

Then pop rockers Mayday Parade launched into their first song, rich in upbeat riffs and catchy choruses, energizing the crowd. With thrashing guitars thrown over their heads and their bodies flailing all around the stage, this quintet pumped up the room. Given how charged Mayday’s energetic performances can be, it was a pleasant change to hear lead singer Derek Sanders perform a stripped down version of “I Swear This Time I Mean It,” bringing a needed change of pace to the set. With the many Mayday fans in the crowd, audience members sang along to this acoustic version.

After this short reprieve, these Tallahassee FL rockers kicked back into a lively set that propelled them to a full-strength performance. One crowd surfer after another had to be pulled down from the stage front as the audience reacted to Mayday's frenetic pace. While they played a string of powerful songs, “Black Cat” was the one that stood out due to its infectious guitar hook. With their most popular song, “Jamie All Over,” -- their best in this humble crit's opinion -- Mayday closed out their set and showed that while their stage presence was incredible, their set was truly impressive because they had great music to back it up.

Before headliners We The Kings took the stage, The Take Action Tour organizers played a brief video. Take Action sheds light on important issues from depression to volunteerism for young people and shows how everyone can make a difference. These issues have taken center stage since it was founded in 1999.

Twelve-year-old Patrick Pedraja then stepped up to talk about Driving For Donors, an organization he founded when he was diagnosed with Leukemia. A friend of Pedraja died because they were unable to find a matching bone marrow donor. He then realized the importance of people signing up to the National Marrow Registry, which has a critical shortage of minority donors.

Best known for two Top 40 hits, “Check Yes Juliet” and “Heaven Can Wait,” power poppers We The Kings offers a more middle-of-the-road style so they didn't benefit from following the compelling, balls-out Mayday Parade. Neither as fast or in-your-face as MP, this Florida-based quartet simply couldn't match in performance the previous band's explosiveness and intensity. That's not to say that We The Kings was not able to get the crowd pumping with their impressive array of songs including a favorite, “She Takes Me High.”

Disney star Demi Lovato's surprise guest duet with WTK front man Travis Clark on “We’ll Be A Dream" provided additional support from the Lovato fans who found out through Twitter that the pop singer would be performing there. Although following Mayday Parade was a tall task, the charismatic Clark does his job well, so We The Kings was able to deliver a strong performance that also rocked the House of Blues.

The female-skewing, teenage audience departed from the venue with smiles on their faces. It was clear the bands had left it all on the stage. Ears ringing, this was a night to remember.

For more info on how to be added to the National Marrow Registry, visit: www.marrow.org/JOIN

To support Driving For Donors, please text ACTION to 85944 to donate $5.

For info on next year's annual Take Action Tour! info go to: http://www.takeactiontour.com/

Theater Review: "Restoration"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 20 May 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Written by Claudia Shear
Directed by Christopher Ashley

Starring Tina Benko, Jonathan Cake, Alan Mandell, Natalija Nogulich, Claudia Shear

Would Italian art authorities really entrust the cleaning of Michelangelo’s David in honor of its 500th birthday to a hot-tempered, little-known art restorer from Brooklyn? Claudia Shear, who wrote and stars in Restoration, thinks so.

Shear, whose brashness is her best feature, plays Giulia, an Italian-American restorer whose career has hit the skids. Thanks to an old professor friend, who tells her she’s in the running for the position to clean the sculpture, Giulia travels to Florence, where her presentation impresses the board responsible for choosing the restorer, and soon she has the job.

Once she begins work on the statue, Giulia is beset with all manner of distractions. Daphne, the museum’s sexy spokesperson, is a tall, willowy blonde whose cell phone rarely leaves her ear, even while she’s stalking the gallery in high heels: needless to say, she and Giulia loathe each other at first sight. (Marciante, another board member, is less confrontational.) Cleaning women  and annoying tourists and locals also walk past; then there’s Max, the gorgeously dark and virile security guard who limps (wait until you discover why!) and carries on increasingly flirty conversations with Guilia about everything from art to sex to being American and Italian.

These diversionary tactics -- occasionally diverting, mostly labored -- are needed because Restoration is otherwise plotless, showing how Giulia, while cleaning David, is slowly restoring her personal life and professional reputation. Although the lesser characters make token appearances throughout, Giulia unsurprisingly becomes closest to Max, allowing Shear to script amusing flirtations between a hot Italian man and a dowdy American woman, apparently under the assumption that Italian men will screw anybody.

A few illuminating bits of dialogue about art or relationships (between men and women or a woman and the statue she’s cleaning) are heard, although Shear too often reaches for cheap jokes as Giulia cleans David’s private parts. The cast gets little chance to rise above the stock characters, except Jonathan Cake, whose Max is an appealing blowhard. Shear’s self-effacing put-downs and quick retorts constitute a performance that never convinces us that she’s a serious art restorer.

Director Christopher Ashley uses the whole of the New York Theater Workshop’s stage to savvily suggest the Galleria dell'Accademia come to life. Thanks to Scott Pask’s ingenious scenic design, Ashley fashions a suitable replica of the great Florentine museum; the decision to turn David into a Rubik’s cube (or Cubist painting) by jumbling the parts that Giulia works on is particularly inspired. 

Too bad Restoration can’t conjure up similar theatrical magic: By the time this lightweight 90-minute play ends, we’re no closer to figuring out why Shear wrote it.

nytw.org

Theater Review: "Gabriel"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Give props to playwright Moira Buffini for not following well-trod routes in where she sets her play Gabriel, ostensibly taking place during World War II. Instead of Nazi-occupied Paris or bombed-out London, she opts for Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands near the northern French coast which were British territories and peopled with British subjects. When the government decided they would prove impossible to protect, they were left to be occupied by the Nazis for the duration of the war.

Buffini uses that history as the starting point for a hollow allegory about survival amid war’s horrors. The Becquet family comprises Jeanne, an attractive middle-age mother who's learned to collaborate with the enemy; her 20ish daughter-in-law, Lilian, married to Jeanne's son, off fighting the war; and Estelle, her precocious 10-year-old daughter.
 
When Lilian finds a naked and handsome young man on the beach, she and Estelle bring him to the house; hidden in the attic, he's nursed back to health by the women. Conveniently, the man has amnesia: since he speaks German and English fluently, no one can tell whether he's a British or a Nazi soldier. Estelle christens him "Gabriel," but whether he's an angel or not will be tested by the appearance of Von Pfunz, head of the local German regiment, who -- despite his affection for Jeanne, which she reciprocates to a point -- is put off by Estelle's juvenile harassment (like urinating in his boots and swiping his diary) and thoroughly repelled by Lilian's Jewishness.
 
Gabriel contains the ingredients for a diverting if old-fashioned espionage melodrama, but its blandness is due to both Buffini’s limitations as a writer and David Esbjornson's skewed staging, embodied in Riccardo Hernandez's spare set that slopes for no good -- or even not so good -- reason, and the island’s imposing fortifications are heavy-handedly hinted at on the back wall. Contrarily, Scott Zielinski's artfully composed lighting and Martin Pakledinaz's evocative costumes are sensible in their sobriety.
 
Lisa Emery (Jeanne), Samantha Soule (Lilian) and Lee Aaron Rosen (Gabriel) all give straightforward performances that have scant shading, while two other actors mar the play. Zach Grenier's Von Pfunz is the clichéd Nazi from countless movies and plays, rotten to the core but hypocritically raging against Estelle's "uncivilized" behavior. Grenier also hisses and giggles with unsubtle menace: Christoph Waltz’s Oscar-winning portrayal in Inglourious Basterds proved that Nazi villains could be multidimensional monsters, but Grenier and Esbjornson revert back to the old days.
 
Libby Woodbridge, a 20-ish actress, is never believable as the 10-year-old Estelle. She's tall and thin, which makes her look 17 or 18, which is fatal for a play hinging on the young girl pitted against the big bad Nazi, even at one point brandishing a knife against him. Maybe a younger actress couldn't do all this plausibly, but neither does Woodbridge.
 
There’s a fascinating psychological case study inside Gabriel about a young man, his memory wiped clean, who might either re-learn his fascist tendencies or return to the side of the angels. Too bad Buffini never follows up on such a promising storyline, to Gabriel's -- and Gabriel's-- ultimate detriment.

Gabriel
Atlantic Theater Company

336 West 20th Street

New York, NY

April 23-June 6, 2010

atlantictheater.org