East Coast East Side
Once again, I was seated right next to Damien Jaques for opening night of the show at Next Act. There he and I were in the Next Act critic’s ghetto: the rear row of the Off-Broadway Theatre. He was on the left. I was on the right. Yes, it was a bit awkward. The Journal-Sentinel theatre critic and I shared not a word or a single moment of eye contact. He is a very squat gentleman, making me feel pushed to the right for the entire length of the play. Alas, my wife elected not to join me, having already been to the Roger Bean musical with me the previous night. (She is not one to attend theatre more than once per weekend except under extreme duress.) Jaques take notes during performances. Given the amount of space he lends to actually addressing aspects of the producton, these brief notes comprise a sizeable fraction of what he says about them. (Much of a Jaques review in the Journal-Sentinel is spent on discussing the finer points of a play’s script. Much of a Jaques review is [or at least could be] written without ever seeing the performance.)The after party for “Mercy of A Storm,” was respectable, with tasty bits of food and Miller products. The play’s director Mary Kerr gestured wildly early-on, spilling hors d’oeuvres all over the floor from the plate of a nearby Montgomery Davis. Mary was nice enough to clean up the mess, seeming respectably embarrassed with the whole affair. That’s the kind of town Milwaukee is: you can direct one of the best shows currently playing in this town and work with some of the best actors we have to offer, but if you spill hors d’oeuvres, you’re still expected to clean them up. Cute.
As Milwaukee as my week has been (saw and reviewed two plays and four films—a nearly respectable amount of work) I had a briefly pretentious moment on Saturday. My wife and I ran into a theatrical Artistic Director I know in the nutritional supplements section of the local Whole Foods. How pretentiously artsy and east coast of me. That night my wife and I had delicately prepared mussels with sweet red wine by candlelight while listening to Hillary Hahn on the classical music station. Somewhere beneath it all was a heavy bass-line from a neighboring apartment that reminded us both that we were still on the East Side.
Posted by rbickerstaff on 11/19 at 10:11 PM