Driving Miss Crazy

Fork-sized reviews of Broadway revivals La Bete and Driving Miss Daisy

Recession is here. Plays the new big thing on Broadway, minimal sets, tiny casts, hefty star-power. But is fame enough...?

La Bete, a revival of 90s play that ran for, like, two performances, stars David Hyde Pierce, Joanna Lumley, Mark Rylance. Shakespeare-type (Hyde Pierce) being forced by Queen (Lumley) to bring Shrek-esque buffoon (Rylance) into acting troupe because she thinks he's funny. Interesting piece on the hows and whys of society allowing low art to be elevated to high art, while high art becomes an object of scorn among the masses who, at the end of the day, don't care about iambic pentameter and just want to be entertained.

Sets, costumes, etc., etc., the elements are there, lovely, creative, perhaps a bit inconsistently literal. Hyde Pierce and Lumley simply spectacular. May inquire at box office to see how much it would cost to slip in for their closing monologues in the last 30 minutes of the 2 hour play.

Why just last 30 minutes? Because if I have to sit through Rylance's somebody-shoot-me-please-I-beg-of-you-I-can't-take-anymore AWFUL comedic stylings again, all the cheer and goodwill I have left will be permanently sucked out of me. What, I believe, should have been the embodiment of every handsome, self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual actor you've ever disliked, is interpreted here as a Jerry Lewis/Adam Sandler (in his early days) type of mental retard who takes a dump behind Shakespeare's bookshelf, cannot make eye contact with anyone in an irritating childlike manner, drops the end of 2/3 of all his lines for comic effect which gets old after the first 45 minutes, farts, belches, spits, strips, basically delights the dumbed-down audience so Hyde Pierce can turn around at the end of the play and tell me and three other people who want to gouge out our eyes that we must defend art from the people sitting around us.

Successful? Sure. But this isn't Theatre of Cruelty. It's Broadway and most people are paying $121.50 to be entertained, not tortured ($35 for me. Thanks, TDF!) I've never had anyone shoot to the top of my MUST MISS list faster than Mark Rylance who pulled almost exactly the same shtick in Boeing Boeing, and how he continues to steal all the reviews is quite beyond me. 15 minute monologue delivered by actor, while dazzling the folks who still wonder how actors "memorize all those lines" utterly excruciating.

Hyde Pierce and Lumley, however, positively light up the stage (Lumley quite literally). If you can stomach the 21st Century's Jerry Lewis acting like an barking idiot for 45 minutes you'll be treated to a handful of wonderful monologues by these two.


Driving Miss Daisy. Vanessa Redgrave (THE Vanessa Redgrave!), James Earl Jones, Boyd Gaines. 90 minutes. Drab set. Unfortunate costumes. Okay. So the color and sparkle will come from Redgrave and Jones, right?

Sad to say, once again, another tiny cast with a weak line that, in this case, renders the show difficult to watch. Gaines is great in the thankless role of Miss Daisy's exposition-spouting son, and Jones defies expectations as Hoke, giving a swell, if a bit emotionally heavy-handed, performance which is likely to delight Star Wars fans the world over.

Unfortunately, someone needs to tell Ms. Redgrave that merely speaking with a false Southern accent does not a genteel Southern lady make. More to it than that. Don't know why they keep putting British actresses in roles which require Southern accents--they can never do the Rs and the As. When Redgrave first comes on stage mixing cake batter, looking extremely awkward doing so, you know this doesn't bode well. Moving too much, pantomiming, it's too much, too unreal, and, worst of all, too phoned-in. Tender moment teaching Hoke to read is reduced to Redgrave clowning and dropping all pretense of character. Two sneezes during the show reminded me of the studies done attempting to understand why actors "in the moment" NEVER SNEEZE on stage.

A little heavy-handed on the "THIS IS SEGREGATION" side of things. We get it, okay? We're not stupid.

Then again, based on audience response to Rylance in La Bete, maybe we are.

My job

Aaand now I'm a werewolf with raptor feet.

I have the coolest job in the world.

*does more pull ups, crunches*