Joe's View

Scary and funny is one of my favorite entertainment combinations, and the new collection of short plays at The Theatres at 45 Bleecker in Manhattan has both elements in abundant quantities.
“The Scariest” is being presented by a theater company known as The Exchange in a very small basement space at the Bleecker St. venue. As one theatergoer said on his way down the rather creepy staircase, “I’m scared already!”
The show is a site-specific piece in which the audience is scattered around raised platforms on which eight tales of the supernatural are presented by a tip-top acting company consisting of Joaquin Torres, Mandy Siegfried, Jesse Hooker, Andy Grotelueschen, Angel Desai and Rebecca Brooksher (Desai was featured in last season’s revival of “Company” on Broadway and Brooksher gave a terrific performance in the two-character play “Dying City” at Lincoln Center last winter).
The short plays include two variations on the horror classic “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs, as well as a loose adaptation of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of a deadly female poisoner.
The space definitely adds to the strong atmosphere. The playing area and audience seating spaces are surrounded by what looks like a series of shower curtains, so we become aware of the fact that we are as exposed and as vulnerable as the characters on the stage — I think most people in the audience probably glance behind their seats every once in a while to see if anything is about to emerge from the plastic curtains.
The evening concludes with the frightening and hilarious “Revelations” by Kristin Newbom which mixes end-of-days rants with bits of Scientology philosophy gleaned from interviews given by Tom Cruise. The one-act play is about the way that actors become possessed by the parts that are written for them and the “spirit” of Cruise eventually possesses every member of the cast.
Cross “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” with “The Omen,” add in that notorious YouTube clip of Cruise spouting off about his faith in the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, and you’ve got this wild and deeply unsettling finale to “The Scariest.”
The show has been well reviewed and extra chairs were squeezed in for last Saturday night’s show, so I have a hunch the run might be extended beyond the original March 29 closing date.
(Tickets for “The Scariest” are $24 and may be ordered by calling 212-239-6200 or online at www.telecharge.com)

Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451” has been widely read, and taught in countless high school English classes, but the author believes his story of a world without books is often misinterpreted as an attack on censorship.
The novel about a future society in which books are banned — and “firemen” are assigned the task of ferreting out and destroying books — appeared at a time when the spectacle of Nazi book-burnings was still fresh.
But, Bradbury intended his novel as an attack on what he then saw as the growing menace of television.
The 88-year-old author told a reporter from The L.A. Weekly last year, “Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was.”
Bradbury said TV created a new form known as “factoids, ” and that it has been particularly destructive in the coverage of news.
“Useless,” Bradbury said of most TV news. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.”
What Bradbury wrote about radio and TV in the early 1950s can be seen as even more pertinent today, when reading continues to decline with the advent of limitless downloadable visual entertainment and information.
“(Radio and TV have) contributed to our growing lack of attention,” Bradbury wrote in a letter to a friend two years before “Fahrenheit 451” appeared. “This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”
Tuesday night at 7, it will be my pleasure to host a screening of director Francois Truffaut’s faithful 1966 film version of “Fahrenheit 451” as part of the Fairfield Theatre Company’s monthly “Martini and a Movie” series.
The film feels remarkably prescient in its view of a drugged and happy populace watching inane entertainment on giant wall-screen TVs. We also see folks on public transportation “reading” romance comics that leave them in what look like auto-erotic trances.
The movie was Truffaut’s only English language film and it stars Oskar Werner as the fireman Montag who becomes a secret lover of books after he swipes a Charles Dickens novel before it is burned. Julie Christie plays a dual role — Montag’s drugged, TV-addict wife and a young revolutionary reader who is part of the book-saving underground.
The issues raised by “Fahrenheit 451” are always worth talking about, so the discussion after the screening should be lively. It is also a story that seems to appeal to all ages.
If you don’t have plans for Tuesday night, please join me at the Fairfield Theatre Company for the free screening at 7 p.m.
(For more information on the Fairfield Theatre Company, visit the non-profit group’s Website at www.fairfieldtheatre.org. The theater is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center.)

David Hajdu’s new book, “The Ten-Cent Plague” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is an alternately funny and appalling account of the widespread hysteria over comic books in the early 1950s, a cultural witch-hunt that put hundreds of writers and artists out of work and killed a vibrant pop art-form for at least a decade.
Overshadowed in most 1950s era history books by the Communist witch-hunts of the same period, the successful political and media fight against the creators of a 10-cent entertainment form designed for kids and teens is just as shocking to recall.
“They did no spying for rival governments,” Hadju writes near the end of the book. “They traded no atomic secrets. Unlike their rough counterparts in the Red Scare, the artists and writers caught up in the comic-book controversy were never charged with espionage, treason, contempt of Congress or court, or obstruction of justice. What they did was tell outrageous stories in cartoon pictures, a fact that makes their struggle and their downfall all the more strange and sad.”
Hajdu traces the history of comics from their addition to the pages of newspapers more than 100 years ago to their rise as a huge stand-alone entertainment during the 1940s.
Comic books got racier and more violent during the World War II era, providing kids and teens with stronger material than they could find at the movies or on radio.
Media observers, church leaders and politicians amped up their criticism after the war, citing comic books as one of the causes of the rise in “juvenile delinquents” in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Hadju suggests that adults are always nervous about entertainment designed to excite adolescents; he makes it easy to see parallels between the comic book hysteria of 50 years ago and today’s pundits and political leaders who would like to keep rap music and violent video games away from impressionable young minds.
“The Ten-Cent Plague” starts off in an amusing almost nostalgic vein as we meet the kooky New York artists who made good livings drawing comic books such as “Panic” and “Menace” and “Crime SuspenStories.”
The canny publishers kept would-be censors off their backs for many years by including “crime does not pay” morals at the ends of their lurid stories (1960s pornographers used a similar gimmick when they sold their XXX films as sex education movies).
But, by the end of the 1940s, a coalition of irate parents, newspaper columnists, pop psychologists and groups such as the Cub Scouts and the American Legion whipped up a hysteria that led to mass comic-book burnings all over the country and even legislation that banned the sale of crime and horror comics to minors in some states.
Hadju follows one of the major horror comic-book publishers, Bill Gaines, who saw his hugely successful business collapse in the wake of the anti-comic-book movement.
Gaines did have the last laugh, however, when he transformed “Mad” from a comic book to a full-fledged magazine in the late 1950s; he was then able to freely satirize the prudes and the scolds who tried to make pop culture so dull during the Eisenhower Era.
“The Ten-Cent Plague” suggests that the underground resistance to the “great comic-book scare” was one of the triggers of the countercultural explosions of the following decade. The book ends in France where the legendary expatriate 1960s underground comic artist Robert Crumb tells Hadju how the banned 1950s-era books inspired his work.
“Frustrated with the juvenility and the vacuity of the (censored) comics of the (late) 1950s and early ’60s, Crumb and his peers found solace and inspiration in the pages of the pre (censorship era) comics; and those who grew up to be comic-book artists and writers themselves carried the work’s irreverence, idiosyncrasy and ambition into underground comics and the graphic-novel movement,” Hadju points out.
“The Ten-Cent Plague” is a valuable reminder of a very dark, but all-too-recent era in American cultural history.

Hurricane Katrina inspired one of the best crime novels of the past year — James Lee Burke’s “The Tin Roof Blowdown” — as well as the superb Spike Lee documentary “When the Levees Broke.”
Now, playwright Beau Willimon examines the 2005 catastrophe in a powerful piece of theatre, “Lower Ninth,” which is running at the Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan through April 5.
The intermission-less, 70-minute drama is set right after the storm, when two poor African-American men, Malcolm (James McDaniel) and E-Z (Gaius Charles), find themselves stuck on their rooftop, wondering how long they will have to wait until help arrives.
The younger E-Z and older Malcolm had a troubled relationship before the storm — with Malcolm serving as a surrogate father to the angry youth. We find out that Malcolm was an addict who left town for a while but that he found God, returned to New Orleans, and is determined to straighten out E-Z.
Both men are coping with the death of Lowboy (Gbenga Akinnagbe) who drowned when he refused to abandon his car in the torrent and whose plastic-wrapped body occupies part of the roof.
The play feels a little bit like a contemporary “Waiting for Godot” with E-Z and Malcolm killing time — and exchanging grudging affection and insults — as they begin to wonder if they will completely de-hydrate or starve to death on the roof before help arrives.
In a powerful — and creepy — surreal interlude, E-Z encounters the ghost of Lowboy and they have a long conversation about what has happened to their seemingly forgotten, doomed city.
More a collection of compelling scenes than a traditionally structured play, “Lower Ninth” is powered by the excellent three-actor cast and is another painful reminder of our country’s recent shaming.
(For more information on “Lower Ninth” and the Flea Theater, go online to www.theflea.org.)

You can tell that you’re in good hands at the new Lincoln Center Theater revival of “South Pacific” even before the show’s first scene.
Just after the overture begins, director Bartlett Sher rolls back the thrust stage, uncovering a very large orchestra.
We have all grown so used to the smaller orchestras that are completely hidden from view at most of today’s Broadway shows that Sher’s simple but beautiful gesture is one of the most powerful theatrical moments I’ve witnessed in recent months.
The show is, of course, one of the greatest hits in the history of the American musical theater — with a glorious Rodgers and Hammerstein song score — so Sher lets us know right at the start that he will be presenting the music with the utmost respect.
The revival uses the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations and the two leads (Kelli O’Hara and Paulo Szot) sing magnificently, so musical comedy fans will be on cloud nine during the performances of “Some Enchanted Evening,” “A Wonderful Guy,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and the rest of the classics in this score.
I saw an early preview last week — the official press opening is April 3 — but the production is in great shape.
Sher and designer Michael Yeargan use the challenging space at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre — with the audience on three sides of a giant thrust stage — as well as any directing-designing team in the history of that venue.
Indeed, “South Pacific” fits the space so beautifully that you would swear it’s a new show designed specifically for this particular theater.
The beauty of the design and the swift movement of the characters in and out of the space makes the show feel fresher than it might have in a more traditional prosenium staging.
Yeargan and Sher worked together at the Beaumont on a wonderful new musical a few seasons ago — the Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas hit “The Light in the Piazza” — and that experience clearly served them well for this Rodgers and Hammerstein revival. Their “South Pacific” is beautiful to look at from start to finish, but in a simple and uncluttered manner in which the subtle lighting and well-chosen set pieces combine for stunning (and completely modern) stage pictures.
Kelli O’Hara has quickly advanced into the top tier of musical theater stardom, from a supporting role in “Sweet Smell of Success” to her featured role in “Piazza” and then her starring performance opposite Harry Connick Jr. in the Roundabout Theatre’s hit revival of “The Pajama Game” two seasons ago.
O’Hara acts as well as she sings which makes her a very potent force in the contemporary musical theater. Ensign Nellie Forbush has to register quickly and forcefully as a character in “South Pacific” but also must have the vocal heft to sell songs made famous by Mary Martin in the original production. O’Hara is terrific in a part quite unlike the ones she has played in recent seasons.
Paulo Szot comes to the role of Emile de Becque from the world of opera — just as the original male lead Ezio Pinza did in the original production — and his renditions of “Some Enchanted Evening” and “This Nearly Was Mine” produced tremendous ovations at the performance I attended. He and O’Hara have very strong sexual chemistry.
It is hard to imagine a better 2008 revival of this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. I have a hunch the limited run — set to end on June 22 — will be extended through the summer. If you’re a fan of classic Broadway musicals, you won’t want to miss this sumptuous staging of “South Pacific.”
(For ticket information, go online to www.LCT.org or call Tele-charge at 212-239-6200.)

“The Seven Days of Peter Crumb” is a very scary but compulsively readable first novel by the British actor/writer Jonny Glynn that was recently published in this country as a Harper Perennial paperback original.
The book takes us into the disintegrating mind of an ordinary middle-class Londoner who decides he will kill himself in seven days but will go on his own killing spree until then.
Some of the promotional material compares the book to Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” but the way that Glynn examines the split in the man’s personality seemed more reminiscent of Ruth Rendell and Joyce Carol Oates to me.
Indeed, the mercifully brief and matter-of-fact way that the author presents Crumb’s ghastly crime spree is not unlike Oates’s horrifying 1995 novella “Zombie” (in which she dramatized the Jeffrey Dahmer case).
It is unsettling, to say the least, to share Peter’s point of view as he looks around and sees a city filled with people he views as worthless potential victims: “She sat there hunched over her McDonald’s chicken dippers, shovelling them into her craving insatiable gullet. The bus stank of processed glutamates…I gave her a contemptuous look and pointedly opened all the windows, not that she noticed — she seemed oblivious to any offense the sight and stink of her might be causing.”
Glynn writes about Peter in two different voices — the presumably sane man who once had a wife and a child and a job; and then the festering mad Peter who is trying to gain dominance.
There are strong elements of black comedy in the novel which is set in a city where the larger horror of terrorism has everybody’s nerves jangling to the point that an everyday serial killer barely registers in people’s consciousness.
“The Seven Days of Peter Crumb” introduces a major new crime writing talent; I can’t wait to see what Glynn does next.

With a title that can’t be printed in many publications and sexually provocative posters and ads placed all over New York, Michael Domitrovich’s “Art*******” was, sadly, set up for an almost inevitable fall.
Serious theatergoers are probably put off by the soft porn promotion and sensation seekers have to be disappointed by the brief sexual situations and glimpses of nudity.
The Joe Oppedisano photo for the play’s ads is striking, but had to be severely cropped in many New York publications (Oppedisano is best known for his graphically sexual imagery, including the photo shoots for the packaging of downtown adult filmmaker Michael Lucas).
Domitrovich’s play is an interesting examination of the role of publicity and money in the downtown art world. The jumping off point is the attempted suicide of the play’s twentysomething protagonist Owen (Will Janowitz) after he receives a crushing review in Artforum.
The drama opens with Will in a coma being worked on by two doctors we see in a giant video projection on the rear wall; their medical jargon is gradually replaced by two more projections of snarky art-world insiders, giving an equally discouraging diagnosis, not on Owen’s physical health, but on his career prospects after the damning critique.
Domitrovich flashes back to Owen’s turbulent life before the review and a circle of frenemies that includes rising musician Trevor (Asher Grodman), a German fashion designer named Max (Tuomas Hiltunen) who is about to get his first Fashion Week show and two sisters who are wired into the downtown scene — public relations woman Maggie (Jessica Kaye) and partygirl/artist Bella (Nicole La Liberte).
Each character gets a chance to tell his or her story in a mock-12 Step meeting imagined by the comatose Owen. All five cast members are excellent with Janowitz facing the biggest acting challenge because we never get to see Owen in a relaxed state.
The play has been stylishly directed by Eduardo Machado, who is a fine playwright himself (with Long Wharf and Hartford Stage productions on his resume). It’s a slice of contemporary New York life that would have a hard time in any commercial venue — the play is simply too abrasive and unresolved — so the fact that the show is expected to close Sunday is not surprising. I’m not sure if a more tasteful title and ad campaign would have produced different results.
(“Art*******” is at the DR2 Theatre at 103 East 15th St. For ticket information, visit www.telecharge.com)

What is it about some indefensibly bad old movies that makes them so much fun to watch?
“Road House” was almost unanimously roasted by critics when it was released in 1989, but since then it has become one of the most popular movies on cable and a few years ago the film was affectionately spoofed when it was turned into an off-Broadway musical.
Over the years, “Road House” has attracted a huge cult following that relishes every melodramatic twist and turn in a crazy tale of a high-priced bouncer (Patrick Swayze) who travels the country being paid thousands of dollars a week to clean up dangerously violent bars. The badness quotient of the movie falls somewhere between “Valley of the Dolls” and “Showgirls,” two other classics of the hooting variety.
Although the Rowdy Herrington-directed yarn was promoted as a serious action drama, it was clear right from the start that the cast and crew viewed the material as a near-farce with some of the most over-the-top dialogue ever uttered in an American movie (the best lines are too blue to be quoted here).
“Road House” was back in the news earlier this week with the announcement of the death of the blues/jazz guitarist Jeff Healey, who leads the road house band.
Healey wasn’t an actor, but he contributes lots of wry humor and good music to “Road House.” In the opening scenes, the road house of the movie’s title is such a hell hole that Healey and his band are forced to play inside a cage so that they are not hurt by flying debris. After Swayze starts his clean-up campaign, his character and the guitarist become close friends.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed several of the actors who worked on “Road House” — in conjunction with other projects — and mention of the 1989 picture put smiles on the faces of Sam Elliott, Kelly Lynch, Ben Gazzara and Marshall Teague. It was a crazy nonsensical script, they all agreed, but they had a blast making it and have found — to their chagrin — that fans like to talk about it as much as some of their more prestigious vehicles.
Tomorrow night at 8 p.m., the Rave HD channel is paying tribute to Jeff Healey with an encore presentation of the musician’s last televised concert, “Beautiful Noise: Jeff Healey and the Jazz Wizards.” The show features Healey on trumpet, lead vocals and guitar, and demonstrates his amazing evolution from a blues guitarist into a full-fledged jazz musician.