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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Gettin’ the Band Together, now playing on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, is an original musical about a down-and-out stockbroker who gets his high school band back together in time to face off against his old rival in his New Jersey hometown’s Battle of the Bands.

That’s it. That’s the whole show. On paper, it sounds pretty boring: a stockbroker? An all-dude rock band? From Jersey? Is this really what the world needs in 2018?

But I suspected there must have been some reason that in this age of high-glitz adaptations of movies and other blockbusters, this unassuming original rock musical had struggled its way from a small-town Jersey stage to Broadway, and so I set out for the Belasco hoping to find magic and wisdom and a reflection of the self, or at the very least a fun evening.

The onstage story of Gettin’ the Band Back Together is a basic battle of good and evil — of following dreams versus settling for mundanity — playing out in song and dance. As a fellow theatergoer who’d already seen the show described it, it’s basically the movie Dodgeball but with rock music. And that’s not a bad thing, unless you hate fun.

Gettin’ the Band Back Together is a warm, infectious delight. Yes, it’s true that the show has been prominently panned because its shamelessly tropey plot is packed with dorky, improv-style humor that constantly pelts you with silly jokes, visual gags, cheesy puns, physical comedy, and references to other rock musicals. But it works anyway, because it’s performed with deep joy, it’s extremely well-sung, and it’s delivered with charm by an ensemble having the time of their lives. If you let all of these things speak to you, as you should, then at some point during the performance, you will inevitably reach that wonderful moment where you are laughing purely because you are laughing.

It’s this feeling that illustrates what ultimately made a lasting impression on me as I alternately laughed and cringed my way through the show: not the onstage battle between bands, but an offstage one. The musical that Gettin’ the Band Back Together is trying to be is distinctly at odds with the current Broadway culture — embodied by an unmoved audience at the performance I attended — that unfairly expects it to be something more.

The truth is that Gettin’ the Band Back Together is a delightful show. But even if it weren’t, I would be writing this review with my heart on my sleeve to tell you all to go see it, because it’s one of those musicals that earnestly strives to be exactly what it is: a good-hearted, shamelessly self-indulgent trope factory built on fun and silliness. And in this age of problematic faves and anxiety-laden media consumption, this show, practically wholesome in its throwback juvenilia, is the rare offering that isn’t going to make you feel bad for liking it — even though it’s inane.

In that spirit, it’s reminiscent of another recent tropey, heartwarming cultural offering: Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. On some level, Gettin’ the Band Back Together is the movie’s Broadway equivalent — a sort of To All the Bands (or Least Rock Musicals) I’ve Loved Before. So what if its storyline is familiar? So what if it openly embraces every clichéd tale of down-and-out has-beens getting their groove back? Just like To All the Boys, its execution is solid, and its cast is charismatic. In essence, it’s a “cheesy cover band” equivalent of a rock musical. And that’s perfectly fine; after all, there’s a reason people love cheesy cover bands.

Put another way, Gettin’ the Band Back Together is one giant dad joke, if your dad were still a kid at heart, and that kid was a giant Nickelodeon fan who never got over Ren and Stimpy going downhill after season two, who secretly cried when My So-Called Life ended before Angela and Brian got together, who definitely got drunk at Bonnaroo and wrote “fuck Nickelback” on a fence while stoned; someone who, in adulthood, probably owns a Blu-ray of Drumline because he wants to be close to that movie in a physical way; someone who just wants his kid to be happy and kind and motivated by love rather than by a capitalist reading of the American dream.

The show sports a decently catchy, fun score by Mark Allen, making his Broadway debut. The cast — led by the charmingly winsome Mitchell Jarvis as Mitch, our stockbroker-cum-band reuniter, lover, dreamer, and Alex Brightman impersonator — performs it with loud conviction. But the real star of Gettin’ the Band Back Together is the book, which comes to us via veteran producer Ken Davenport and the improv comedy troupe Grundleshotz, in a literal “Hey, gang! Let’s put on a show!” process. (Among the Grundleshotz improv performers is Jay Klaitz, who doubles as Mitch’s MILF-obsessed, stoner best friend Bart.)

Grundleshotz, Davenport, and Allen have infused Gettin’ the Band Back Together with so much energy that it leaks out of the stage at random moments, punctuating an endless stream of jokes that succeed due to the sheer enthusiasm and dedication of the show’s cast, and to their own shameless silliness.

Writing down the jokes can’t translate their onstage effectiveness as a litany of Dadaist dork humor, but here are a few: There’s a dead cat. There’s a “nuns and roses” quip. There’s an R&B singer who turns love songs into domestic disputes. There’s a character whose only purpose in life is to take selfies. There’s a spray-tanned villain who drives a Pontiac Solstice and just wants to be loved. There’s a love ballad composed entirely of bad puns about police. There’s a running “your mom” gag. There’s every kind of New Jersey in-joke you can wedge into a two-hour running time. There’s a one-liner that’s such a cute, absurdist mix of juvenile humor and randomness that it literally stops the show.

I should repeat that: The songs are solid and fun, but it’s the jokes, not the songs, that you’ll remember.

Taken on their own, the jokes in Gettin’ the Band Back Together are nothing unique or exhilarating, but they work because the cast is so committed to selling them. In fact, I have rarely seen a more committed, joyous ensemble work so hard to win over a dead audience than I did during my Thursday night show. I’ve never seen a cast sing their hearts out with more glee and vibrance in the face of a crowd that clearly rejected the kind of show they were attending. Thank god for my seatmates Tyler and Bradley, who were there to see the show for the second time in a week, and who were living for Gettin’ the Band Back Together the way only we queer Broadway fans living through the homophobic cake years can.

“This is the kind of show I can take my Trump-voting brother to and we’ll bond over it,” Tyler told me before the show started.

“I cried,” Bradley added.

“It’s so dumb,” Tyler gushed to me at intermission. “It’s so dumb, isn’t it amazing?”

This show is so dumb, and it is amazing. It is so funny, so soft and joyous, that during intermission, I texted a friend who refused to come see it with me solely to upbraid her for her mistake. Meanwhile, my betrayer audience sat unmoved by the endless adorkable hilarity playing out in front of them. And every second that the sea of unenthused faces around me refused to be swept along by the ebullient hopes and dreams of a bunch of New Jersey ’90s kids who just wanted to have fun again, I resented not only them but the modern theater industry itself.

After all, only Broadway could build an American musical legacy out of exploiting camp for its cultural mileage, and yet somehow wind up increasingly abandoning ironic forms of entertainment — including “so bad it’s good” enjoyment.

In recent years, Broadway has conditioned audiences to expect either high-budget remakes with canned messages and blatant crowd-pandering (last season’s Spongebob comes to mind) or high-budget sophistication à la Dear Evan Hansen. Hell, even Gettin’ the Band Back Together, with its crop of references to aging rock artists, was designed to appeal to a certain crowd of baby boomers, to its detriment and their apathy.

But at heart, this isn’t a musical for boomers; instead, it represents and caters to the kind of media-savvy fan who fully embraces absurdity and silliness in their pop culture (the sillier, the better). As such, Gettin’ the Band Back Together desperately needs a younger audience, or at least a better older one.

Who were these people sitting around me who refused to show any enthusiasm for a stellar ensemble that served up some of the strongest group vocals I’ve heard since Evan Hansen? Who were these people who sat largely unmoved while our band of heroes rocked a bar mitzvah, reminisced about the roller coasters at Six Flags Great Adventure, and overcame numerous trials and obstacles to not only find love and happiness but receive a deus ex machina from none other than a fictional version of Aerosmith’s Joe Perry?

As it happened, a good portion of my fellow audience members had apparently come to see Gettin’ the Band Back Together because they’d received comped or discounted tickets as part of Broadway deal websites like Show Score. Through these kinds of watch-and-rate deals, some theatergoers — thanks to retirement, or sheer determination — are able to see upward of five shows a week.

That’s great for them, and ostensibly it should be good for shows that open in the summer, like this one. Late-summer Broadway openings tend to be rare for New York, because the tourist crowd doesn’t gravitate toward new releases that don’t already have strong buzz; you need New Yorkers to see those shows, and in August, they’re often away.

So these websites help fill seats during the offseason, which is a win. But it’s easy to see how they can hurt shows like this one, which wind up being viewed by an assembly line of people looking for deals first and feels second. It struck me that while teenage audiences were being encouraged, off-Broadway, to Be More Chill, on 44th Street, the cast of Gettin’ the Band Back Together was pleading with their older, middle-class audience to be less chill. And, miracle of miracles, eventually the audience at my show thawed out; gradually, more and more of them seemed to open their hearts to the silliness and sincerity of this show, its complete lack of irony and pretense, its sheer eagerness to make you laugh.

But they couldn’t have done it without my dudes Bradley and Tyler, whose constant laughter kept the orchestra section on life support all night. Late in the third act, veteran Marilu Henner, who plays Mitch’s mom with brassy warmth, came halfway up the aisle just to film the two of them — cast members breaking the fourth wall to film the audience is not an infrequent practice on Broadway these days, but rarely is it done with such specificity — as they lost their minds over the big finale number, when Mitch and the band finally play the Battle of the Bands. It’s exciting!

I was happy for them both, these pure-hearted theater lovers receiving a pure-hearted musical blessing, and feeding all their love and energy back to this hard-working, earnest cast. That is what we come to the theater for. That is Broadway at its core, stripped of size and massive budgets and pretension, until all that remains is love and communion.

At intermission, I’d overheard one of the comped five-show-a-week people say, with a shrug, “Maybe it’ll run for a few weeks.”

Fuck that.

Go see Gettin’ the Band Back Together. Enter with love and leave with laughter. May it, and all the other plucky, misunderstood musicals of its ilk, run forever.

Original Source -> Why critics are scorning new rock musical Gettin’ the Band Back Together — and why it deserves your love

via The Conservative Brief

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gossipnetwork-blog · 7 years

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Meet Trans Comedian Making Fart Jokes an Act of Resistance

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/meet-trans-comedian-making-fart-jokes-an-act-of-resistance/

Meet Trans Comedian Making Fart Jokes an Act of Resistance

“I love to create very dumb and stupid shit,” says comedian Patti Harrison. Jessica Lehrman for RollingStone.com

Patti Harrison is seated onstage at an ACLU fundraiser in the dimly lit backroom of a Brooklyn bar. It’s a comedy show, but the room is somber – it’s been mere days since Donald Trump was elected president. Despite the upsetting turn of events, Harrison appears overwhelmingly put together. She has the alert, composed posture of an honor student on the first day of school. When she speaks, her tone is measured and polite, as if she is selecting each word carefully from a basket of perfectly ripened apples.

She tells the audience how deeply upsetting the election has been for her, a trans woman of color. She has also just landed her dream job as a comedy writer, and she is rattled by feeling so high and so low so swiftly. She proceeds to quietly read the pitches she had to bring into work the day following the election and the room fills with ripples of laughter that escalate into shrieks and roars. One is a show called “Son Boss” – a father promotes his son too many times until he realizes his son is now the boss. Harrison punctuates the premise with a deadpan, “Uh oh, Son Boss.” The audience wails.

Eight months later, Harrison found herself in front of an audience of millions. President Trump had tweeted that he would ban transgender people from the military and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon invited the 26-year-old Ohio native to share her thoughts on the proposed ban. Harrison was polished and charming as ever as she chided the president, saying, “Donald, you are so stupid, you are sooo stupid. You’re lucky you’re so hot.” The appearance was a hit – earning nearly 400,000 views on YouTube, thousands of retweets on Twitter and a headline in The New York Times. It was a surreal moment for Harrison who, in the face of the current political climate, speaks with as much reverence for the power of fart jokes as she does the importance of trans rights.

“I love to create very dumb and stupid shit,” says Harrison, “And that’s the funny thing – when people seek me out as this like political comedian, I literally just want to joke about IBS and farting.”

Harrison still performs in the basements and backrooms that make up New York City’s alt-comedy scene, but she is poised to become the most visible working trans comedian in America. You may recognize her from her comedic videos about queer and trans identities. Or perhaps you’ve seen “Patti Reviews Animals,” where she serenaded a squirrel monkey, delivered heartbreaking news about Steve Irwin to an alligator and confused a Patagonian cavy, a South American rodent, with Sofia Vergara. If you haven’t seen Harrison yet, chances are you will soon. With a recurring role on season two of TBS’s Search Party, a guest role in the current season of Broad City and a small part in Paul Feig’s upcoming film, A Simple Favor, Harrison is suddenly everywhere. But perhaps the biggest role Harrison has been asked to play is that of mouthpiece for the trans community. Harrison’s identity as a trans woman of color, paired with her general charm and poise, make her a perfect go-to for witty commentary on trans rights – even if her humor is rarely overtly political.

Jo Firestone, who writes for The Tonight Show and has produced many live shows featuring Harrison, adores her absurdist, gross-out wit. She recalls a card Harrison made for her. “[It] had a goofy cartoon character on the front … a cute little poodle – and then on the inside, the doodle-poodle had developed breasts and a penis and balls and was bleeding from the mouth and screaming out, ‘My body is a cage!'”

Harrison is like this on stage, too. Her tone is polite, composed and inviting. When paired with her pointedly stupid jokes or characters – which alternate between sweetly wholesome and ultra vulgar – the effect is disarming. It’s like watching a cashmere sweater unravel and reveal hundreds of blood-thirsty baby spiders – horrific and captivating.

“She has a warmth about her that is very exciting,” says Firestone. “She just has ideas that nobody else has and her overall demeanor is so interesting. She’s so calm on stage and so in control but also so strange.”

Although Harrison’s live act isn’t improv, it retains the off-the-cuff energy of her improvisational roots. She often dips into characters who are both endearing and repulsive. She loves, for example, to play old people who are horny. And she adores the opportunity to sing a silly song doing an impeccable Stevie Nicks impression. In a recent “bats and rats”-themed comedy show in New York City, Harrison asserted that she definitely knew what bats and rats were before she crooned, “I’ve seen the love on a child’s face know, yeah I know that love always wins. But I never learned this one thing.” She pauses dramatically before bursting into the chorus: “I don’t know what a bat is / I don’t know what a rat is, too / I don’t know what those things are / Is it like a shoe?”

Harrison says much of her humor is inspired by growing up in Orient, Ohio, a rural town where she was often the only person of color in an almost exclusively white community. The daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant mother and a father with roots in Detroit and Tennessee, Harrison quickly learned that, in order to survive, she had to sympathize with those who openly mocked her. “I think a lot of me trying to blend in was me co-opting the racism that was used against me in a way – being OK with it. Like, ‘Yeah they’re calling me chink but they mean it in a nice way. They’re not racist, they hang out with me every day! Sure, they make jokes about me eating rice all the time, but they invite me to the movies sometimes!'”

“She just has ideas that nobody else has and her overall demeanor is so interesting. She’s so calm on stage and so in control but also so strange,” Jo Firestone says of Patti Harrison. Jessica Lehrman for RollingStone.com

Harrison, the youngest of four sisters, credits her siblings for helping her to see that she didn’t have to accept other people’s biased behavior. “My sisters were really smart,” she says. “And they sort of planted that seed in me that I actually don’t have to put up with this if I don’t want to.”

Growing up, Harrison also loved MadTV, especially its female performers and their unabashed wildness. “People like to shit on MadTV,” she says. “But it was this hub of female excellence and female character comedians like Debra Wilson, Nicole Sullivan, Mo Collins, Stephanie Weir – all of these people that are just like powerhouse performers.”

But it wasn’t until college, when a friend invited her to an improv show, that it occurred to her to perform on stage. She was immediately smitten with the form and auditioned for the improv team at Ohio University. She was elated when she got in. “That was the defining moment in my college career. I felt like, ‘Wow, I’ve accomplished something.”

When Harrison finished her fourth year of college, she came out as trans. Her family was supportive but coming out wasn’t without its uncomfortable conversations. Having switched majors, she still had credits to complete for her degree, but she ultimately decided not to return to school. Instead, she moved to New York to earn her living as a famous improvisor. “I thought that was a thing you could do,” she laughs.

Performing after she came out as trans was markedly different from her college stage experience. “My command changed,” she says. “Before I transitioned, I felt like I could walk on stage and just, like, say anything and people would just laugh. And that’s kind of a privilege that I just lost through the layers of social context and me being visibly a political object in a lot of people’s brains.”

Like all comedians, Harrison must face the challenges of connecting with an audience, but being trans often adds an additional layer of division between herself and the people from whom she’s hoping to elicit laughs. “It’s like, ‘Oh that’s a trans person.’ And that’s the conversation they’re having in their head throughout my set,” she explains.

Harrison still vividly remembers the cutting feeling of her first brush with transphobia as a performer. “One of the first shows I did in New York, I got on stage and this person in the front at normal speaking level was just like, ‘Oh that’s a guy. That’s a dude,'” she says. “And I had to keep going. And I bombed. Because I felt so disarmed in a bad way. It immediately got me in my own head.”

Harrison says she now feels mostly at home in the spaces where she performs, especially in Brooklyn where she knows she has allies. “I perform in spaces that are very inclusive and protective,” she says. “I feel more comfortable knowing that there are people around [who are] progressively minded who will have my back.” But there are still moments that give her pause, particularly when friends introduce her to people who turn out to be transphobic. “People are like, ‘Oh this is bla bla bla, he’s so nice, he’s great!'” she says. “And then it’s like, oh I have to stand with this guy who won’t look at me.” Harrison also has had the feeling she’s been booked for shows by men who are eager to identify as allies, but who are clearly uncomfortable interacting with her. “It’s like, ‘I’ll put you on the show, but oh do I have to touch you? Do I have to hand you the drink ticket?'”

Following her appearance on Fallon, Harrison was briefly flooded with requests for interviews. While it was an opportunity both for visibility as a performer, and visibility for the trans community, Harrison noticed an upsetting pattern in the questions she was sometimes asked by her interviewers. “I think it’s important for people to know [that I’m trans],” she says. “For the most part, there’s not a ton of out and working trans comedians, or people who are visible. [But] sometimes those questions [about being trans] have been a gateway to more invasive questions.”

Those questions are invariably about the intimate details of Harrison’s transition. She’s been asked various times whether she’s had surgery. “It’s always about sexualizing you,” she says. “It’s always about ‘Can I fuck you?’ and ‘How can I fuck you?'”

Dylan Marron, a writer and performer who got to know Harrison while working with her at comedy site Seriously.tv says he was instantly impressed with Harrison’s writing and her sensibilities as a performer. “I think what makes Patti so brilliant – in terms of needing more representation in media – is that Patti is just so fully herself,” he says.

Marron recalls a video Harrison made in 2016 after Brooklyn Magazine released their 50 Funniest People in Brooklyn list. The video was captioned, “To congratulate everyone whose name made it on.” In the video, Harrison gazes forlornly offscreen, scanning for her own name. She realizes she hasn’t been included, turns to the camera and asks theatrically, her voice strained, “Where’s my name?” She sobs, rises and exits dramatically, on rollerblades.

“Queer art is all about subverting further levels than you ever thought possible,” he says. “I think that’s what Patti does so beautifully.”

The daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant mother, Patti Harrison says much of her humor is inspired by growing up in Orient, Ohio, a rural town where she was often the only person of color in an almost exclusively white community. Jessica Lehrman for RollingStone.com

While she recognizes the value of representation, Harrison also says there’s something affirming about getting cast in parts on Broad City and Search Party, neither of which were written with a focus on the characters being trans. “It’s a good sign when we can have a marginalized person on screen – any person of color or LGBTQIA person – and there’s no shoehorn explanation as to why they are there,” she says. “They can just be on screen and their character motivations are what they are and they’re not like ‘Oh this is my maid. She’s trans, but she’s also a flute player.'”

“I think in some places it’s like, yeah someone in the midwest needs to see that I’m a trans character and I’m a person,” she says. “But for me it is very rewarding to get to just act and not have to think about my otherness for a few hours.”

In the same regard, Harrison often feels that speaking about the silly and mundane sometimes feels like its own political statement. “I’m learning now that just being a visibly marginalized person and not addressing it in an artistic space is almost more political than for me to be on stage talking about it,” she says. “It’s fully a privilege to be an artist and not have to talk about your oppression in your art. If you don’t have that challenge – you get to make art about a hoverboard!”

As for the dismal political landscape, Harrison says it’s only driven her to keep creating the stupidest jokes possible. “I think in the way that a lot of people’s bodies release tears when they’re stressed or sad, my body releases horrible, horrible jokes about bird assholes and the dumbest things I can think of, because – even if it’s just for a second – it [provides] relief. I guess the equivalent of taking a deep calming breath for me is like farting in a beautiful musical tone,” she says, adding, “Or farting with a dear friend! If you’re doing it with a friend you can harmonize a chord.”

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