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Why is this man smiling? McGuire in American
Soup. |
From
Nuts to Nuts
By
James Yeara
American
Soup
By
Mary Jane Hansen, directed by Bill Fortune, musical direction
by Will Severin
New York State Theatre Institute, through March 17
American
Soup by Mary Jane Han-sen is a phenomenal 45-minute revue
of some classic or near-classic rock and pop songs from the
1950s through the 1980s, from 1958’s “Johnny B. Goode” to
1984’s “Missing You,” with stops along the way for “American
Pie,” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and “Like a Virgin” just
to hit the highlights. American Soup has fantastic
commercial viability as an hourly presentation at Las Vegas’
Hard Rock Café. Musical director Will Severin’s six-piece
band (Raymond Jung on bass, Brandon Joes on keyboards-vocals,
Joel Aroeste on guitar, George Fortune on percussion-vocals,
Severin on guitar and vocals, with Shannon Johnson as featured
vocalist) blister through the songs with great clarity and
power, capturing the energy of hits like “Born to Be Wild”
and the bittersweetness of “California Dreamin’.” Each classic
is covered well, sounding as close to the original as possible
while still exuding enough sense of being a live performance
that the audience rocks in Russell Sage College’s Schacht
Fine Arts Center as an audience at the Schacht Fine Arts Center
has never rocked before. The songs receive an adequate intro
by people walking across the stage saying lines like “When
I was 6, I saw Elvis” (segues to “Can’t Help Falling in Love”)
and “I remember the first time I got into real trouble” (segues
to “Mercedes Benz”). So strong and sure are the playing and
singing that you may wish, as I did, that you had Severin’s
7-Up group on your iPod smart list.
American
Soup by Mary Jane Hansen is a promising 15-minute-long
fantasy on white-suited, white-haired, white-on-white Andy
Warhol (effetely and effectively enacted by John McGuire in
what has become his finest season at NYSTI) in purgatory visited
by a black-suited, black-briefcase-bearing character named
Joe (Ron Komora) who may be Death come to assign Andy to hell
(or Uncle Joe Bruno come to take back the state grants). Framed
by copies of Warhol’s famous pop-art silkscreened images of
Campbell’s soup cans, Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola and Marilyn
Monroe on set designer Robert Anton’s evocative grey scaffolding,
the exchanges between Andy and Joe have a quirkiness that
could eventually be crafted into an engaging performance piece
on the nature of art, life, and death, though having Andy
Warhol act as a guardian angel a la Clarence in It’s a
Wonderful Life already is a stroke of high camp genius—or
the result of one too many late-night bong loads.
American
Soup by Mary Jane Hansen is a 50-minute-long pedantic
and banal meandering through key events of the time between
1961 through the 1980s as seen through the touchstone of a
stereotypical working-class family in Queens. This PowerPoint
presentation masquerading as a play exploits the Kennedy assassination,
Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and
AIDS in a quest for relevance; it achieves a sort of Fox News-smarmy,
hot-button sensationalism, indicating a presupposed feeling
instead of acting a truth in the moment or achieving an emotional
response from the caricatured characters’ situations. If gay
marriage, abortion rights, flag burning and illegal immigration
were thrown in, you’d have all the touchstones through to
2007. It’s pretense presented with blocking and head bobbing.
There’s too much declaring—“This country still hasn’t passed
something called ‘The Equal Rights Amendment’ ” and “Well,
after the Peace Corps, I joined the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference to help build a monument to Martin Luther King
Jr.” being two of the more egregiously clunky—and too many
lines that ironically announce the critic of American Soup:
“We’ll never actually get it together, will we?” “This isn’t
funny,” and “I know it’s not the real thing, but I’ll sing
you a song every single day.”
American
Soup by Mary Jane Hansen is 107 intermissionless minutes
of song, facts, and ersatz “dramedy” that are like the bastard
child of an iPod mother and a Wikipedia father. The songs,
the Warhol fantasy, and the soap opera-ish story of the Queens
family don’t blend together like a soup, but stay separate
like the meat, mashed potatoes, and cherries of ancient TV
dinners. American Soup does stand as a tangible exemplar
of Andy Warhol’s dialogue and NYSTI’s guiding aesthetic: “I
think everyone should do whatever they want.” With enough
grants and family connections, everyone should have their
15 minutes of fame.
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