Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49

(Borrowed from the NY Public Library on 40th St.) Back in the mid-70s when I was in my teens, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a massive best-seller in paperback. It was a big, important book that got a bunch of glowing reviews and I thought I should read it. I couldn't finish it or make head or tail out of it. There was something about missiles and Nazis, but I can't recall any characters or why I should care about them. But Pynchon is a highly regarded author and now 50 years later, I needed something short to read until the next session of my online book club when they assign us another novel. So while scanning the Fiction section of the NY Public Library at 40th Street, I found this work which is only about 150 pages. Just as confusing as Gravity's Rainbow, but at least I finished it. The heroine Oedipa Maas goes on a wild goose chase once she becomes executrix of her millionaire ex-lover's estate. She finds a weird symbol on a ladies' room wall and somehow it's connected to an ancient independent mail system. Somehow this secret society of mail carriers is important, but it's not clear why. They're killing or threatening all the men in Oedipa's life. Why or what it has to do with an auction of a set of rare stamps is not sufficently explained. And how is Oedipa like the Greek tragic figure Oedipus? Well, the ex-lover was older, so is it because she had sex with a father figure? Did she metaphorically blind herself?

There are several well-written and intriguing passages such as Oedipa's drunken seduction with Metzger, the estate's handsome lawyer where she dons several layers of clothing so she won't lose in strip poker. I also like the Paranoids, a teen garage band Oedipa encounters. But the conspiracy Oedipa investigates didn't seem particularly dangerous or vital to expose. What was she after, what made her journey one I wanted to follow? It didn't make me want to return to Gravity's Rainbow or pick up Pynchon's later novel Vineland, which Paul Thomas Anderson filmed as the Oscar-winning One Battle After Another.

This cover from a paperback edition was groovier than the book itself.

Off-B'way Update: Patti LuPone in Full Gallop

Patti LuPone will star in Full Gallop.

Three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone (Evita, Gypsy, Company) returns to the New York stage as legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland in the solo play Full Gallop written by Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson, who played the role in the original 1995 production. The production directed by Gordon Greenberg (The Baker's Wife) begins previews on Jan. 8, 2027 at NY City Center Stage II, with an opening set for Jan. 17. 

Wilson played Vreeland when the play premiered at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and again for NYC engagements at Manhattan Theater Club and the West Side Theater. She won an Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. Vreeland served as fashion editor for Harper's Bazaar, editor-in-chief for Vogue and consultant for the Metropolitan Museum's costume collection. 

B'way Update: Annie; Princess Bride

Reid Shelton and Andrea McArdle 
in the original Broadway production on
Annie.
Credit: Martha Swope

The sun will come out tomorrow...or next fall. Tony-winning director Sam Pinkleton (Oh Mary!) will direct a 50th anniversary production of Annie, the beloved musical based on the long-running comic strip about the spunky, red-headed orphan who gets adopted by multi-millionaire Daddy Warbucks. 

“If you ask any of my closest friends what I love more than anything on the planet, everyone will have the same answer: Annie,” says Pinkleton in a statement. “Annie is everything I love about New York City: gutsy, fearless, and funny as hell. It’s a perfectly constructed musical comedy that my collaborators and I will run toward with joy and abandon—with open hearts and total adoration for this legendary show that has made generations fall in love with musicals.”

Annie opened on Broadway in 1977, won seven Tony Awards, and ran for 2, 377 performances. There have been Broadway revivals in 1997 and 2012 and a touring production played Madison Square Garden in 2024. Film versions were produced in 1982, 1999, and 2014, and a live TV version aired on NBC in 2021. No word on casting, but there is already speculation on who will play Miss Hannigan, the deliciously evil mistress of the orphanage. Some on social media predict Jinx Monsoon of RuPaul's Drag Race and the recent Pirates of Penzance revival. Others vote for Cole Escola, star and author of Oh Mary!

Off-B'way Review: The Ford/Hill Project

Elizabeth Marvel and Gabby Beans in
The Ford/Hill Project,
Credit: Rebecca Smeyne

A docu-play made up of verbatim Senate testimony? Doesn’t exactly sound riveting. Yet The Ford/Hill Project, now at BAM’s Fishman Space after regional productions and a run at the Under the Radar Festival, provides a searing portrait of the workings of government power and its failure to deal with violence and harassment against women. Elizabeth Marvel (one of four cast members) and Lee Sunday Evans (who directs) have stitched together the most dramatic excerpts of testimony and questions from the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Both high-profile events were rocked by the respective eyewitness accounts of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, both of whom claimed the nominees mistreated them. 

Hill testified Thomas pressured her to date him and then, when she refused, used lewd, pornographic language and innuendo in front of her when they worked together at the US Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ford claimed Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were in high school. At the time of both hearings, the accusations made headlines and threatened the Republican nominees’ appointment to the highest court in the land. Both vehemently denied the allegations and were eventually successfully confirmed. With the passage of time, the impact of these events has faded, but this intense distillation of Hill and Ford’s stories and Thomas and Kavanuagh’s insistent denials bring them vividly into focus.

Book Reviews: Still More Christopher Durang Plays

(Taken out of the Lincoln Center Library): Christopher Durang had the same sense of humor as me. Wild, wacky, and full of pop cultural references. I've read or seen most of his plays, but I wanted to go back and re-experience them. Some of them have dated allusions and I don't know if they'd play today. (Leona and Harry Hemsley, Bush's war on terror, Jesse Helms, Bill Clinton, etc.) But we are still dealing with the forces of racism and homophobia that Durang railed against. His forwards and afterwards are also fascinating to read. In the commentary on Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater, he recounts the then-seemingly insurmountable problem of the NY Times theater critic (Frank Rich at the time) having too much power. 

Volumes read: Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater.

Miss Witherspoon and Mrs. Bob Crachit's Wild Christmas Binge are collected in one volume. I saw the former at Playwrights Horizons. The latter debuted regionally but has yet to appear in NYC. It imagines Mrs. Crachit getting sick and tired of the poverty and misery that surrounds her and she goes off a tear. I wish I had seen Kristin Nielsen do this role. 

The Idiots Karamatzov (co-written with Albert Innaurto)

Durang Durang, six one-acts performed together Off-Broadway including parodies of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard. 

3 Short Plays: The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes (a satire of "well-made" plays where a family gathers as the old cruel patriarch is dying and regrets are expressed), and 'dentity Crisis.

B'way Update: Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd in Small Mouth Sounds

Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, and 
Sarah Paulson will star in
Small Mouth Sounds on Broadway.

Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd will return to Broadway in an all-star production of Bess Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds which previously played Off-Broadway in 2015. Roberts and Rudd co-starred in a staging of Three Days of Rain in 2006 (which is also returning to Broadway this season.) Small Mouth will be directed by three-time Tony winner Joe Mantello who will also be directing a new production of Downstate on Broadway. This production is another in a growing trend of Broadway transfers of recent Off-Broadway critical success. (There are now 13 play revivals scheduled for Broadway this season and only four new plays.) Wohl is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Liberation which had a similar Off-to-on Main Stem trajectory. Small Mouth won the John Gassner Award for Outstanding Play by a new American author from the Outer Critics Circle. Previews for Small Mouth Sounds begin on Feb. 18, 2027 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in advance of a March 18 opening. 

Also starring are Martin Freeman (The Hobbit), Greta Lee (The Morning Show), Tony and Drama Desk winner Sarah Paulson (Appropriate), and Isaac Powell (Once on This Island). The play concerns six strangers meeting at a spiritual retreat and trying to keep a vow of silence. Scott Rudin and Barry Diller are the producers.

Dr. Who Out to Tender

Ncuti Gatwa and Jodie Whittaker

After over six decades, the BBC has put Doctor Who "out to tender," meaning they are accepting proposals for an outside producer to take up the reigns while the program has been suspended. This hiatus has happened once before when the Doctor was in limbo from 1989 to 2005. I can't be too upset because 63 years is a remarkable run for any TV program and there is plenty to rewatch and read in past episodes, countless books and comics. 

What does gall me is the carping from fans who claim the show's downfall in ratings was due to its "woke" attitude and the recasting the Doctor as a woman and then a black gay man. There was even a comment on FB that Peter Capaldi was the last "good" Doctor, i.e., the last white male Doctor. He went on to say that Jodie Whitaker should have been a companion like Romana, and Missy, the female version of the Master, should have been the Rani, another renegade Time Lord who happened to be a woman. This fan was saying the Doctor should only be a white British dude. This attitude springs from not wanting to see women or other minorities in traditional white straight white male roles. This poster evidently has a problem with women being the central figure, rescuing the guys instead of the other way around. This Doctor is an alien and this whole show is a fantasy, so what's the big deal about a woman or a black man assuming the role?

The other main complaint is the Whitaker and Gatwa episodes seemed to be pushing a liberal "Woke" agenda. As if the Doctor was never about inclusiveness and diversity before. I will agree that many of the Whitaker stories were hitting us over the head with their messages on racism, homophobia, climate change, and autocracy. The writing wasn't particularly strong. During the whole "Flux" season I had no idea what the hell was going on. 

But the Gatwa episodes were much better overall. I think because Russell T Davies took over as the show runner from Chris Chibnall. His sense of story structure was much stronger. There was still a social consciousness but it did not overwhelm the plots. In Dot and Bubble, the fact that the Doctor is black  and the racism of the people he's trying to save is subtly brought up and not explicitly stated until the very end.  Boom was my favorite episode of these seasons. The Doctor is confined to a single spot--a landmine on a war-torn planet which will explode if he moves off it--for nearly the entire segment. It was a clever, tight script.

The future of Doctor Who is in doubt now. But I have confidence it will live on in some form and continue to fascinate millions of Whovians.