Slow Growth: If/Then, reviewed for Architect

The other characters in If/Then spend a lot of time talking about how awesome Idina Menzel's character is.

In 2009 I attended a lecture by Jack Viertel, a theatre-critic-turned-producer, elucidating the structure of Broadway musicals. Actually, "lecture" doesn't really reflect what an intimate affair this was. It was more like a musical-appreciation lesson, held in the home of Sasha Anawalt as part of the NEA Institute fellowship for arts journalists writing about theatre that she oversaw. Anyway, Viertel broke down the way these shows work the way screenwriting guru Robert McKee deconstructs commercial movies. He even had musical theatre performers on hand to sing samples of each type of song he described as he detailed its emotional and/or narrative function within the show.

I’d seen only a handful of musicals at that time. I was fascinated to learn what a complicated and tradition-encumbered form it is, and how many different moving parts must to cohere just so to make something that, done right, looks and sounds effortless.

I thought of that lecture last week as I was watching If/Then, the new Idina Menzel-starring musical from the writers of the Pulitzer Prize-and-Tony Award-winning Next to Normal. The show is getting a limited test run here in DC before it opens on Broadway in March. A lot of it doesn't work, but the experience of watching a big, complicated show in draft form was fascinating. Because the character Menzel plays is an urban planner by trade, Architect magazine commissioned me to review it. You can read that piece here. 

Wrap Your Legs Around These Velvet Rims and Strap Your Hands Across My Engine 31

I infer from the official graphic there will be trampolines. I am pro-trampoline.​

Tomorrow morning I will fly to Louisville, Kentucky to help cover the final, three-day "industry weekend" of the Humana Festival for New American Plays. I'll be doing this as part of Engine 31, a pop-up newsroom.  (Sasha Anawalt, the "motherfucker who found[ed] this place -- Sir"*, answers your eminently reasonable questions about what that is and who pays for it here; thank you for asking.)  I'm excited to be a part of it, and to see and work with my old friends Sasha, Michael Phillips, Rebecca Haithcoat and Doug McLennan.  And nearly as excited to meet the other seven journalists who're part of this thing.  Follow along at Engine 31, and/or via Twitter @enginethirtyone.

I am reliably informed there will also be some basketball thing happening.

*Sasha is not actually an actual motherfucker; she is in fact delightful. I am merely quoting Jessica Chastain's character from the movie Zero Dark Thirty here, as is only sensible and appropriate when discussing a theater festival. Engine 31 contributor Michael Phillips, whose name I used as an FCC-permitted substitute for "motherfucker" on the radio once, but who is also not one, usually, called ZDT the best film of 2012, so context.