The Fortress of Solitude

[MusicAndPassion]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 6:57am

I won the free lottery to The Fortress of Solitude's first preview last night. Sat fifth row center, with a perfect view of the stage. I understand it's the first preview and performance of this show in New York, so here are a few of my thoughts.

Before the show the director made an announcement about it being the first preview, what that means, and to bear with them. He also made an announcement that David Rossmer, playing the hilarious character Arthur Lomb, was seriously hurt and that he will still perform with his injury. After the show, people involved said he lost his finger the night before! Kudos to Mr. Rossmer for giving a stellar performance after a terrible accident.

The show itself is in great shape. The score, by Michael Friedman, is excellent. The show itself seems to be a hybrid of Next to Normal, In The Heights, and Fun Home in many different ways, and the score echoes the score of these three shows while still keeping an original quality that all new musicals should have. Some of Itamar Moses' book needs revising, but there are some brilliant moments of mirroring between characters in Act I and Act II.

Adam Chanler-Berat is stellar. He leaves the stage for probably about 5 minutes the whole show. His line delivery is excellent, making Moses' book work and Friedman's score shine. His chemistry with every character, from his *SPOILER absent mother *UNSPOILER to his girlfriends, best friends, neighbors and father, are very believable and real. In my opinion this is the best I've seen him.

The rest of the cast is quite good. Their voices shine, and even though some exhausting from rehearsal was evident, they made due and delivered. The show has moments of brilliance, character development that avoids cliches when it easily could give in, and uses Gowanas, Brooklyn itself as a character in the light that In The Heights used Washington Heights.

If you can, see this production. I do hope it extends and finds a new home after November. Like Fun Home, it could work on Broadway in a small theatre. It's not a perfect show, but it's pretty powerful, moving, and original.

Started on time at 8, was on the street by 10:45.

[macnyc]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 7:24am

Wow, this is incredible on so many levels! Losing a finger! I give him credit for his "show must go on" attitude. I can't even imagine that. And I'm glad to hear the Public has come up with another original, quality musical. I'm very excited to see the show now! Thanks for a well-written report.

Updated On: 10/1/14 at 07:24 AM

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 8:42am

Lost a finger? How careless! I'd like to heard the story about THAT.

[inception]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 10:09am

It sounds like they already made some cuts since Dallas, some reviews from there said the first act alone was 2 hours.
Looking forward to seeing this next week.

[Someone in a Tree2]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 10:15am

"It sounds like they already made some cuts since Dallas."

Very disrespectful way to talk about David Rossmer's digit.

[inception]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 3:18pm

^
It didn't even occur to me how that might sound. I was referring to reviews from Dallas that said the show was over 3 hours long there.

[JPeterman]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 3:44pm

I saw it in Dallas. I enjoyed it very much. I actually cried at the end, it just hit home to me.

I did not notice that it was excessively long. It seemed tight and ship-shape to me even before it left for New York.

[luvcaroline]

Posted: 10/1/14 at 8:34pm

We loved it in Dallas as well. The performances were top-notch and the music was mostly enjoyable. We did think that they tried to include too much, so it's nice to hear it's been trimmed. I highly recommend it.

[RippedMan]

Posted: 10/5/14 at 11:37pm

I saw it tonight. Rushed, and got moved down.

I have to say I was not impressed. The music was catchy at times, primarily because Freidman repeated the same handful of melodies over and over again. There were a handful of good melodies and a lot of forgettable moments. I wouldn't say there were a ton of SONG but more like sound bites. And why why why why why would all these old white men get together and write a RAP for the black characters? It's just so absurdly terrible. Why does it need to be a rap? He has a gorgeous voice. Let him sing. It just felt so forced.

The story as a whole just didn't grab me. I wasn't sure what the pay off of a lot of the moments were. We never really saw why he loved his mother so much, why he never really took to his father, why was his girlfriend singing a song about how he lied to her only to have her never confront him? Why did the dad get a song, but the mother - who keeps appearing over and over again - never gets a song of her own? And why are the bits she sings so out of her range?

The physical production was fine. I cringe at seeing the "graffiti" font because it screams white people trying to be urban.

In the end I'm just not sure this show needed to be musicalized. There were good moments, and some pretty moments, but as a whole it's just not a very interesting or thrilling musical.

All the actors were fine.

[inception]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 2:52am

"All the actors were fine."

Who wrote this? Après Huit?

I guess I'll go into this with lowered expectations.

So much stuff that I have been reading about this doesn't even sound like the novel, or what I would pick as highlights from the novel.

[After Eight]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 7:18am

A muddled mess. The music ranges from nondescript to painful, without even one decent song in the lot.

*SPOILER*


A particularly irritating phenomenon seems to be popping up of late: morally-odious characters who see fit to give high-minded lectures on right and wrong. We currently have the three garbage-foraging snoops speechifying in Found; and now, here, even more intolerable, a wife and mother from the godawful 70s propounds weighty hippie platitudes about making the world a better place where we will all live as one, etc. The only thing blowing in the wind from this pretentious sermonizer is the rank odor of hypocrisy, since she then runs off with another man, abandoning her husband and son for good.

Well, I guess, in this respect, the show got one thing right. Those hippies were masters of self-righteous hypocrisy.

[RippedMan]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 9:48am

Yeah, the actors were fine. I'm not sure what else you want me to say. When you see it, you'll understand. Beret's main character is fine. He's never asked to do more than he can handle. He's basically playing Henry 2.0. He's in good voice, and suits the material, but he never goes above and beyond what I expected.

The other actors are all in the same vein. The show doesn't really ask anyone to step outside of their comfort zone. The guy playing Mingus was probably my favorite. Great voice and solid acting.

The story just felt so jumbled to me. I mean, we had this big Preacher character that was introduced through a never ending song. And then that's about it. He doesn't really get much of a backstory or anything.

The main character isn't flushed out enough to make us care too much, and in the end, it's not really his story it seems anyway.

[Owen22]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 1:31pm

This show is such a mess. A good intentioned, sometimes nicely written mess, but a huge mess nonetheless.

SPOILERS. I read the Wiki of the novel as the show left me confused as to certain "magical realism" episodes and, yes, they came from the book and were part of its critical downfall as well. Though it feels from the reviews that at least the novel owned these plot points, the show seems to want it both ways, as literal happenings and as metaphor as well.

Beret does what he can with the character, reminiscent of the character he played in another questionable musical at Playwright's last season (why are these big theatrical institutions producing such mediocre works??) and the kid who plays Mingus is pretty great. The rest of the cast is better than most of their material.

There is something moving in this story, I admit, but I never once cried and I felt like I could have. But it's so unfocused (whose story is it anyway?) I couldn't latch on to anything that may have profoundly touched me.

Updated On: 10/6/14 at 01:31 PM

[dreaming]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 1:34pm

I'm seeing this on Thursday. I am having a lot of trouble getting through the rather dense book. It's just not holding my attention the way I want it to. I sure hope the musical can-but I'm not holding my breath.

[RippedMan]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 2:02pm

Yeah, I was kind of intrigued by the "magical realism" moments, but then they just got rid of it. And then at the end they mention it again? I was confused.

I think it might have been more interesting if they had streamlined the book. Like "Natasha and Pierre." Just take a section and make that the focus. Or if they wanted they could have just focused on the "bromance" at the center of it.

[inception]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 4:09pm

No offence meant above RM, just seems like the sort of comment he gets ripped for all the time.
Kind of wish you could give them notes about the focus it needs. To me that is the essential core of the book.

As a Lethem fan I am coming out from the West Coast mainly to see this, fully aware of the so-so reviews it got in Dallas, but there's so much other stuff (Chita/Idina/Rannels) I'm doing too that it won't wreck my weekend if it disappoints.

[RippedMan]

Posted: 10/6/14 at 5:58pm

You're fine. I just write bluntly. It's not meant to come off a "my way or the highway" type of thing.

I haven't read the book, so I can't give you any focus there, but the show itself doesn't know who the main character is. You have a narrator character who is always on stage, but we don't really get to learn too much about his life. He loves his mother and hates his father. That's about as deep as the relationships go. He has a girlfriend who he doesn't tell about his past. For what reasons we never know? He wants to get this compilation of records together because his mom loved this certain singer, but it's not very compelling.

Then we have all these other characters. There's this big mean black man who is always taking stuff from Dylan, and then he gets a 'happy ending' at the end of the show, but why? We don't like him as a character, so why do we care what happens to him?

It just felt like too many characters were in the show. And the dancing was terrible.

[inception]

Posted: 10/10/14 at 11:04pm

Yes, it is disappointing.
Just quickly using the wifi here at the public after the show tonight.
As someone very familiar with novel I did enjoy much of the first act. Unfortunately, they cut out at least a third of the novel and yet still have too much story that they are trying to tell. So much of what they cut would explain the characters motivations better. Like the mother: After 8 is right about her, but what this adaptation leaves somewhat unclear is the bad effect her actions had on her husband and son. They also cut most of the "magic realism" elements from the novel, pretty much to the point that it doesn't make sense to even have any of it.

SPOILER

In the novel, the ring is from a crazy homeless man and gives Mingus the power to fly. Later Dylan uses it to fly in college, but as it ages it changes and gives him invisibility. He uses this power to break into the prison and give the ring to Robert at Mingus's request. But Dylan does not inform his old bully of the change, and Robert dies trying to use it to fly out of prison.

The cast does give exceptional performances, most notably Andre De Shields who brings down the house in the first act. For the most part though the material does not match the quality of the cast.

[RippedMan]

Posted: 10/11/14 at 12:34am

Agreed, and that's really interesting about the ring. It seems to me that the magic realism would have made the show feel more special. I'm surprised they would cut that out because as it stands, it's just not that compelling.

[inception]

Posted: 10/11/14 at 8:53am

I woke up this morning, well I'm still on West Coast time, so 4am my time, thinking about how they could fix this a bit by not holding as closely to the structure of the novel. Some SPOILERS follow:



I would take the "liner notes" section that starts the second act and open the show with that, jumping right in with all these great Motown style numbers. In that section the have the song they say was The Subtle Distinctions biggest hit, but it is a different number than the one in the first act which mentions Superman and flying. So cut "Bothered Blue" and make the other song their biggest hit. Instead of Dylan presenting this to a producer, have him reading this to his adult girlfriend, and when he gets to the part about Rude buying a house on Dean Street, she cuts in with the whole "Wait a minute? Didn't you grow up there? Do you know these people? Are they still alive?" stuff. Then Dylan could be all like, well this all started with my mother. And she could be like, "Your mother? I thought she left? There's so much you've never tell me...." Now flashback to the first act covering the childhood, which still needs some streamlining.
There's so much in the book about Dylan getting into punk and the Talking Heads and also stuff about the early days of hiphop, which they try use musically a bit now to show the characters aging, but it just is too confusing right now and for me that was some of the least compelling music in the show. Regarding the ring, I don't mind the change of where it came from - this maybe helps explain how Dylan is haunted by his mother running off; but it needs to be clear that it actually has powers and it is more than just a childhood fantasy. This is essential because it raises the stakes of why Dylan wants the ring so badly before he goes off to college - which just isn't there in the show now.
The second act could focus more on Mingus and his time in prison which gets so quickly glossed over in his ballad right now. It needs to be more clear about why Mingus wants Robert gone - how he us bringing Mingus down with all his shady dealings. In the book Dylan learns all this when he visits the prison. It would probably be too difficult to stage the sections of the book where he uses invisibility, and uses that to break in to see Robert in solitary.
I don't know if these ideas would gel with what they are trying to bring out as the theme of the show right now. It is just that as it is now, there is so much going on and people were left scratching their heads at the end saying I don't know what happened or why.

[ClydeBarrow]

Posted: 10/17/14 at 2:35pm

I saw this last night and pretty hated it. Somehow they took a terrible, boring book and made it even WORSE. Thankfully I only had to spend nearly 3 hours with this though.

People are saying that this didn't need to be musicalized but the music was the only thing that kept me from wanting to kill myself was Michael Friedman's music. Well, that and Rebecca Naomi Jones who takes a pretty worthless character and works her usual magic.

That's about as many positives I can come up. The rest of the cast is fine (RippedMan came up with the adequate descriptor). I cannot for the life of me understand the praise for Andre De Shields because I found him to be horrendous and overacting like whoa. The guy playing Robert was bad because I never got a sense of why we should fear him as he was played way too comical. The woman playing Rachel...WOOF was she ever bad. Hopefully she was sick and isn't always such a horrible singer.

The set was so stupid. For a story that is so much rooted in the location (namely Brooklyn) there is no sense of where things are taking place. A row of doors makes it look more like a old variety show, not a musical. After looking at the Playbill I saw that the scenic designer worked on SNL and that made sense. Everything looked very cheaply done.

Now I'm going to get into more of the changes between the show and the book which I found extremely detrimental to the story. Some of the details might be wrong because I tried to erase that book from my mind. Needless to say **SPOILERS**

1) The disappearance of Rachel - The show makes it seem like Rachel is no type of influence on Dylan's life since she leaves so quickly and you never get a sense of who she is.
2) The absence of Running Crab - Dylan gets postcards throughout his life from a person assumed to be Rachel. In the end, Dylan learns that his mother died and she was Running Crab when he finds her typewriter. This is important because it shows that Rachel had some presence in Dylan's life.
3) Mingus & Dylan's relationship - They do hint at the sexual nature of their relationship in the show but it's explicitly stated in the book. This further shows the bond between them in childhood and the reason they cared about each other later in life.
4) Robert Woolfork - The main reason he leaves Dylan alone is because it's believed that Rachel beat him up. Dylan also finally stands up to him and calls him "Robert Woolfvck." I think these instances would have helped to flesh out this pretty one-dimensional character in the play.
5) THE RING - It's so stupid that Rachel's wedding ring was somehow imbued with magical powers. Not that getting the ring from a homeless man is logical but it lends to the fantastical element. I'm actually fine with the exclusion of the power changing from flight to invisibility because I always thought that was stupid. The only good part of that was the Dylan jail sequence which would NOT have played well on-stage.
6) Liner Notes - By far my least favorite moment in the book and it should have been excised in the show. The change from the movie pitch didn't bother me as much as the fact that the British (why?) guy was so in love with the idea of the box set. This was more of a passion project for Dylan than anything that someone would find profitable.
7) The Ending - I was infuriated when the ring allowed Robert Woolfork to fly out of jail because in the book it doesn't work and Robert plummets to his death. This is essential to the story because it shows how Dylan wielded his power and the power of the ring itself.

I understand that if all this were included then the show would be even longer but some elements seem essential to the story while some still included do not.

[inception]

Posted: 10/17/14 at 3:42pm

Even if you hated the book, you make a lot of good points especially regarding the ending.
I think what I liked about De Shields' performance was that is was so over the top.

[inception]

Posted: 10/17/14 at 3:59pm

Also regarding the set, simple and inexpensive doesn't have to be bad or ugly - which was something that impressed me with Found when compared to this. Found's set is very simple with the collage of notes plastered across the back wall, yet to me it was very pretty especially with the use of baby blues and pinks. Their use of clear acrylic furnishings also adds to the simple beauty of that set. Another very simple yet beautiful set, though much more tech heavy, is the one for If/Then. So yeah, the set for Fortress was another disappointment - even more so when you think back to the amazing set that was in the same theatre last year.

[ClydeBarrow]

Posted: 10/17/14 at 4:08pm

I don't believe I said the set is bad because it's simple. It's bad because you get no sense of where the action takes place. I don't expect it to be ACT ONE but you've read the book so you know the importance of Brooklyn as a setting. Lethem practically fleshes out Brooklyn better than most characters in the novel.

I'm not saying I know how this should be accomplished for a stage musical but that's why I'm not a set designer.

[RippedMan]

Posted: 10/18/14 at 12:50am

Well, Eugene Lee (the set designer) also did Wicked and the original Sweeney Todd, so the man knows how to do a grand set piece. I just don't think it quite worked here. I didn't mind the set, but overall I thought it was quite strange. Like when the lights above the audience would light up when they would use the ring? It seemed like a cool moment, but then the ring was never mentioned again...so who cares? And Clyde, your points regarding the changes are really interesting. To me, it seems like they took too many liberties and basically melted it down to something that's a bit incoherent. I still don't quite get the point of Jones' girlfriend's characters song which they repeat quite often.

And regarding the mother.. her vocals were terrible and laughable when I saw the show. I think it's just written out of her range, which is rude from the composers standpoint. Why write something she can't sing? If you're going to cast her, use her in her best light.