Cheers & Cheers

Hey New York!

Here's a really good idea:

STREET URINALS!

Four Stalls, No Waiting

Strangely, I've still seen a lot of men peeing on the street here, a lot more than I've ever seen in NYC. Maybe these urinals are one of those weird sociological backfires where the presence of public urinals actually encourages the idea of public urination rather than curbing it.

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Hey New York!

Here's a really bad idea:

Circle and Stalls, No Waiting

This is real. Seriously. I'm not joking. It's real.

Every time I walk past this theatre, I just can't believe it. It looks like a fake facade out of some Zucker Brothers movie.

Woody Hits The High Note

Scene 3: Diddy's All White Party

When I was in London in 1999, I saw a production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof starring Brendan Frasier as Brick. But this...if I didn't have to do my show every night, I would totally get blasted and go see this. It has to be hilarious.

"Why am I in a hammock?!"

Words, Words, Words

Let's Agree To Disagree

The British really do have a way with words.

I've been reading GUTENBERG! reviews all week, trying to decipher the meaning behind adjectives like "sparky," "amiable," "goofy," and "delightful as far as it goes." I've also been mulling over all the ways I (and Mr. Doug Simon) have been described: "tall and preppy," "tall and gay," "tall and sweats a bit," "lofty..."

Then, of course, there was the savage pan we got in Metro. (I've searched valiantly for a link to it online, but alas, it seems to be lost to the tunnels of the Underground.) That review made it very clear in no uncertain terms that Scott and I can neither act nor sing, that we have no comic timing, and that one of the two stars we earned was because the show was so thankfully short.

Luckily the Metro reviewer stopped short of wishing us bodily harm. But today we got a great review in The Observer that said (among other things), "Gutenberg! The Musical! deserves the brio implicit in its punctuation."

Not exactly a sentence Liz Smith might pump out of her typewriter at The NY Post.

And that's what I find so interesting about the way of speaking (and writing) here. While words themselves seem so precise, the phrasings can sometimes meander a bit while admittedly being strangely evocative. For example, I've been told there is no English word for "beer" here. "Beer" is too vague. Instead they have "bitters," "lagers," "stouts," "ciders," etc.

Precise.

But today I took a day trip with Scott and his family to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and Bath, and our tour guide was a delightful old Englishman who, when telling us something like, "We're about the turn on the lights in the bus," would say, "Perhaps you would want to take this opportunity to shield your eyes from our internal illuminations."

Not exactly the soul of wit.

At Stonehenge, it was brutally cold. The wind was whipping across the fields and you're supposed to stand out by the rocks and listen to an audio tour from a receiver you hold up to your ear. The tour is mostly interesting and well-made, but when your hand starts to frostbite, it makes you less appreciative of phrases like, "And then Mesolithic Man slipped the large stones, like giant teeth, into the gums of the earth."

Brits Have Bad Teeth

This knack for overblown phrasing coupled with incredibly precise word choices continues in the signage around London - especially in the Underground.

This sign was beside the lift in the Earl's Court station:

Somehow "The other doesn't bear thinking about" doesn't have the same ring to it as "If you see something, say something." But then they also have signs like these:

BOMBS! Now that's a word I'm very glad hasn't found its way into any of our GUTENBERG! reviews. Or should I said, "It plucks my heartstrings brightly, the knowledge that such an exclamation lies withheld from the revered musings of the capital city's critical journalists."

UPDATE
The Daily Telegraph review just came in and includes the sentence, "With the speedy professionalism of bulldozers demolishing a monstrous carbuncle, King and Brown dismantle the clichéd cornices and sentimental cornerstones that so tarnish musical theatre's reputation." I rest my case.

The First Days of Discussion

I met Whit Stillman last night, director of Metropolitan and Barcelona (to name two films). He's a friend of our producer and was very kind. Told me he thought I was a fantastic straight man...which means, get ready to see me in Whit Stillman's next bawdy comedy romp as the stodgy professorial type who learns that sometimes it's okay to cut loose and have a little fun.

Here's the full review from THE TIMES OF LONDON. He gave the show five stars (out of five)!

Gutenberg! The Musical!
Clive Davis at Jerym Street Theatre, SW1

CALL it synchronicity, if you like. On the very day that The Phantom of the Opera set the record for the longest run on Broadway, two young Americans were demonstrating just how much fun you can have driving a stake through the heart of a portentous, dumbed-down extravaganza.

Playing in a venue that is barely big enough to hold one of the Phantom’s famous chandeliers, Gutenberg! The Musical! — receiving its world premiere in London — contains more wit and intelligence than three decades of megashows.

Written and performed by Anthony King and Scott Brown, this small but perfectly formed entertainment embarks on a gleeful rampage through every stock device ever tossed in front of tour-bus audiences. If you want to bring a seminal historical figure to life, all you need are some illiterate medieval burghers, a handful of rock-lite riffs, some deliciously contrived anachronisms, a love interest called Helvetica and an ample supply of peaked caps.

Caps? Well, yes. With no scenery or costumes and only the pianist, Michael Roulston, for company, King (tall and preppy) and Brown (short and impish) signal changes of character by donning a selection of identical cruise-ship headwear emblazoned with the individual’s title. My favourite is the leering, bigoted flowerseller who runs amok under the label “Antisemite”.

Sometimes wearing a half-dozen hats all at once, the duo enact meticulously choreographed crowd scenes and deliver a string of dubious historical titbits.

The central conceit is that we are witnessing a run-through of a show that is desperately seeking a West End backer. Endlessly apologetic, the two performers supply a commentary on the nuts and bolts of modern musical theatre, introducing us to “charm songs” and all the other contrivances that are part of the composer and producer’s arsenal.

The evening could easily have slipped into cynical overkill, but the entire parody is delivered with the lightest of touches. Sometimes I found myself wondering whether the co-lyricists had been rummaging in Randy Newman’s desk. The satire is so droll, you could easily imagine it finding a place on one of his albums.

How did the rise of the printing press affect the Church? Why does the evil Monk speak in a Deep South drawl and why is he obsessed with sharpening pencils? Questions, questions. Gutenberg! delights in leaving them all hanging in the air. All that remains is whether the production can transfer to a larger space without destroying the chemistry. Fingers crossed.

Box office: 020-7287 2875 Theatre

And here are a few links to some other reviews (both mostly good):

The Evening Standard

The Stage Online

There's also a pretty good review in Time Out London (4 of 6 stars), though the reviewer actually makes the dumb Steve Guttenberg joke. Unfortunately I can't find a link to the actual review, but he calls the show "valiant guff," which I want to get emblazoned on a T-shirt.

More to come....

Times for Reviews

The critics came to the show last night. It was an incredibly tough performance. Almost the entire audience were critics, so they really didn't laugh at all - they just wrote on their notepads. A lot.

It was pretty demoralizing, though Trevor et al. insisted the show went well. Still, Scott and I left the theatre a little down.

Well, the reviews are not out yet, but Clive Davis, the reviewer from the The Times (London) posted this in his blog late last night.

Monday, January 09, 2006
GET YOUR TICKET NOW

Just back from the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, off Piccadilly Circus, after seeing an utterly brilliant new show, Gutenberg! The Musical! - the funniest and cleverest spoof I've come across in years. (You'll enjoy it even more if you're allergic to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Boublil & Schoenberg, as I most definitely am.) The American co-authors, Anthony King and Scott Brown, play all the parts, from the inventor of the printing press himself to a pair of drunks, an evil monk and an anti-semitic flower-girl. Mel Brooks couldn't have done it better.

Dear Jesus - please let all the reviews be like this.

Bits and Brits

Pubs close at 11:30pm in London. It's ridiculous. I'm pretty sure the reason there is such a problem with alcoholism here is because you have to pound beers as fast as humanly possible or start drinking incredibly early to accomplish any sort of buzz at all before last call.

Saturday night, strangely we weren't ready to go home at 11:45, so we went to an after hours club called HOSPITAL (you have to be a member to get in but - we gots connections). That closed at 1:30am.

The tube stops running at 12:30am, so the only way home at that hour was a night bus (which was described to me as "hell's gauntlet") or a black cab. I took a black cab, and as it swept me down the curvy streets of London from Soho to Earl's Court, we drove past Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, and it suddenly hit me, "I'm actually performing this show in London for a month."

We had our first two performances of the newly-extended GUTENBERG! this weekend (the show now has 16 songs!). Critics come tonight, so that will be the real test, but so far feedback has been very good. It's been enlightening performing the show for a London audience that is also primarily a theatre audience and not a comedy audience. Comedy is very narrowly defined here, so it seems our bizarre hybrid of comedy, theatre, parody, and pantomime is somewhat hard to categorize for some people.

The number-one comment we've gotten so far is, "There are so many jokes! Almost too many!" More than a few people have told us that the jokes come so quickly they don't have time to get them."

The epitome of this has to do with a joke that has always been a sure-fire laugh in the states. Near the end of the show, I'm lecturing the audience about their "ridiculous hatred of the Jews" and I say, "Think of where all this hatred could lead. Before you know it, we could be in the middle of a second world war."

In the states, that was always a definite laugh line. But so far in London? Silence.

I asked a few people about it, and this is what they all told me, "I heard you say it, but then it took me a second to realize that the time-period of the show was actually before the first world war, and once I realized that, I realized it was a joke and very funny, but you had already moved on to the next joke."

Overall the holocaust stuff in the show gets only chuckles here - though they laugh uproariously every time one of us sings "I hate Jews." That was also explained to me - "I think for the most part the holocaust simply isn't in our conciousness as much as it is in New York City. We don't really have Jews here and because we're English, we tend to side with the Palestinians."

Hopefully they can work out this whole Israel-Palestine thing before we close. It's killing us!

Greenwich Me Time

After a night of no sleep and too much drinking at the UCBT New Year's Eve party, I arrived in London on Sunday to the excitement of...a transit strike. Of course, being polite British strikers, they didn't completely shut the tube, they just ran it less efficiently.

Scott and I are in London to do our show, GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! for 26 performances at the Jermyn Street Theatre (just south of Picadilly Circus!). So far it's been a mad rush of rehearsals and set accumulation as well as adding two new songs to the show that have never been performed for an audience.

One song is a patter song called "What's The Word?" in which the townspeople of Schlimmer spread rumors about Gutenberg. It's mildly retarded, but I think it really flushes out the characters of Beef Fat Trimmer and Another Woman (something that was definitely lacking - Who is this Beef Fat Trimmer? Why does he trim?).

The other song is a big Act I finale called "Tomorrow is Tonight." It's very retarded but will rock your socks off. It also has one of my new favorite lyrics from the show:

LOOK AT THESE HANDS
THEY'RE ATTACHED TO A NORMAL MAN
A NORMAL MAN WHO PROBABLY CHANGED YOUR WORLD!

TOMORROW IS TONIGHT
IT'S A HISTORY AND FUTURE FIGHT!
TOMORROW IS TONIGHT

Think Meatloaf meets The Who.

I finally got to my accomodations on Monday night - a bed and breakfast in Earl's Court called the Windsor House Hotel. My room is approximately the size of a poor man's foyer, but also includes a hilariously small shower crammed in one corner and an 8-inch television sitting on a chair at the foot of the bed. BBC 2 and 3 even come in pretty clear. 1, 4 and 5 - not so much.

I ate breakfast on Tuesday in the basement B&B "dining hall." It consisted of toast, a soft-boiled egg, and a German family fighting about German things. Might very well be the last time I engage the second "B" while I'm here. I don't cotton to Germans and toast.

Even though I have only been here a few days, I am surrounded by Brits, and I find myself already adopting a British accent from time to time, as well as saying phrases I would never normally say like, "Shall we break early then?" Earlier today I caught myself saying, "Perhaps it would be proper if we phoned."

It's horribly annoying.

See - I did it again. I'm going to be a real asshole by the time I get back to the colonies.