Boozy
nytheatre.com review by Loren Noveck
May 8, 2005
From the minute the “please turn off your cell phones, beepers, and pagers”
curtain speech devolves into a passionate rant on urban planning, it is clear
that Boozy is not your average musical. It’s more like the musical you
might get if you threw the collected works of Brecht, Robert Wilson, and Abbott
& Costello into a blender with a few college textbooks, a ride at EPCOT Center,
and a biography of Robert Moses. (For those who aren’t New York City history
buffs, Moses was the last of the great urban planners, the man responsible for
both the Verrazzano Bridge and the Cross-Bronx Expressway, among many other
projects). It’s a wild, inventive, action-packed exercise in tightly controlled
mayhem—so sit back and enjoy the ride.
The subtitle of Boozy is “The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of
Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses,” and that gives you a pretty
good overview of the plot, such as it is. The story of Le Corbusier, a French
modernist architect more famous for his theories than his actual buildings,
serves as almost a prologue, and the starting point for the bizarre revenge plot
that winds through the piece, but the majority of the play is about Moses.
Thrown into the mix are some over-the-top conspiracies for world domination (Goebbels,
Roosevelt, and Mussolini—played at times by live rabbits, whose presence is in
fact justified by the script in one of the evening’s silliest jokes—banding
together to profit from World War II), a vengeful femme fatale (Le Corbusier’s
ex-girlfriend, a.k.a. urban-policy reformer Jane Jacobs), and a fairly accurate
condensed history of urban development policy in New York. And just in case
that’s not complicated enough, the cast also includes dancing Freemasons, a
crippled child of indeterminate ethnicity (their description, not mine) with a
Cockney accent, and a Daniel Libeskind (the winning architect in the competition
to redesign the World Trade Center site) imitator. (One of the press clippings
indicates that Les Freres Corbusier, the company behind Boozy, invited
Libeskind to perform as himself, but he declined.)
Amid all of that, if you can keep your attention focused, the show does present
a moderately cogent re-evaluation of recent opinion on Moses, which, depending
on how strongly you feel about him, is either refreshing, sacrilegious,
disappointing, or inconsequential to your viewing experience. Although the
play’s subtitle acknowledges the negative view of Moses that was popularized by
Robert Caro’s biography The Power Broker, the creators are interested in
opening Moses’ legacy for reexamination, reminding us that he was seen as an
enormously popular visionary before he became demonized for his plan to demolish
SoHo for an expressway.
I swear, it all makes cockeyed, manic sense by the time they’re through. This is
a credit to the coherent vision of the co-creators—director/writer Alex Timbers,
lighting designer Juliet Chia, and set designer David Evans Morris—and the rest
of their production team (costume designer Jenny Mannis, video designer Jake
Pinholster, sound designer Bart Fasbender, and choreographer Katherine Profeta).
The production’s stylistic—and stylized—cohesion lets everyone involved get away
with flourishes and digressions that might otherwise seem indulgent or
aggressively and over-consciously “postmodern.” The self-indulgence isn’t
entirely missing—sometimes they’re having a little too much fun with their
technological toys, particularly in one video-simulcast sequence that seems
unnecessary—but it’s kept to a minimum.
Timbers also brings out top-notch performances from his whole cast. The entire
ensemble walks the very difficult line of performing tongue-in-cheek material in
a highly stylized manner without ever seeming facetious or smarmy. There’s not a
drop of condescension by the actors toward the audience or their characters;
even when the narrative is mocking the characters, the actors are fully
committed. Among the principals, I was especially taken by Nina Hellman as Jane
Jacobs. Jacobs is the thread that ties together the play’s real-world story
(more-or-less accurate biographies of Corbusier and Moses) and its off-the-rails
counterpart (see the description of the Goebbels/Mussolini rabbit conspiracy,
above), and Hellman finds both the seriousness of Jacobs’s passion for emergence
theory and the camp in the revenge fantasies of a scorned Frenchwoman. Among the
ensemble, special kudos for sheer bravura go to the loopy glee of the flamboyant
Mayor LaGuardia (John Summerour) and his demented, drooling pageboy/love slave
(Matthew DeVriendt).
Boozy is a madcap high-tech and high-concept farce. At times, its
conceptual ambitions and its farcical ones collide: the play raises some serious
questions about the future of our cities that are often obscured by the chaos of
the manner in which it asks them. As far as I can tell, the play's broad strokes
of Moses’s biography and philosophy are pretty accurate. But it’s hard to derive
grounded opinions on urban policy from a play that also claims that Mussolini,
Goebbels, and Roosevelt planned World War II to profit from housing
developments. Nonetheless, this is a beautifully executed, smart, and fiercely
original piece of theatre.
