The Greenwich Village Follies

A light-hearted production with a heavy dose of love for the Village’s cultural heritage and Off-Broadway (and Off-Off and Off-Off-Off-Broadway) theater, The Greenwich Village Follies is high spirited and deliciously raunchy, offering an overview of the Village’s history in the form of an old-school musical revue.



Reviewed by Ilena George

Back in the early 1900s, the Greenwich Village Theater (long since razed and replaced with a commercial building) became famous for housing the Greenwich Village Follies, a smaller scale version of big budget Broadway revues popular at the time. The Follies made up in talent what it lacked in financing. But while the old Follies had the distinction of becoming the Village’s first production to transfer to Broadway, I highly doubt it had the pot dealer’s chorus line, the hilariously bad wigs and mustaches or the anthropomorphized painter’s canvas of Andrew Frank and Doug Silver’s current incarnation, playing at the Manhattan Theatre Source.

From Peter Stuyvesant to the Stonewall Riots, Poe to Pollock, pot to peaceniks, The Greenwich Village Follies brings the Village’s colorful characters and events to campy life. It’s a more self-aware version of Schoolhouse Rock meets the Ziegfeld Follies after being robbed and forced to replace all their costumes and props with cheap knock-offs. But the cheapness—put on display by having the set resemble backstage, with props carefully hung up or shelved and always completely visible—is part of the charm. The show and its performers are playful throughout, from the actors’ pre-show schmoozing with the audience, to the production’s self-deprecation (“Of course most of our theatrical tradition is filled with unemployment, anemic ticket sales, and scavenging closed shows for set pieces.”), to its inclusion of a Greenwich Village trivia contest. Just as playful and catchy is the music—just try getting the (absolutely dead-on) Washington Square Park pot dealers’ anthem out of your head. Although the performers—John-Andrew Morrison, Charlie Parker, Guy Olivieri and Patti Goettlicher—are all very talented, the production plays up its Off-Broadway status and avoids taking itself too seriously; weak spots and awkward transitions are pointed out and commented on for comic effect. The actors all address each other by name and at one point Patti segues from Guy’s recounting of various facts related to African-American history to her ode to NYU by saying, “Hey guys—not to be the little white girl who’s not interested in black history but I’m ready for my NYU song.”

Some of the material covered, especially toward the beginning, feels geared towards out-of-towners—what self-respecting New Yorker doesn’t know that Washington Square Park used to be a potter’s field, or about the misogyny and prejudice behind the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire?—but the production really gains steam in its second half. Especially in “Splatter Me All Over,” where Charlie Parker as Jackson Pollock’s canvas urges the inebriated artist to cover her with what would become the artist’s signature paint drips. Parker’s captivating vocals and her ability to rock the hell out of the canvas costume (a sheet with a whole in it, stretched between two poles) makes this clever song astoundingly good. Beginning with a double entendre-laden ode to the Village’s sex shops, to a charming barbershop quartet-style homage to the recently-closed Chumley’s (the bar responsible for the expression “86 it”), to the completely brilliant “Splatter” and the surprisingly touching “Stonewall Girls,” Follies morphs from a varied and playful recap of historical events to a meatier and sleeker glimpse at the institutions and people that have shaped the Village. It’s still cheeky fun, but with a double shot of nostalgia and appreciation thrown in that just doesn’t come through in the same way earlier on.

The play ends with a musical version of former poet laureate of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman’s poem “City of Friends,” which begins: “I dream’d in a dream I saw a city, invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;/I dream’d that was the new City of Friends.” With this capping off an evening of sincere New York love, only the hardest of hearts wouldn’t melt a little.

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The Greenwich Village Follies
By Andrew Frank and Doug Silver, original concept by Fran Kirmser
Directed by Andrew Frank
Manhattan Theatre Source (177 MacDougal Street)
July 6-28, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, Saturday July 28th at 7 and 9 pm
Tickets: $18, Theatermania (212) 352-3101 or www.theatermania.com

Doppelganger

Fusing quantum physics and urban legend, Feed the Herd’s Doppelganger uses a technologically sophisticated space—complete with interactive video and sound effects triggered by the actors’ manipulation of the set—in a trippy exploration of how the heart and mind deal with loss.

Reviewed by Ilena George

“What if there are two types of reality?” muses George (Jermaine Chambers) during an acid-fueled moment of clarity, “What if there is something other than linear logic?”

Doppelganger’s non-linear narrative poses this and other metaphysical questions by looking at two characters’ fragile mental states as they cope with grief following a traumatic death. George, originally an elevator-fearing corporate drone, becomes a frenzied risk-taker after witnessing his friend and co-worker Frank (Matt Hanley) fall out a window 40 stories up. Marcia (Heather Carmichael), Frank’s co-worker and erstwhile lover, hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since witnessing what remained of Frank after he hit the pavement. But Frank won't stay dead: both George and Marcia are haunted by various versions of Frank—from flashbacks to the day of Frank’s death, to Frank’s ghost, to his flesh-and-blood doppelganger. Potentially, Frank’s untimely demise sparked from an accidental meeting with his double, his doppelganger, while on line at a coffee shop.

Overseeing George and Marcia’s mental health, embodying corporate culture’s lack of soul and providing an overview of the double-slit experiment and other tenets of quantum physics is the office’s psychiatrist and motivational counselor, known only as The Doctor. Metha Brown’s eerie delivery and apparent omniscience, coupled with the set’s anxiety-provoking, quick-moving video projections of the characters stressing out, 40 stories worth of skyscraper rushing by and even relatively normal street scenes infuse ordinary objects and events—tables, papers, sleeping, speaking—with a sense of creepy malaise and anxiety.

The play consists of fragments—fragmented scenes, fragments of scenery, small personal objects suspended from the ceiling—that build on each other to depict the troubled mental landscape of these two characters as they try to sort out what exactly happened that day and what the aftershocks have been. Frank’s death consumes George and Marcia; they basically exist as characters only because of it and there’s something surgically clean about this obsession. Artistic attempts to parallel scientific principles with humanity and the human experience often don’t hold water. Just try reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. That is, saying something has a dual nature is not automatically the equivalent of a photon’s particle and wave-like characteristics. But Doppelganger allows the science some room to breathe, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions as to what exactly is going on. But while the science is evocative, Doppelganger’s visual representation of George and Marcia’s mental states is more striking.

But all these fragments put together create a portrait that still lacks a piece or two as almost nothing is fully explained or known for certain beyond the fact of Frank’s death (which may not even deserve to be called a fact). While the beginning and end neatly mirror each other, the story calls out for a few more pieces to make it complete. Perhaps a little too much is left up to the audience to fill in but if you enjoy a provocative challenge on the nature of reality in a uniquely equipped space, don’t be afraid to sharpen your mental pencils and color in the blanks for yourself.

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Doppelganger by Simon Heath
Directed by Emanuel Bocchieri
3LD Art and Technology Center (80 Greenwich Street)
June 23 - July 21, Tuesday through Saturday at 8 pm
Tickets: $25, Theatermania (212) 352-3101 or www.feedtheherd.org