Little Seen Film of the Day: Colma: The Musical

Colma: The MusicalA charming if somewhat amateurish indie musical that tells the coming-of-age stories of three teenagers recently graduated from high school living in Colma, CA.  Billy, Rodel and Maribel are facing the challenges of young adulthood, and chasing their dreams.  Billy aspires to be a performer, and auditions for the regional musical where he meets a college student named Tara, who is also an aspiring actor.  Rodel is being raised by a single parent and is struggling with how to tell his father that he is gay.  Maribel just can’t figure out what to do with her life.  When Billy’s ambitions threaten to tear the three friends apart, all three must re-assess and find away to move on.

With its micro-budget and low production values, COLMA: THE MUSICAL is a tiny movie, but it has a really big heart.  The musical numbers are strong.  COLMA is the debut film by  Filipino-American H.P. Mendoza, who stars, co-wrote the screenplay, and wrote all the music and lyrics.  Director Richard Wong also co-wrote the film.  There aren’t a lot of films out there telling the Asian-American experience, and it’s nice to see one that is so fresh and accessible.  The film is far from perfect, but it’s a lot of fun and worth a screening.

 

Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises was more delightful than I had imagined!

Going in, I was most scared for Sean Hayes, but dammit, the boy can sing! (He does mug a bit in the middle, but not all the way through.)

Kristen is miscast. She’s neither young enough nor vulnerable enough. But she sounds great!

“A House Is Not A Home” has no place in the musical and should not have been added, but “I Say A Little Prayer” is a nice way to give Kristin a big number early on and helps even out the ballad/uptempo balance for her.

The male dancers are great! Very athletic and joyful.

But the biggest surprise was Katie Finneran! She was my favorite part of Wonderfalls on TV, but damn. She steals the show in the first scene of Act II. She should get another Tony for this performance.

Finally, I’m very glad that no one wore pink and orange together. I was worried when I saw the show logo. That color combination nearly made me ill in the Sweet Charity revival.

P.S. I was so excited by the music that I had to go home and download two Jill O’Hara albums. She was the Fran in the original show and I have always dug her voice.

Karaoke Dorkness

Okay, I’m surrendering all pretense that I’m not a dork. A friend of mine from college posted several Facebook status updates to his profile lately that redirected to a site called SingSnap. What is SingSnap, do you ask? It’s online karaoke. No more, no less. But just think about it… we habitual karaoke-ers pick out our songs at home. We rehearse them. We learn every nuance of the original recording. And then after we humiliate ourselves in public, we try to learn the quirks of the karaoke recording track so we can do better next time.

Imagine if you had that power at home. The power to record and re-record at will. The power to add effects to your stage performance. The power of karaoke-social-networking. Mwah-ha-ha-haaaa….

I even bought a gold membership for six months before actually saving any of my recordings because it adds reverb and compression to your voice recording. I’m a sucker, I know. But listen to my first lame attempt. I can do better, I know, but I wanted to get this up for my friends suffering from heat exhaustion at the Library Leadership Institute for Massachusetts. Reports say that they spent the day in a non-air conditioned room all day when it was 90 degrees outside. It may have been upwards of 105 degrees inside!

Forever Plaid, Not So Bad. (Not so hot, either.)

Forever PlaidThanks to Chris Caggiano and some lady at NCM Fathom (a division of National CineMedia), Michael and I were able to see the one-time-only 20th Anniversary Special “cinecast” of Forever Plaid. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it. It’s a four person musical that opened Off-Broadway in 1990 and ran for many years. (The 20th anniversary, presumably, celebrates one of its pre-New York limited runs in smaller theaters.)

The premise of the show is that a quartet of clean-cut young men, on their way to pick up snazzy plaid tuxedos to top off their burgeoning swing/jazz vocal career, are killed when their Mercury crashes into a busload of Catholic schoolgirls who were headed to watch the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. We are able to watch them perform the show they always meant to do because they have one tiny reprieve from the afterlife. That’s about it for the plot and it always has been. It’s basically a cute excuse to perform a lot of nice 50’s and 60’s tight harmony numbers well, with a wink and a nudge.

The show is now pretty much a staple of regional dinner theatres, and truth be told, that’s probably where it should stay. It’s a cute show and with the right voices, makes for a satisfying dessert. My 86-year-old (I think that’s right) father-in-law would love it. My grandma would have loved it too, if I’d taken her twenty years ago. But alas, she passed several years ago. I was really hoping to love it too because I really dig the sounds of The Hi-Lo’s, who I consider the masters of this kind of tight harmony vocal acrobatics. But in the end, the film and associated live-broadcast performance left me feeling like I’d watched a fun HBO theatre special from 1980, like Annette O’Toole in Vanities or Margot Kidder in Bus Stop — an amusing two hours, but kinda like “donuts for dinner.”

So here I sit, wanting something a little meteor meatier. Why? The voices were just fine. The guys were mostly coming across very sincere, so the jokes played just fine. Some jokes were pretty lame, and the constant bumbling was a bit much to stomach outside of a dinner theatre setting, but I’m not one to quibble about that.

But first of all, the evening was presented as if it were going to be a live broadcast of the stage show. At least, that’s what I thought from the trailer we saw Tuesday at the Harvard Square Lowes. Instead, what we got was a live introduction from Fred Willard at some unknown theater in Los Angeles rambling on about how awesome it was that this was being broadcast in 500 cinemas in the U.S. and Canada. Then they showed a movie. A movie staged and shot months before. Then, the live broadcast returned to Fred Willard’s theater and — to their credit — the cast members performed some live numbers.

Second, the voices were lovely, but they did not have the energy or punch of The Hi-Lo’s. That’s just me, I know, raising my expectations based on a really high bar. The Hi-Lo’s were named that for a reason: a really, really wide range of pitch, including a first tenor that sounded like a freaking coronet. (If you haven’t heard them, lemme play you a few tracks.) Besides a few bass-heavy numbers, the Plaids were more like The Four Freshmen or … I dunno, the Ink Spots. More suited for recordings or concerts than dynamic theatre. In fact, it wasn’t until the after-film live numbers that I could even hear the high tenor wail and then I think it wore on him cause he started to crack or go flat after the first couple numbers.

Third, the direction of the film was just awful. Sorry, but you know how I said it was like an 80’s HBO theatre special? Let me amend that by saying it was like an 80’s HBO theatre special run through Adobe After Effects. Someone didn’t trust the actors to keep our attention and insisted on inserting all kinds of graphics and animation over the performers. Particularly distracting was the sheet music frame around the Scottish number and the floating business cards around their event-related medley. Ick. But what do you expect? The director was Stuart Ross, the man who conceived, wrote, and directed the stage show. All he’s credited with directing on IMDB are this film, one episode of Frasier, and one episode of Veronica’s Closet. It looks like Dad ran Baby’s first birthday through some cheesy iMovie effects.

And finally, the film boasts that it has original cast members from the stage show. Well, David Engel, who plays the bass vocalist Smudge is pretty cool. He’s my favorite performer, all told, in the film. He’s adorably goofy, but not too annoying, and gets an awesome “stud moment” late in the show. But Stan Chandler, who plays the first tenor Jinx is looking… well, like he should be 20 years younger. Oddly, so does Larry Raben, who plays Sparky, the “cut up” of the group. I’m not sure why he was cast, since he was not in the original cast and he’s playing the role created by one of my favorites — Jason Graae. Not sure what Jason’s been up to lately. He must be lying low. The fourth member, Frankie was played by Daniel Reichard of Jersey Boys fame. He was pretty good, but I can’t say I have the same attraction to him that Chris does. He’s a little too pretty.

The evening was not bad by any means, however. There is a singalong component to Forever Plaid, which I love under most contexts. I was singing my lungs out to “Matilda” along with a few others in the audience. And the after-film performance had a bit of that too. It was kind of difficult, since there were only 17 people in our audience at the Fenway 13 cinema (including the four of us who got in on Chris’s press comps), and the live performance tried to divide us into four-part harmony. But WTF. I took the high road and sang the first tenor in falsetto because there were so few people there to be embarrassed in front of.

But there were two really special parts of the evening. In the post-film performance, the Plaids trot out — OMG — Carol Effing Channing!!! She sings “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” admonishing the audience for applauding after the first verse because “I’m not DZHUN yeyat!” And then the Plaids try to get her to teach “us” how to sing “Sh-boom, Sh-boom. Ya-da-da-da-da, Ya-da-da-da.” But she’s unsure if she’s singing the right number of “Ya-da-da’s.” Priceless. And God knows, this may be the closest I get to seeing her live before she leaves us!

The other special part was getting to meet Chris and his friend Victor, who he knows from the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus. Such charismatic men, both! At one point, I turned to Michael to explain that Forever Plaid was a bit like Nunsense, but since it had very little plot, it was more like Oil City Symphony. Chris grabbed my hand and said, “You just said Oil City Symphony. We are going to get on just fine.” Or something like that. My heart melted in a totally non-adulturous way.

Here’s to the power of digital media. It can stream Fred Willard live to 17 people in Boston. Or it can make really awesome friends.

[title of post]

So this was the big night. We saw [title of show] on mother-scratching Broadway. Holey frijoles, I don’t have the words to describe it at the moment. We saw it before at the Vineyard Theatre, off-Broadway. Mainly I’m logging the event tonight so that I will be compelled to describe it in detail tomorrow when we train home.

[FYI, just noticed from the above link that Heidi is the only member who got a significantly new costume. Like the new one better than the stripes, so I’m not complaining.]

Besides getting to hang out with my dear friend (and superstar) Susan Blackwell, I got to hug Hunter Bell and shake Heidi Blickenstaff’s hand. Still haven’t met Larry Pressgrove. And Jeff Bowen smiled at me, but dammit. He has no idea that I’m the dude who cracked his showtune cipher and sported his patch all around town today. (Pictures of that and more tomorrow.)

As much as I’m tempted summarize the evening as, “I’m so proud of my dear friend who made her way from Ohio state school to Broadway,” I really have to say that seeing the show has kicked me in the ass. Again. My soul is re-energized having seen five honest people making good the right way. Basically, this show is (and hopefully will continue to be) proof that “laying it all out there honestly” is just the way to do things. All the people who claim “you have to play a game here or there” will hopefully have to find new excuses from here out.

That would make me very happy. Just like this show does. Again, more details to follow tomorrow.