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Praise for A Glance at New York...
New York's Good Old Days Were Often Far From Nice
By NEIL GENZLINGER
October 23, 2007
The phrase "a blast from the past" comes immediately to mind.
Axis Company has shaken the dust off a lowbrow stage work called "A Glance at New York" that was a hit in 1848 and injected it with a huge dose of 21st-century adrenaline. The players don't so much perform the show as attack you with it. Who knows how this play, by Benjamin A. Baker, was rendered in 1848, but here it's a visual and aural treat.
The story, such as it is, concerns a rube named George (Ian Tooley) who comes to the city and is fleeced repeatedly by street swindlers. The character who apparently electrified those pre-electricity audiences, though, was Mose (Jim Sterling), a burly firefighter with a gift for slugging people.
Axis serves up their sketchy tale with ridiculous declamatory deliveries and elaborate costumes (by Lee Harper and Matthew Simonelli) that might be described as thrift shop "Masterpiece Theater." Mr. Sterling is decked out like Daniel Day-Lewis in "Gangs of New York," and everyone else appears to have escaped from a Dickens novel. The griminess feels almost contagious; when you get home, your bathtub will never have looked so good.
The director, Randy Sharp, keeps the actors in constant motion, except when they pause to deliver, with incongruous beauty, a few musical numbers. Why "A Glance at New York" was popular way back when will be no clearer to you at the show's end than it was at the beginning, but you'll still be wishing that the performance, which clocks in at about 50 minutes, hadn't ended so soon.
nytheatre.com review
Martin Denton
October 19, 2007
Axis Company's production of A Glance at New York is a remarkable experience. I'm not sure that I've ever seen any work of theatre this Brechtian and this postmodernly deconstructionist accomplish its artistic goals so effectively.
The play itself dates back to 1848. It was written by Benjamin A. Baker and, according to the Axis's program notes, was "the first true American stage blockbuster." It introduced the character of Mose the Fireman, a larger-than-life rowdy urban counterpart to other American tall tale heroes like Paul Bunyan and Mike Fink; in the play, when other characters get into scrapes they can't get out of, Mose appears like an earthbound but otherwise preternaturally powerful Superman to save the day.
The chief recipient of Mose's help in A Glance at New York is George Parsells, a well-heeled but entirely innocent country bumpkin who has come to the Big City for the first time. The play is essentially a series of vignettes, in most of which George is taken advantage of by a pair of slippery characters always named Jake and Mike (it wasn't clear to me whether they were the same Jake and Mike in every case or not). To us knowing New Yorkers in the audience, George is a rube and Jake and Mike are Bowery con artists (to George, Jake and Mike are city slickers from whom he eventually learns an important lesson about survival on Manhattan Island).
The tone of the thing is meant to be fast, furious, and funny: the best analogy I can find is to classic cartoons‹substitute Elmer Fudd for George and Bugs Bunny and/or Daffy Duck for Jake and Mike and you'll have an idea of the natural rhythm and also of the intended stakes (i.e., very low indeed). George's naivete makes him an easy mark, and we're entertained watching the sneaky guys get the better of him, and we're satisfied when Mose steps in to restore (a kind of) order.
But director Randy Sharp doesn't think the events of A Glance at New York are funny at all, and the amazing thing is that rather than spoiling the show with her grim perspective, she transforms it into a surprising work of activist art. The nine actors seem to be playing not simply their assigned characters in the play but also, layered around that, authentic denizens of 1848 New York. They're dirty and scared and desperate and even a little bit disoriented almost all the time; without saying or doing anything overt, they comment eloquently on the conditions (economic, political, social) that make George, Mose, Jake, and Mike not just plausible but inevitable parts of the raw urban landscape. There's a Dickensian feel to the proceedings, and also a Brechtian one; Sharp accomplishes the singular hat trick of dismantling, for our benefit, both of those traditions in the context of the most simpleminded of farce/melodramas. The result is sort of breathtakingly resonant, for the very problems that Glance unintentionally illuminates still live with us today.
Sharp keeps the pace quick and the play short, just a shade over 45 minutes long. More than that might be hard to take; this Glance is more to be admired than to enjoyed. The design, especially spectacularly detailed costumes by Lee Harper and Matthew Simonelli, is top-notch. The acting, very skillfully adhering to Sharp's idiosyncratic vision of the play, is expert all around, with particular standouts being Brian Barnhart as Jake, Laurie Kilmartin as George's citified cousin Jane, and Ian Tooley as the sometimes terrified, sometimes stubborn George. The show includes several hauntingly melancholy musical numbers, including a gorgeously sad "Beautiful Dreamer" sung by Britt Genelin.
Sharp and her Axis colleagues turn what could be a campy or gimmicky glance at our city's past into a soulful, mournful, long look. Sometimes it even feels uncomfortably like a look in a mirror, and that's this show's particular potency.
October 21, 2007
Opinionist: A Glance at New York
Until last weekend I had just a vague sense of what life in mid-19th century New York was like for the masses – filthy, brutal, corrupt, vulgar, smelly and desperate for dentistry. Now, thanks to a spellbinding 50-minute theatrical tour led by the Axis Company, I've got a vivid picture of what passed for living on the city's streets in those days. The play is called A Glance at New York, and though you've probably never heard of it (neither had I) it was a smash vaudeville hit in 1848. Earlier this year the company delivered a high-octane revival to the Edinburgh Festival, making it an unlikely hit all over again.
Now they've brought it back home to their plush little subterranean theater in the West Village and it's a must-see for anyone who enjoys wildly imaginative ensemble work. The story centers on a wide-eyed rube who, on his first visit to the city, gets duped into an increasingly embarrassing series of cons. Luckily for him, he falls in with a burly firefighter named Big Mose; together with his cousin the trio lead the audience on a bawdy, violent adventure through old New York's bustling streets and seedy nightlife.
The city itself is the star here due to the inspired direction of Randy Sharp, who keeps her talented 11-member cast constantly swirling, muttering and humming about the stage, pausing at times in stunning tableaux to evoke the interior of a saloon, bordello or "ladies" bowling club. Combined with the superb, sumptuously ragged costumes by Lee Harper and Matthew Simonelli, the company cracks open a window into a now distant New York era. Different characters tumble out of the crowd as needed to exchange words or punches with the central characters, then melt back into the mob, which never rests. (At times there's so much happening at once that it becomes a challenge to focus on the central action, but ain't that New York?) What makes A Glance at New York really exciting is the way Sharp builds her bridge to the past not with the typical naturalistic theater devices but with a sprawling surrealism, rambunctious as the city itself.
"Beckettian...an effectively stylized piece of theatre...especially memorable."
– The New York Sun
A Glance at New York
October 18, 2007
By Harry Forbes
Here's a glance at New York all right – not today's gleaming metropolis but the
grimy, bustling town of over 150 years ago. Benjamin Baker's 1848 play was an
enormous hit in its day, and its tough but softhearted hero, Mose the fireman,
became a popular prototype. This eye-filling – thanks to Lee Harper and Matthew
Simonelli's great costumes – if pocket-sized revival also proves largely
entertaining.
A Glance at New York gives us country bumpkin George Parsells (Ian
Tooley), cheated at every turn by con artists Mike (David Crabb) and Jake (Brian
Barnhart) whenever George's friend Harry Gordon (George Demas) turns his back.
George's cousin Jane (Laurie Kilmartin) has come to New York with her aunt (Edgar
Oliver) to surprise him. Eventually George and Harry run into Harry's old school
chum Mose (Jim Sterling), and the three have a series of adventures at a ladies'
bowling salon, an entertainment emporium, an auction house, and a ball, running
into the cons at every turn.
The cast, which doubles – or triples, in Oliver's
case – as required, plays in a confident declamatory style, at times addressing
the air rather than each other with a look of peculiar bewilderment. Apart from
its brevity – at only 50 minutes, it surely must be a shortened text – and those
surreal touches, the show resembles a miniature version of the RSC's famous
Nicholas Nickleby.
Director Randy Sharp's fluid production includes several Irish
ditties, most affectingly a mellifluous rendering of "The Star of the County
Down." Steve Fontaine's ambient sound effects are effectively employed. Props –
like the abandoned baby basket entrusted to a puzzled Mose, sparking a touching
reminiscence of restoring a child to its mother after a fire – are
two-dimensional stylizations.
A Glance at New York was purportedly a hit at the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival. On home turf, this virtual time machine should find
audiences just as welcoming.
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A GLANCE AT NEW YORK
Old-time vaudeville transplanted to the present
Another year, another excellent off-Broadway New York company debuts on the Fringe. Unlike their predecessors The Riot Group and T.E.A.M., however, Axis Theatre Company aren't blazing trails with their original scripts. They've managed to create one of the freshest pieces of theatre on the Fringe with an almost forgotten libretto from 1848 and the scraps of a long-lost tradition.
Benjamin A. Baker's A Glance at New York was the smash hit of old-time New York vaudeville; tales of roaring boys and their gals, and the swaggering, kind-hearted braggart Big Mose who lorded over them. This production is not a straightforward contemporary reinterpretation — although it's never explicitly signposted, the disorientated, disheveled cast appear to be playing the original vaudeville performers themselves, who have somehow seeped through time. Fusing the old-fashioned saucy farce of vaudeville to contemporary NYC trends for mass-character storytelling, Axis have created a new art form wholly specific to their city, which is always the central character.
When not centre stage, the performers sink back into an amorphous mass, a Greek chorus of beggars and shysters in perpetual fidgety movement, making ghostly poetry out of Baker's blustering, bombastic script. (Kirstin Innes)
www.list.co.uk
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Sharp spin on an old classic
JO CAIRD
A Glance at New York
Assembly Rooms, George Street
RANDALL Sharp's adaptation of Benjamin A Baker's 1848 melodrama, A Glance at New York, is stylistically impressive.
An extremely minimal set allows Lee Harper and Matthew Simonelli's sumptuous costumes, all torn buttonholes, chiffon petticoats and sagging long johns, to shine.
Props are super-simplistic two-dimensional cutouts that lend the production an air of children's playtime, echoing the naivety of the central character.
A polished cast, no-nonsense staging and the considered inclusion of two unpretentious musical numbers make for a satisfying piece of theatre.
Until August 27
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Axis Theatre Company
A Glance at New York
Assembly Rooms
Ensemble physically driven choreographic theatre with a strong fusion of vocal and physical expression, almost operatic in feel...
This work was bursting out of the tight confines of the Wildman Room at Assembly. It bristled with energy and absolutely rippled from the moment the ensemble catapulted from behind the simple red curtain to the final backwards retreat stage left at the end. The fusion of vocally strong and physically stylised engaging performance from the maturely confident ensemble was operatic in style and flowed in a liquid-like seamlessness, evoking the authentic sense of the raw, tatty and dangerous world of New York in 1848; this being an adaptation of a Victorian melodrama by Benjamin A. Baker. The way in which the ensemble were able to hold the material so clearly focused between them allowed the eye to shift and flit totally held in the varying degrees of tension created. Text and physicality really danced together and the vocal variations were striking. The design was rich and there was a quirky almost impudent used of a pantomimic 2D props.
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"A Glance at New York' is everything theatre should be, an unsettling, enthralling look back into the vanished city."
—Kevin Baker, author "Paradise Alley"
"...spectacularly clever..." —Backstage
"...a fascinating approach...the innovations go beyond the technological to create a production that never creaks..."
—American Theater Web
"...one of the brightest starts in the Off-Broadway firmament..."
—Time Out New York
"...a vaudevillian quality and excellent costumes and make-up give a strong sense of the period...There's a beautiful tableau towards the end when the company liltingly sings the Irish ballad The Star of the County Down, and moments of slapstick humour add attractive notes to the performance."
—The Stage
"Sharp unfurls a magnificent, painterly canvas, on which mid 19th century New York is reimagined as a hyperreal Wild West of the East, where the rule of law is patchy at best, peopled with brawling villains in bizarre, dreamlike top hats...visually stunning..."
—Fest Magazine
"The style is all striking poses and declaiming in a stylised way... to convey the alien, dangerous edginess of this world...the costume design by Lee Harper and Matthew Simonelli is truly awesome."
—OnStageScotland
"An interesting show in the Vaudevillian style is extremely well performed..."
—One4review.com
"...there are lovely moments that hark back to New York's Irish underbelly: a stomping rendition of Molly Brannigan and, best of all, a plangent, plaintive chorus of Star Of The County Down."
—Metro (UK)
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