REVIEWS FOR THE
FIX
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AP REVIEW OF THE FIX
'Fix' a Corrosive Spoof of Politics
By Michael Kuchwara
AP Drama Critic
Monday, April 6, 1998; 2:54 p.m. EDT
ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) -- On stage at the Signature Theater, the pillars of democracy are literally ready to collapse. These columns teeter at awkward angles as wheelers and dealers scramble to win office at any cost.
Welcome to ``The Fix,'' the most corrosive, explosive and gleefully wicked musical comedy to come along in some time. With a smile and a sneer, it celebrates the shenanigans that are necessary for success in American politics.
``The Fix'' follows the fortunes of the Chandler family, whose members seem to be a composite of the Kennedy dynasty and the Clinton clan. Before the musical has time to get past its first few notes, Reed Chandler, a front-runner for the White House, has died -- while in bed with his mistress.
Death doesn't stop Reed from getting up off a gurney in the morgue and doing a little soft shoe. ``Let the Games Begin,'' he warbles. And who better to follow in his footsteps than his wayward, pot-smoking son, Cal.
Guiding the young heir up the political ladder are Cal's voracious mother, Violet, and his embittered, polio-stricken uncle, Grahame. They form quite an unhealthy trio as the doltish lad is pushed into the Army and then propelled into the city council, the governor's mansion and finally a nomination for the U.S. Senate.
Along the way, Cal graduates from pot to cocaine to heroin -- the title has more than a political connotation. He also acquires a wife, a sultry ex-stripper of a mistress and a business relationship with a mob figure that eventually proves his undoing.
In addition, Grahame lusts after his nephew, a desire the young man is willing to exploit for his own advantage. Cal's paternity is also suspect, with his real father a redneck murderer who fried for his sins.
Not exactly an uplifting tale, but then authors John Dempsey (book and lyrics) and Dana P. Rowe (music) revel in the story's nightmarish black humor.
The authors have gone for an extra edge of desperation, a wild sense of comedy that mixes ``The Manchurian Candidate'' with Monty Python. Apparently, its seriousness and the wrong political climate -- sunny and optimistic -- doomed the musical when it was done last year at London's Donmar Warehouse.
There's no such problem here. In fact, the creators' timing is superb, considering what is happening in Washington these days.
The score could be called contemporary eclectic, but it is first and foremost theatrical -- advancing the plot and defining characters. Rowe's music, showcased in Michael Gibson's brash Broadway orchestrations, draws its inspiration from a variety of sources. Filter the Who's Peter Townshend through Kander and Ebb and you might get some idea of its wide sensibility as it veers from rock to pop to gospel to torch to country to show-biz flash.
Dempsey's commonsense lyrics are sturdy and often witty, particularly in a lively vaudeville number called ``Two Guys at Harvard.'' The song cleverly explains the intertwining collegiate days of Reed, Grahame and Violet.
Director Eric D. Schaeffer moves the musical at a furious pace. There is no down time in this show. Charles Augins' choreography is equally fleet-footed.
Stephen Bienskie is sweet-tempered if not overpowering as Cal. The character must drive the story, which Bienskie does in third gear. He is best in a gospel number called ``Simple Words.'' In it, Cal artfully extricates himself from the embarrassing situation of having uttered a four-letter word in public. He does something unusual for a politician. He owns up to it.
Bienskie also gets mileage out of ``I See the Future,'' a political speech done as a hymn. Schaeffer has staged it with TV screens above the audience. It lets them see the cues the neophyte politician is receiving to make the song more effective to his audience.
Linda Balgord, done up with a Louise Brooks helmet haircut, has the vocal power if not the humor to inhabit Violet Chandler. Her gorgon is heavy-handed when it comes to dialog, but the woman can belt out a song.
More successful is the third member of this terrible trio, Uncle Grahame, played by Sal Mistretta. He gives a savage, snarly performance, full of self-pity. Mistretta will make you uncomfortable but you will still root for him -- which is quite an achievement.
Jim Walton, as dear old dead Dad, is quite a hoofer, a smooth song-and-dance man. Yet the show's best voice belongs to Natalie Toro as Tina, the girlfriend who introduces Cal to hard drugs. Toro sizzles her way through the evening's big torch song -- ``Lonely Is a Two-Way Street.''
``The Fix'' couldn't be more hilariously contemporary, and in Dempsey and Rowe, the theater has found a new composing team for all seasons.
The production runs through May 3.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
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USA Today
'The Fix': An ambitious political act
ARLINGTON, Va. - Presidential musicals have a long history of being hazardous. George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Leonard Bernstein all ended their musical comedy-writing careers after the respective disasters of Let 'em Eat Cake, Mr. President and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Fix, a new(ish) musical at Signature Theater here, hedges its bets by not taking its womanizing, cocaine-snorting, White House-bound protagonist further than a governorship. But that doesn't mean its ambitions are limited. Hectic and dense, The Fix ( 3 stars out of four) likens the corruption of the political process to nothing less than the fall of the Roman Empire: The script references Nero, and the set's a classically columned edifice collapsing in on itself.
The passionate, accomplished, witty, vigorous rock-tinged score by the talented young American team of John Dempsey and Dana Rowe doesn't sugarcoat anything and is often purposefully uningratiating. That's perhaps why last year's London production drew such bad reviews. Now rethought by Signature artistic director Eric Schaeffer - the hottest musical play-doctor around - the show's (slightly tired) satire is balanced by the humanity behind the scandal.
For all its surreal atmosphere, The Fix is mostly about family dynasties. The personalities suggest the Kennedys, the politics suggest the Quayles, and the mistress suggests Gennifer Flowers. But while we're used to being fascinated by these people in real life, the musical asks us to love them - well, some of them.
The governor, for one: He adores his ex-stripper lover, and, as he's been railroaded so mercilessly into a political career by his power-hungry family, there's poignancy in his drug abuse. Even his tough, ambitious mother, Linda Balgord (who starred in the Sunset Boulevard tour) attempts pathos in a drunken musical confession that's more Norma Desmond than Rose Kennedy.
One could imagine a more charismatic slacker-turned-politician than Stephen Bienskie, but he does hold the sprawling show together. And Natalie Toro, as his mistress, confounds the initially sleazy impression she makes, emerging as the most emotionally genuine character in a fascinating gallery of cutthroats.
By David Patrick Stearns, USA TODAY
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The Washington Post
Signature's 'The Fix': Politics With Pizazz
By Lloyd Rose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 1, 1998; Page D01
The satiric musical "The Fix," which opened last night at Signature Theatre, is wicked fun: a grotesque political cartoon scrawled in primary colors. A pop paranoid version of our worst nightmares about American politics, the show is something like the offspring that might result from a night of passion between "The Manchurian Candidate" and a Busby Berkeley musical. Director Eric D. Schaeffer has reconceived the tone of the show -- which was played for doomy seriousness in its London premiere -- and it's his wildest, and in some ways most exciting, stage work yet.
Lou Stancari's set looks like the resurrected wreck of the Titanic -- noble walls slant alarmingly into the ground, and the gilded Corinthian capitals are flaked and crumbling. All too clearly, this is not the set for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Suspicions of cynicism are confirmed when the late presidential candidate Reed Chandler (Jim Walton), who has expired a la Nelson Rockefeller, springs up from his slab in the morgue for a song-and-dance number.
Reed may be dead, but his son Cal (the star-powered Stephen Bienskie) is still alive to be molded, and the boy's dragon-lady mother, Violet (sleek, big-voiced Linda Balgord), and crippled homosexual uncle Grahame (magnetic Sal Mistretta) focus their thwarted ambitions on him. Cal is a trifle dim but extremely pliable, and his handlers expertly guide him from a city council seat to the governor's mansion. Alas, as you might have guessed, this is not to be a story with a happy ending.
John Dempsey's book scavenges from a number of scandals, many of them involving the Kennedys. But what he's written is actually more like "I, Claudius" than "Winter Kills" -- a luridly overblown comedy of lethally bad manners. As a serious critique of American politics, "The Fix" is ludicrous; as a National Lampoon gonzo rant, it's exhilarating. Fair play, good taste and all sense of shame go out the window as the show unapologetically, even gleefully, becomes as vulgar and entertaining as the politics it claims to skewer.
"The Fix" is produced in association with its original producer, Cameron Mackintosh -- and it shows. Money has been well spent here. The mostly out-of-town cast is outstanding, and Charles Augins's sinuous, dynamic choreography is as much a star as any of the performers. Anne Kennedy's over-the-top costumes have a hallucinatory vividness: a vicious handler in a silky green suit and matching sunglasses, Violet in a scarlet suit, the dead dancing Dad in bright suspenders and a jacket cornily aglitter with stars. (Kennedy is also a wizard with socks.)
Dana P. Rowe's songs aren't quite great, but they're extremely good, and they're being sung by people who know what to do with them. Bienskie's opening number, "One, Two, Three," has a rock drive that doesn't show off his voice, but later he reveals an exquisite creek-clear tenor. Bienskie isn't flashy, but he has crack timing and tremendous power. And when he's ready for his performance to knock you flat -- in the gospel-inspired "Simple Words/Dangerous Games" -- it does.
Balgord can hit notes that should be outside the human vocal range, and Mistretta can act a song with such nonchalance that he makes singing look like the stuff of everyday conversation. As Cal's ex-stripper mistress, Natalie Toro is simultaneously hot and vulnerable, her strong voice edged with gentleness. In perhaps the show's most stunning visual moment, Schaeffer poses her for an instant in mid-song, blowing her skirt up around her legs, a re-creation of the famous still of Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch."
Having tackled Sondheim as often as he has, Schaeffer obviously has a lot of confidence, but he's downright cocky here, and the show is all the better for it. Jon Kalbfleisch's musical direction and David Maddox's sound design share the wit and tension of Schaeffer's direction, and Daniel MacLean Wagner has provided a phantasmagoria of light and color for him to play with. He's deliciously mean -- when Graham sings about his illness, nurses dance behind him with huge red feather fans -- then suddenly poignant and haunting, as in the scene at a funeral where the umbrellas gleam a dull, debased scarlet and purple. This production of "The Fix" gives you what is maybe the best feeling you can get from a musical: that a bunch of talented people were working at the top their powers and having the time of their lives.
The Fix, book and lyrics by John Dempsey, music by Dana P. Rowe. Directed by Eric D. Schaeffer. Musical direction, Jon Kalbfleisch. Choreography, Charles Augins. Orchestrations, Michael Gibson. Props, Avery Burns. Assistant director, Frank Lombardi. With Mary Jayne Ra leigh, Anthony Galde, Raquel Hecker, Lawrence Redmond, Amy McWilliams, Daniel Felton, Jean Cantrell, Donna Migliaccio, Michael J. Bobbitt, Jon Garcia, Rod Thomas, David James, David Tapper, Joel Carron. At Signature Theatre through April 26. Call 703-218-6500.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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The Alexandria Gazette Packet &The Mount Vernon Gazette
Signature Premieres Powerful Production of "The Fix"
Reviewed by Brad Hathaway
Arlington's Signature Theatre's latest, and in some ways best, musical production is the American premier of the new musical "The Fix." It is a powerful production with wonders to behold at almost every turn.
"The Fix" uses most of the tricks of the theatrical trade to explore the tricks of the political trade. Its strength is its realization that they may not be all that different. While it doesn't imply that theater is politics, it surely says that politics is theater.
It goes even deeper, however, to deal with the theme of human frailty and vulnerability. Thus, it becomes more than an expose of the sordid side of the body politic. It becomes a tragedy of the failure to live up to expectations ... one's own and those held by others.
All of this is presented in over-the-top high camp in a uniquely adult musical. There's no real nudity and the language contains a minimum of the expletives deleted from the Watergate Transcripts. But there are seductions, drug use, murders, and assorted acts of insult and humiliation.
How, then, can it be such a rousing good time? The magic of musical theater is at work here. Director Eric D. Schaeffer has assembled not only his biggest cast ever but his most talented and then he gives every last one of them an opportunity to shine using all the tools of the modern stage.
The play is the story of an American political clan driven to succeed, but each member suffers some inadequacy for the role that the public demands of political celebrities. The story is peppered with images from the public myths of the Kennedys. But these fictional characters are arch-types, not portraits and the story is allegory not biography.
Nearly thirty songs range from quasi-rock through vaudeville buck and wing; from rousing chorus numbers through saloon torch songs; from country/western hard luck laments to a troublingly effective campaign speech as anthem. They come at you at a pace that would wear out its welcome if it weren't for two things. First, every one of them moves the story ahead and/or defines a character with hardly a superfluous release, reprise or excursion. Second, the cast is so talented you want them to take an encore of each number. But they know -- or Mr. Schaeffer knows -- that there are simply too many highlights to let us linger over any one of them. Keep it moving, keep the upper hand!
Leading off this tremendous cast is Stephen Bienskie as the son of a Presidential candidate tapped to follow in some of his fathers footsteps when dear old dad, the maniacally fascinating Jim Walton, dies during a pre-election fling with a prostitute. Bienskie brings the right appearance to the part of the college kid catapulted into a national prominence he neither sought nor wanted. He sings his heart out during his progression from callow kid through phenomenal success to self destruction. All the while he gives a complex and thoroughly satisfying performance that keeps us caring about him right up to the tragic end.
The fascinating role of his emotionally and physically crippled uncle is burned into your memory by the perfectly over-the-top Sal Mistretta. He never hits a wrong note musically, dramatically or comedically.
A standout cast of supporting characters -- and characters is the operative word here -- is topped by Lawrence Redmond who creates yet another of the fascinatingly individual characters he seems to chisel out each season on Signature's stage. Here he gives us the ultimate bad-old country boy.
Everywhere you look you see tremendous performance gems. Natalie Toro smolders as the saloon singer who becomes the boy's lover/supplier. Amy McWilliams is hilarious and, at the same time, touching as the vacuous blond selected as the candidate's wife for her demographic features. Jon Garcia is stylish as the mobster with which they play dangerous games.
All of this takes place on Lou Stancari's fabulously evocative and very flexible setting of off-kilter beams, pieces of pillars and video screens. With Daniel MacLean Wagner's lighting design of follow spots and color pools, and the large cast sporting Anne Kennedy's colorful costumes, there is always a new wonder to behold. David Maddox has come up with a sound design that features visible mikes and a heavily amplified sound mixing flawlessly with the frequently hidden chorus. There is a thumpingly good band of eight under the direction of Jon Kalbfleisch who's piano work on "Child's Play" with Bienskie is a joy of collaboration. The band makes Michael Gibson's new bass driven orchestrations sound intense and intimate at the same time.
The entire production bears the signature of Signature's director Eric Schaeffer. He invests each moment of the show with its own, distinct element. From practicing hand gestures for a political speech to pulling a belt tight for a heroin injection, there is a visual equivalent to each line and each point in the script. This is Schaeffer's particular genius. In "The Fix" he found the perfect vehicle for his brand of high energy, fast paced, razzle-dazzle'em theatre. He makes the most of it.
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Click here for a pre-opening interview with the authors,
Fixing 'The Fix'
By Jane Horwitz
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