The Substance
​(dir. Coralie Fargeat)
Review by Jeff DeRouen

As a good gay, I’m here for an acting swing from Demi Moore and happy to lay my money down to experience the magic that made her one of the nineties biggest stars.

I’d heard The Substance was not typical “I’m back” fair, that writer/director Coralie Fargeat had crafted something special, and that Demi Moore gives a brave, compelling performance. Holy moly – what an understatement. This is a momentous work inspired by the likes of Cronenberg and Kubrick and absolutely one of the most batsh*t movies I have ever seen.

Moore plays an aging fitness star who takes a secret serum and splits in two – her younger and older self. They are both HER and she must change bodies every week or complications take place (and I wouldn’t dream of giving you any more details than that).

The Substance is a sci-fi/body horror allegory where Fargeat lays bare her view of how
society affects women giving us top notch gore and career-best performances from both
Demi Moore AND Margaret Qualley.

It’s a riveting, unsettling, hilarious, and absolutely disgusting sci/fi body horror masterpiece that must be seen with an audience in a theater – I can’t wait to go again.

A Survivin' Thing: Out of the Boil, A Climate Change Musical @ The New Marigny Theatre
Review by Todd Perley

​The setting: a New Orleans dive bar. The players: neighborhood working folk—a nurse, a teacher, a tech guy, some service industry, etc. The conversation: climate change, education, local infrastructure, and why doesn’t the Algiers ferry run twenty-four hours anymore? Sound familiar?

It should. I think we’ve all been to this bar with these people and discussed these things with similar passion. Except in Rel Farrar’s new play, these aren’t people; they’re crawfish. Socially aware crawfish, dressed in red, complete with little red claws. And they sing. They sing their P.O.V.s to the tunes of E.L.O. songs. Okay, so maybe we haven’t been to this bar.

The conflict: Chef Bezos (played by local treasure Ratty Scurvics) is offering a sizable grant to the crawfish that pitches the best socially-conscious scheme. I’m sure that will work out well. Clearly, the chef has the crawfish’s best interests in mind.

The characters are intellectual, hilarious, and self-aware, reminiscent of classic Woody Allen films. The arguments are tight and multi-faceted, never preaching to the choir. Tech Guy waxes rhapsodic on the philosophy of Ayn Rand to his girlfriend. When rebuffed, he sings his angry response to her via the song 'Evil Woman'.

While the arguments are mature, there’s a childlike joy throughout. All the props are over-sized. Picture a crawfish holding human-sized cups, beer bottles, cigarettes, or scissors, an effective offset to the serious themes when the lines are delivered by someone drinking from a shot glass the size of a paint bucket. The table is a board set upon a bottle of Mod Podge (those crafty crawfish!)

Danielle Small directs this serious piece with campy lightheartedness. The mood matches the tongue-in-cheek vibe of her 'Waterworld', which has played, hilariously, in local swimming pools for years (I look forward to these annually). Neal Todten as musical director pounds out E.L.O. hits on the piano beautifully.

But it’s the cast that brings the Zatarain’s to this crawfish berl. They’re all just having so much fun, and the actors’ joy is infectious. Whenever things get dark, someone starts playing darts…with dart props made of four foot pool noodles.

The goofiness never detracts from the message. As Rel tells us in her author’s note, “This show is about believing you can make things better…maybe pigs can fly (metaphorically speaking).”

You can suck da heads of these concerned mudbugs at the New Marigny Theater, October 3–6.
​

Tumble deeds: Cirque du Soleil's Songblazers @ The Saenger Theatre
Review by Dorian Hatchett

Is there anything French clowns and acrobats can’t do?  If you said “pay homage to the uniquely American art and culture that is country music without seeming condescending or silly” I would posit that you are wrong.  The proof is in Songblazers, a Cirque Du Soleil Theatrical production currently on tour across the US.  

With a forty-year history of wowing audiences around the world, Cirque is currently operating nineteen different productions, either touring or resident, in ten countries. Their shows are the gold standard for production level, and this one was no different. The sets are designed to be more than backdrops, and the costumes tell stories all their own. Cirque owns its own music production company, just to make the show that much more seamless, and you won’t find a better produced stage outside of Broadway.  

Songblazers tells the story of an aspiring country music songwriter, set in Nashville Tennessee. There’s a slow wind-up, as the environmental entertainment while awaiting the curtain smoothly transitions into the show proper, and we’re greeted by a massive, complicated set featuring balcony stages for a live band, and a giant moving steam engine that is occasionally a stage and occasionally the moon and is always the center of the action.  

I am always excited to see how a traveling show will use the stage. The flexibility, the professional knowledge, that must be used to shift the blocking and lighting and props for every single location on a tour is a source of wonder for me. The performers made it look like they grew up on that stage, using every single inch, never looking crowded or sparse. Dancers and acrobats confidently chewed up scenery and there wasn’t a bad seat in the house.  

There was real genuine laughter and joy from the audience. What country music backed show doesn’t have a full-cast bar fight? It hits a little different when the actors are acrobats. A juggler performs feats of midair organization, with a whole stack of red solo cups, set to the song Red Solo Cup. Toby Keith would be proud. There’s no way someone doesn’t love that bar.

There was a carnival strongman advertising nails by driving them into a board with his hands, and I cannot stress how very difficult it would be to do aerial silks in a cowboy hat, but they pulled it off with aplomb. They might have friends in low places, but they are at the height of their craft. 

More information about Songblazers and Cirque du Soleil
​

​Domestic Abyss: A Doll's House at the Marquette Theatre
Review by David S. Lewis

It is more than passingly uncomfortable that a play written about gender dynamics in 1879 feels perfectly relevant today. 

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, credited with many of the most important dramatic works such as Peer Gynt and Enemy of the People, was accused of feminist propagandism for A Doll’s House, in which Nora, a married woman realizes that her value to all of the men in her life is based exclusively on her conformity to reductive societal ideals - especially her relationship with her paternalistic husband, Torvault. 

While the original is in three acts, Amy Herzog’s Tony-winning revival (a rarity for a translation) condenses the work to around 90 minutes, which somewhat impedes the repetitive rhythm of the original,  in which deliberate redundancy serves to reinforce the boundaries of the Nora’s world. Herzog also updates the language, transforming quaint idiom like “wretched” into something more contemporarily acidic. 

Herzog’s version forces us to deal with the familiarity of the characters’ interactions; most of us have seen these play out in the relationships of people we know intimately, and the effect is shocking.

In Crescent City Stage’s presentation, director Jana Mestecky, with two decades in the New York theater scene, shows us the play from the eyes of the couple’s children, encouraging us to see ancient dynamics from a symbolically innocent perspective.

In casting Elizabeth Newcomer and Michael A. Newcomer as Nora and Torvald, a couple married in real life portray the dysfunction of the married characters vividly: the chemistry is real and familiar, which permits the pain and outrage felt by the characters to come through incisively.  

The play here feels loaded and modern, and what vestiges of the work’s Old World origins remain imbue the minimalist production with a surreality the serves to heighten the tension. Secondary characters in this are also wonderfully cast: Douglas Scott Streater’s Dr. Rank, a family friend with several important secrets, is genial and warm, and so his revelations land like a blade. 

Sue Jin Song’s Kristine, whose attempts to rebuild her own life upend Nora’s, gives an earnest that makes her character feel complete. And Doug Spearman provides his Krogstad, a brooding and embittered former loan shark trying to turn a new page, with a dignity and affection well-reserved for this false antagonist, seemingly a threat to Nora’s bourgeoise idyll but ultimately the key to unlocking her life’s prison.

Hurricane Francine affected this play's schedule, so please consider supporting them on September 22 @ 2:30p.m. Click here for information and ticketing.  
You can follow David S. Lewis: @allaboardnola
​

Dreads or tales...
PENNY DREADFULS: THE REMARKABLE ROOMING-HOUSE OF MADAME LE MONDE 
Review by Dorian Hatchett

Tennesee Williams never stopped writing.  His most popular pieces stunned Broadway audiences from the 1940s through the 1960s, but his body of work spans his entire life, as wildly diverse as it is prodigious. The three plays performed in Penny Dreadfuls: The Remarkable Rooming-House of Madame Le Monde are among his most esoteric, and for good reason.  

Williams’ work is entertainingly clever and complex, the characters deeply flawed in all the most (and least) relatable ways. There’s never just a story happening on the stage, though. Williams was a gay man who lived in some of the worst times to be gay in America.  He was a sickly child in a dysfunctional family. He had a schizophrenic sister and puritanical family. He saw first hand how humans treat the people who they consider “other” and it informs every word.  

His most popular work was a delicate balance of artful plot and social commentary. The escapism of theater was maintained, and one could enjoy the production and then dissect the deeper narrative at their leisure (or choose not to, and remain entertained by the characterizations alone). Later in his life, though, the critical acclaim was more sparse, and Williams sank his entire might into the power of the stage to deliver that societal critique.  

Instead of subtle, unspoken undercurrents, his stories became morality plays screaming from the rooftops of the pain and mistreatment of society's most maligned, most oppressed, most overlooked. These shows are meant to make the audience uncomfortable; to pour misery directly into your hands and make you sit with it, squirming in the reflection of stage lights and the smell of plywood.

The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company (about to start their 10th season) has a sterling reputation for their candor and sensitivity when interpreting this work. In their hands, these pieces are treated with respect bordering on veneration, the audience becoming their beneficiary.  

Truly appreciating this writing demands the correct application of dark humor, and the Penny Dreadfuls are apex gallows comedy. The audience writhes internally, and nervous laughter is the near constant over quiet contemplation or rapt attention, the small cast of actors radiating unhinged savagery from their pores. 

The laughter is genuine at first. The show’s master of ceremonies is none other than Jigsaw from the Saw horror movie franchise. The action on stage descends with furious speed, to the limits of what an audience can silently accept, and their discomfort is the most high praise a show like this can receive. 

Monica R. Harris (Madame Le Monde, Mrs. Yorke) commands the stage with her facial expressions, and the other actors' apparent distrust of her is so palpable it may be genuine. Adrienne Simmons (Lily, Jigsaw) is physical theater personified. Her shoulders offer entire soliloquies. Cody Keech (The man with the size 11D, the Boy) seduces more than Miss Simple with his promises of a life fully lived, with all its messy imperfections. 

Accolades must be given to the set design, and its brilliant geometry. Backdrops that fold into themselves is a masterful use of a tiny space, transforming in the blink of an eye. The interaction between stage and audience is effortless, as if the fourth wall simply does not exist. We are acutely aware that they, and their suffering, are part of the show as much as Mint’s mobility hooks, propping up the dialogue with reflected energy.  

I was not immune to the uncomfortable silence, the awkward shuffle of my feet, the nervous laughter, the awareness that I didn't know what to do with my hands. Like many audience members, I made uncouth jokes as I filed out of the auditorium. 

With a declaration that the characters in the rooming–house were none other than Clive Barker’s cenobites, if they were portrayed by tubercular victorian children, I unintentionally reasserted that horror as a genre is rooted in a human need to explore hell as a place we have manufactured, through our own faults. Sartre was right, and it is indeed other people.

PENNY DREADFULS: THE REMARKABLE ROOMING-HOUSE OF MADAME LE MONDE runs at The Lower Depths Theatre @ Loyola University through Sept 28th. Click here for more information and ticketing
​

​
​Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at The New Orleans Museum of Art 
Review by Jamie Chiarello

As a street artist who is used to sitting out in the quarter hawking my paintings, a museum is a very special and particular type of place to me. On one hand, it is easy to eschew most establishments, to question whether art should be sought in a museum anymore than learning in school or God in a church.

On the other hand, I will always remember one of my formative museum experiences where I entered with a big chip on my shoulder about the stupid masses who didn't care for anything I cared for and then looked around me and was dumbstruck by the symbolism of a museum in itself; a building where people who deeply care about art house it, and work tirelessly to preserve it for future generations. 

I didn't have any particular expectations upon entering the NOMA to see the show 'Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art'. The main question I have been asking myself when experiencing art is: What is my initial direct visceral experience? How do I make sense of this? How is this affected by any subsequent explanation about the work before me?

The curation of this collection is extraordinary. Upon entering, we are immediately confronted by an enormous, pitch-black chandellier by Fred Wilson. Stepping closer, I was both in awe of the intiricacy and skill in handling such a delicate material, and mildy repulsed in a pleasurable way by the slick blackness of the material that reminded me of both oil and H.R. Giger.

Seeing the chandellier at eye level evoked a theme that reoccured over and over through out the show: Who made these works? For whom? Fred Wilson's piece both asks and answers this question, and it is worth going to see the show for this piece alone.

From there, we are shown glass works from antiquity, mostly from the Middle East and the Roman empire. You can't help but wonder, what lives did these objects live in their own times? Will our old junk bottles one day be in museums to be ogled over and speculated upon? It is impossible to study any art or material development divorced from the brutality of human history.

The beautiful shining crystal banana and sugar bowls only silently nod to the slave labor and the historical exploitation of local communities employed to obtain such luxuries. Looking at the work from the Venetian Island of Murano we are asked questions of labor, skill, beauty and alchemy. A room exploring glass bead work, and displaying a Black Masking Indian suit by Big Chief Down M. Edwards of the Timbuktu Warriors is a striking local feature.

Leading into the modern and contemporary realms, the intent seems to shift to become more about provocation. There is a show of 3D printing and vases, and I want to loop back around to the start of the show, though this is more so a reflection on my own tastes and interests. 

​At large, the show is incredibly engaging, and very well organized. Like glass, our perceptions of ourselves and historical markers have tendencies toward warping and are strangely fragile and enduring. Go to City Park, go to the museum: this is a worthwhile way to ponder and pass time in the Anthropocene. 

The Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art runs at NOMA through February 10th, 2025. More information here. 

The Apostle
review by Jeff DeRouen

I miss video stores. Something about being able to look at titles I can pick up with my hands seems a more efficient way of curating my viewing instead of, you know, scrolling through Netflix for two hours before deciding to just go to bed.

The New Orleans Public Library is a fix for my nostalgia ache, as they get just about every new release on DVD or Blu-ray and have a large selection of older titles (including Criterion for those in the know). And so I enjoy the occasional perusing of the shelves and finding hidden gems I may have missed or would like to see again.

This week, my soul was led to a rewatch of Robert Duvall’s small and magnificent Louisiana-based film, The Apostle (dir. Robert Duvall, 1997). Shot in towns like St. Martinville and Des Allemands, Duvall hired locals (amateur actors and regular folks) to inject verisimilitude to the story of a disgraced evangelical preacher. He believes he’s on a divine mission to revitalize an old Louisiana church, after losing his own congregation and fleeing from the police in Texas.

Duvall gives us the world of Charismatic Christianity, where Jesus reigns supreme and even the worst sinner can be delivered unto salvation. It's also fun to see Billy Bob Thornton in one of those early redneck, racist roles that the guy does so well. He deals with the subject ironically and unflinchingly, delivering a more authentic faith-based story than any of the recent, stylized and melodramatic Angel Studio releases. And Louisiana, captured in all its sweaty, sunlit, mosquito-infested beauty, is the perfect backdrop for this moving and messy tale of redemption.

You can buy/rent The Apostle online (on YouTube only for some reason) or head to the public library and get that good ole standard definition DVD.

​Alien: Romulus

Remember ‘Alien’, and how it masterfully drip-fed suspense to create one of the most chillingly immersive horror films of all time? Remember ‘Aliens’, the contrasting, high-octane sequel which shifted gears into viscerally dynamic combat sequences? Well, preserve those memories in cryostasis, because in comparison, Romulus isn’t worthy enough to pry a crusty facehugger off their freshly-impacted space helmets. 

The ninth film of the Alien franchise (including Predator spin-offs) is an “interquel”, a word I really hope to see spat out of an airlock some day as I look on impassively. It feels like a concept from an IP on life support, klaxons blaring, the letters INTERQUEL illuminated in urgent, flashing red neon. 

Rain Carradine (Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny) and her adoptive android brother, Andy (Industry’s David Jonsson) are stuck on a grimey mining colony. Rain’s work-earned travel visa is denied by The Company, and so they hook up with an anarchic collective, and joyride a shuttle out of the atmosphere to steal a derelict, but still orbiting cargo ship. Seems like incredibly lax security considering all of the corporate authoritarianism on land, but hey, the movie has to happen. 

Rain is the responsible, adaptable, Sigourney Weaver insert. Andy is an easily-reprogrammed automaton with a dad joke subroutine that you wish was mutable. The rest are four or five (I honestly lost track) generic, Young Adult punk/hacker types, with cut and paste personalities and provincial accents. What follows feels like a regional youth theater production of the original film, adapted from memory with a week’s notice until opening night. 

Their mission is to hotwire the cargo ship and use its cryogenic pods so that they can head to Rain’s home planet for picnics and personal fulfillment. The only obstacles are the cargo ship’s residents: a robot science officer and an unknown quantity of, well, aliens, who have apparently been routinely using him as a chew toy. This gristle-legged humanoid is a digitally de-aged, waxwork version of the late Ian Holm (he's from the first movie!), his estate hopefully well compensated for this gruesome curtain call. 

The stakes include Rain and Andy’s familial bond, and a hinted-at-but-largely-undeveloped romantic interest with one of the less mouthy punks. Oh, and one of the hackers is pregnant. Don’t worry, you’ll be reminded of this A LOT. The dialogue consists mainly of sweatily-yelled explainers: “That will damage the baby!”, “The elevator won’t work without gravity!”, “They have acid for blood, remember!”...I’m paraphrasing but it’s exposition all the way down. 

Plot points are rammed down your throat with the subtlety (and spiritual enjoyability) of a facehugger’s facial impregnation probe. Speaking of which, I might be growing prudish in my old age but the visual lingering on the notably phallic/gynecological aesthetics of the aliens’ eggs and writhing tendrils felt creepily uncomfortable, especially given the youthfulness of the cast. 

The rest of the movie devolves into a scrappy, ragtag crew, just haphazardly Scooby Doo-ing it around a gooey industrial warehouse while the sound guy double clicks on a folder of wav files called ‘IRON FOUNDRY’. It’s hard to care about any of them, any character development left languishing in the vacuum of space somewhere. The actors are not the problem (I’ve really enjoyed Spaeny and Jonsson in other things) and do what they can with the script, but they’re all written as indistinguishable, aggressively cocky Zoomers. It’s an alien horror for the IG Reels demographic - a Gen-Zee-nomorph, if you will (though you probably won’t).

What we’re left with is an underwhelming meteor shower of half-hearted fan service. Outside of Holm’s infirm android, we tick off a chest-bursting scene (plus a bonus, gratuitous variation), and TWO alien-human face-to-face shots with the protruding teeth, just in case you didn’t get the first one. The kicker, though, is a dead-eyed re-delivery of an iconic line from Aliens that burns up in the atmosphere under the weight of its own cringe value, well before its landing gear can even be activated.

I know that this sounds like “Old Man Shouts At Gaseous Nebulae”, but as someone who saw the originals, Romulus is a Disneyfied mess that asks: what if a space horror was navigated by TikTok influencers? Rewatch the first two Alien movies and bask in the characterization and the near-unbearable tension, with pay-offs that earned their places in cinematic history. By the time the inevitable Alien: Remus comes around in 2026, this absolute casserole of a movie will surely have been forgotten. Don’t call Romulus, we’ll call Romulu. (PO)

​Sometimes it's hard to be a Roman: Julius Caesar @ The Lupin Theater
Review by Paul Oswell

I doubt that unseasonably violent storms or spontaneously combusting men were witnessed on the night that the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival chose to stage this particular play, but you could be forgiven for believing it to be a portentous decision. Just a week before opening night, the Supreme Court declared the possibility of king-like immunity for future Presidents, a development that is strikingly on the nose given the Trumpian themes of the opening act.

We meet Caesar (played by Silas Cooper) in his pomp, on the cusp of regal authority thanks to a rising tide of plebian devotion. Two close associates, Cassius (Erin Cessna) and Brutus (Wendy Miklovic), are beginning to see Caesar as weak due to his seizures and ailments, and they fear that ascension to the crown will spell the end of the Republic. High ranking members of a political organization looking to replace a physically flawed but well-liked figurehead? Seems like Joe Biden should also brush up on his classics.

Wild weather, fiery omens and his wife’s nightmares alert Caesar to possible tragedy, while a lethal conspiracy gains traction among the political class in the dead of night. Even though the morning brings the Ides of March, JC does very much not beware them. At first, he tells the Senate that he will not attend that day, refusing to give a reason, with the Nixonian rhetoric of, “The cause is in my will.” When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. 

His hubris eventually has him change his mind and attend court, and there he is gleefully celebrated with cake and fine wine. I’m just kidding. As we all know, he is instead brutally murdered, stabbed repeatedly by almost everyone he trusted. His one true ally, Mark Antony (James Bartelle), witnesses the bloody aftermath, superficially sanctioning the assassination but as the mob departs, he vows revenge. 

If the first act is a patchwork of personal machinations and skullduggery, the second plays out the consequences on a larger scale. Caesar’s son, Octavius (Zarah Hokule’a Spalding), arrives in Rome and forms a coalition with Antony and Lepidus (Enne Samuel). Armies are raised to fight the exiled Brutus and Cassius. They are ultimately successful, Brutus committing suicide still haunted by Caesar’s ghost. 

Director Salvatore Mannino skillfully creates an evocatively dark, tempestuous world that seems fraught and ominous. Hope Bennett’s impressively coherent costume design is reminiscent of the utilitarian garb of guerilla fighters, with hints of the latest Dune movies. The lighting and video projections (a moveable video wall conjures up changing scenes and moods) work deftly with the sound design, used most pleasingly to recreate booming arena speeches - excellent work by Alexander la Vallant Freer, James Lanius III and Steven Gilliland respectively. 

Cooper’s Caesar flits convincingly between potency and paranoia, while Miklovic and Cessna are powerfully engaging, mixing stirring rhetoric and aggressive ambition. Bartelle’s Mark Antony runs on high emotion throughout, the withering subtext of his ‘honorable men’ speech at Caesar's funeral one of the most memorable scenes. Seller’s Casca is everything a conniving, consigliere-type should be, while Hokule’a Spalding makes sure that Octavius’ arrival is explosively dramatic. 

It’s a large cast, but Monica R Harris, Ryan Hayes, Justice Hues, John Jabaley, Aria Jackson, Mary Langley, Matthew Raetz, Stephen Rose Pendleton, Enne Samuel, Joe Signorelli and Kristin Witt all render beautifully well-drawn characters. The staging is at close quarters, giving it a visceral immediacy. Disorienting torches flash across the audience and death scenes are starkly intimate.

As noted, it’s a spookily topical production, the lions that stalk the capitol almost too relevant an allegory for today’s real-life political landscape. Or perhaps violent swings of power are so historically common that Julius Caesar is simply an evergreen fable. Either way, lend your ears and eyes to this fantastically entertaining production - it's no less effective a filter through which to view today's politics than the nightly news. 

Julius Caesar plays at the Lupin Theatre through July 21st. For show information and tickets, click here. 
​