My day Off-Broadway began and ended with bubbles, lots of bubbles: The first show I saw used the bubbles, accompanied by stage smoke and pounding dance music, for an audience of 3-year-olds; the sixth show more than two miles away and 12 hours later used the bubbles and the smoke and the pounding music in what looked like a Pagan sacrifice for an audience of 30-year-olds. In-between were musicals and mysteries, gratuitous nudity and several entries in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Let me explain.

For the next two weeks, from Tuesday, September 8th through Sunday, September 20th, 2009, a total of 26 Off-Broadway shows have agreed to charge just $20 — normal prices go as high as $100 per ticket — if you show up 20 minutes before curtain time and there are seats available, in a program called 20 at 20 (or 20@20) that the organizers have compared to Restaurant Week.

On the Web site for 20at20, I read: “Since Off-Broadway has performances to fit everyone’s schedule, you can see more than one,” and then it suggested the possibility of seeing “five shows in one day, for less than the price of one Broadway ticket.”

What would be the point, I thought; who would do that? Then I realized that I would.

11:00 a.m.

The Gazillion Bubble Show

It worried me that I almost fell asleep during the very first show of my day — do I not have the attention span of a five-year-old?! — but this was, after all, early for live theater, and besides my foot was really hurting for some reason, and, ok, look, there’s just so much I can get excited at this stage of my life about….bubbles.

“Gazillion Bubble Show” offered 75 minutes of bubbles — bubbles the size of a child’s head, then an entire child, then two children, then four children… children from the audience volunteered to be covered by these bubbles, and were then given gifts of bubble-making machines, also on sale in the lobby. As loud in its self-promotion as in its music (there is an ad for the show during the show), and interspersed with a screen of videos and instructions (e.g. “scream loudly if you want to see more”) that many in the audience were too young to read, the show delivered on its bubbles: bubble hats, psychedelic bubble sculptures, cloud rings with bubbles attached, bubbles as dense and pretty as a snowfall, bubbles accompanying a brief but intense green laser light show finale. Put together by Fan Yang, each performance is presented by just one member of his family — the show I saw featured Ana Yang, his wife.

Prices normally range from $41.50 to $86.50, so $20 is a bargain, especially if your child is one of the volunteers who gets one of the plastic bubble-making toys, which retail for as much as $64.

Strange Interlude # 1:

Five of the shows being offered for $20 are, like this one, at New World Stages, the former movieplex on 50th Street off Eighth Avenue, so it makes sense to focus here for the $20 tickets, since if any one of these shows is sold out 20 minutes before curtain time, the odds increase of being able to find another show for $20 to go to in time.

Off-Broadway began as an alternative to Broadway and is best-known for introducing American audiences to the avant-garde and to serious drama on cutting-edge issues. There is also now a whole genre Off-Broadway of non-verbal shows, most famously Blue Man Group which is NOT participating in 20 at 20, and Stomp, which is.

2:00 p.m.

Perfect Crime

A man in a tuxedo and black gloves enters a parlor lined with books, looking and sounding as if he is about to commit a crime. Instead, a woman climbs down the stairs and shoots him. Who murdered him? Why? And is he really dead?

These were some of the questions that have been answered in a convoluted but apparently widely satisfying way for more than 22 years. Opened in April 1987, “Perfect Crime” is the longest-running play in New York City. I figured it was time I saw it.

There is so much that is remarkable about this play, although most of it had little to do with what happened on stage, which I shouldn’t talk about anyway, since it’s a mystery. (It may be critics’ respectful silence about the plot, whose resolution struck me as having at least one big hole, that helps account for its longevity). “Perfect Crime” was the first stab at a full-length play by Warren Manzi, who was starring in Amadeus on “Broadway” when he wrote the first draft. Earlier this year, Catherine Russell, who plays the possibly murderous wife-psychiatrist and who also works off-stage as the general manager of the play, was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for having missed only four performances of the show over the past 22 years. She wasn’t even ill; she missed the performances in order to attend her siblings’ weddings (not even funerals!)

Strange Interlude #2

The Snapple Theater Center is the ninth venue where “Perfect Crime” has played, and I suspect it is the weirdest; it is upstairs above a Duane Reade drug store and beneath a billboard for “Wicked.” The sign for the theater just looks like another billboard, an ad for Snapple, complete with manhole-size Snapple bottlecaps. It is probably the most invisible theater in one of the most visible locations in New York City.

All three Off-Broadway shows currently playing at the Snapple Theater Center — “The Fantasticks” and “Magic and Zone”, as well as “Perfect Crime” — are participating in the 20@20 promotion. Since the Snapple Theater Center is in fact located on Broadway — on the corner of Broadway and 50th Street, with entrances both on 50th Street and on Broadway — a newcomer might wonder why these are not Broadway shows. An old-timer would rattle off the standard answer (without necessarily understanding it): It has to do with the Actor’s Equity contracts. Broadway theaters must have 500 or more seats; an Off-Broadway theater must have 100 to 499 seats; an Off-Off-Broadway theater has 99 seats or less.

There are several serious plays Off-Broadway (and serious doesn’t mean humorless) that are being offered as part of the $20 promotion:

A Boy And His Soul by Colman Domingo at the Vineyard Theater Company

After Luke & When I Was God, two plays by Conal Creedon at the Irish Repertory Theater

“Keep Your Pantheon” and “School”, two plays by David Mamet at the Atlantic Theater Company

In The Daylight by Tony Glazer at McGinn Cazale Theater.

The Columbine Project at the Actors’ Temple Theater.

4:00 p.m.

Altar Boyz

The Altar Boyz are a Christian boy band with five members, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan and Abraham; Abraham is a yarmulke-wearing Jew. That was one of the running gags, which also included a singer who talked about being treated for “exhaustion” rather than alcoholism and another who has a crush he can’t quite admit.

There were some stabs at a plot — the band is presenting its last concert of its “Raise the Praise Tour” , in New York City, and there is a machine on stage created by Sony electronics called a Soul Sensor that indicates how many souls in the audience “might be burdened with sin.”; the aim of the boys is to get the number on the sensor down to zero. Over the course of the 90-minute musical, we saw the number fluctuate.

It was not for the nominal plot that “Altar Boyz” received almost universal critical praise when it opened in March, 2005 but for its gentle mocking lyrics — e.g.

You know the Bible tells you that

God’s the one that made you

So get out on the dance floor

And shake what he gave you

lines of dialogue like “American consumers are demanding more God in their entertainment than ever before,” and its energetic and playful choreography.

The cast has undoubtedly changed many times and, in the afternoon performance that I saw, two of the five roles were played by understudies. If anything, the understudy, Mitch Dean, who was playing the role of Mark, was the stand-out performer. But, whether it was just me entering the mid-afternoon stretch, or the performers facing the first of four weekend performances, I didn’t feel the excitement that’s usually generated by a hit show.

6:00 p.m.

Naked Boys Singing

At the end of the first of the 15 songs that make up the hour-long musical revue — a song whose lyrics include:

Why make a fuss

When it’s obvious to us

You’re here to see

Gratuitous nudity…

No crudity

Just Gratuitous Nudity

a man called out from the audience, “Oh, I’m sorry, I must have the wrong room. I was looking for ‘Altar Boyz,’” before he was coaxed to join the company in the buff.

This was something of an inside joke, since “Naked Boys Singing” was being performed in the same theater where “Altar Boyz” had finished maybe 20 minutes earlier; the Soul Sensor was still on the stage, if you knew where to look.

Of course, that’s not where most members of the audience were looking. But this is not a Chippendales revue. The show has been around for ten years because of its clever lyrics and choreography, as well as a cheerfulness you could almost call wholesome. Would it be a sacrilege to point out its similarities to “Altar Boyz”?

Strange Interlude # 3
The producer of Altar Boyz, Ken Davenport, who also produced The Awesome 80’s Prom and My First Time (which are part of the $20 promotion) and is a well-read theater blogger , was one of the people who thought up 20@20.
Excerpts from an interview with him in the New York Times:

*”The bright lights of Broadway attract a lot of people, but we wanted to put the focus on New Yorkers, who make up a big portion of our audience…
*”If you want to get a better seat, go early…
*”If you see seven shows in the two-week period, you get a voucher for a free dinner…
*”Off Broadway could not survive on $20 tickets. No one is making money off of these tickets.”

8:00p.m.

The Toxic Avenger

The town bullies of Tromaville, New Jersey dump the town nerd, Melvin Ferd the Third, into one of the many barrels of toxic waste, off of which the town’s mayor has gotten rich. Melvin becomes the Toxic Avenger, spewing brain matter onto row C; luckily, I was in row F. The Avenger promises to restore the town’s environmental health and win over the blind librarian.
The musical, adapted from a low-budget horror movie, opened in April and (like the two preceding ones I saw at the New World Stages) is performed without an intermission. It managed to make cheap jokes at the expense of the blind, New Jersey, school athletes, the hearing-impaired, the elderly. There were numerous dismemberments and beheadings; at one point, the Toxic Avenger used two limbs he had severed to play a drum. Still, the show made me laugh, even though I had the right to feel a bit like a zombie myself, having now spent nine hours inside various theaters — or maybe I was laughing because I had spent so much time in theaters?

“The Toxic Avenger” gives bad taste a good name. This befits a show directed by John Rando, who came to fame as the director of “Urinetown: The Musical.” There was palpable excitement in the audience and evident enjoyment on the stage. Among the wholly positive reviews, Charles Isherwood in the New York Times struck a few discordant notes, including a complaint that the whole musical rested on a cast of five actors doing multiple roles. They were, though, impressive performances. One actor, Jonathan Root, plays 14 roles! Nancy Opel was as good as everybody says, as the Tina Turner-like vamping corrupt mayor and the whining mother. “Given the cheapo provenance of the material, this winking approach to the show’s minimal cast is funny enough,” Isherwood wrote. “But it might be funnier if full-priced tickets to ‘Toxic Avenger’ did not run to $85.”

So will it be funnier at $20?

10:00 p.m.

Fuerza Bruta

The thought occurred to me as I stood watching the dozen or so men and women wordlessly writhe on a shallow and translucent pool of water suspended just above our heads, or run through screens, or dangle at odd angles from the ceiling, or get sprayed from a water hose, or hit members of the audience over the head with styrofoam bricks, that perhaps the day had been too long and I was hallucinating.

So this is how it ends.

Actually, “Fuerza Bruta” (Brute Force) had a lot in common with “The Gazillion Bubble Show.” Ok, in the kiddie show I was not allowed to stand; in this show obviously for college kids I was not allowed to sit; Bubbles forbid photography; Bruta encouraged it. But both opened in 2007, both are about 75 minutes long, in neither do you need a command of the English language, or any language (although it would come in useful in the bubble show), both assault/entertain with throbbing music and flashing light, although in Bruta you can see the DJ’s who do this, one of whom is wearing a George Washington wig.

Ok, time to call it a day. Here are the “Fuerza Bruta” reviews

Here is a video:

Welcome to Off-Broadway.

(Photographs of “Altar Boyz” and “Naked Boys Singing” are from The New York Times and do not feature the current casts) Photograph of Fuerza Bruta on flickr by Laverrue

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