- By -Staff
- Entertainment
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Rachel LampertHere's the thing: I am a former theater professor who wants to be curmudgeonly Andy Rooney when I grow up. Now that I don't have to see bad productions I just won't go unless I know I will like a production. Even then I tear the production apart, imagining that I have wild eyebrows and that Andy Rooney voice that says, "And you know what else I hate?"So it must mean something good that I plan to attend Sunday's performance (3pm at the Lansing Middle School Auditorium) of Rachel Lampert's 'The Soup Comes Last'. Lampert will be performing her original one woman show to benefit LTAPA, the Lansing arts booster club. The show tells the story of her trip to China to choreograph a production of, of all things, 'West Side Story'.
I saw 'Soup' years ago at the Kitchen Theatre (Lampert is the artistic director there), I think before it played off-Broadway in New York City in 2004. It is a hilarious and touching story of culture clash in which Lampert and an American stage director are flown to a rural community to stage the show with the help of a translator.
The irony is that the Director is an 'ugly American' type with no apparent understanding whatsoever of the Chinese culture and mores. The sardonic outrage this produces in Lampert spans everything from the things you pack when going from things we take for granted in America to getting Chinese actors to understand a script written by Americans about gang warfare and love in New York City, based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet about approximately the same thing, but in Italy.
I find most one-person shows self-indulgent and tiresome, but Lampert expertly avoids those traps with an honest, humorous outlook and sharp wit. Her engagement with her Chinese fellow artists contrasts with the director's constant culture clash. The usual challenges of mounting a major musical seem all askew as the Americans struggle with the very meaning of the words in the script. And all the while this unlikely performance takes shape. The show must go on!
In the production I saw Lampert finished the performance with slides of the actual experience, putting faces to the characters she had so expertly crafted with words. That cemented the humanity of the experience, making you feel you were right there as it happened.
Sunday's performance is for a good cause. LTAPA has provided a wealth of sound and lighting equipment, money for productions, scholarships, and guest artists to enhance Lansing's music and theater program over the years. The organization is one of the key reasons Lansing's productions are among the few I will attend, Andy Rooney or not.
But don't go to be philanthropic -- go to give yourself a gift. 'The Soup Comes Last' will brighten your freezing January Sunday afternoon and keep you warm and smiling for years afterward.
This show has attracted many 'Soup' groupies who flock to see it whenever Lampert pulls it out of her bag of theatrical tricks. Is a 'Soup' groupie a 'Soupie'? In either case you will want to be one once you have seen Sunday's performance.
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