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National Post
14 hours ago
- Lifestyle
- National Post
Makeover: A fresh look for a 50th high school reunion
Wendy Morris, 69, was attending her 50th high school grad reunion and wanted a little special treatment to celebrate herself. Article content Wendy has medium length and fine-to-medium textured hair. She wanted to refresh her colour so we applied neutral-beige highlights throughout to brighten her blond for the summer. After shampooing her hair with Oribe Beautiful Blonde Shampoo and Conditioner, we sprayed the mid-lengths and ends with Oribe Run-Through Detangling Primer for added hydration. We then trimmed up her hair and styled it smooth. Article content
Washington Post
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The Hunter S. Thompson musical is somehow both gonzo and square
I was milling around with some ambivalence at my 25th high school reunion, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when Hunter S. Thompson delivered a jump scare from beyond the grave. Days before I was scheduled to see a musical about him at Signature Theatre, a glossy paperback of the rebel newsman's pinnacle work 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' was discovered inside a time capsule packed by a handful of my classmates. The book sprang at me like a skeleton hand clutching a lit cigarette. I haven't figured out who put it there, but the typewriter-armed misfit clearly meant something to a restless teenager toiling in mid-'90s suburbia — and probably dreaming of drug-addled fame and abandon. The vitality of his legacy, 20 years after he died by suicide in 2005, is the animating question of 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,' which is as unwieldy yet stubbornly straightforward as the title suggests. Do people even know who he is anymore? A Gen Z actor (Giovanny Diaz de Leon) planted in the audience sizes him up and wagers a decent guess: James Taylor? Having to convince the uninitiated why they should care means starting the show on the back foot, a position it never really recovers from. Thompson is framed as a folk hero with hedonistic tendencies, righteously damning the man and championing people he calls outsiders and freaks. Among the more vaguely rebellious vibes are pointed throughlines that smartly speak to the present, mainly in drawing parallels between Presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. But in wrangling counterculture into musical theater, the show reenacts the fate that befell its subject — morphing a hip renegade into a goofball cartoon. Making a case for his notoriety in his beloved first person is Hunter himself (Eric William Morris), clad in the signature green poker visor, red Hawaiian shirt and yellow-tinted shades. (The casually groovy costumes are by Toni-Leslie James.) In a familiar storytelling trope, our protagonist is aware of his limited time on Earth (measured in 'tick, tick, tick' refrains from the ensemble) and determined to prove that he burned fast and bright. For a narrator who invented the outlandish, freewheeling style known as gonzo journalism, it feels a bit square to start this memoir at birth. But composer Joe Iconis and book writer Gregory S. Moss attempt a cradle-to-grave account of Thompson's life and career in 2 hours and 40 minutes. For Thompson fans and those who've seen filmmaker Alex Gibney's very good documentary 'Gonzo' (2008), the plot will yield few surprises: his breakout embedding with the Hell's Angels, turn to covering presidential politics and eventual descent into caricature. True to Thompson's spirit, that road is riddled with sizable detours — such as his love of firearms and how he met his exceedingly patient wife (Tatiana Wechsler) — and traversed with madcap momentum. ('The way you tell a story is confounding,' a faux heckler tells him.) The highlights of director Christopher Ashley's production, which premiered in 2023 at La Jolla Playhouse, where he is artistic director, are in the visual flourishes that aim to capture the colorful gusto of Thompson's writing. Handheld horses clomp through his chronicle of the Kentucky Derby, and fuzzy bats with ruby eyes swoop overhead en route to Vegas. (Puppetry design is by Animal Cracker Conspiracy.) On the throw-everything-at-the-wall set (by Wilson Chin), wildly colorful and dynamic lighting (by Amanda Zieve) directs the eye with stunning precision. For all that, the production's ingenuity feels like elaborate costuming dressing up dogged convention. The book hews closely to an and-then-this-happened checklist of Thompson's career, rollicking tangents notwithstanding. Iconis's pastichy score, a 'Hair'-light mix of Broadway pop and melodic rock with touches of gospel, rap and emo, is propulsive and occasionally catchy, but no match for Thompson's originality. Nor Ralph Steadman's — a song about the British illustrator, whose macabre panache came to epitomize Thompson's style, rings anodyne next to the Steadman drawings plastered on the walls. As with his score for 'Be More Chill' (which reached Broadway in 2019), Iconis excels at vivid, one-off character songs. George Salazar, a standout of that show, gets a resounding anthem here as Mexican American activist Oscar Acosta, whom Thompson characterized as his Samoan attorney sidekick in 'Fear and Loathing,' a diminishment the musical attempts to correct. In a pair of breakthrough numbers, Ryan Vona proves exceptionally limber as George McGovern ('Oo, daddy, talk to me about poverty,' Thompson coos at his adored candidate) and tenderly affecting as the adult version of the writer's long-neglected son. Morris meets the challenge of gassing up Thompson as his career rides high and deflates, though registering emotion mostly falls to others while he's busy trying to change the world. Thompson is more apt to show feeling in an ardent ballad about the cause: We need a nation, he sings, of 'unemployment insurance/ and contraceptives/ literate children/ and empathetic leaders.' Fair enough. But a character needs more than gusto and a bleeding heart to feel human. Maybe it's no surprise that George Abud walks off with the show as a dry and mordant Nixon, Thompson's right-wing nemesis whose long tentacles still reach into the present. He prods and cajoles, jeers and intimidates, until he bellows the most bluntly inspired hook of the night: 'Richard Nixon gonna beat yo hippie a--.' Can you tell which party still struggles with messaging? Distilling an unbridled storyteller into one he didn't write himself is a daunting business: On opening night, Iconis said the show has been in development for some 20 years. But it speaks to the clarity of Thompson's convictions — and to how quickly and often history has repeated in recent decades — that the social struggles depicted here could be ripped from the headlines. This way, you can at least tap your feet and share a laugh. The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, through July 13 at Signature Theatre in Arlington. 2 hours and 40 minutes with an intermission.
