To review Stalking Christopher Walken go to the Fringe Review Form at the bottom of the page, write your review, and then click POST REVIEW.
Fringe Audience Reviews
reviews of shows in the 2012 San Francisco Fringe Festival
To review Stalking Christopher Walken go to the Fringe Review Form at the bottom of the page, write your review, and then click POST REVIEW.
“What were they thinking?” It’s a question we often ask ourselves when baffled by others’ actions. Described as a “comic jaunt” into the mind of the actor, “Stalking Christopher Walken” dances — often literally — around what Walken was thinking during one of Hollywood’s sadder unsolved mysteries, the death of Natalie Wood.
The hourlong play makes its Bay Area debut as part of Christina Augello’s 21st annual San Francisco Fringe Festival. Presented at Exit Theatre in the Tenderloin, this year’s Occupy Fringe Theatre 2012 includes 12 days of performances from 41 local and visiting companies beginning Wednesday.
Gabriel Grilli, artistic director of the newly founded collaborative theater ensemble BrickaBrack, is the director, playwright and embodiment of “Walken.” His idea is to bring the audience on a journey into the dark corners of Walken’s dreams.
“I started working on this piece many, many years ago after I had worked with Chris in New York in 1995,” Grilli says. “I had the idea and workshopped it in New York a long time ago. I was never really happy with that version.”
Until recently, few people remembered that Walken was one of the four people on the yacht Splendour with Wood — along with her husband, Robert Wagner, and captain Dennis Davern — the night she drowned in 1981.
A 2009 book to which Davern contributed helped reopen the investigation, and just this month Wood’s death certificate was amended from accidental drowning to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
“When all this news started to come out about Natalie Wood’s death being re-examined, I just thought, we need to look at that Walken piece again,” Grilli says. He changed the focus to Walken’s relationship with Wood.
“The catalyst for this piece is the idea that he hasn’t really dealt with what happened,” Grilli explains. “Obviously, I don’t know the reality of that, I don’t know if he’s haunted by this or not, but that served as the premise for our piece. That he’s been sort of storing away his emotions about this for the past 30 years because the truth has never really been told about it.”
The play also explores Walken’s background and life outside of the movie industry. Grilli combines public statements by the iconic and oft-imitated actor with original writing.
“It will be interesting to see what the audience recognizes as coming from him and what we’ve manufactured,” Grilli says. “There’s a really thin line there sometimes.”
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/theater/2012/08/journey-christopher-walken-s-mind#ixzz25WtYM1HC
This unique piece is a must see! It combines dance, drama, comedy and romance with effortless grace. The hour ebbs and flows like the dreamscape plot, playing on emotion and captivating the audience from start to finish. It manages to achieve real subject-matter depth in such a short time. You truly feel transported into the depths of Walken’s mind. The acting and choreography is also top notch. Very refreshing and wonderful to see original yet accessible theatre in the Bay Area!
Gabriel Grilli and his fantastic cast truly blew me away last night! Stalking Christopher Walken” is superbly performed from start to finish. I really didn’t want it to end! Gabriel IS Chris Walken! He is so very talented ….the triple threat that he is….actor, singer, dancer!! The choreography tells the story with humor, passion and is so very inventive. I give this show 2 big huge thumbs up and would go see it again but I have a feeling this one will sell out quickly. It’s magnificent!
9/10 You must go and see this show. I wont spoil the plot.
An interesting look into the mind of Christopher Walken during and after his involvement with the death of Natalie Wood. Causes you to consider alternatives to the “official” version of her death. Grilli is good, but the casting around him is exemplary.
Brickabrack delivers with Stalking Christopher Walken! I laughed, I cried and was riveted by this story of Chris’ choices about the death of Natalie Wood along with a glimpse into his mind. Fabulous cast – Katie Tandy is really a stand-out along with Gabriel Grilli. An hour well spent.
Very engaging from start to finish. Great choreography and a talented cast that never stops moving for the entire hour. Really evocative for the size of the production (though it’s big and technically elaborate by Fringe standards.) Grilli really plays Walken with a surprising amount of depth and heart where it would be all too easy to delve into caricature. The supporting cast was also terrific. I expected laughs; what I didn’t expect was a few tears. I highly recommend the show.
I saw the last show Saturday night and, first off, feel extremely lucky that I even ended up there. I went on sort’ve a whim. Saw a flier at Stage Werx earlier in the week and it had me at Christopher Walken. I love Christopher Walken; that was all I needed to know. Well yeah, went online and skimmed some positive reviews, but came in otherwise blind. Then, secondly, lucked out in getting a seat. Apparently the show made Fringe history by selling out in the first five minutes!!
Here starteth the review:
Gabriel Grilli, you are magic. I want to live in your head. Our psyches could enfold each other like Russian Dolls – Christopher > Gabriel > Me…
The play begins lightly and chaotically. Christopher stars in a meta-conscious one-man variety show. He enjoys it, we enjoy it. We’re introduced to the Walken 5. It is genius. Gabriel has us drifting in – enjoyable yet familiar nonsense easing us into the first shallow layer of dreamworld. Christopher (and we) accept the surreal, as you do drifting off. And most of all it’s genius because it is obviously a feint at the tone of the play, which we don’t want to think about. We feel both the audience and Christopher resisting a pull down into the darker, deeper regions of his psyche. But it wants him from the get-go, the snarling paparazzi seem harmless at first but really drag a narrative out of what started off as chaotic silliness.
Let’s start with the Walken 5. We accept them at first as reasonable – the people in our dreams are often random white noise, so why not. They’re funny, they’re his back-up dancers and cheerleaders, they shrug in and out of character types – sure, again, why not? IT MAKES SENSE. The fluidity of these dancers in who or what they represent correspond perfectly to the reality of a dream and highlights the way only true emotional sense dictates this interior universe. A frequent instance is the costumeless change they undergo when his dreamscape/the emotional undercurrent of the play feels defensive or anticipates malice – they quickly morph into the snarling, animal outside world/paparazzi. Less frequently they’ll have very simple costume changes to denote their new roles as totems.
The ways in which he’d introduce the important figures in his life was wonderful. Although the casting for multiple roles makes practical sense, I think that this efficiency points more to an intuitive knowledge of the subconscious than logistics. The way these back-up dancers, the brain’s white noise, switch to important personal figures (but both blurred and intensified until they’re personal totems, not people) at the drop of a hat, is also very familiar. People change like this in our dreams. And the totems that appear in our dreams are people who’ve affected us and live on, not as themselves, but as the figments of ourselves they’ve become; us speaking to ourselves in their voices, becoming something different from who they were as we knew them.
In Christopher’s mind we encounter The Agent – the business itself / The Wife – duty, responsibility, reality, home, business, failure, shame, coldness / Natalie – love, idealism, beauty, failure, fragility, the past, innocence, longing / RJ – evil. I love that little cookie we’re given in the first layer, when the actor we have not yet come to know as RJ interjects with a slightly macabre yet hilarious commercial for a senior citizen life aid – it’s foreshadowing both for us and Christopher.
So Bravo to the rest of the cast as well. Really. Everyone was hilarious, everyone danced beautifully. Special snaps to the actor who played RJ just for that scene before which you had to change shirts so quickly you had to keep a straight face the entire next scene that you had your polo neck in your face (the shirt was on backwards).
Somehow we find ourselves in a deeper level of the subconscious. Christopher is (for the most part) alone. Pensive. Sitting. Becomes further detached by experiencing his thoughts along with us by listening to a voice-over, rather than voicing them himself. This is where I REALLY love Gabriel’s writing. The play moves fluidly from quiet emotional moments to laughs and, more frequently, from the quiet emotional moments to brief moments of levity that are effective in themselves (I almost died when that two-person turtle crawled across the stage) yet don’t take away from the tragedy of the moment.
I was entertained, moved, and inspired. Christopher’s kooky stream-of-consciousness was perfect – silly and slightly unhinged, but written so without being irreverent.
It beautifully segues into reflection on his great inner turmoil, Natalie Wood, and a somewhat stable narrative, the way our dreams finally settle from chaos into linear action.
Other highlights:
The simple boat set.
The choreography of the car – very cute, dancers and plexiglass.
The first time Natalie and CW see each other. HILARIOUS. It just kept getting funnier the longer it was drawn out. (Although that does draw attention to the ONE problem I had with a couple of the other dance numbers – sometimes those serious dances – like between RJ and Natalie – felt repetitive and dragged on long after making their emotional stance clear. The choreography was too repetitive to really have any effect after establishing its..point.)
Also, props on the puppet. (<–was that funny? punny?)
Gabriel as dancer, writer, actor, and director is just stunning. I look forward to many more productions of this play, which there should be and which I am sure there will be. This entails an inevitable evolution of it which is probably a wonderful thing, but for now it fills me with dread – I just don't want it to change. In fact I can't imagine a better gift than to be able to rewatch a recording of this show or to be able to read the playscript, just to relive and to learn from.
the end.