Customer Reviews

Side Man: A Play

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I have seen this play on Broadway and was spellbounded. This play is amazing. It really graspes reality. This play connects with famalies, such as mine, across the globe. It is beautifully written and deserved every Tony award that it recieved. Leight is amazing and does not bore you, does not offend you, and does not discomfort you in this all too true play. "Side Man" is magnificent and is surely the best play this year.

In the tradition of the most distinguished American plays ("Long Day's Journey" and "Glass Menagerie" specifically) Warren Leight reveals the modern family as at once the oddly comic locus of expectations unfulfilled and (in the words of G.B. Shaw) "the greatest instrument of torture the human race has yet devised." There are two sorts of side men in this brilliant play: the jazz musicians who accompany the more stellar performers but live principally for their music nonetheless, and the family members whom they shove off to the margins of their lives as inconsequential side men in comparison to their more important art and male camaraderie. By turns painful and hilarious, the play is altogether worthy of the praise the critics have accorded it. My judgments stem from a reading of the text and from the pleasure of having seen the piece recently performed on the stage.

Warren Leight's brilliant salute to the jazz musicians of his youth. Leight creates a world long past where jazz musician be-bopped their way into immortality among the select few who "got it" in their small jazz world. It is a world of gigs until dawn with legendary musicians, passing joints, unemployment lines, and speaking not words but chords and riffs. Depicted as the casualties of this world are the neglected familes of these musicians ignored as outsiders and civilians.

The playwright easily glides through time (one moment in the present, the next moment thirty years in the past)with the ease of Arthur Miller.

One senses loss in the fading of these jazz gods--like cowboys or Sioux warriors. It is a sad lament to a bygone era in American music. Please do not miss the experience of reading this requiem for that legendary moment in time.

I've both read this play and seen it performed, and I've been moved by the author's breadth of heart. He brings a rare humor, intelligence and intuition to this depiction of a family whose dysfunction is intimately linked to creativity, in the period when America's musical taste turns from jazz to rock. What's really heartbreaking is not that the characters cause one another such suffering but the author's tender acceptance that they don't mean to. The writing style is lucid and often splittingly funny. In the end, the characters in Side Man fail in their quest to connect with one another, yet Leight connects with each one so compassionately that you nevertheless experience a sense of reconciliation. This is a beautiful work, I recommend it to everyone.

Side Man was one of the best plays to arrive in New York last year -- at CurtainUp, the Internet Theater Magazine we reviewed it 3 times -- when it opened in a small Off-Broadway House, when it transferred to the Rounadabout and again, when it mvoed to its present location on Broadway. We also did an interview with playwright Warren Leight -- Christian Slater is the playwright's stand-in and the narrator of the play. If you like jazz and well-written play, check out this book -- and, of course, put it on your "to see" list when you go to New York

leight makes the reader care about a group of shadey personalities in a manner one would not think possible. when i started reading the play, i thought narration would ruin it for me, but clifford's insights into the people he interacts with make each of them more fuly realized. both sad and comically endearing, this is a charming play that i am pleased to be seeing on stage very soon!