By Kiara Downey

This week I had the splendid opportunity to chat with the multi-talented East Village marvel, Angela DiCarlo. DiCarlo, whose gift for makeup design led her from Des Moines, Iowa to Manhattan, has created outrageous and unpredictable stage shows here in New York for the past 10 years. She’s a singer, a writer, and a producer who frequently lights up the stages of Joe’s Pub, Feinstein’s, and the Wild Project.

This gorgeous downtown denizen positively froths with bawdy delight. Whether she’s bringing a ruthless gossip columnist to life or belting out raunchy tunes at “The Mad World of Miss Hathaway,” this lady is a queen of theatre scene. She and I convened at the bustling 7A restaurant and dished on drama and what it takes to be a lauded lady performer in the hottest hood in the city.

As soon as Ms. Di Carlo walked into the café I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. With a shock of gorgeous red hair, a daring leopard print jacket, and eyebrows drawn in a Joan Crawford arch, she glamorized the crowded room. For anyone who watches “Mad Men,” this girl looks like a sassy sister of the show’s secretary Joan Harris, who is played by Christina Hendricks.

In fact, it was at the suggestion of Di Carlo’s friend and one-time producer David Conrad Brouillard that she first penned a few satirical songs for the spoof of that show about midtown, martini-drinking bad boys.

“I’m a cabaret artist and I had worked in other group projects such as ‘Lady, Lady, Lady’ at the Zipper Room,” she told me. “But I put this show together on my own. It was David who gave me the idea.”

When I gushed about the show’s delicious getups, DiCarlo admitted, “Most of the costumes come from my personal collection. Well, mine and my husband’s.”

Now, almost two years after bringing “The Mad World” to life, DiCarlo has just wrapped her 8th iteration of the show (titled “I’ll Be Horny for Christmas”) and she’s gathered a  sumptuous gaggle of talent to play her crazy characters.

From FischerSpooner’s Casey Spooner and Adam Dugas (“Chaos and Candy”) to David Ilku (“The Dueling Bankheads”) and Mike Albo (“Unitard”), the cast of the 2012 holiday episode brought seasoned stage chops to the creatures she’d invented.

“I’m so lucky to work with all of these people. David Ilku is a New York legend and Mike Albo is just fabulous. The whole cast is amazing.”

Albo, who was once a downtown Dazzle Dancer and is now a celebrated writer and soloist, wandered around the set as a vapid hippy and sang a song about hallucinogenic drugs, and I guffawed at just about every word Ilku said and sang. He and DiCarlo presented a joyous series of one-liners in a scene reminiscent of television’s Hee-Haw, and his voice impressed everyone in the audience.

When she finished her lunch, DiCarlo (who still does makeup for stars such as Kristen Wiig and Zach Galifianakis) reapplied a coat of bright coral lipstick and dashed out to prepare for that night’s production. It’s a shame you missed this recent “Mad World,” but don’t fret – DiCarlo and her wild crew will be back with more in May.

photo courtesy of Wiki Commons

Just a month after the conclusion of Mad Men’s most-watched season to date, AMC released that yesterday’s season 5 premiere of Breaking Bad, a show about a drug chef and his drug-dealing business, was the most-watched episode in the show’s history, marking “unprecedented growth” in viewership.

According to the release, the show saw a 2.2 HH rating and 2.9 million viewers during its 10pm air, a 14% increase compared to last year’s premiere, and a 34 percent increase in viewership among the highly-sought 18-49 demographic.

In conjunction with its 11:30 pm encore, which is simply a repeat,  the show accumulated a whopping 3.5 million viewers, 700,000 more viewers than Mad Men’s season 5 finale.

Last night’s episode was the first of the show’s final season, which is slated to run 16 episodes.

Filmed in New Mexico, the show has been critically acclaimed since its January 2008 debut, garnering 16 Emmy nominations during its run.

-Nick Gallinelli

This one was, but only to a point. Season 5 had its work cut out for itself after a finale that saw an impulsive marriage proposal from Don to secretary Megan (Jessica Paré, enjoying a major and deliciously well-acted career break) and Joan (Christina Hendricks) keep Roger’s (John Slattery) baby after an affair while her husband was in Vietnam. And yet despite plenty of forward movement, much of this season felt like a benchwarmer. We met a mysterious new copywriter, Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), but have yet to learn more about him. We still no precious little about Stan Rizzo (Jay Ferguson). We learned of Ken Cosgrove’s (a nicely understated Aaron Staton) sprouting career as a fiction writer, but are left to wonder if his conflict with Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) will continue to grow after the latter passive-aggressively tried to put the kibosh on Ken’s creative outlet.  If seeds were planted, many will have to sprout in another season, not this one.

Major plots included emotional revelations for both Pete, who stayed with Trudy but stepped out with the wife of his commuting buddy, and Roger Sterling (John Slattery), who left his wife after finding LSD. These guys are sad sacks, and both actors dig deep into their emotional recesses – when they have the material. For a season that only includes thirteen episodes, I wish each chapter within had provided a glimpse of their ongoing ennui. Weiner and his staff instead threw these characters maybe three to four episodes each of specific focus, which is an episodic disservice to organic character development. For a show that raises the bar in terms of attention to detail, the overall story threads felt looser this season than they have in the past.

As ever, performances were on a par with few others this season. And there were some definite water cooler moments this season – Megan singing “Zou Bisou Bisou,” Joan’s personal sacrifice to become an SCDP partner, Peggy’s (Elisabeth Moss) simultaneous exit from the firm, and Lane Pryce’s (Jared Harris) suicide – some of which worked better than others. For instance, I’ll never forget the look on Peggy’s face as she stepped on the elevator, we hope to greener pastures (she’s the new Tess McGill, a surrogate for all those hard workers angling for an opportunity to advance). But Lane’s heavily telegraphed death never rose above the “well-meaning man caught in a financial tide pool” trope. His death may haunt Don, but it hasn’t resonated with me the way it should.

Which brings me to that most unhappy man of all, Don (no one does hypocritical indignance nor hangdog perturbation better than the inestimable Hamm). Some have criticized the amount of story time devoted to Megan, but I think it was all merited. She’s the most interesting aspect of Don’s current life, and she’s a fantastic character. Megan is a good actress but not an inspired one or an innately raw talent, and Paré delineates that line exquisitely well. Also, I particularly love how Peggy respected her every time we expected her to resent the new bride, a sly way of delineating her own continuingly growing confidence.

But I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of Don’s marriage by the end of the season finale. After giving her a career boost, does he watch her infatuation? Disappointment? Estrangement? Love? Does he actually have plans to move beyond her? The season’s final question, to quote the King of Siam, ‘tis a bit of a puzzlement: “Are you alone?” The answer will always be yes, regardless of how many others are in the room with Don. He’s a solitary man at heart, but that doesn’t mean his marriage to Megan should end. If I tune in next season to find that Megan is on the way out, you can add this writer to the list of unhappy men.

Jon Hamm in Mad Men's Season Five finale.

At least that’s what season five’s viewership would suggest. Season five of AMC’s provocative drama, Mad Men, is the most watched season to date, and last night’s season finale was the most watched season finale in series history. Season five averaged 2.6 million viewers, a 15% increase from season four. The finale drew 2.7 million viewers. 1.4 million of these viewers drew from the show’s core demographic—adults 25 to 54-years-old.

AMC President Charlie Collier had nothing but praise for Matthew Weiner, the show’s producer and writer, and his entire team. Collier called the show’s increasing popularity “an uncommon television growth record and a testament to the ongoing quality and uniqueness of this rare property.”

On Netflix, the first episode of the first season of Mad Men is the most watched episode.  On iTunes, season five is ranked in the top five for cable dramas. Mad Men is the first basic cable series ever to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series for four consecutive years.

“We make Mad Men for the fans,” said Weiner. That strategy certainly seems to be working.

Mad Men’s renewal contract also included a guaranteed sixth season, which will probably come out next year.

—Alissa Fleck

“Smart” TV and the Gray Flannel Ego

By Ben Kessler

Smart TV is a unique kind of aesthetic nonentity, but even nonentities have to come from somewhere. Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner, like HBO’s three Davids (Chase, Simon and Milch, of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood respectively), has a media profile that mixes elements of many leadership archetypes—he’s part film director, part producer, part CEO. Because they preside over a vast creative apparatus rather than yoking themselves to any particular aspect of production, Weiner and his fellow smart showrunners are presumed by journalists to be above the unfortunate susceptibilities that plague the individual artist.

As part of this post-auteur framework, the protagonists of smart TV shows are usually distorted extensions of their creators. Mad Men’s Don Draper is given to pronouncements that have no precedent in the early-1960s mainstream but could easily fit into contemporary liberal-bourgeois conversation (e.g., “You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”).

In Draper/Weiner’s case, Mad Men’s benighted ’60s perspective lends a transgressive thrill to this sort of sentiment. For certain viewers, there’s perfect perversity in a character embodying chauvinism and capitalism who carries on about the meaninglessness of existence like a dweeb from a recent Woody Allen film. Someone of a New York magazine mindset might ask with fascination, “How’d a guy like that come by such deep thoughts?”

Set in 1966, Mad Men’s fifth season starts with a civil rights protest on a Manhattan sidewalk. Right away, Weiner proffers a scene designed to answer media folks’ demands for a deeper engagement with race on the show. But Mad Men’s makers show their true colors by ending the teensy protest prologue on a note of pseudo-liberal self-congratulation. After being waterbombed by ad men (not our heroes) from the offices above, a black protester gets the last word, a tin-eared summation that deadens the civil rights dialectic: “And they call us savages.”

To read the full article at City Arts click here.