Archive

Robin & Me: My Little Spark of Madness

May 11, 2023

Under the direction of Chad Austin, Droxler uncannily becomes not only Williams (and all of Williams cinematic characters who each serve up different helpful advice), but also his father Ed; mother Mary; and other characters, all, of course, just facets of his own persona. He even conjures the comic actor Jim Carrey who, for a short time replaces Robin Williams as an ad hoc advisor. Even Jack Nicholson makes a guest appearance. [more]

Khan!!!The Musical, A Parody Trek-tacular

May 10, 2023

The music is well-done, with the songs fully integrated into the storyline and lyrics that help define essential elements of the character's nature and are filled with inside Star Trek references and jokes. For example, when Theerakulstit skillfully sings "Young," entirely in character as Kirk, we hear Kirk as an older man regretting getting old and no longer able to be the arrogant swashbuckling starship captain of his youth. When we meet Khan for the first time, Kropp sings “My Wrath,” which gives a history of how he came to be in this place and the reason for his extreme anger at Kirk. Although many of the references will be missed by a non-Star Trek audience, the songs are well-constructed, and more importantly, they are sung by a cast that knows how to sing on key and on pitch. While you may not leave the show humming a tune, they are the types of songs that one will return to without getting bored. [more]

Eighteen-Year-Old Actor with Autism Honored by Only Make Believe Charity

May 9, 2023

Collet Reyes has been a part of the Only Make Believe charity since he was eight years old. Living with a developmental disability and being diagnosed on the Autism spectrum, Reyes has worked through these challenges to pursue his dream of becoming a professional actor. For the last ten years, Reyes was able to write, perform and learn all aspects of the theatre industry. He continues today by working with Only Make Believe actors to attend monologue workshops wherein he developed a monologue of his own to use at future auditions. He has taken professional headshots and continues to volunteer in his current role as both stage manager and mentor to children at The Rebecca School. [more]

On the Town with Chip Deffaa: “As You Like It” On Stage and “Banded Together” In the Movies

May 9, 2023

Each was an individual; I liked hearing all of the different voices and accents and inflections. Each one brought his or her own personality to the work. But—and this is a compliment--they were all performing the play in the same fundamental manner. As performers, they were all on the same wavelength. (Kudos to director Kelly Brady and company.) The characters were talking with one another--not offering orations directed at the audience. The actors all knew the material so thoroughly, they were able to speak their lines easily to each other, with utter naturalness, in a conversational way. They were giving us Shakespeare’s words. But they weren’t delivering speeches to us; they were interacting with one another the way people in real life do. And that made the play come alive for us. It wasn’t a historical relic. The characters felt like human beings, with the same sorts of feelings we all have. We could relate to them. [more]

Good Night, Oscar

May 9, 2023

Sean Hayes, up till now best known for his Emmy Award-winning performance as Jack McFarland on "Will and Grace," gives a titanic performance as humorist, raconteur and pianist Oscar Levant once called the wittiest man in America, in Doug Wright’s new play "Good Night, Oscar." Although Levant is not much remembered today, you can enjoy this character study and depiction of early late night television even if you have never heard of him before. While "Will and Grace" has made evident Hayes’ way with one-liners, "Good Night, Oscar" demonstrates that Hayes is able to dig deep in a character portrayal as well. Credit must go to director Lisa Peterson for inspiring this memorable performance. [more]

Bliss Street

May 7, 2023

The main issue with this show is the lack of clarity in the book. Who is the play about, the father or the son? Act I is primarily a story about Paul Sub and his business ventures leading up to the creation of The Coventry. Act II is more about Charlie Sub and how his father's business decisions impacted Charlie's life. In both cases, the story's elements need to be restructured to make it more compelling. Does it matter what type of romantic relationship Charlie develops in LA? Did Paul's liquor store fail after the robbery? The book needs to be edited to define clearly which story is being told and to eliminate the scenes that do not advance the story. [more]

New York City Center Encores!: Oliver!

May 7, 2023

When Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s baton brought out the first notes of the "Oliver!" overture from the Encores! Orchestra, the memorable tunes just flowed and didn’t stop until more than two hours later at the standing ovation and exit music. Lionel Bart’s score is rich in melody, the lyrics and the libretto evoking Dickens while still being theatrical. (The late William David Brohn did the lavish orchestral arrangements.) Lear deBessonet, the show’s director (and the Encores!’ artistic director) has fashioned a fast-moving evening filled with great performances starting with the sweet, fresh-faced Oliver of Benjamin Pajak and the incredibly talented ensemble of kids who gambol about with abandon. [more]

Hong Kong Mississippi

May 5, 2023

From the moment he walks out with a stuffed “Disneyfied” dragon to tell us a fairy tale his mother told him when he was little, we are enraptured by Pinky, an 11-year-old Chinese boy growing up in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Written and performed by Wesley Du, "Hong Kong Mississippi" is a coming-of-age tale that speaks innocently, yet often in frank terms, of racism. And providing the real dose of irony, the only other character to experience a seismic shift in the play is the man who resents Pinky the most, a man who against his better judgment unknowingly becomes Pinky’s mentor and father figure he never had. [more]

Summer, 1976

May 5, 2023

Auburn (Pulitzer Prize winner for Proof) has a knack for writing complex female characters. That knack hasn’t failed him in "Summer, 1976." Diane, the lustrous Laura Linney, is an aloof artist/university professor who meets Alice, the warm and magnetic Jessica Hecht, a stay-at-home mom, via their very young daughters. Alice’s husband, the unseen, but occasionally heard, Doug, an economist on the tenure track at the university where Diane also teaches, devised a babysitting co-op that involved coupons exchanged for hours of babysitting, a system that eventually breaks down quite humorously. [more]

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

May 3, 2023

Directors Noah Brody and Emily Young, both of the Fiasco Theater, have neatly trimmed the dialogue and some of the minor characters so that the play comes in at two hours and 15 minutes. However, they have made some choices that work much less well. Except for a rolling doorway to designate Merrythought’s home, Christopher Swader & Justin Swader’s scenic design does not differentiate one scene from another due to its lack of design elements. Other than the musical interludes, the productions lacks atmosphere in all its scenes. They have also used doubling and tripling to the point where it is difficult to keep straight who most of the actors are when they appear on stage in this play that has probably never been seen by most members of the audience. Most distracting is actress Royer Bockus playing three male roles – Merrythough’s son Michael, Little George, and a Servant as well as a horse named George. The role of Venturewell has had a change of gender but as Tina Chilip is still called “Merchant” but does not suggest one in her 17th century matron costume, this remains a little disconcerting. Characters who play major roles in one scene return to play minor roles in others which is more than a little confusing. [more]

Peter Pan Goes Wrong

May 1, 2023

The Company soon loses its way as bunk beds self-destruct, lines get mangled, Peter Pan flails about in failed attempts to fly and crocodiles and mermaids parade about on skateboards. If this sounds like a normal production of Barrie’s classic tale, then I am telling it wrong. The main problem with "Peter Pan Goes Wrong" is that virtually all the jokes are physical, an unending series of scenic disasters that become not just predictable, but tiresome. Even the great physical comedians of the silent film era knew when enough was enough. [more]

Prima Facie

May 1, 2023

The mesmerizing Jodie Comer, making her Broadway debut in the Olivier Award-winning best new play after starring in the genre-subverting BBC show Killing Eve, portrays Tessa (for which Comer also won an Olivier in her West End bow) with stunning fidelity to the pain she causes and endures. While the tension between these two aspects of Tessa's personal history eventually ignite a fervent reassessment of who she has been, who she is now, and who she should be, Comer never gets ahead of herself in the performance. Early on, as Tessa recounts, in predatory terms, conducting a cross-examination that frees a rapist, Comer convinces us, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Tessa not only perceives practicing law as a "game" but also is emotionless about the outcome, no matter the consequences for others. At this point, in hearing Tessa trumpet her job so blithely, the horror is ours alone, because, for Tessa, everything she's saying is just another day at the office. [more]

The Thanksgiving Play

May 1, 2023

Larissa Fasthorse’s "The Thanksgiving Play" gives a good tweaking to those who are so hung up on political correctness that they dare not make a decision. On the other hand, the play reminds us how difficult it is to be fair to all sides of the historical spectrum. The erasure of the Native American point of view is made clear by their very absence from the play, while the problem of educators knowing how to walk the fine line between inclusion and suitability is given a rare airing in this delightful parody. The use of in jokes, theatrical, historical and educational notwithstanding, "The Thanksgiving Play" is a satire that entertains while it makes some very real and needed points about political correctness when dealing with unpleasant American history. [more]

God of Carnage

April 28, 2023

The direction by Nicholas Viselli ultimately misses a key point in this plot, which is that Alan and Annette should be staged as perpetually trying to leave Veronica and Michael’s apartment. These two couples are strangers to each other; they are not friends or even acquaintances. Yet the staging plunks the four of them together with too much familiarity and intimacy. Their situation does not call for them to remain in each other’s company for so long, or for backrubs to be exchanged, etc.; it’s just not believable. The entire premise of the plot is made implausible by blocking and acting choices that should have been redirected. [more]

The Singing Sphere

April 27, 2023

I left with questions about what I had just experienced. It was not a feeling of dismissal but one of consideration for the experience. It was and is not a question of good or bad but whether it works or not as a play. The average theatergoer thinks "Waiting for Godot" or "Endgame" are bad plays because understanding them is not readily accessible. While "The Singing Sphere" is not an easy play to engage with, I think it does work, but it is for a select audience. [more]

Plays for the Plague Year

April 26, 2023

While the playlets seem too slight to have much dramatic weight as they are mainly about one minute long, they do have a cumulative effect summing up a year that was like no other in recent memory. Often the scenes feel like they want to go and continue, but Parks keeps them short. Periodically, we have a one sentence scene telling us how many people have died from Covid as of that date. Beginning on March 13, 2020, the first full day of the shutdown, the playlets continue until April 13, 2021, a year and a month from when Parks started. An electronic sign above the stage states the date of each scene and its name which include such titles as “Home,” “Broadway Is Closed,” “The City at 7 PM,” “Who’s Gonna Pay For This?,” and “Hiatus 4 Months: Holding It Together Together.” [more]

Dance Theatre of Harlem 2023

April 24, 2023

A short documentary film about the fabulous actress, composer, pianist and wife of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Hazel Scott, preceded the new ballet, "Sounds of Hazel," choreographed by Tiffany Rea-Fisher. The film revealed Rea-Fisher’s inspiration to put her feelings about Scott into ballet form. The resulting work, though uneven, gave the DTH dancers many opportunities to show their zest, sensuality and grace while still not particularly illuminating the astonishing life of Scott whose career was sidelined by the McCarthy Blacklisting forces. The score, featuring only two Scott performances plus a pro-America speech she made, divides the work into seven sections designated by geographical locations: Trinidad, Harlem, Paris. The score was arranged and partially composed by Erica “Twelve45” Blunt. Although well-meaning, "Sounds of Hazel" is not well choreographed, uneasily combining sassy hip swings with ballet to evoke Trinidad and jazzy movements adorning ballet steps to bring Paris alive. Had Scott’s name not been in the title, there would be no way to infer that Sounds of Hazel was about her. [more]

R.I.P. Robert Patrick, Playwright

April 24, 2023

He was perhaps best-known for his play "Kennedy's Children"--produced successfully on Broadway and on the West End, and in many cities, internationally. He also gave us some 60 other published plays, including "Camera Obscura," which was filmed for PBS starring Marge Champion, and "The Haunted Host," which helped launch the acting career of a terrifically talented young Harvey Fierstein. They met when Fierstein was 16; Patrick gave Fierstein his first leading role in an Equity production, and they became good friends for life, (I have good memories of Harvey performing a striking monologue from that play, years later, during an appearance at the club Eighty-Eights). [more]

On the Right Track

April 22, 2023

The latest collaboration by composer lyricist Albert M. Tapper and bookwriter Tony Sportiello, "On the Right Track," proves to be a charming chamber musical for three performers playing seven roles. The show combines realism with magic and the supernatural as it tells three stories which take place on a New Jersey Transit train. The Conductor, the narrator, also is a mystical figure who is able to give the characters second chances in life and lea them to a better place than when they came on board. Owing some inspiration to such classics as Sir James M. Barrie’s "Dear Brutus", Sutton Vane’s "Outward Bound" and Frank Capra’s "It’s a Wonderful Life," "On the Right Track" avoids being preachy at the same time that it offers suggestions about how to live one’s life. [more]

Lady M (Heartbeat Opera)

April 22, 2023

Heartbeat Opera seems to have found the way to separate themselves from the rest of the pack of alternative opera companies here in New York. Their way is to inject the standard repertory of grand opera with fresh ways of presenting the rich beloved scores. Enter music director Daniel Schlosberg, a Brooklyn-based composer-pianist who is their ingenious arranger for both Puccini's "Tosca" and Verdi's renamed "Lady M," and conductor and pianist for "Lady M." He arranges "Tosca" for a band of eight, "Lady M" for a band of six. Consider both of these Herculean feats with sumptuous results. [more]

Post-Pandemic State of the Arts 2023

April 22, 2023

Many Broadway shows are also exorbitantly expensive. While smaller productions such as Off Broadway or Off Off Broadway used to be a comfortable option, producers such as Cyndy and Thomas are finding it more difficult to find financial backers. They are also struggling to rebuild audiences that they had before the pandemic and build up new ones. Finally, they still suffer closures when an artist gets sick. According to an unnamed film producer, a similar situation arose for artistic films – many film houses that used to show such films closed right before or during the pandemic. For example, while the Paris Theater is still open, the Lincoln Plazas Cinemas that used to sit on 63rd and Broadway has closed. According to several artists, a further challenge is that the home entertainment industry that boomed during the pandemic is now stiff competition for any live entertainment or art film houses. [more]

Cellino v. Barnes: The Play

April 21, 2023

Where does one begin to tell the story of two manifestly successful lawyers who mixed professionalism with adolescent ideation? A case where one wants a career as a serious law practitioner and the other not so much. But they both want to make money, and they both have egos that want to be in the spotlight. I suspect that Mike Breen and David Rafailedes, the writers, performers and directors of "Cellino v. Barnes: The Play," asked themselves the same question in 2017 when they decided to write a humorous play about the creation and impending demise of the Cellino & Barnes personal injury law firm. Unfortunately, in their effort to find the broad humor in the partnership's creation and end, Breen and Rafailedes missed the mark. [more]

Muse

April 21, 2023

Tangredi’s script has some lines that could stand revisiting, but even in its lack of polish it does have good dramatic bones. Unfortunately, "Muse" fails utterly on delivery. Although the direction by Hazen Cuyler demonstrates some inventive staging in scenes which take place simultaneously in different times, it completely misses the mark by not insisting the actors listen to each other in earnest and find their dialogue organically. Thus, the acting is unilaterally unbelievable; the performances are stiff and filled with maudlin, melodramatic mugging and grandstanding. [more]

An Appreciation of Todd Haimes, Producing Artistic Director of Roundabout Theatre Company

April 21, 2023

Roundabout, under Haimes' leadership, was noted both for new works and for revivals of older shows with strikingly new elements (like this season's gender-bending revival of "1776.") He was the first producer to try livestreaming a Broadway show ("She Loves Me" in 2016). And somehow, besides producing lots of shows (and 11 Tony Awards), Haimes also found time to teach at Yale University and Brooklyn College. The biggest change he saw in theater in his career, he said, was the change in audience composition, with Broadway growing more and more reliant on tourists. He said it bothered him that nowadays, in his opinion, so many theater ticket buyers preferred to see crap so long as a star they knew from TV or film was heading the cast, than see a better play with better (but not necessarily famous) actors. [more]

Camelot

April 20, 2023

Unfortunately, though Sorkin may have made this "Camelot" more politically correct, scientifically accurate and less supernatural, it is much less entertaining and magical than earlier productions and certainly much darker as well as less funny. Whereas the original 1960 Broadway production billed itself as “the most beautiful show in the world,” Bartlett Sher’s revival has an almost empty grey stage most of the time (designed by Michael Yeargan) and drab costumes from Jennifer Moeller. Although the cast has 25 performers, the court scenes always look underpopulated as though not enough courtiers have shown up and there is almost no pageantry which one expects for a royal court of the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages. [more]

Tosca (Heartbeat Opera)

April 20, 2023

Just when you think you’ve seen an opera so many times you can’t imagine it being told anew along comes Heartbeat Opera with a riveting take on Puccini’s "Tosca." Director Shadi G. sets it as a thriller in Teheran, Iran with a cast of singers trying to get through a performance in defiance of the censors. The opera "Tosca" has always been set under a dictatorship of an authoritarian regime. It is usually set 1800 with the Kingdom of Naples’s control of Rome threatened by Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. The Heartbeat production underlines the usual terror with Irani police officers in shadows, hidden in stairwells and behind stage entrances ready to arrest the performers if they do anything outside the strict code of ethics and behavior in the Irani culture. This added layer to the story provides a lot of exciting running exits into the audience to avoid capture by the authorities. [more]

Fat Ham

April 19, 2023

When it comes to modern adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many theatergoers tend to treat them like a test, mentally annotating plot and character correlations as if their high school English teachers were going to tap them on the shoulders and ask, "Did you catch that one?" If you suffer from this same hang up, then consider James Ijames' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fat Ham" therapy, not only encouraging its audience to break free from fawning fidelity to the Bard but also, more poignantly, tragic endings. Simply put, for Ijames' insightfully idiosyncratic take on Hamlet, we're not in Elsinore anymore, and that's a good thing. [more]

*mark (A solo performance of the Gospel of Mark)

April 17, 2023

Fortunately for us, “Magisian” Drance is quite the storyteller. Under the reasonably succinct direction of Jackie Lucid, he spryly moves around the space, emphasizing parables with chalk drawings and applying subtle changes to his inflection, body language, and eye contact to make the various characters distinct. Intense and playful, somber and jubilant, he makes this story engaging yet simple, without the help of costumes, scores, and songs which allow shows like "Godspell" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" to thrive in the contemporary theater canon. The Magis Theater Company endeavors to share this gospel as it might have been done in older times, from start to finish and on the backs of its storytellers alone. [more]

Television

April 17, 2023

Bossert directs his own work here, thereby unfortunately removing any crucial distance from the material. Where the story of the play and the relationships we see are engaging, the play-within-the-play enacted by Sandra and Barry is not. The narrative there is a sequence of conversations cut off by interruptions that neither add nor detract from the scene at hand. The real-life interruptions by Wesli as the “director” unhappy with the way the scenes are moving are almost a relief from what the audience has just listened to. The fact that an entire town anxiously awaits each new episode is somewhat unbelievable unless they are truly desperate for diversion. [more]

Shucked

April 17, 2023

In addition to a surfeit of approximate rhymes, the score for Shucked includes a paean to corn and a reprise of the following ready-for-Hallmark advice: "maybe love is like a seed/a little sun is all you need." Meanwhile, Horn blithely salts the earth with acerbic observations about how "marriage is simply two people coming together to solve problems they didn't have before." Foregoing any accountability for this philosophical inconsistency, director Jack O'Brien instead attempts to cover for it with turbo-charged pacing that not only sacrifices thought for an admittedly infectious energy but also, as a part of this devil's bargain, undermines the comic timing necessary for a lot of Horn's jokes to land properly. But the amiable cast never falters, even when the laughs do or the score becomes more saccharine than corn syrup. The cast is adept, too, at executing Sarah O'Gleby's inventive choreography on scenic designer Scott Pask's ramshackle barn of a set. Particularly enchanting is a rolling barrel dance that Durand daringly pulls off with impressive grace. It's just too bad that this delightful surprise isn't accompanied by many others. [more]

Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight

April 14, 2023

Gunderson uses two actors to play Emilie and writer Voltaire who was her mentor, companion and lover, and then three actors to play everyone else, from Emilie’s mother, husband and daughter, to servants and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton and poet Jean-Francois de Saint-Lambert. As they do not change their costumes, we are never entirely certain who they are when they reappear. Throughout the play Emilie is working on the physics formula F=mv2 (known as force vive) which she attributes to German mathematician and thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Unfortunately, this math will be foreign to most theatergoers who have not studied physics. Emilie narrates and addresses the audience, then turns back and interacts with the other characters on stage. She also keeps score in chalk on the walls as whether Love or Philosophy is in the ascendance. The play, cast as a flashback, has very short scenes so that a great deal passes in a short time. While the first act seems to be bits and pieces, the second act settles down into a more dramatic confrontation between Emilie and Voltaire and becomes more involving. MacGowan never finds the right tone to accomplish all of this. [more]

Regretfully, So the Birds

April 13, 2023

Silliness and whimsy can often be admirable qualities in a play, but not when taken to the degree playwright Julia Izumi has in her new work, "Regretfully, So the Birds Are," a co-production of and WP Theater and the Playwrights Horizons where the show has been well launched. "Regretfully," directed by Jenny Koons, centers on the trials and tribulations of the Whistler family: mother, Elinore, in prison for burning her husband alive; Illy and Neel, brother and sister who want to marry each other; sister Mora the cynical third sibling; and Cam, the dead father who has morphed into a snowman. [more]

Bringer of Doom

April 11, 2023

"Bringer of Doom," written by Joe Thristino and smoothly directed by Mark Koenig, is a comedy about Lotte and her effort to exact revenge against her estranged mother, Esme, because of a public humiliation her mother inflicted. She uses an ex-comedian, Demetrius, or more precisely, a no-longer-performing comedian, as the waiter to serve her revenge, cold, but with a measure of spice. His job is to "roast" Lotte's mother with clever rejoinders and barbed put-downs when she comes for dinner at Lotte's apartment. He is to make her highly uncomfortable without causing her to leave. [more]

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