This is the most pretentious and boring show I’ve seen in years, sometimes seeming to last as long as the span of years 1816 to 2240 when the actions take place. For a science fiction play about artificial intelligence, it is utterly devoid of imagination.
The women have head scarves and speak Farsi in “English” by Sanaz Toossi, an Iranian-American who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama with this play. Set in 2008, the characters are taking a class in Iran to perfect their English to go to America. The story is about language as identity — to speak to our souls.
From the moment Audra McDonald enters to blasting horn music this is her show. Forget the great actors of the past, Merman to LuPone. With superlative acting and a stunning soprano, in every number her voice soars. McDonald is not just a singer who acts, with deep feeling and expressive moods, but an actor who sings, and it takes the play to a whole new dimension.
“The Village Gate Reunion Show” at Urban Stages pulled together singers that met and performed on the “patio” of that famous Greenwich Village jazz club and theater when they were young, about 40 years ago. Not all have seen each other since then. You could hear the talent some had, still have. It’s a nostalgia show.
The best thing about the revival of “Sunset Boulevard” is the singing by Nicole Scherzinger as the faded film star Norma Desmond. The second best is her famous final line: “I’m ready for my closeup,” now in common parlance. Not so good is the over-the-top camp acting or script.
Film director Joan Micklin Silver once told me that making a film from a book, she had to pull the movie out of the book. But here director John Collins has run the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby as a reading of Nick Carroway’s narrative and as drama only when dialogue pulls in the dozen actors. Even so, GATZ grabs you so you cannot leave a 6 1/2-hour production. At the end, I saw no empty seats.
Louis Armstrong was a sublime performer. This play is a great recreation of his music with terrific dancing, but it’s more vaudeville show than drama. It shifts quickly through his career as a black artist. Some interesting stuff about dealing with gangsters and Hollywood racism but too much about his four wives. Best is James Monroe Iglehart as Armstrong who has brilliantly copied his gravelly voice.
Director Kenny Leon has cut Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play from 3 hours to 1 hour 40. I was grateful. The play on the life of small-town America covers the years from 1901 to 1913. For the period, gas lamps are hung out over the orchestra. The set is made of wood chairs, a weathered wall, an old spinet piano. But the town seems sealed in glass, with no references to the outside world.
The hills of California in Jez Butterworth’s engrossing feminist play are not real but mirages in a story of working-class dreams and desperation. It’s 1955, and Veronica (Laura Donnelly) is consumed with making her four young girls a world-class music success. Like many a Mama Rose, her chief goal appears to be liberation from her own life, which is a running a Blackpool B&B called “Seaview,” from which you can’t see the sea. I say “feminist” not because I think the author claims that but because it is about the destruction of women by the patriarchy of the time.
This powerful musical drama is about a group of artistic friends – musicians, wall spray painter, photographer – who, prompted by the political radical among them, organize participation in the 2011 “Arab Spring” movement in Egypt that brought down U.S.-supported dictator Hosni Mubarak. It was written by Daniel and Patrick Lazour, brothers who grew up in Massachusetts.
Every fall over three days, some of the best cabaret artists in the country appear at the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention at Rose Hall at Lincoln Center. If you never go to any cabaret in the year, you must go to this one. Which of course will hook you on cabaret forever!
Good propaganda is subtle. You don’t know it’s propaganda. Erika Sheffer’s play “Vladimir” is as subtle as a sledgehammer. She and her family immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1975, 15 years before Glasnost. She hates the new state of Russia with a passion.
“To Claude AI: Please write this theater review in the style of critic Lucy Komisar.”
Lucy Komisar’s Theatre Review: “The Plagiarist’s Dilemma.” [My comments in italics.]
Jacob McNeal’s latest play, starring Robert Downey, attempts to grapple with the thorny issues of AI, plagiarism, and literary integrity, but ultimately falls flat in its execution. [Well, not totally flat.] The production, which feels more like a disjointed television serial than a cohesive theatrical experience, meanders through a series of scenes that fail to captivate or provoke. [Not true by the end.]
The under-story of David Henry Hwang’s play is more important than the obvious story line.
In this compelling autobiographical work, DHH (a strong Daniel Dae Kim, playing Hwang), tells how he challenged a decision to cast white British actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon.” Pryce is shown with taped Asian-style slanted eyes. In the play, a Vietnamese woman, 17, who turned to prostitution to survive, kills herself so the child she had with a soldier can go to America. How racist is that! Send the kid to the wonderful country that destroyed yours!
This play unintentionally exposes the mainstream political fakery about the January 6 protest by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. And also the treachery of a son who turns in his father to the FBI even though he knows the father, distraught at a downturn costing his job, drinks, takes Zantac for anxiety and is prone to exaggerate.
The performers in Gerard Alessandrini’s “Forbidden Broadway” are routinely as good or better than those they mimic and satirize, and this year’s is no exception.
In “The Roommate,” by playwright Jen Silverman, we are thrust into a mismatched living arrangement that teeters on the precipice of absurdity, leaving audiences questioning the credibility of its characters and narrative. Directed by Jack O’Brien, this production features the formidable talents of Patti LuPone as Robyn and Mia Farrow, splendid as Sharon, yet even their seasoned performances struggle against a script and mood that often feel more suited for a sitcom than a stage play.
In the latest Broadway revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” Sutton Foster reigns supreme, solidifying her place in the pantheon of American musical theater greats. This whimsical take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” with book by Dean Fuller, Jay Thompson, and Marshall Barer, adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino, lyrics by Barer, music by Mary Rodgers, proves the perfect showcase for Foster’s incomparable talents.
Max Wolf Friedlich’s “Job” is a riveting psychological detective story that blurs the lines between truth and deception, sanity and madness. And evil. This taut two-hander, subtly directed by Michael Herwitz, keeps the audience on edge.
With a book by Kristoffer Dias and music and lyrics by singer Alicia Keys, this is presented as Keys’ own story. At least that her “songs and experiences growing up in NY inspire a story made for Broadway.” It turns out “inspire” can be interpreted many ways.
Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) plays Alicia Keys. She is black. Moon’s voice is strong and rich in the show’s jazz, soul and rock. Her mother, Jersey (a fine Shoshana Bean), is white. Davis, her father (a realistic Brandon Victor Dixon), is black. Ali and Jersey live in the huge artists’ cooperative on West 42nd Street near the Hudson River in the neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. Davis has nothing to do with the family.
“The Outsiders” by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine is based on a novel written for teenagers by a teenager (she was 16) and tells of kids full of angst. The youths are poor, some suffering from addiction, and they resent kids of their age with money. Some still have dreams of getting out to a better life. So this is about class. And turns out the rich kids don’t feel all that better off.
David Adjmi’s new play “Stereophonic” strips away the glitter and glamour of 1970s rock to reveal a gritty, often unsettling portrait of creativity, ambition, and toxic relationships. Set in a California recording studio, this engrossing and entertaining behind-the-scenes drama exposes the misogyny and exploitation lurking beneath the counterculture’s rebellious facade.
“Water for Elephants,” book by Rick Elice, music and lyrics by Pigpen Theatre Company, transports audiences to the rough glamour of a Depression-era traveling circus. Based on Sara Gruen’s novel, this musical adaptation is a charming, if somewhat hokey spectacle that relies on stunning choreography and circus acts.
Rebecca Frecknall’s production of “Cabaret” is a raw dive into the seedy underbelly of 1930s Berlin. From the moment you enter the theater, transformed into the infamous Kit Kat Club with its murky red walls and intimate table seatings, you’re transported to a world on the brink of catastrophe.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel is lavishly presented in a musical that captures the glitz and darkness of the Roaring Twenties. The audience enters a world of excess, where everything sparkles – including costumes that shimmer with gold and glitter. The play was pulled out of the book smartly by script writer Kait Herrigan, with music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Nathan Tysen. The director who moves the plot almost cinematically is Marc Bruni.
