In the mid-19th century, the King of Siam, now called Thailand, was struggling to modernize his country. Much of the struggle was against himself. He was a despot who thought of himself as a god. He had numerous wives and everyone — wives, children, commoners — had to keep their heads lower than his, even if it meant prostrating themselves. And King Mongkut had slaves.
If cleverness is next to godliness, Jim Parsons soars on both counts. His send-up of religion, believers and politicians is a holy hoot.
Parsons wears a white robe over slim black pants and red sneakers and speaks avuncularly with the slight southern accent he picked up in his native Houston.
It‘s the end of World War II, Liberation in Paris. Former soldier Jerry Mulligan (Robert Fairchild), a New Yorker who wants to be a painter, stays. This modern jazz ballet with brilliant music by George Gershwin and unforgettable lyrics by Ira Gershwin is wrapped around a story inspired by a 1951 movie. Jerry becomes friends with Adam Hochberg (Brandon Uranowitz), a very NY-accented pianist and composer who hits the keys at the Dutois café. Uranowitz is a charmer, It‘s still a dark time in the city of light, there‘s hunger. The men find rooms at a hotel where artists don‘t get charged.
Part operetta, part farce, part screwball comedy, this musical revival is about the behind-the-scenes relationship of Lily Garland (Kristin Chenoweth), a temperamental actress, and Oscar Jaffee (Peter Gallagher), a bankrupt theater producer. On a luxury train traveling from Chicago to New York, Oscar tries to cajole the glamorous Hollywood star, once his protegée, into playing the lead in a not-yet-written drama, and perhaps into rekindling their romance.
The opening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is powerful and realistic. The thunder shudders, the lightening flickers, water mists up through a ship’s floor boards, passengers and crew list and fall. A couple left the theater with a very young son whose face showed real fear.
The scene depicts the power of natural forces. But in this case, the power is supernatural. Because the storm has been conjured up by Prospero, former Duke of Milan, exiled to a remote island, who with the help of a magic cape is getting back at the king and brother who betrayed him. He has shipwrecked them on his island.
Political satire is often the best political commentary. Take the superb sketch musical comedy by Paul Hodge and Michael Hodge, which skewers Democrats and Republicans with equally well-aimed barbs.
The clever device is that two actors play Bill Clinton, the older, wiser William (Tom Galantich) and the young roué, Billy (a very good Duke LaFoon) to show us the two sides of his personality. There‘s only one Hillary, but Kerry Butler has enough talent for two.
The set is Art Deco inspired by the Grand Palais in Paris. It‘s the Belle Époque of the early 1900s. But how belle depends on how you look at it.
The 1944 Colette story on which the play is based is about the demi-monde of Paris, where elegant courtesans with their rich lovers dined out at Maxim’s, drinking Veuve Cliquot and flicking their gowns and feathers.
This play may be about the 16th century, but the dialogue, the politics, the economics, the power struggles give you a sense of watching the mafia.
Except that rather than focus on money, we are watching the dramatic repercussions of King Henry VIII‘s desire to get a wife who will give him a male heir.
When the music is by John Kander and the lyrics by Fred Ebb, you think dark. “Chicago,” “Cabaret,” “Kiss of the Spiderwoman.” “The Visit” fits perfectly into that very satisfying canon. This is a stunning production, with director John Doyle using the musical pieces to build the psychological and intellectual tension.
The story is shadowy and shocking, a political fantasy based on the 1956 play by the Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Writing soon after the end of World War II, he crafted this as a morality tale for our times. Now it‘s a chamber opera.
Love, sex, age and class. Key elements in David Hare‘s 1995 play about a rich guy who had an affair with an employee a few years before and would like to start it up again.
He runs restaurants. She was a lawyer‘s daughter (ie. privileged) who wandered into his eatery on London’s Kings Road and got a job. And a promotion. And a lover. She left six years later when his wife discovered the affair.
The Fiasco Theater has become the clever modern interpreter of Shakespeare, and this production is no exception. When two rivals for her hand sing “Who is Sylvia?” – the name of a pop song — it gets a laugh, because the sad-romantic song is perfectly in tune with this contemporary, light-hearted production.
Sometimes theater awards shows are a chore to sit through. Lots of “thank you, thank you…..” to boredom. But the Fred and Adele Astaire awards June 1 for best dancers and choreographers was a delight.
The top dancer awards went to Leanne Cope “An American Paris,” and in a tie vote, to Robert Fairchild, “An American in Paris” and to Tony Yazbeck, “On the Town.”
The Awards were established in 1982 by the Douglas Watt Family Fund for the Performing Arts, to recognize outstanding achievement in dance on Broadway and in film.
Dael Orlandersmith‘s “Forever” is a powerful blend of fact and fiction about this talented writer/performer‘s growing up as the daughter of an abusive, alcoholic mother in Harlem. And her discovery of the roots she chooses to adopt after a visit to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris where great artists, writers, musicians, are buried.
Orlandersmith has done fine autobiographical works in the past, among them “Yellowman,” about a dark, over-weight black woman falling in love with a light-skinned black man. So one knew that this production would be dark in the psychological sense. But the story takes one by surprise.
Wendy Wasserstein‘s play about the impact of feminism on women is troubling for a feminist. The movement has attempted to persuade women that the essence of their destiny and dignity is not writ out biologically as wives and mothers, but as self-fulfillment with choices in the same wider world as men.
Daniel Beaty‘s portrait of Paul Robeson in his one-man show at BAM is stunning and moving. Memorable. It won an immediate standing ovation. Of course, Beaty had as a subject a man of great talent, courage and fortitude. For Americans to understand their history, this play should be seen in universities and theaters around the country.
Beaty, in a performance powerfully directed by Moisés Kaufman, makes you shiver at the cruelty of the U.S. government persecuting Robeson for daring to express his views, and then cheer at the man‘s grit, with just a few reservations. And because in mainstream histories, he‘s not given his due, it‘s worth talking about that in detail.
British playwright Peter Morgan is a subtle political historian, here suggesting what went on over sixty years in private meetings between ten British prime ministers and Queen Elizabeth. In Buckingham Palace. It‘s all in his imagination, but it is a careful critique of the politics and class loyalties of the characters and the Queen.
The play is fascinating, and I enjoyed it immensely. Helen Mirren is brilliant as Elizabeth through the years. Cool, contained, to the manor born, aging but ageless in her sense of self.
Morgan has written a number of notable political works, including Frost/Nixon and The Special Relationship,about the U.S. and the UK. Stephen Daldry, who directed the play Billy Elliot,” with Margaret Thatcher the villain in the miners’ strike, does an excellent job etching Morgan‘s critique of privilege. (Morgan’s father was a German Jew who escaped the Nazis, his mother a Polish Catholic who emigrated after the Soviet takeover.)
People that do bad things should be punished for them. People that video bad things and post them on the internet should get punished. What about people who use avatars to do bad things on fantasy internet sites? And what if those bad things are realistic pedophilia and murder?
Jennifer Haley‘s unusual play shows a fantasy world where bad things, (which you don‘t ever see) go on. It is not an erotic or sadistic drama. It‘s sci fi, but only partly. It‘s rather an intellectual provocation. It is crisply directed by Anne Kauffman.
Money is power is the message of Beth Henley‘s engrossing 1990 feminist play about two mail order brides and the men they marry in the late 19th-century Wyoming Territory. It gets a realistic staging by director Jenn Thompson. The story starts in the 1860s and for 25 years follows the reversal of fortunes of the two couples. Henley based the story and characters on true events.
It takes a while, through your laughter, before you realize that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ comic play, “An Octoroon,” is forcing you to confront slavery. Sure, the plot is about slaves who are being sold off because their owner can‘t pay the mortgage. But the dialogue of those slaves seems like it comes from a TV sitcom, mixing current daily realities with that of the slaves. Director Sarah Benson‘s stunning light touch sneaks up on you.
David Ives is the master of comically surreal theatrical sketch comedy. Nobody comes close. Because not only are his one-acts witty, but they play cleverly outlandish intellectual games.
One of Ives‘ games is to play with doubles. My favorite in this collection being staged at The Duke is The Enigma Variations.
The back story of “Churchill,” the solo play finely adapted and performed by Ronald Keaton, is class politics. Winston Churchill was to the manor born. His grandfather was the Duke of Marlboro and Viceroy of Dublin, his father Henry Spencer-Churchill (Lord Randolph) was a Conservative member of parliament who hadn‘t done well at Eton. Winston couldn‘t get into college and took the exam three times to finally get into Sandhurst, the British military academy. Privilege screams.
A hokey funny spoof of film noir, the mood set by 1940s music, this play by the inventive Stolen Chair company mines every verbal and physical cliché in the book. And the ensemble, whose members have been together for a decade, does a superb job in bringing to life the characters, one of which is soon to be dead.
Private eye Ben Farrell (Nathan Darrow) has the mystery of his career to solve. (Think Sam Spade/ Humphrey Bogart) Crimes are happening after they are written about in a pulp mystery magazine, “Murder Monthly.”
A prisoner‘s account of what goes on in New York City‘s holding pen for arrested men is unexpectedly and often hilariously funny. He deftly skewers, no, impales, the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the criminal justice system, there and in the courtroom.
Joe Assadourian discovered his theatrical talents in prison. He got in trouble at 22. He‘d always been in trouble, but that depends on how you define trouble. He said, “I‘d been doing voices in school. If I was sent to the principal, I‘d do him.” An upper class family would have sent young Joe to acting school. But soon he would get into big trouble — a gun, a struggle, a shot — and land in jail. Confined for 12 years, he‘d been writing in notebooks. Then he got into a prison theater program where Richard Hoeler, now his director, unearthed his very large talent.
This is the back story of Grimms‘ fairy tales, for adults. It‘s a deconstructed Grimms.
The show, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine, was a brilliant conception when it was first produced in 1986.
Grimms‘ fairy tales were morality tales. Having the fairy tale characters intersect with their stories, Sondheim and Lapine turn the events in the woods into a metaphor for the challenges of life. The message is that the woods are full of dangers; be careful what you wish for. It‘s also about community.
Edward Albee, who is gay, has made a fine dramatic career skewing the gloomy relationships of heterosexual couples and establishing the women as villains. (This may have started because he hated his adoptive mother.) His 1962 “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” made his reputation.
This 1966 play continues the theme a few years later. The partners of the two married couples don‘t sleep with each other, and the daughter of one of them has just left her fourth husband. Most of the blame is on the distaff side. Yes, I know that the director is a woman, Pam MacKinnon. And with her taught direction, the actors are superb.
