The free-floating anger exuded by the Jets and Sharks as they clash under and leap onto fire escapes is combustible. Any reason for the gangs’ hostility? Well, when Officer Krupke (Lee Sellars) arrives in the neighborhood, along the Hudson River on the Upper West Side of New York City, he slams one kid in the stomach with a Billy club. Lt. Schrank (Steve Bassett) comes into a local drugstore and insults the Puerto Ricans as migrant scum. The sociological stage is set. There’s nothing dated about Arthur Laurents’ revival of his own West Side Story. This American theater classic is another proof that the best, most enduring musicals (and plays) combine personal stories with political ones.
My guest at Hair was an old friend who had been a leader of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. As we left the theater, he shook his head. He said, We were much more political. That said, and history corrected, Diane Paulus’s revival of the 1968 musical now on Broadway captures the mood of part of a generation of young people (a minority of their contemporaries) that helped change the culture.
In David Ives’ ingeniously clever play, a feminist avenger turns the tables on a playwright conducting auditions for a work based on Venus in Furs, a novel of sexual domination and submission by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the 19th-century Austrian writer. An actress arrives in an audition studio. She’s wearing a black leather skirt and tight black lacey underwear top, stiletto-heeled boots, and a silver-studded dog-collar. She’s not on the audition list. But she persuades the playwright to let her read, and suddenly she is a 19th-century Austrian aristocrat, charming, articulate, and outrageous in the white flouncy dress she pulls over her grunge-wear. This play plumbs men’s psychological connections between sex and power and their view of women.
For about 20 years, from 1964, when Communists ruled Poland and dissidents went to jail, a very extraordinary underground theater troop bucked censorship and pelted the regime with avant garde works inspired by the director Jerzy Grotowski. It played to full houses at shipyards and churches and other opposition stages until the actors in 1985 were forced into exile.
Wormwood the name of a star, is a vivid, ironic and satirical attack on the Polish Communist system. First staged in 1985 at the church in Mistrzejowice, near Krakov, it is composed of pointed skits whose double meanings and metaphors were clear to audiences.
Zero Mostel — consummate actor, painter and personality — was a presence in American films and stage for decades, except for a brief hiatus called McCarthyism. Zero was cynical, iconoclastic and flip. He scowled and shouted in a voice that was stentorian. Jim Brochu’s one-man show, directed by Piper Laurie, brings him to life, eyes piercing out of a gray-bearded jowly face, recreating his physical presence and attitude, and most importantly his passionate political commitment to honor at a time when theater people and others were selling out their colleagues.
Director Ciaran O’Reilly has done a brilliant job in staging O’Neill’s 1920 psychological thriller about the self-appointed emperor of a Caribbean backwater whose subjects suddenly turn on him. John Douglas Thompson is overpowering as Brutus Jones, a black American who has fled from a southern chain gang and, persuading the locals that he can be killed only with a silver bullet, takes over in a revolution that removes the erstwhile chief.
This charmingly radical musical by Yip Harburg and Fred Saidy – given a smart, lively, delicious staging by Warren Carlyle — was a shot across the bow of conservative America when it opened on Broadway in 1947. It showed black and white sharecroppers in solidarity against the tax foreclosure sale of a farm. It depicted the corruption and racism of a white politician who is buying up local real estate so he can block cheap public electric power. And it satirized capitalism by declaring that digging up some gold buried in the ground would remove an incentive and wreck free enterprise. Even the famous If this isn’t love has the pointed line, If this isn‘t love, it’s red propaganda!
In Annie Baker’s fascinating play acting exercises morph into real life for an instructor and four people who sign up for a community theater workshop in Shirley, Vermont. Slowly, the theatrical games turn into life games. Director Sam Gold moves seamlessly between acting exercises and real life drama so that the characters’ stories, said by others, are expressed and acted out, as it were, by themselves.
I have to start out by saying that I despise everything about celebrity and the attendant fawning over people in the public eye, generally in movies or fashion, just because they are in the public eye. That doesn’t include criticism of their art – of acting or design, for example – just the intense interest over every personal detail of their lives. Get a life! I want to scream. Your own!
This gem of a play by Theresa Rebeck is a theater aficionado’s delight. A stage manager and two actors – one an overpaid film star and the other a struggling pure artist –connect in a rehearsal for a Broadway production of an undiscovered masterpiece by Franz Kafka. As the run-through proceeds, celebrity film actors who get starring roles in theater are deftly and comically skewered. The play, given light-hearted and subtle direction by Scott Ellis, is one of the best of the season. The cast is excellent.
It starts with a light ball setting off two figures; she is in black underwear. Hot Latin drums keep a frenetic double time. Then for a change of pace comes a Lady in white silk and a man in a tux; they waltz and execute twirls through the air in a way you hadn’t seen. After that, 20s/30s jazz dancing; the guy wears a fedora and vest. A sailor and his partner jitterbug. A woman in pink is squired by a guy in a black leather jacket. (Costumes are by Janet Hine.)
The conceit of this bizarre, whimsical play could be dismissed as an absurd allegory except that it is based on true facts! Take men who don‘t have a clue about women’s sexuality, add a few wives who feel malaise, throw in a guy who’s unhappy that he can’t find a female partner, and send them to a doctor with a very unusual prescription. It’s often comic, albeit, like the bad sex it skewers, ultimately unsatisfying.
Melissa James Gibson has a clever way with words. In this stage-of-life play, she uses that talent to examine the lives of four college chums who have stayed close friends, for good and for ill, into their late 30s. It’s not a deep play, but it’s engaging. In a sympathetic, non-judgmental way, she deals with friendship, the dissolution of marriage, adultery, personal loyalty, death, and the desire for a meaningful life.
For over a quarter of a century, a trio of witty Brits has been amusing audiences with pointed political musical satire and a few jabs at social mores. The latest version in the Brits Off Broadway Festival includes some numbers that you won’t find even from hot American satirists.
Ragtime is a cinematic, visionary, heart-stopping view of America of the early 1900s. The power and sweep of the bittersweet mix of true history and invention take your breath away. The characters are meant to be symbols, as the play mixes real people with invented ones, true events with imaginary ones. Fictional people come from three families”upper-middle class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, socialist immigrant Jewish from Latvia, and Harlem black – who represent American dreams and the tragedies that ensued during the struggle for justice. They play also shows the transformative power of the new 20th century.
There’s a whiff of television in Tracy Letts’ dark comedy about a sixties radical coming to terms with his life and a society that continues to have an underclass. The story is intriguing if a bit formulaic. It’s as if Letts said, Well, we need a middle-aged white ex-hippie with a pony tail, a brash young black man, a couple of cops of mixed colors and genders and some bad guys to prevent the story from cloying too much. That said, there is some charm in what he came up with, even if it’s not great drama. Tina Landau directs at an agile pace that highlights the laughs.
When theater actress Lily Darnley (Kristen Johnston) kisses her image in the mirror, it might be taken as an exaggeration. It’s not. It’s the quintessential moment in this funny backstage comedy about self-absorbed celebrity divas who, alas, were just as much among us in the 1920s as today.
There’s a genre of musicals that is supposed to be for kids, but is just as much for adults. I include The Lion King and Wicked and now Shrek the Musical. I loved them all. What they have in common is strong moral politics. The characters in the first play fight oppression, the second combat racism and Shrek does a bit of both. Like the others, it proves that shows about ideas are more interesting and fun than empty-headed fluff.
This social and political back story of Rhythm and Blues is a vibrant sometimes sketchy, but visually exciting story musical with terrific sounds that range from R&B to gospel. It’s 1951 on Beale Street, and Huey (Chad Kimball) wanders into a hot music joint. He’s found the music of his soul. The only problem is that this is the black part of town, and he’s white.
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s powerful plays are written in the dark poetry of lives marked by the desperate seeking of love etched against routine misfortune and tragedy. Yet the characters often exhibit joyous defiance against the odds of disappointment.
The friends and family whose lives make up the stories McCraney tells reside in the projects in the mythical city of San Pere in the bayou of the Louisiana Delta, south of New Orleans. There’s little sense of an outside world.
Directors in modern times have enjoyed playing with Shakespeare, often modernizing his plays, putting actors in scenes and clothes that are not of the period described. But Brian Kulick, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company and the adapter/director of this play, entwines Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, set in Troy during the Trojan War, with The Iron Age by Thomas Heywood, a contemporary. Shakespeare’s is the more personal play, but much of the macho jousting seems inspired by Heywood’s war story. The amalgam is a worthy effort, though I think I’d rather have seen Shakespeare’s play. This one often lacked his poetry.
Nightingale is Lynn Redgrave’s less-than-completely-truthful memoir of the women of her family, their men and their unhappiness about marital sex. Redgrave as an actress of course does a fine professional job. And the dialogue is smart. But for a tell-all memoir, mostly about sex, it manages to eke the most lively sections out of the one part of the story that is totally made up.
Alan Ayckbourn’s mordantly funny satire of middle class marital life – a staple of his genius through 70 plays — is significantly enhanced by the presence, almost as a fly on the wall, of 9-year-old Winnie (Ayesha Antoine). Winnie’s school assignment for the next day is to write about My Wonderful Day, and she methodically records the marital spats and infidelities she observes, generally with a blank expression and fidgeting as any kid might. Ayckbourn is a master of subtle slapstick, the one liner, the bizarre situation. His dark wit is displayed here with perfect comic timing.
If there’s a king and queen in this production of The Royal Family, the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber 1927 parody of the Barrymore acting dynasty, they are Jan Maxwell and Reg Rogers, who steal the show with their theatricality.
The device of the play is that Julie Cavendish (Maxwell) and her daughter Gwen (Kelli Barrett) are torn between their love of the stage and their desire to have married lives. Julie’s mother Fanny, (Rosemary Harris), the grande dame of the family revels in having had both.
A Steady Rain by Keith Huff, a television script writer, is a thriller about two beat cops, partners, friends from childhood, that would seem to belong on TV. On the other hand, some of the events they describe are so bloody, that I’d rather see them described in the two interlocking monologues that make up the play rather than watch them in full color.
The stories are gripping. On the other hand, like most TV, you forget them pretty quickly.
