Nathan Louis Jackson’s play about a black family in Kansas City struggling to achieve a middle class life avoids the pitfalls of sitcom due largely to the four accomplished actors and director Thomas Kail, who breathe life into what on its face is a rather predictable story.
It hangs on whether Malcolm King (an appealing Alano Miller), who has managed to get a masters degree in Connecticut, will give up chances of a good university teaching job under his mentor, an environmental professor, or will he stay home to care for his father William (a warm-spirited Wendell Pierce) who has muscular dystrophy.
Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage smartly shows the disintegration of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps people civil. Reza, perhaps coming from the salon culture of France, has a habit of locating her dramas in living rooms. These tête-à -têtes ought to show the height of culture. Instead, they display the dark sides of polite society.
This story begins with a touted civilized meeting between two couples, one clearly upper class, the other middle class, one couple chic, the other dowdy, to deal with fact that son of the first hit the son of the second. They start out honest, each admitting the family faults. As the evening gathering of nice people progresses, they descend from throwing words into throwing things. Taken further, we see the basic failure of ethical man. It is a fascinating transformation.
This charming, vivid musical biography tells the story of two American composers who changed the idiom of western popular music. The curious parallel personal tragedies of Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin exist in contrast to their generally upbeat lively sounds.
In the early 1900s, the two musicians created musical sounds that established a new American music that would echo across this landscape and the world. Both were consummate outsiders: one the son of a slave, the other a Russian immigrant who had escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms with his parents. Mark Saltzman’s play – with the stunning music of Joplin and Berlin – is a lively, appealing, often fascinating look back at what motivated these American musical giants. The motivations and the men were quite different.
About the political and personal struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, the play underlines the eternal reality of struggles for power. Written by Friedrich Schiller in the 18th century and adapted by Peter Oswald, it is a political thriller that gets a memorable staging by Phyllida Lloyd.
Alan Ayckbourn’s play is an ultra-sophisticated comedy that verges perilously close to sitcom, then skirts around it. The round-robin of three plays is what the clever British author posits against the normal sequential serial, a Rashomon style
The idea behind Noel Coward’s play is quite promising. Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett), a middle-aged murder mystery novelist – obviously quite successful in writing or marriage, from the country villa he inhabits – invites a medium (Angela Lansbury)
The mystery of Samuel Beckett’s play about two down-at-the-heels hobos who watch an overbearing master abuse a pathetic slave is the division of the audience into those who laugh and those who don‘t.
Simon Cato (Gavin Lawrence) in his gold and purple stripes is cheeky, witty, a charmer as a jockey. Step back. This is 1861 and he is black; cheeky translates to impudent, (a challenge to power). A witty black man probably had no translation. Colonel Wiley Johnson (Chris Mulkey), who has hired Simon to ride his racing horse, pleads, Will you try and behave like a slave for just a few minutes!
August Wilson’s powerful, moving play conjures up a mood that is both poetic and surreal, though on the face of it, it is completely naturalistic. Perhaps it’s the distance of time, nearly a century ago, 1911, when blacks, only 50 years away from the start of the Civil War, were living on the border between slavery and freedom. Or it could be the ethereal staging by director Bartlett Sher, who excellently follows Wilson’s intent to turn the characters into symbols of their kind as well as real people. Sher starts that by showing the characters first in silhouette.
Exit the King is Ionesco’s witty satire on the corruption of those in power, given a tongue-in-cheek staging by Neil Armfield with a bravura performance by Geoffrey Rush as King Beringer, the man with only 90 minutes to live. Berenger loves parties. Well, the party’s over. Or about to be. The party, of course, is life.
I have never seen anything like the three acrobatic contortionists who twisted and bent to the sound of Indian music under the Cirque de Soleil tent on Randall’s Island. Their movements created living sculptures that shifted and held and then moved to another pose. Clad in colorful, patterned skin-tight leotards (costumes by Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt), they were stunning. Memorable.
How can you satirize torture and torturers? If you’re comically stinging playwright Christopher Durang, you stick pretty close to the truth till weirdness and absurdity overtakes the brutality. In this brilliantly funny play, Durang blunts the edge of what might appear to be gruesomely violent by turning reality into farce. He gets a lot of help from director Nicholas Martin who transforms right-wing psychopaths into figures of comedy.
Stanley (Hunter Foster) was an investment banker, a master of leveraged buyouts. As Foster tells it in song and dance, he was an overachiever of insider trading, moving a step up the ladder of legalized crime. Then, at 42, he had a massive heart attack. And died.
Now he’s the conductor on the train in this whimsical pastiche by John Weidman (often clever lyrics by Michael Korie, tuneful music by Scott Frankel) about people on the way to the netherworld – via a New York subway car with silvery benches — instructed to remember the best moments of their lives. It’s where they will spend eternity.
Take an environmentalist attacked by thug hired by a corrupt New Jersey mayor and thrown into a vat of that state’s famous pollutants so that he comes out dripping with green sludge. Add a blind librarian who, when she return books to the shelf, lets go in mid-air so that they fall to the floor. She also writes porn, samples of which we hear. Nothing’s better than a clever political satire, and The Toxic Avenger is the funniest I have seen in many a year.
Tina Howe’s bittersweet look at a tough, smart, legally blind and aging painter railing at the indignities of being warehoused in a Riverdale nursing home is sensitive and often funny. Jane Alexander shines as the painter, Catherine Sargent, who feels suffocated, blocked from her past life and surrounded by people who’ve gone senile.
The Classic Stage Company’s bold mounting of three Greek playwrights’ visions of one of the most famous ancient myths lurches from melodrama to vaudeville and gives audiences some diverting hours in the modern theater.
Three directors have taken on the task, Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas staging Agamemnon and Elekra and Paul Lazar helming Orestes. The contemporary translation and adaptation is by Anne Carson. A mostly expert cast moves through the dramas, with special praise deserved by Stephanie Roth Haberle for an in-your-face Klytaimestra, Steve Mellor as the to-the-manor born Agamemnon and then his brother Menelaos, and an astonishing Annika Boras as Elektra, who asserts a daughter’s revenge with studied passion.
A central theme of Arthur Miller‘s plays is morality, often personal morality in difficult times. All My Sons, produced in 1947, excoriated a man who sold faulty aviation equipment to the military during the war. The Crucible, staged in 1953, was his Salem witch trials commentary on McCarthyism. And a decade later, Miller was back to the theme with Incident at Vichy, a 1964 chilling and depressing look into peoples‘ psyches and morality in the time of the Holocaust. In each succeeding play, the times got tougher, moral choices more difficult.
The score carries this sprightly if not perfect production of the classic 1950 musical comedy about a Salvation Army missionary who reforms a couple of hard-boiled but appealing gamblers. The book by Jo Swerling & Abe Burrows was based on The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown and Blood Pressure, two short stories by Damon Runyon, who gets stage credit via the opening scene of a writer typing Broadway Stories on an old Remington.
Sarah Brown, the engaging Kate Jennings Grant, is out to save some souls. Nathan Detroit (Oliver Platt) is committed to finding a place to run his floating crap game for the night. This is a show where a lot of joy washes over the audience in spite of the fact that the songs are over-miked and the talk scenes between the numbers don’t sparkle as much.
Lynn Nottage‘s tense, intense thriller about the horrors of rape in the Congo is guaranteed to leave a knot in your stomach. If you‘ve avoided reading the newspaper stories, you can catch up right here. The play aspires to be a modern version of Brecht‘s “Mother Courage.” “Plus ça change, plus c‘est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Could there be love under so much mean-spiritedness and cruelty? Was there something about this corner of rural Ireland that left so many inhabitants so bereft of human kindness? In Martin McDonagh’s first rate dark comedy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Aaron Monaghan gives a bravura performance as Cripple Billy, who desperately wants to be valued for himself and not by his infirmity.
But he must navigate the shoals of a town where most of those around him lack civility, much less compassion.
The mood is surreal in Richard Greenberg’s fast-paced, sharply acted, quirky drama of love twisted into domination. The setting is naturalistic enough – a wood dock back-dropped by cedars at a summer home across the lake from a Catskills hotel. But the witchy, controlling Eva Adler (a biting Mercedes Ruehl), who presides over the scene, could blot out the sun as she does the life of her daughter and her chances with young men who deign to wander over from the hotel. Ruehl as Mother Eva makes Mama Rose (Gypsy) look like a wimp.
A revival of this impressive dance-theater piece first presented in 1984, is a powerful, sensual, emotional evocation of man‘s trajectory from heaven to hell, from the innocence of joy to repression and brutality. The eleven dancers of the company are notably talented, able to bend their bodies to gracefully walk doubled over as animals or pre-humans in the scene of origins, to move and twist with grace, to fly upside-down on wires, to present faces as expressive as their bodies as they show the pinched and frightened visages of people under repression. It‘s a performance you will not forget.
As U.S. workers are fired by corporate executives who take multi-million-dollar bonuses, “Billy Elliot, The Musical” seems made to order for the current American stage. It is a call for solidarity against those in power. It‘s a very British class-conscious play, with workers raising their fists to a giant puppet of 1980‘s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It also tells a universal truth that political struggles must also defend personal freedom.
