In this dysfunctional family near-soap opera by Stephen Adly Guirgis, the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are all con men, or women. The venue, a middle-class apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, is a place for drive-by scams and attacks that have you shifting the characters between the hero and villain columns. And asking some questions for which answers are never there. That said, the acting, headed by lead Stephen McKinley Henderson, and direction by Austin Pendleton are fine, as complex but also as hokey as you are likely to see on TV.
“How did you get to be here?” A common question often rephrased in conversation. But this Stephen Sondheim – George Furth production takes it dramatically smarter in multiple musical flashbacks, each chosen year before the previous one. And each vignette is a surprise.
Brilliant, clever, trendy, stunning, wonderful, the best musical of the season, every number a show-stopper. It’s 1933 Chicago, time of depression and prohibition. A couple of musicians, Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), sax and a double bass players looking for a gig in a show bar, see a gang murder by mafioso Colombo, known as “Spats” (Mark Lotito), and his confederates. Witnesses will be killed. They run into a dressing room and appropriate the clothes and wigs which of course yields the costumes of the girl band.
A novella is not a play. The 75-minute drama by Adrienne Kennedy is largely a monologue, delivered expertly by Audra McDonald, but still a monologue. It was first produced thirty years ago, but this is the first time it’s been on Broadway.
Deirdre O’Connell is wonderful as Becky, the neurotic inheritor of the mantle of 17th century Salem’s witchcraft victims. She is as out-front and aggressive as her flaming red hair. But the Sarah Ruhl play she inhabits is a confusion of current issues (depression and opioids), fantasy witching (potions to make people fall in and out of love) and suggestion that the present echoes the bad historic past.
I saw David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy in 2001. It was clever and funny, as his works tend to be. About a girl who has a disease that ages her very fast so while in high school she looks like she’s 72. What a difference a couple of decades makes. Now it’s a musical, with Lindsay-Abaire doing lyrics and Jeanine Tesori the music. And more school kids have been added.
“Ain’t No Mo’” by Jordan E. Cooper is a fantastical surreal in-your-face satirical pastiche of American black experience. It targets blacks (read the black bourgeoisie) as well as whites. You won’t find anything as adventurous on or off Broadway. Which makes it sad it has posted a closing notice for Sunday, Dec. 18th, just two weeks after its opening. So here is what you will see if you go and what you will miss if you don’t.
It is Aug 13 2021. Henry Naylor is a topical comedian looking back at the Taliban departure from Afghanistan a decade before. Naylor was a writer for the British TV satire show “The Spitting Image” and a stand-up comic. He likes satires on war like Mash, Catch 22, Dr. Strangelove. A decade earlier, he had a chance to do a show on BBC comedy radio, and he wanted to talk about the Afghanistan conflict, but the state-funded broadcaster said Afghanistan is not funny. Too many dead bodies. He noticed that journalists talking about Afghanistan were not really there. They gathered on the border. Including a BBC reporter who faked reports. Yes, the BBC was full of fakery. Naylor wanted to expose the media lies. So, flashback.
A history of American jazz in 90 minutes? The Anderson Brothers’ “The Journey of Jazz” does so in fascinating pastiche of music and visuals, starting with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” smartly performed by pianist Dalton Ridenhour, and finishing with Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” They show along the way how styles evolved, how jazz composers were affected by classical music (think Thelonious Monk) and went on to influence the music of Broadway and popular culture (Richard Rodgers).
In 1918, at age 18, Noël Coward wrote a feminist play about a novelist who gave up working to be wifely support for her less talented playwright husband. Coward was a great admirer of George Bernard Shaw, and this is due homage. It is an amazing feminist play for the time. And gets a fine production from the Mint Theatre which specializes in bringing out plays of many years past.
It’s not quite Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man,” but Ed Weinberger attempts a take with two 3500 year-old geezers wandering in the desert on Moses’ famous trek to “the promised land.” Lou (Josh Mostel) complains his boots are too tight and “How come in all these 30 years, not once has anybody — ever — had the decency to tell us the truth? We’re lost…. We’ve been lost ever since we left Egypt.”
Bud (Richard Masur) red robe, black glasses, tells him to have faith in God’s miracles.” Who dropped manna from Heaven? Who brought forth water from a rock?”
August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” is not about learning how to play the piano. It is about the powerful lesson an old ornately carved piano teaches about history and about the respect and honor one owes one’s forbears, especially when they suffered greatly to preserve the dignity they bequeathed to their children. It’s about slavery.
KT Sullivan, a doyenne of jazz through the Mabel Mercer Foundation she heads, presented the Cabaret Convention’s Great “American Songbook: American Standards,” at the three-day event’s finale at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Oct 28. This thrilling event brought singers from the U.S. and abroad to an annual gathering of cabaret fans. And as they are standards, it’s worth noting who wrote them.
Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays is about fantasy and fakery, the desperation and dysfunction of the underclass. The brothers Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen H) and Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) had parents who cheated on each other, left when the sons were 13 and 16. He had women on the side, she had her “Thursday man.” “Why do you think they left us? They were struggling.” Well, a lot of parents are struggling.
Yip Harburg (1896-1981), was a socialist song writer born on the Lower East Side of New York, where he was named Isidore Hochberg. He changed that to the “American” Edgar Harburg, which would turn into “Yip” Harburg. Yip stood for Yipsel, the acronym of Young Peoples Socialist League, the youth group of the Socialist Party. How did he know that in some future years, that would label him “un-American”!
It’s not really Chekhov’s first play. It a clever take-off on a manuscript discovered in a Russian safe deposit box in 1921, the 19-year-old Chekhov’s first try and justifiably never staged. Overabundance of characters, themes and action; it needed an editor.
Author/directors Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel of the Irish experimental theater group Dead Centre took up the challenge. But rather than simply winnow away the chaff (it ran five hours) and present the rest onstage, they have helped make Chekhovian sense by unpacking everything to the audience as the play unfolds. And not just this play, but the playwright’s famous memes, such as the iconic gun. All done through headsets!
The best thing about “1776” is Peter Stone’s script, which will never change. The controversy about this production staged by Jeffrey Page and Diane Paulus is about casting the men of this Continental Congress as female, including whites, blacks and transgenders. The play would be better with actors believable in their gender. Fortunately, there is some good acting that makes you accept the play on its diminished level.
Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play is about the self-delusion of upper-class Jews who thought their absorption into Austrian culture meant that in spite of years of anti-Semitism and rising Nazism they would not be in danger. Read European Jews for Austrian Jews. And after that, the corruption of the Austrian Socialists and Social Democrats who joined the Nazi rallies. Also of the “Collective West,” including Roosevelt, who refused to take in more than a handful of Jewish refugees and left millions to perish.
The reenactment of the 1965 Cambridge University debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley is an interesting if minor moment in civil rights history, but a disappointment as theater. That is partly because two long monologues (not really a debate) and two short introducers don’t provide enough dramatic tension for theater. You want a real interaction. And partly because two of the actors are fine but the other two are middling to mediocre.
I was going to ignore what follows, but then, on top of so many stories about the “cancel culture” (person disagrees with you, banish them!) and today’s article in the NYTimes about the issue of masking or not masking at theater, I thought it worth adding this story to the conversation.
Lynn Nottage who wrote the book for “MJ” is known for serious plays about the black experience, and this fits that bill as a struggle against the system. Director Christopher Wheeldon, also the choreographer, is the perfect helmsman. The show is about movement and the choreography is overwhelming.
Part romance, part con game. Both require some self-deception. So, therefore a classic American musical. A corny hit when it premiered on Broadway December 1957, a time more naïve than now. Today, it’s not dark enough.
Robert Icke’s “Oresteia” is a brilliant takes-your-breath-away modern version of the Greek narrative of Athens’ war on Troy which, at its center, is about male warmongering and sexism. It makes you realize that little is new about rulers who would sacrifice their own children as well as masses of citizen subjects to maintain their power over other lands. The universality is made clear when Calchas (Michael Aabubakar), a Greek god and seer, intones names of god Zeus, and then goes on to name two dozen others, Allah, Apollo, Buddah…, because military in every land called up gods to bless their marauding.
When you’re talking about a musical theater genius such as Stephen Sondheim, it’s hard to pick favorites among his oeuvres, but “Into the Woods” is high on the list. Because with Sondheim’s music and lyrics, and James Lapine’s book, this staging by Lear deBessonet infuses joy. Because Sondheim-Lapine (who directed the original in 1987) take some vintage western fairy tales and, mining recognition for surprise, turn them magically into witty morality tales.
Billy Crystal’s story, book by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, based on the 1992 film, requires you to believe that Buddy Young, a washed-up comic got a new start when an Emmys broadcast mixed up names and announced he had died and the Today Show invited him on to show it wasn’t true. Maybe this worked 30 years ago. Now the book is silly, often crude, a bit vulgar, a bit TV, with jokes as dated as the Borscht belt routines he started out with.
