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.
“POTUS,” which I am surprised to find on Broadway, is misogyny masquerading as feminism. It is crude, vulgar, at the intellectual level of 13-year-old boys, or maybe a local sex-themed comedy club that serves up booze and cheap laughs. Harriet (Julie White), the president’s top aide, reports to staff that he has just said at a press conference, “Please excuse my wife’s absence. She’s having a cunty morning.” You heard that right.
What’s amazing about Shakespeare is that directors can do a complete change of time, venue, mood and still the magic works. The trick is to pull you into the story.
Robert Icke’s “Hamlet” at the Armory starts with a video, could be the news, the funeral of the king of Denmark. The backdrop is a foreign military conflict. Then back at the palace we see 12 surveillance screens watched by security. Suddenly there’s an apparition: the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
When you first see Fanny Brice (Beanie Feldstein) she is shown in a very covered up outfit, looks matronly, and she is of that middle age. Later it’s clear in a flashback that the story begins with her as a young girl – and that she was always fat. That blocked me from believing her portrayal of the story of Fanny Brice – who had been a lithe dancer as well as comedienne – and the romantic connection with her lover, the gambler Nick Arnstein (Ramin Karmiloo), a suave charming David Niven type who had squired gorgeous long legged chorus girls.
Richard III, the evil scheming murderous soon-to-be king of England, after he kills the competition, was obsessed with his deformity, now believed to be a disease of the spine, which has been portrayed in Shakespeare’s play over the centuries as a hump or a withered arm. In the vision of director Robert O’Hara, that essential part of the play is turned on its head. Richard, portrayed by the fiery Danai Gurira, is damaged only in his mind, his ethic, his soul. When he speaks lines about his infirmity, it makes no sense.
Larry Kirwan’s “Paradise Square” is a smart, entertaining, serious, important musical about a real time in America, a look at the role of capitalism in slavery, whites and blacks running the underground railroad, and how capitalists divided them. Director Moises Kaufman knows how to make a show suffused with music into a riveting dramatic play.
It’s snowy outside probably someplace north of New York City. The guests, most in their 40s and 50s, are artistic or professional, and the conversation, which is the centerpiece, is the kind that wafts around New York parties when people show off their knowledge or talents or, no talent needed, loneliness and the need for other people. They mostly talk past either other, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing new is said. Maybe this is satire.
A few years ago I wrote about French actress Nathalie Schmidt appearing in a web series, “I DO,” which was getting a lot of attention from web festivals around the country. The prizes keep coming.
If you want to see a serious, piercing, unforgettable play about America, see Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes.” It could be subtitled “The American Killing Fields.” The expansion of colonial America to the West, its manifest destiny, a myth we’ve all learned in school, was a cover for genocide. The U.S. was built on savagery, a holocaust, the slaughter of Native Americans, and Tracy Letts tells it brilliantly, with Anna Shapiro’s direction emphasizing the banality that covers up horror.
Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” stars a brilliantly effervescent Mikhail Baryshnikov, a fine dreamy Jessica Hecht, talented supporting players, a giant robotic arm topped by a ring-lit camera and a cute scampering robotic dog. And that’s only the half of it, since I saw the in-person play but not the virtual on-line version. Golyak also directed, marshalling good performances and pulling out a plot from what could have gotten lost in a three-ring atmosphere.
Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite is a collection of sitcom sketches that worked in 1968 but a lot less so in 2022. The last about the parents of a young woman terrified of getting married is very funny, the middle extended bit about fans of the celebrity culture is so-so, and the first about an unhappy wife who discovers her businessman husband is having an affair with his secretary is so dated it should have opened with a time lapse warning.
Will Pomerantz’s staging of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” may be small in size, in a space with just a few sticks of furniture and runtime cut from 3 hours to 2, but the conception and production work grandly. The set by Brian Staton is fine and the cutting seems to leave nothing out. Bass, fiddle and guitar set a mood with evocative music by Nancy Harrow.
Martin McDonagh is brilliant at dark surreal comedy. It’s 1963. The brick wall of a prison room. Hennessey (Josh Goulding) is going to be hung/ or hanged. For raping, killing a young girl. He protests innocence; he never even met the girl. The grammar becomes an issue which seems a misdirected concern when one is taking a human life. Hers? Maybe his.
Thornton Wilder’s 1942 play won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. I haven’t seen the play before or the 1983 film. So, I must assume it got the prize for this moment in wartime to tell people that humans have gone through worse times. Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction is sometimes so hokey that you think you’re watching TV. But then she goes on target. The play at the end seems to show how the bad son represents the U.S. militarists now threatening America and the world through their “let’s destroy Russia” operation so we can be the hegemons/rulers of the world.
Shaina Taub’s “Suffs” is the play I’ve been waiting for about the too-little talked about struggle for American women’s* right to vote. Asterisk: American white women, but a massive achievement none-the-less. Taub makes clear the internal conflict of the movement’s failure to recognize black women as partners.
D.H. Lawrence’s 1913 “The Daughter-in-Law” is a classical misogynist play. The tired message is that to have a happy marriage, a woman must be subservient to her husband. This holds even if he’s below her in intelligence and ambition and disinclined to better himself by work. She should just move herself down a peg. And mothers are controlling harridans who spoil their sons’ lives if they can.
This version of “Company,” 15 years after the last spare, stylized, sophisticated production, is a a mélange of pop and TV, with obeisance to current diversity rules. The main character is a girl and one couple is homosexual. And sophistication is traded for garish. But Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics are still brilliant.
LSD was supposed to make Aldous Huxley, Cary Grant and Clare Booth Luce burst into gorgeous new worlds, but as James Lapine imagines in this inventive, intriguing musical, it makes them more introspective, calling up pasts they cannot escape. As writer-director Lapine mixes that with their politics, I came away admiring the characters Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton) and Grant (Tony Yazbeck), but had mixed feelings about Luce (Carmen Cusack).
“The Lehman Trilogy” by Stefano Massini appears to be a love song to American capitalism, though if you look carefully, you will see some tarnishings and even betrayals. It starts with Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale), a German-Jewish immigrant, arriving in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, nervous in his best black suit and coat.
I thought this was going to be a tacky, yellow press redux of the paparazzi chasing Diana. I was wrong. It is a terrific feminist, anti-royalist story (book by Joe DiPietro) of what happens when a woman, facing a powerful institution (the “Royal Family”), has the gumption to stand up and fight for her dignity.
“Cullud Wattah” by Erika Dickerson-Despenza is billed as about “three generations of black women living through the water crisis in Flint, Michigan,” where community water was poisoned because the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, wanted to save money and in 2014 switched from Port Huron water to contaminated Flint River water. He was backed up by key state and city environmental “regulators.” In quotes, because they didn’t seem to think contaminated water came under their remit. Or lacked the courage to challenge the governor.
In this hokey, schmalzy soap opera about a black maid working for a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana, the cast is better than the text. The script is by Tony Kushner – America’s most over-rated unimpressive playwright — who based it on childhood memories. It was first presented in 2003 and it had the same flaws though less glitz, which must have been added to cover up the flaws.
“Fairycakes,” written and directed by Douglas Carter Beane is a clever, often funny, revisionist take on fairy tales Including Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan for kids with a leavening of Midsummer Night’s Dream for grown-ups. All in rhyming couplets. And with a few contemporary takes, including the manipulation of fear and guilt on which families are built.
“Morning’s at Seven” written in 1939 by Paul Osborn, starts out as a small town family story of the innocent 1920s. It’s often comic, but it’s also a serious look at the difficulties and hidden sorrows that afflict people who seem quite comfortable, discontents that begin to dominate as they get older.
