Brit Henry Naylor‘s play about the moral choices of people trapped in the Middle East horror and the western reporters of it could not be more timely, or more searing. The dialogue is stirring, often tough, and poetic. It is part of a series he has presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the last few years about the human suffering and the ethical challenges posed by the region’s crises.
“Win That War!” sing workers in a parachute factory in a town about 1,000 miles south of Chicago. It‘s a striking transformation of Georges Bizet‘s opera “Carmen,” about a worker in a Spanish cigar factory in 1820, to wartime US in 1943 with a book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.
Shakespeare‘s “Othello” at the Delacorte in Central Park seemed more about racism to me than it ever had before. Under the clear, commanding direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson and featuring the mesmerizing, almost painfully gut-wrenching acting of Chukwudi Iwuji as Othello, you imagine what a lifetime of racial slights has done to his judgment and trust.
More than 60 years after its charm overwhelmed the American stage, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s“My Fair Lady,” with revivals through the years, is back, and this time there‘s a feminist kick. And some class solidarity. They are changes from America’s reactionary 1950s when it premiered. Credit director Bartlett Sher. The street flower seller Eliza (Lauren Ambrose) is a sweetheart, and you get the sense of a supportive society among the sweepers and other night workers at Covent Garden
“Travesties” is a glorious kaleidoscope of famous people, fiction and events that converge in Zurich during World War I and raise questions about radical politics, the meaning of art, and the validity of memory to link it all. Tom Stoppard pays homage to and questions absurdist and revolutionary art in a play which presents three of the great figures of the time through the clouded memory of a retired British diplomat posted in Zurich during the Great War. It is a brilliant historical fantasy directed by Patrick Marber.
This Saint Joan (Condola Rashad) is a charmer. At the same time, she is no farm wench but a tough young woman of 17. She hears voices. She vows to make the English occupiers leave France.
Marin Ireland is compelling in the Transport Group‘s minimalist production of Tennessee Williams‘ “Summer and Smoke.” Her lovely slow southern accent is all the decoration the stage needs. Director Jack Cummings III does a fine job in evoking time and place with no accoutrements required.
Carousel is gorgeous. Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Richard Rodgers, produced in 1945. Well, I‘ll take the lyrics, not the book. The story is from “Liliom,”a 1909 play by the Hungarian Ferenc Molnar. The balletic and acrobatic dancing is stunning, not surprising from Justin Peck who is resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet. The vocals are thrilling, led by opera diva Renée Fleming who presents her solos as if they were arias. But, the story is a little silly, hokey, a young cotton mill worker becoming infatuated with a carnival barker, but you must look at it as you would an opera or ballet. If only it was done in another language!
Edward Albee‘s 1991 play “Three Tall Women” is the attempt of a gay male to get into the psyches of three women, or rather of one women at three stages of her life, played by three actresses on stage at the same time. It is reportedly inspired by his adoptive mother, whom he despised. So, you get a clueless young girl marrying a rich man for money, morphing into a cynical lady in her 50s, and a nasty old woman past 90. Mostly about their interactions with men, nothing about their own hopes or dreams.
In Kenneth Lonergan‘s smart, serious, funny morality tale of the big city, a cop angling for a promotion visits a hooker in a high rise while his newbie female partner waits below, a clueless young security guard in the lobby has a propensity to blather, and his supervisor has a crisis when his brother is implicated in a killing, The “hero” is the one who can‘t help telling the truth.
Federico GarcÃa Lorca was a poet and playwright in Spain in the 1920s and 30s. In 1934 he wrote “Yerma,” about a peasant woman who is obsessed with the desire to have a child. Her husband is a farmer, but she has nothing in life but to be a mother. Lorca was gay. Don‘t know how that affected his attitude toward women who defined themselves only by what they could do with a uterus. Or if he used the story as a critique of women he viewed as crazed baby-making machines. The lady gets no sympathy.
Clever, funny, challenging, not totally persuasive, “Admissions” tells of the family crisis when Charlie (the terrific Ben Edelman), son of parents with top jobs at Hillcrest, an expensive second-tier prep boarding school in rural New Hampshire, doesn‘t get into Yale. The father runs the school, the mother is admissions officer, and they are committed to diversity. But Charlie thinks his friend Perry – child of middle class black father and white mother– got in because he checked the “black” box.
When I saw this amazingly timely play by Sarah Burgess, about corporate Democrats attacking a progressive Texas candidate, I thought people might think, that really is a stretch. But no, it was real. It‘s at the Public Theater, but have you checked the news? Do you know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has just in recent weeks attacked Laura Moser, a terrific progressive female candidate for Congress from Houston, Texas?
Don‘t arrive late to this charming, surreal and politically sharp-edged play. When you claim your seats, you may be almost touching distance from a sandy oval filled with a few chairs, discarded plastic bags and cups, a real goat being fed by a peasant guy, and a caged rooster that is grabbed and petted by a peasant lady. A lake is edged in sandbags. The livestock will disappear, but the sense of magical realism created by director Michael Arden will not.
This smart musical revue tells the changing attitudes of and toward women over a century with the lyrics of popular songs of the time. It‘s semi-autobiographical about the author Dorothy Marcic, a former Vanderbilt professor who wrote a 2002 book on how women were portrayed in songs, channeled here by Janet (Jana Robbins), as a middle-aged college professor.
“A B movie” would be too generous a description of this dreadful play. It is based on the tome by Ayn Rand, a bible of the far-right, which, if the play is any indication, shows they have no more taste in literature than politics. Or maybe this is just the fault of adapter Koen Tachelet. Director Ivo van Hove adds his own horrors.
This gorgeous fantasy by Claire van Kampen, directed by John Dove, is based on a real story, with the narrative setting art and sensitivity against the plotting of ambitious court politicians of the time. The candles on overhanging chandeliers suggest the whimsy that is a mirror of reality. Philippe V (the brilliant Mark Rylance) is the feeble-minded 18th-century Spanish king who was the grandson of King Louis XIV of France. (It was the time of imperialism by Europe‘s royals.)
I have been doing investigative journalism about financial and corporate corruption for 20 years. Ayad Akhtar‘s play is right on the mark. It is based on the story of the corrupt junk bond trader Michael Milken. He got confederates to manipulate stocks so he could take over companies to loot and destroy them. It was a scandal of the 1980s. Too bad the market corruption he revealed never stopped. But this Akhtar gives you an excellent play-by-play. Better than what you might read in the press. Doug Hughes direction is a bit TV potboiler, but he nails it.
At the start of Martin McDonagh‘s quirky “Hangmen,” a condemned prisoner, Hennessy (Gilles Geary) is shouting his innocence. It hardly matters to hangman Harry (Mark Addy) who has heard it all before in his 25 years on the job. It‘s 1963 in Lancashire, the north of England. Near the end, Peter Mooney (a very good Johnny Flynn), a menacing stranger who exudes fake charm, erupts in a storm when Harry‘s wife Alice (Sally Rogers) refuses to rent him a room because his references don‘t check.
Actor John Lithgo is a charmer and always a pleasure to watch how he creates characters with voice, accent and a scrunch of the face. These two short stories lend themselves to his talents, though I have to admit, they might be better read and opened by the imagination.
This is a very good/bad play. Actually, it‘s a staged TV sitcom. It hits all the political bases, as they do. I enjoyed it, as I might a sitcom if I ever saw them (I don‘t), but great drama it is not. The most is to call it a trenchant satire.
So, we enter the upper-class townhouse, with its a white couch and high sideboard, (there will be a terrace). Peter (Marton Csokas) is spying on the phone of Chloe (the always sharp Uma Thurman). She in blonde ponytail wears jeans and black heels. What does that say? Not comfort. (Jeans comfort, heels not) A certain carefully scripted cool sexiness.
Surreal, slapstick, funny, political, clever, and very feminist, Ariana Mnouchkine‘s staging of “A Room in India,” created by Hélène Cixous and Mnouchkine‘s world-famous Théâtre du Soleil (founded in Paris 1964), is a rich feast for audiences.
It is built around the travails of a French political theater troupe visiting India whose director abandons them because he can‘t produce the Mahabarata, the ancient Indian epic. Never clear why.
The Fiasco Theater company has become known for iconic, clever, delightful productions of Shakespeare plays that are both complex, with live music performed by the actors, and minimal and intimate, with few characters and small settings. This production at the Classic Stage Company opens with terrific sea shantys in a country style. It will proceed to joyous drinking songs. And a charming and very accessible production of Shakespeare‘s comic play about shipwrecked twins and mismatched lovers.
Albert Camus‘ 1948 play, powerfully, surreally staged by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, director of the Paris Théȃtre de la Ville, seems so prescient, so of the moment, that you could swear it was written yesterday. Orwell‘s “1984” was published a year later. But both warn against totalitarian governments that frighten and coopt ordinary citizens until a few brave souls fight back. They will be bloodied. Both are called allegories. I consider them warnings.
Before the First World War, things in England seemed quite solid, unmoving, as far as classes went. The upper class was frivolous, its members assumed everything about their lives would remain pretty much the same. Nice homes, nice parties. At the opening, a family and friends in Yorkshire are doing charades, underlining lives of fantasy.
But the interwar years seemed to change everything, to auger in a seismic shift in class relations. J.B. Priestley‘s absorbing 1937 play about what happened to one family and the people whose lives they touched explains how by the time the Second World War occurred — why are we having so many world war? but that’s another story — to be followed by the victory of the Labor Party, the ascendancy of the upper class was not so assured. At least, money would matter more than class.
