Amy Sherald’s exhibit at the Whitney Museum is a collection of portraits of people who are black but who could be anyone from the nature of the lives they project: a worker, a tractor driver, a lady with a bicycle, an equestrian. And Michele Obama, which is what got Sherald some fame. The faces are flat, the flesh colors are black but cool. Sherald, born 1993 in Columbus, GA, shows what black people would look like sans racism. Workers. Doing sports. Being the smartly dressed wife of a president. (She also has a painting of Breonna Taylor.)
“Glass,” “Kill,” and “What If If Only” are smart Caryl Churchill plays, surreal metaphors of how people live as individuals and in societies. Of course, they are metaphors, and it takes Churchill’s inventiveness and director James MacDonald’s direct realistic portrayals to make them engage you. They were first presented in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 2019.
Moral hypocrisy never goes out of style, and Norwegian playwright Hendrik Ibsen was a master at demolishing it. “Ghosts,” then called Gengangere (“the ones who return,”) published in 1881 and presented at that time in Norway and the US, aroused the fury of the smug burghers on both sides of the Atlantic with its searing portrait of an honorable gentleman as sexual predator. Perhaps because Ibsen not only took on forbidden subjects such as sexual abuse and venereal disease, but because pillars of society such as clergy were shown to share guilt for the evil done to “polite” society’s victims.
The Anderson Brothers’ performances at Birdland and other venues are more than just jazz. They have become icons of jazz history performance. They delight audiences with the stories of the jazz eras and musicians that they then bring to musical life. The other night at Birdland, Will and Peter on the horns went through decades from Dixieland to Coltrane.
“The Buena Vista Social Club” is about a Cuban band founded in 1996 made up of musicians that had played decades earlier, in the late 1950s, importantly on the cusp of the 1960 Cuban revolution. Their album released in 1997 became an international success. Some performed in the U.S. and Europe, and the band was the subject of a Wim Wenders documentary in 1999.
Usually, I don’t like family dramas. But this one is different, not hokey or predictable. “Purpose” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has more twists than a corkscrew. Though the drinks here are hard liquor, not wine. And director Phylicia Rashad, also a fine actor, keeps the pace so fast but smooth that you almost run to keep up. It is a not-to-miss play by an author who has become one of today’s not-to-miss playwrights.
“Vanya” is a gay play imagining the characters of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” where the men are somewhat interesting and the women are pseudo females that no real women would ever recognize.
This slow-moving political thriller sets a State Department official in Senegal (or does she work for another agency?) against young Peace Corps volunteer who “reallocated” U.S. government bags of concrete to help build a community garden instead of fortifying his house against deep state expected Muslim terrorist attacks. (They haven’t happened.) She will send him home unless he cooperates on a plan to catch a purported terrorist. It builds slowly and gets exciting only in the last third of the 80-minute show.
The best part of “Redwood” is the realistic climbing and aerial dancing off and around the trunk of the massive tree. The vertical movement that blends contemporary dance and climbing was created by Melicio Estrella of the dance company Bandaloop. The performers use harnesses and ropes and instead of just climbing up, they move out and soar and twist like circus acrobats. The moments when Idina Menzel and other actors climb and fly out over the audience are thrilling.
This is the most pretentious and boring show I’ve seen in years, sometimes seeming to last as long as the span of years 1816 to 2240 when the actions take place. For a science fiction play about artificial intelligence, it is utterly devoid of imagination.
The women have head scarves and speak Farsi in “English” by Sanaz Toossi, an Iranian-American who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama with this play. Set in 2008, the characters are taking a class in Iran to perfect their English to go to America. The story is about language as identity — to speak to our souls.
From the moment Audra McDonald enters to blasting horn music this is her show. Forget the great actors of the past, Merman to LuPone. With superlative acting and a stunning soprano, in every number her voice soars. McDonald is not just a singer who acts, with deep feeling and expressive moods, but an actor who sings, and it takes the play to a whole new dimension.
“The Village Gate Reunion Show” at Urban Stages pulled together singers that met and performed on the “patio” of that famous Greenwich Village jazz club and theater when they were young, about 40 years ago. Not all have seen each other since then. You could hear the talent some had, still have. It’s a nostalgia show.
The best thing about the revival of “Sunset Boulevard” is the singing by Nicole Scherzinger as the faded film star Norma Desmond. The second best is her famous final line: “I’m ready for my closeup,” now in common parlance. Not so good is the over-the-top camp acting or script.
Film director Joan Micklin Silver once told me that making a film from a book, she had to pull the movie out of the book. But here director John Collins has run the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby as a reading of Nick Carroway’s narrative and as drama only when dialogue pulls in the dozen actors. Even so, GATZ grabs you so you cannot leave a 6 1/2-hour production. At the end, I saw no empty seats.
“Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a fascinating juxtaposition of videos of the great choreographer’s dances with art works that inspired him.
Louis Armstrong was a sublime performer. This play is a great recreation of his music with terrific dancing, but it’s more vaudeville show than drama. It shifts quickly through his career as a black artist. Some interesting stuff about dealing with gangsters and Hollywood racism but too much about his four wives. Best is James Monroe Iglehart as Armstrong who has brilliantly copied his gravelly voice.
Director Kenny Leon has cut Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play from 3 hours to 1 hour 40. I was grateful. The play on the life of small-town America covers the years from 1901 to 1913. For the period, gas lamps are hung out over the orchestra. The set is made of wood chairs, a weathered wall, an old spinet piano. But the town seems sealed in glass, with no references to the outside world.
The hills of California in Jez Butterworth’s engrossing feminist play are not real but mirages in a story of working-class dreams and desperation. It’s 1955, and Veronica (Laura Donnelly) is consumed with making her four young girls a world-class music success. Like many a Mama Rose, her chief goal appears to be liberation from her own life, which is a running a Blackpool B&B called “Seaview,” from which you can’t see the sea. I say “feminist” not because I think the author claims that but because it is about the destruction of women by the patriarchy of the time.
This powerful musical drama is about a group of artistic friends – musicians, wall spray painter, photographer – who, prompted by the political radical among them, organize participation in the 2011 “Arab Spring” movement in Egypt that brought down U.S.-supported dictator Hosni Mubarak. It was written by Daniel and Patrick Lazour, brothers who grew up in Massachusetts.
Every fall over three days, some of the best cabaret artists in the country appear at the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention at Rose Hall at Lincoln Center. If you never go to any cabaret in the year, you must go to this one. Which of course will hook you on cabaret forever!
Good propaganda is subtle. You don’t know it’s propaganda. Erika Sheffer’s play “Vladimir” is as subtle as a sledgehammer. She and her family immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1975, 15 years before Glasnost. She hates the new state of Russia with a passion.
“To Claude AI: Please write this theater review in the style of critic Lucy Komisar.”
Lucy Komisar’s Theatre Review: “The Plagiarist’s Dilemma.” [My comments in italics.]
Jacob McNeal’s latest play, starring Robert Downey, attempts to grapple with the thorny issues of AI, plagiarism, and literary integrity, but ultimately falls flat in its execution. [Well, not totally flat.] The production, which feels more like a disjointed television serial than a cohesive theatrical experience, meanders through a series of scenes that fail to captivate or provoke. [Not true by the end.]
The under-story of David Henry Hwang’s play is more important than the obvious story line.
In this compelling autobiographical work, DHH (a strong Daniel Dae Kim, playing Hwang), tells how he challenged a decision to cast white British actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon.” Pryce is shown with taped Asian-style slanted eyes. In the play, a Vietnamese woman, 17, who turned to prostitution to survive, kills herself so the child she had with a soldier can go to America. How racist is that! Send the kid to the wonderful country that destroyed yours!
This play unintentionally exposes the mainstream political fakery about the January 6 protest by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. And also the treachery of a son who turns in his father to the FBI even though he knows the father, distraught at a downturn costing his job, drinks, takes Zantac for anxiety and is prone to exaggerate.
