This play may be about the 16th century, but the dialogue, the politics, the economics, the power struggles give you a sense of watching the mafia.
Except that rather than focus on money, we are watching the dramatic repercussions of King Henry VIII‘s desire to get a wife who will give him a male heir.
When the music is by John Kander and the lyrics by Fred Ebb, you think dark. “Chicago,” “Cabaret,” “Kiss of the Spiderwoman.” “The Visit” fits perfectly into that very satisfying canon. This is a stunning production, with director John Doyle using the musical pieces to build the psychological and intellectual tension.
The story is shadowy and shocking, a political fantasy based on the 1956 play by the Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Writing soon after the end of World War II, he crafted this as a morality tale for our times. Now it‘s a chamber opera.
Love, sex, age and class. Key elements in David Hare‘s 1995 play about a rich guy who had an affair with an employee a few years before and would like to start it up again.
He runs restaurants. She was a lawyer‘s daughter (ie. privileged) who wandered into his eatery on London’s Kings Road and got a job. And a promotion. And a lover. She left six years later when his wife discovered the affair.
The Fiasco Theater has become the clever modern interpreter of Shakespeare, and this production is no exception. When two rivals for her hand sing “Who is Sylvia?” – the name of a pop song — it gets a laugh, because the sad-romantic song is perfectly in tune with this contemporary, light-hearted production.
Sometimes theater awards shows are a chore to sit through. Lots of “thank you, thank you…..” to boredom. But the Fred and Adele Astaire awards June 1 for best dancers and choreographers was a delight.
The top dancer awards went to Leanne Cope “An American Paris,” and in a tie vote, to Robert Fairchild, “An American in Paris” and to Tony Yazbeck, “On the Town.”
The Awards were established in 1982 by the Douglas Watt Family Fund for the Performing Arts, to recognize outstanding achievement in dance on Broadway and in film.
Dael Orlandersmith‘s “Forever” is a powerful blend of fact and fiction about this talented writer/performer‘s growing up as the daughter of an abusive, alcoholic mother in Harlem. And her discovery of the roots she chooses to adopt after a visit to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris where great artists, writers, musicians, are buried.
Orlandersmith has done fine autobiographical works in the past, among them “Yellowman,” about a dark, over-weight black woman falling in love with a light-skinned black man. So one knew that this production would be dark in the psychological sense. But the story takes one by surprise.
Wendy Wasserstein‘s play about the impact of feminism on women is troubling for a feminist. The movement has attempted to persuade women that the essence of their destiny and dignity is not writ out biologically as wives and mothers, but as self-fulfillment with choices in the same wider world as men.
Daniel Beaty‘s portrait of Paul Robeson in his one-man show at BAM is stunning and moving. Memorable. It won an immediate standing ovation. Of course, Beaty had as a subject a man of great talent, courage and fortitude. For Americans to understand their history, this play should be seen in universities and theaters around the country.
Beaty, in a performance powerfully directed by Moisés Kaufman, makes you shiver at the cruelty of the U.S. government persecuting Robeson for daring to express his views, and then cheer at the man‘s grit, with just a few reservations. And because in mainstream histories, he‘s not given his due, it‘s worth talking about that in detail.
British playwright Peter Morgan is a subtle political historian, here suggesting what went on over sixty years in private meetings between ten British prime ministers and Queen Elizabeth. In Buckingham Palace. It‘s all in his imagination, but it is a careful critique of the politics and class loyalties of the characters and the Queen.
The play is fascinating, and I enjoyed it immensely. Helen Mirren is brilliant as Elizabeth through the years. Cool, contained, to the manor born, aging but ageless in her sense of self.
Morgan has written a number of notable political works, including Frost/Nixon and The Special Relationship,about the U.S. and the UK. Stephen Daldry, who directed the play Billy Elliot,” with Margaret Thatcher the villain in the miners’ strike, does an excellent job etching Morgan‘s critique of privilege. (Morgan’s father was a German Jew who escaped the Nazis, his mother a Polish Catholic who emigrated after the Soviet takeover.)
People that do bad things should be punished for them. People that video bad things and post them on the internet should get punished. What about people who use avatars to do bad things on fantasy internet sites? And what if those bad things are realistic pedophilia and murder?
Jennifer Haley‘s unusual play shows a fantasy world where bad things, (which you don‘t ever see) go on. It is not an erotic or sadistic drama. It‘s sci fi, but only partly. It‘s rather an intellectual provocation. It is crisply directed by Anne Kauffman.
Money is power is the message of Beth Henley‘s engrossing 1990 feminist play about two mail order brides and the men they marry in the late 19th-century Wyoming Territory. It gets a realistic staging by director Jenn Thompson. The story starts in the 1860s and for 25 years follows the reversal of fortunes of the two couples. Henley based the story and characters on true events.
It takes a while, through your laughter, before you realize that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ comic play, “An Octoroon,” is forcing you to confront slavery. Sure, the plot is about slaves who are being sold off because their owner can‘t pay the mortgage. But the dialogue of those slaves seems like it comes from a TV sitcom, mixing current daily realities with that of the slaves. Director Sarah Benson‘s stunning light touch sneaks up on you.
David Ives is the master of comically surreal theatrical sketch comedy. Nobody comes close. Because not only are his one-acts witty, but they play cleverly outlandish intellectual games.
One of Ives‘ games is to play with doubles. My favorite in this collection being staged at The Duke is The Enigma Variations.
The back story of “Churchill,” the solo play finely adapted and performed by Ronald Keaton, is class politics. Winston Churchill was to the manor born. His grandfather was the Duke of Marlboro and Viceroy of Dublin, his father Henry Spencer-Churchill (Lord Randolph) was a Conservative member of parliament who hadn‘t done well at Eton. Winston couldn‘t get into college and took the exam three times to finally get into Sandhurst, the British military academy. Privilege screams.
A hokey funny spoof of film noir, the mood set by 1940s music, this play by the inventive Stolen Chair company mines every verbal and physical cliché in the book. And the ensemble, whose members have been together for a decade, does a superb job in bringing to life the characters, one of which is soon to be dead.
Private eye Ben Farrell (Nathan Darrow) has the mystery of his career to solve. (Think Sam Spade/ Humphrey Bogart) Crimes are happening after they are written about in a pulp mystery magazine, “Murder Monthly.”
A prisoner‘s account of what goes on in New York City‘s holding pen for arrested men is unexpectedly and often hilariously funny. He deftly skewers, no, impales, the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the criminal justice system, there and in the courtroom.
Joe Assadourian discovered his theatrical talents in prison. He got in trouble at 22. He‘d always been in trouble, but that depends on how you define trouble. He said, “I‘d been doing voices in school. If I was sent to the principal, I‘d do him.” An upper class family would have sent young Joe to acting school. But soon he would get into big trouble — a gun, a struggle, a shot — and land in jail. Confined for 12 years, he‘d been writing in notebooks. Then he got into a prison theater program where Richard Hoeler, now his director, unearthed his very large talent.
This is the back story of Grimms‘ fairy tales, for adults. It‘s a deconstructed Grimms.
The show, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine, was a brilliant conception when it was first produced in 1986.
Grimms‘ fairy tales were morality tales. Having the fairy tale characters intersect with their stories, Sondheim and Lapine turn the events in the woods into a metaphor for the challenges of life. The message is that the woods are full of dangers; be careful what you wish for. It‘s also about community.
Edward Albee, who is gay, has made a fine dramatic career skewing the gloomy relationships of heterosexual couples and establishing the women as villains. (This may have started because he hated his adoptive mother.) His 1962 “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” made his reputation.
This 1966 play continues the theme a few years later. The partners of the two married couples don‘t sleep with each other, and the daughter of one of them has just left her fourth husband. Most of the blame is on the distaff side. Yes, I know that the director is a woman, Pam MacKinnon. And with her taught direction, the actors are superb.
Red Barn director Joy Hawkins brings Key West a pitch-perfect staging of Alfred Uhry‘s funny, political and subtly biting play about an assimilated 1939 Atlanta Jewish family whose status-conscious matriarch rejects their heritage. Uhry wrote from childhood memories.
Boo (Beulah) Levy (given a sharp, tough portrayal by Karen Grant), criticizes her daughter Lala (played nicely as a bit ditsy by Lisa Elena Monda) for putting a star atop their decorated Christmas tree. Excuse me, Chanukah bush. Boo says the tree is fine without the star, which makes it Christian. Lala doesn‘t see the distinction. (Neither does Uhry.)
Her main concern, however, is getting her daughter into society and married. There are limitations. It has to be German Jewish society. Boo looks down at those who came from “east of the Elbe,” the river that runs between Germany and Czechoslovakia. She boasts that their house is on a block filled with Christians, though their neighbors of course don‘t accept them.
Here‘s a case in which it helps to pay attention to the playbill. Michael Frayn‘s 1982 classic play within a play, or in this case, a farce within a farce, gets a first rate production by Key West‘s Waterfront Playhouse under the deft hand of artistic director Danny Weathers.
Even if you don‘t know the script, the opening play called “Nothing On” seems an odd disaster. Roger Tramplemain (Brandon Beach), a real estate agent is taking his girlfriend Vicki (a very good screaming- red-head Erin Mckenna) for a few days at a country house he is supposed to be renting out. The property owners Philip and Flavia Brent (David Black and Susannah Wells) are conveniently in Spain to clock resident days in order to cheat on British taxes. Vicki, who is always angularly posing, has the opportunity to prance around in her underwear. (Non-salacious attire is by Carmen Rodriguez).
The problem with “The Last Ship,” a recitative musical written by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, with music and lyrics by pop artist Sting, is politics. In a play about workers‘ response to the closing of their shipyard, there really isn‘t any. The play is a feel-good story about workers taking over the shipyard to build one last ship to sail around the world. And then what? How does that challenge or even explain the forces that closed their shipyard?
The story begins when the young man, Gideon Fletcher (Michael Esper), rejects his father‘s wish – symbolically represented by a gift of his work boots – that he follow him as a shipyard worker in Newcastle. Instead, Gideon leaves home and girlfriend, Meg Dawson (Rachel Tucker), to see the world and make his fortune.
A mix of cruelty and humanity, a bit of voyeurism, and some fascination at an indomitable human spirit are the stuff of Bernard Pomerance‘s play “The Elephant Man,” in a moving revival directed by Scott Ellis.
The play, staged first in 1977 in London, imagines the trials and unusual accomplishments of Joseph Merrick, who lived in Europe in the late 1800s, afflicted by a disease so appalling – misshapen body, face distorted by a fungus that grew massively on his head, skin like an elephant‘s hide – that his unfeeling Belgian mother shipped him to a carnival freak show.
Here‘s a remake of the classic 1944 play and more famous 1949 movie of three sailors on a weekend pass in New York who leave the ship determined to find romance. Or at least women. The brassy Bernstein music is wonderful, the actors are terrific, with a couple of voices a touch above what you often get on Broadway, and the staging is fine, if unexceptional, but hey, this is New York, where, as Chip says,
“The famous places to visit are so many,
or so the guidebooks say.
I promised daddy I wouldn‘t miss on any,
and we have just one day.
Gotta see the whole town
right from Yonkers on down to the bay…”
We‘re in a gorgeous Upper East Side apartment with floor to ceiling windows. Amir (Hari Dhillon) is a lawyer and wife Emily (Gretchen Mol) a painter. The first bizarre thing is that she is painting him while he is dressed in a proper business suit above the waist but only boxer shorts below. What is that about? Playwright Ayad Akhtar never makes that clear, and it‘s not the only conundrum.
It‘s 1948, the tenth birthday of Café Society, where great jazz and cabaret in a corner of Greenwich Village clashed with the worst know-nothings of the McCarthy era. But we‘re over that now, so come to this musical memoir to enjoy the delicious sounds of the 30s and 40s. And recall how evil the thought police of that era were. The club became a target of slimy columnists such as Dorothy Kilgallen, who called it a “Moscow-line nightclub.” It was the only place that welcomed whites and blacks, certainly enough to make Mme Kilgallen call it subversive.
Indeed, Barney Josephson was a lefty. So? He put money into integrated housing. He used to joke that the Café was “the wrong place for the right people.” Even Eleanor Roosevelt showed up.
