This may be the most original play of the season. It‘s a Chaplinesque melodrama in the style of a silent film, done in black and white, with titles and live piano music. There‘s even a sense of the flicker of the old silents.
Attending Barry Manilow‘s new show is a nostalgic visit to the 1960s and 70s. The overwhelming mood is sentimentality. But it‘s hard to criticize this when Manilow engages in such marvelous self-parody, viz a video of foaming waves crashing on boulders.
If this play were written today, you‘d expect it to end with a murder or at least some physical brutality. The confrontation between George (Tracy Letts) and Martha (Amy Morton) in Edward Albee‘s riveting, iconic play pursues another kind of violence. Each of those expertly drawn characters, forcefully directed by Pam MacKinnon, commits sizzling, psychological mayhem on the other. It‘s a shock to discover that this college professor and his wife have been married for 23 years and haven‘t yet done each other in.
With a minimalist set of a dozen sometimes up-ended pastel colored wood chairs as furniture and metal clothes trolleys to represent doors and windows, “The Suit,” presented at BAM by Peter Brook and his long-time collaborator Marie-Hélène Etienne, is a symbolic play, a fable of adultery. But it also speaks of the cruelty of apartheid South Africa that spills out onto personal relations, and the struggle of the victims to find some joy, some way to survive the pain.
Known for delectable parody, this version of “Forbidden Broadway” starts out as a parody of itself. The talented cast of four belts out, “Forbidden Broadway is alive and kicking. Like Jesus and Judy Garland, we‘re resurrected again.” Signs declare “Bring back Mandy and Ricky Martin!”
This production of the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber biopic of Eva Perón is “Evita” lite, stripped of politics. Director Michael Grandage doesn‘t convey the corruption and brutality of the government of Argentina during Juan Perón‘s three terms in the 1940s, 50s and 70s. While Perón sought to improve the economic and social position of the working class, he also stepped hard on the opposition.
Clifford Odets‘ stylized naturalism combined with sometimes faux poetics often edges close to melodrama in his 1937 play about the conflict between art and money. The dialogue doesn‘t wear well with time and might seem almost ridiculous on stage today. But director Bartlett Sher makes it all believable with a strong and respectful staging. This production is still a powerful moment in theater and one of the best plays by an historically significant American playwright. And the politics of the play still matters.
Christopher Durang, always clever and inventive, has taken four characters from different Chekhov plays and transported them to the countryside of Bucks County, PA. Durang‘s comic remix of Chekhov is amusing and gets laughs, even if it doesn‘t always quite hit the mark.
Vanya and Sonia (“Uncle Vanya”), are brother and (adopted) sister who commiserate about their empty lives. They get a visit from their sister, self-centered actress Masha (“Three Sisters”) and her crude boy-toy Spike who could be Trigorin (“The Seagull”), but that would be a stretch. They meet the ingénue Nina (“The Seagull”) who arouses Masha‘s jealousy. There is also a Cassandra (“The Oresteia”) to stir the cauldron with prophecies. Nicholas Martin directs with an in-your-face this-is-a-joke spirit.
Wild and wonderful and definitely not only for children, Rick Elice’s play imagines what turned a mistreated orphan boy into Peter Pan. Captain Hook and the crocodile are there, too, and we find out how they got the hook and the tick-tock. While you get the history lesson, you will enjoy one of the cleverest, funniest spoofs to come down the pike in years. The direction by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers is inspired.
It seems that in 1885 two sailing ships were making for an unknown Asian country. The one captained by the brigand Slank (Matt D‘Amico) was transporting Peter (Adam Chanler-Berat), who didn’t yet have a name, and some other boys to be servants for the Asian potentate. Another ship was carrying the aristocrat Lord Aster (Karl Kenzler) to deliver a very valuable trunk to the same destination. But that ship is taken over by pirates led by the comically threatening Black Stache (the unforgettable Christian Borle) who is after the trunk, which is full of valuables, including stocks, bonds and unregulated derivatives.
Charlie Chaplin wasn‘t just an actor. He created the characters he portrayed and wrote and directed the films he starred in. There hasn‘t been anyone like him since. But his art, his life, and above all his politics were dangerous to the political system. The opening of “Chaplin” shows him on a tightrope, and he was heading for a fall. Based on a book by Christopher Curtis and Thomas Meehan and with music and lyrics by Curtis, this is the best, most powerful, most intelligent new musical of the season. It‘s a worthy tribute to Chaplin the man, inventive and often thrilling.
The most astonishing moment in this rich and nuanced play comes when the magnificent horse Joey is caught in barbed wire in a no-man’s land between World War I British and German soldiers. Troops on both sides call an unofficial cease fire so one of them can climb out of the trenches and free him.
It takes a horse, an animal with no politics, to bring out the humanity of both sides. We see that the soldiers are not born killers; they are simply obeying orders by political leaders far from the front.
This avant garde take on the Faust story at BAM is by turns inventive, surreal, quirky, gimmicky, tedious, diverting and fascinating. Inspired by the works of Goethe and Marlowe, it was produced and written collaboratively by members of the Vesturport Theatre and the Reykjavik City Theatre of Iceland. Their devil Mephisto (Magnus Jonsson), starts out looking like a moribund Andy Warhol and ends up channeling a hollow-faced David Bowie.
When I saw the promotion photos of a man lying on a woman with his hand on her bare breast, I thought this play would be erotic. It is anything but. It is searing, but it is the heat of violence not of sex. There is a lot of blood. The blood of a violent coupling. The blood of puppies that the white farm owner wanted killed because his dog mated with a local black dog, not one of the pedigreed ones. Funny that it seems exploitative and humiliating of both the man and the woman while not being erotic.
“A woman who behaves never writes history” was the motto of Aimee Semple McPherson, who beginning in the 1920s became a media phenomenon. This smashing and smartly staged production shows how the farm girl who wanted to be an actress turned Pentecostal preaching into a theatrical art form, for two decades besting envious men and winning millions of followers to her radio programs and giant Hollywood temple.
There‘s a darkness that bakes everything as if it were an old painting of the 1600s. The set and costumes are dark blacks and browns. Blackened bricks are set above white stone and arches. Jasmine branches bereft of flowers are wrapped around a trellis.
The darkness extends to the soul of Cyrano (Douglas Hodge), a hostile, aggressive guardsman obsessed and made miserable by his outsized nose. Inside the body that bears that misshapen proboscis, to which he gives many crude, self-lacerating names, lies a passion for his childhood friend, the beautiful Roxane (Clémence Poésy), which he dares not express.
We are at a glitzy Moscow cabaret, noshing on pirogi and black bread set on small round lacey cloth-covered tables and quaffing freely flowing vodka. The walls are hung with red drapes, and chandeliers dip from the ceiling. All around us, on risers along the walls and through the spaces between tables, actors in costumes of the early 19th-century Russian military and low nobility enact the drama of love and betrayal between Natasha (Phillipa Soo) and Anatole (Lucas Steele) from Tolstoy‘s “War and Peace.”
The mayor in a small coastal town in Norway promotes a town development project that turns out to be toxic. He gets the local newspaper editor to cooperate in suppressing the truth. The doctor who has discovered the danger is the mayor‘s brother, but the politician has no qualms in trying to destroy him – to label him an “enemy of the people” — for threatening his position and the financial benefits the project would bring.
Lisa D‘Amour‘s play “Detroit” is a dark metaphor for the disintegration of American society. The acting is very good, and Annie Kauffman‘s direction is sharp and gritty, but this script sometimes appears almost like a TV melodrama. It‘s as if a “big idea” was slapped on top of a roiling personal and social drama.
The irony is that what has been described as the theater of the absurd is so real. Eugène Ionesco‘s “Rhinocéros” is a brilliant description of how people succumb to and collaborate with authoritarian regimes. In his art, there is a numbing truth.
French director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who runs the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, has given a dazzlingly staging at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Romanian playwright Ionesco‘s 1959 masterpiece about how ordinary people let themselves be led and manipulated till they turn into thugs and fascists. And how the most ordinary among them can shed his humanity and intellect — or find solitary courage.
It‘s the late 1930s, in Charleston, South Carolina‘s Catfish Row where the poverty of the Depression seems permanent. Clara (Nikki Renée Daniels) cradling her infant, and her husband Jake the fisherman (the charming Joshua A. Henry) thrill you to the bones with “Summertime.”
The poor black residents eke out a living fishing, picking cotton and hawking goods to housewives. They go to church a lot. Sometimes they have a lively good time at picnics. The men, looking for excitement and quick riches, gamble on dice. Their wives struggle to keep them responsible.
Horton Foote‘s “Blind Date,” set in 1928 in the imaginary Harrison, Texas, was written in 1985 and examines the southern marriage mart of the earlier years through the prism of feminism. The first and best of three one-act plays by Foote being presented by Primary Stages, it pits a bright young woman, who likes books and Rudy Vallée songs, against boring gentlemen callers, in this case one who, as a conversation gambit, recites all the books of the Bible in a minute. She (smartly) disappears upstairs.
It‘s always good timing for a play about ruthlessness and skullduggery in politics, but none better than this year when the Romney campaign has raised it to outsized proportions. The essence of Gore Vidal‘s riveting political satire, which premiered in March 1960, is the corruption of the system. Vidal ran for Congress in Westchester County, NY, (alas, he didn‘t win), so he got closer to politics than other playwrights. He also nails the mainstream press for its gullibility and stupidity.
If Clifford Odets had written a musical for the Group Theater, it would have been “Newsies.” The author of the militant “Waiting for Lefty,” with its moving chorus of “Strike, Strike!,” lives in spirit in Harvey Fierstein‘s play about young exploited workers who rebel against the corporate boss.
At a time when trade unions are beaten down by the big-money people who run our country, it is thrilling to see a play that celebrates the struggle of worker to get decent pay. And especially a reminder of how corporate magnates would and did exploit children if they could. So, cheers to Fierstein for writing the book of this play. At the performance I attended, the enthusiastic reaction of the middle class audience (who could afford the tickets) shows that his message is well received. That is a story that hasn‘t been reported.
He‘s silly, he‘s clever, he‘s outrageous, and James Corden dominates the stage as the sometimes bumbling Brit who ends up working for a criminal and a thug, neither of whom must meet each other or know of his connection to them. And neither of whom are quite what they seem. One, Roscoe Crabb, the gumshoe, turns out to be his sister (Jemima Rooper), as Roscoe has been murdered by the other, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).
Delightfully clever and funny, the musical lark “Sister Act” is feminist as well. It revolves around the tribulations of Deloris Van Cartier (a smashing Patina Miller when I saw it, now Raven-Symoné), who does a raunchy, gyrating “Take Me to Heaven” number in a nightclub run by her hoodlum boyfriend Curtis Jackson (Kingsley Leggs). But after she decides to leave him, she sees him shoot a suspected informer. Fearful of what he might do to her, she races away to the police. Indeed, the gangster orders his men to find and kill her. But the cop (Chester Gregory), who turns out to be an old school chum, hides her out at a convent.
