David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish is a highly improbable but entertaining diversion about a U.S. sign-company owner from Cleveland who goes to China to persuade government tourism officials that they need better translations. For example, Deformed men’s toilet doesn’t quite cut it for handicapped men’s toilet. The play benefits from comic, fast-paced direction by Leigh Silverman.
Eric Schaeffer’s moving, elegant production of Follies is dramatic proof of Steven Sondheim’s brilliance – the subtle combination of emotional focus and scintillating musical panache and wit. It is said best by the show’s name, Follies, which has a double meaning. It refers to the high-kicking vaudeville show the women of the show danced in their youths and to the foolish decisions of human beings. The book is by James Goldman, who is perfectly attuned to Sondheim’s sensibility.
Weird is relative, you might say about the characters in these three rather bizarre comedies about relatives as a connecting theme. The self-involvement of a wife when her husband dies, the revelations set off by a couple who flee a wedding at which one was to be wed, the impact of marital conflict on an unborn son, everything turns on the unexpected, which of course is what makes memorable comedy.
In the mid-1980s I went to Peshawar on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to write about the war between the Russians and Afghans going on across the divide. It all came rushing back during J.T. Rogers’ gripping theatrical docudrama of what went wrong then (and it was virtually all wrong) with American policy in Afghanistan.
Sutton Foster’s performance in Cole Porter’s frivolous, sophisticated Anything Goes glitters as much as the gold sequins on her clothes. She is one of the great musical actresses of our day, and she has a field day showing it in this 1934 musical, featuring a scintillating score with, in addition to the title song, numbers such as I Get a Kick Out of You, You’re the Top, Easy to Love, and It’s De-lovely. Porter’s music and lyrics are still unmatched for invoking the spirit of light-hearted romance.
Cynical and romantic, Noël Coward manages to be both in this charming pas de quatre about the impossibility of love. And this was in 1930!
Two couples find their honeymoons in the south of France held hostage to the marriage that one of each duo had with the other five years before. Might not be a problem, except the sparks that ignited the earlier romance have not been quenched. In fact, it doesn’t take much for the smoldering embers to ignite.
Mary Testa is thrilling in Michael John LaChiusa’s cantata about the true-life Anna Edson Taylor, a gutsy, idiosyncratic woman who in 1901 went over Niagara Falls in an oak barrel she had designed. She was 63, had an overwhelming sense of self and saw this as the defining moment to prove there was greatness in her.
Loneliness and inhumanity are the themes of stark but elegant conception by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne of a pastiche of Beckett mood pieces designed for Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. They are dark and yet sometimes comical, as if one should not take the dreariness to seriously, a combination of Commedia dell’ Arte and Mime, with an acting team at the top of its form. They show happiness and unhappiness dependent on oneself and on circumstances and on how one uses those circumstances.
I saw Maureen McGovern at Birdland, the iconic jazz club on West 44th Street in New York. It always amazes me to hear her smooth mix of jazzy, a soupçon of folk, and lyrics that are as smartly political as they get. These are not the standards you might expect at a cabaret. At 61, McGovern channels the 60s and 70s, and her rendition of the Beatles When I’m 64 is the best I’ve ever heard. She presents an ethereal version of Up, Up and Away (Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon.) She also conveys a feminist idiom: A woman is a fighter, a mighty force of nature. On the folk side of the era, this very versatile performer does a powerful If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), noting that Pete Seeger has always been a hero of mine. And McGovern has long been a favorite of mine.
Michael West’s play is a charming, stylized, fantastical imagining of a Dublin theater troop that gets caught up in the Irish independence movement over a hundred years ago. It tells the story of some actors’ efforts to found the Irish National Theatre of Ireland and the conflicts and dangers that arise because some of them are also committed to the Cause.
The Elevator Repair Company’s often entertaining, sometimes puzzling parody of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel was maybe not intended to be the second. But the production, which cuts but doesn’t change a word of the book, makes one wonder how anyone could have taken Hemingway seriously. Or maybe that’s a result of this hokey presentation of Hemingway’s lines.
I hated this play by English playwright and film director Jez Butterworth. Yes I know it got plaudits and awards, but I thought it was pretentious drivel. The friend I took also hated it. Lest you think that was just an off night, her friend who attended at another time hated it. Nevertheless it was so powerfully acted by Mark Rylance and so vividly directed by Ian Rickson that we were annoyed and even angry, but never bored.
Maria Callas’ brilliance, as articulated by her dazzling stand-in Tyne Daly, was as much about discipline and courage, presence and presentation, as about hitting the right notes. Playwright Terrence McNally shows that through an imagined master class Callas gives late in her career. Working with students, she focuses on what makes a great star rather than a skilled performer. But McNally also creates a feminist parable of a woman who sold her soul for the lifestyle offered by a billionaire.
In a fascinating and occasionally lurid take on sex and hypocrisy — as current as it ever was five centuries past — The Public Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure opens with horned demons slithering around stage. They will appear again at a bordello and elsewhere. Suddenly, a cover is pulled off a mound on a bed and horrific creatures scamper off, leaving the Duke of Vienna (Lorenzo Pisoni) awake and distraught at his sexual fantasies.
This is a terrific feminist juke box musical. It is based on the true story of Florence Greenberg (Beth Leavel), a New Jersey housewife who discovered the Shirelles, four Passaic, NJ, high school coeds, who she would make into a major singing group. She would, in the process, move to Manhattan, shed her traditional husband and take up with a young song writer. This was in 1958, before feminism became a mass movement. Also before Motown, before the Beatles. The visionary Flo and pop music would never be the same.
This is a Shakespeare sex play. Didn’t know he did those, did you? The playbill for the production has a cover that says, Shakespeare in bed. And the comic Reg Rogers, whose signature style of exaggerated and plosive speech makes him recognizable anywhere, delivers a long near-tirade to the play’s heroine, Helena (the generally cool and often hot and always excellent Annie Parisse) about the importance of getting rid of one’s virginity.
Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy is a delightfully clever political romp which pits a crooked businessman and a bought U.S. Senator against a supposedly dumb kept woman who gives everyone a civics lesson while taking the bad guys down a few notches.
Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play is a very funny, ironic, grungy and cautionary tale where four-letter words, sex and betrayal are mixed in equal parts in the down and dirty milieu of New York City drug addicts and their relatives and friends. It starts at a residential hotel in Times Square. Jackie (Bobby Cannavale), just out of jail and on parole, is ready to take up again with his sweetheart Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), but then he notices a man’s hat on a bedroom table.
John Guare’s 1970 dark comedy, in a brilliant revival by David Cromer, shifts between humor and tragedy as it traces the path that links illusion to delusion. As one morphs into the other, the differences appear increasingly subtle.
It was 1935 Warsaw, and a small traveling troop of Jewish actors were playing the shtetl circuit, as they half affectionately, half mockingly called it. They did vaudeville, they did Shakespeare, they did the Bible. Raisel (Donna Murphy) as Moses’ wife: You’re going to do what? You can’t even part your hair! The times are dark and the troop reaches for answers in absurdity: A pogrom is not an easy act to follow.
Michael Halberstam’s chamber music version of Shaw’s Candida is a charming and exhilarating production about male-female relations in earlier days of the battle for women’s sexual freedom. The story is adapted by Austin Pendleton from Shaw’s 1898 version of the play, which he revised in 1930, when post-flapper era so much in society had changed. At the turn of the century, women were even more psychologically and materially dependent on their husbands.
Surreal, sometimes funny, often cruel, Rajiv Joseph’s play in a stunning production by Moisés Kaufman looks at killing, in war, and among beasts, and wonders if it is a primordial instinct, something that somehow infects people who think they don’t do that. It is a powerful production, not your typical war story, as the murder victims come back as ghosts.
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia plays with truth and illusion and shows how easy it is to be deceived. It sets true intellectuals devoted to search and discovery against glory-seeking scholars who invent convenient truths. Stoppard, as he is good at doing, mixes truth about historical figures with fantasy about their connections with the protagonists in a way that adds to the fascination of the plot.
The struggles of the working class are starkly depicted in David Lindsay-Abaire’s striking portrait of a handful of friends in Boston’s Southie neighborhood. At a time when economic decisions by the government leave millions of workers in the dust, it’s a political as well as social commentary.
Like the wind and rain storm that swirls around him as he wanders lands he once oversaw, Derek Jacobi blows fiercely in fury at his faithless daughters. His face is red almost to bursting in disbelief. His eyes could sear with their gaze. Yet, in Jacobi’s powerful, dominating portrayal in the Donmar Warehouse production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this King Lear’s howling anger at how his royal state has been eclipsed is the other side of a royal flaw. It is the mistake of the self-absorbed and powerful who believe the ingratiating lies of their courtiers. And relatives. Both Lear and his loyal Earl of Gloucester (Paul Jesson, quietly moving in his misery) are outmaneuvered by evil progeny.
