Alex Timbers’ play is a stunning satirical revisionist history of America’s seventh president Andrew Jackson as a genocidal Indian killer. It’s done in a rock idiom that takes the edge off and makes him seem almost a man of his time as well as/rather than a political murderer. But with some present day vernacular, it takes on immediacy. It’s a commentary on the past and also on the present day politics of state killing that is rare in its gut-wrenching toughness.
A stage musical/documentary may be a new genre and this one, created and directed by Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator James Lapine, works smartly and engagingly to provide a tour through the life and works of the master songwriter. The man who is known for sustained peaks of imagination comes to life through a very innovative combination of video and musical numbers, with an appealing cast led by Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat.
Dreariness is the design motif of Gordon Edelstein’s persuasive staging of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 memory play about a family trapped in unhappiness and illusion. Dreary dark wallpaper hovers over the single bed with a rose spread in the New Orleans hotel room that the writer, Tom (Patch Darragh), Williams’ alter ego, inhabits. The same claustrophobic space becomes the St. Louis tenement rooms he shared with his mother Amanda (Judith Ivey) and sister Laura (Keira Keeley) .
A table is set with bread and cakes, back-dropped by a forest created from a jumble of cross-hatched planks painted and splotched to suggest leaves. A servant is angry at the housekeeper who enters the space without warning. Do we barge in on you? Class stratification and conflicts ripple through this richly comic production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s satire of a Russian aristocracy high on self-importance and low on cash.
Martin McDonagh takes weird to new levels in this ultimate shaggy dog story. It’s bizarre and funny and if you suspend disbelief and don’t take it too seriously, you will have a good time. It seems that a 17-year-old kid was playing catch in Spokane, Washington, when six hillbillies dragged him to the railroad tracks, forced his hand on the rail and watched while a train sped by and sliced it off. Then they used it to wave him good-bye. He, Carmichael (Christopher Walken), decided if he didn‘t die he would retrieve his hand and pay them back. He has spent the ensuing 47 years doing just that.
Million Dollar Quartet is hot on music and slight on story, the latter a chance 1956 gathering of country and rock innovators Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis at a Memphis recording studio. Fans will like the stars’ doubles’ performances of the songs that made them famous. And this jukebox musical jumps off the charts whenever Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis, dominates the stage with his wild jazzy piano playing and furious rock lyrics.
Creating a richness in their arrangement that adds to the beauty of each poem, director Peter Brook has ordered 31 Shakespearean sonnets, dramatically recited by Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington, to create a striking theater piece. It elegantly expresses love as it consumes men and women in the highs and lows of their relationships and into their later years. The poems are grouped to praise love that lasts through time;and to plumb the pain of separation; the torments of jealousy, self-deception, and guilt; and the sorrows of older age. That doesn’t quite make a play, but it’s more than a poetry reading.
This is not the kind of black tie London cocktail party that Noel Coward was wont to attend. There may be champagne poured and secret infidelities going on, but the darkness that bubbles out of those glasses up reminds one of Albee or Pinter. The Actors Company Theatre has mounted a striking production of T.S. Eliot’s 1950 play that one won’t soon forget.
Horton Foote’s story of a young boy growing to manhood in rural Texas in the early decades of the last century is so gripping, and elegantly performed, that it’s hard to acknowledge that the mundane events of family interactions, marriage, divorce, illness and death in the extended Robideaux clan are in themselves, presented with great subtlety by Michael Wilson, understated and sometimes almost without great drama. Or else, they are the drama of the every day.
Helen (Abigail Breslin) is 10, a wild child, throwing tantrums, screaming. Annie (Alison Pill) is 20, saucy and opinionated. She says, The only time I have trouble is when I’m right which is so often.
Both of them are whip-smart as well as strong-minded, and William Gibson’s 1985 play tells the fascinating story of how teacher Annie Sullivan got Helen Keller, deaf and blind since infancy, to understand, to touch-sign, and to express herself so brilliantly that she became a world-famous traveler and lecturer. The fact that all this occurs in a small town in 1880s Alabama makes it the more astonishing.
This Kander and Ebb show, given an astonishing and dazzling staging by director Susan Stroman, tells the story of what happens to nine blacks accused of collaborating in the rape of two white women in Alabama in 1931. The mood is a jazzy operetta. The dramatic vignettes of the story are interspersed with numbers of a minstrel show, which allows you to catch your breath between horrific events and adds the element of satire.
Who better to craft a political musical than John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the 1993 classic Kiss of the Spiderwoman, about the movie fantasies of a prisoner tortured by the Argentine dictatorship that brutalized the country nearly half a century ago. And director-choreographer Susan Stroman stages this in a cutting, jazzy minstrel style that takes irony to new levels.
Arthur Miller’s story of the betrayal that tears apart a longshore family in Brooklyn was a metaphor for the treachery of the people who named names in the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. In this powerful revival directed by Gregory Mosher, we witness the inexorable downfall of Eddie Carbone (Liev Schreiber), a longshoreman, who forgets the sense of honor and loyalty that is the glue that holds together the hard-working Italian community in Red Hook, on the Brooklyn waterfront, where he and his wife Beatrice (Jessica Hecht) live. His self-interest is not the careerism of the film and theater people who betrayed colleagues to HUAC, but jealousy ignited by the illicit passion he feels for his niece Catherine (Scarlett Johansson).
Donald Margulies’s powerful and moving play dissects the professional and psychological passion of a photographer who covers the horrors of wars, famine, and genocide. Time stands still represents the moment when she presses the shutter button and sees the world only through the view finder. Time stops, sound cuts out; her experience is just what is taking place in the rectangle. There is an objectifying and separation from reality. And for Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) it’s the only moment in life that counts.
Garry Essendine (Victor Garber), who has the sense of a flighty youth, is a self-absorbed actor of 54. He is wont to shave a decade or so off his life, especially when he is playing up to pretty young women. Noel Coward’s semi-autobiographical comedy is at times amusing – it is meant to be a send-up of the actor and his entourage — but it’s nowhere near as clever as Coward can be. And the production by director Nicholas Martin lacks sparkle.
Taking us back to Clybourne Park, to where Lorraine Hansbury’s black family moved in A Raisin in the Sun, Bruce Norris has written a clever, pointed comedy, acted by a superb cast under the well paced direction of Pam MacKinnon, that plumbs the depths of racism to see how it’s changed from the blatant late 50s to the more subtle present.
The free-floating anger exuded by the Jets and Sharks as they clash under and leap onto fire escapes is combustible. Any reason for the gangs’ hostility? Well, when Officer Krupke (Lee Sellars) arrives in the neighborhood, along the Hudson River on the Upper West Side of New York City, he slams one kid in the stomach with a Billy club. Lt. Schrank (Steve Bassett) comes into a local drugstore and insults the Puerto Ricans as migrant scum. The sociological stage is set. There’s nothing dated about Arthur Laurents’ revival of his own West Side Story. This American theater classic is another proof that the best, most enduring musicals (and plays) combine personal stories with political ones.
My guest at Hair was an old friend who had been a leader of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. As we left the theater, he shook his head. He said, We were much more political. That said, and history corrected, Diane Paulus’s revival of the 1968 musical now on Broadway captures the mood of part of a generation of young people (a minority of their contemporaries) that helped change the culture.
In David Ives’ ingeniously clever play, a feminist avenger turns the tables on a playwright conducting auditions for a work based on Venus in Furs, a novel of sexual domination and submission by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the 19th-century Austrian writer. An actress arrives in an audition studio. She’s wearing a black leather skirt and tight black lacey underwear top, stiletto-heeled boots, and a silver-studded dog-collar. She’s not on the audition list. But she persuades the playwright to let her read, and suddenly she is a 19th-century Austrian aristocrat, charming, articulate, and outrageous in the white flouncy dress she pulls over her grunge-wear. This play plumbs men’s psychological connections between sex and power and their view of women.
For about 20 years, from 1964, when Communists ruled Poland and dissidents went to jail, a very extraordinary underground theater troop bucked censorship and pelted the regime with avant garde works inspired by the director Jerzy Grotowski. It played to full houses at shipyards and churches and other opposition stages until the actors in 1985 were forced into exile.
Wormwood the name of a star, is a vivid, ironic and satirical attack on the Polish Communist system. First staged in 1985 at the church in Mistrzejowice, near Krakov, it is composed of pointed skits whose double meanings and metaphors were clear to audiences.
Zero Mostel — consummate actor, painter and personality — was a presence in American films and stage for decades, except for a brief hiatus called McCarthyism. Zero was cynical, iconoclastic and flip. He scowled and shouted in a voice that was stentorian. Jim Brochu’s one-man show, directed by Piper Laurie, brings him to life, eyes piercing out of a gray-bearded jowly face, recreating his physical presence and attitude, and most importantly his passionate political commitment to honor at a time when theater people and others were selling out their colleagues.
Director Ciaran O’Reilly has done a brilliant job in staging O’Neill’s 1920 psychological thriller about the self-appointed emperor of a Caribbean backwater whose subjects suddenly turn on him. John Douglas Thompson is overpowering as Brutus Jones, a black American who has fled from a southern chain gang and, persuading the locals that he can be killed only with a silver bullet, takes over in a revolution that removes the erstwhile chief.
This charmingly radical musical by Yip Harburg and Fred Saidy – given a smart, lively, delicious staging by Warren Carlyle — was a shot across the bow of conservative America when it opened on Broadway in 1947. It showed black and white sharecroppers in solidarity against the tax foreclosure sale of a farm. It depicted the corruption and racism of a white politician who is buying up local real estate so he can block cheap public electric power. And it satirized capitalism by declaring that digging up some gold buried in the ground would remove an incentive and wreck free enterprise. Even the famous If this isn’t love has the pointed line, If this isn‘t love, it’s red propaganda!
In Annie Baker’s fascinating play acting exercises morph into real life for an instructor and four people who sign up for a community theater workshop in Shirley, Vermont. Slowly, the theatrical games turn into life games. Director Sam Gold moves seamlessly between acting exercises and real life drama so that the characters’ stories, said by others, are expressed and acted out, as it were, by themselves.
