I have to start out by saying that I despise everything about celebrity and the attendant fawning over people in the public eye, generally in movies or fashion, just because they are in the public eye. That doesn’t include criticism of their art – of acting or design, for example – just the intense interest over every personal detail of their lives. Get a life! I want to scream. Your own!
This gem of a play by Theresa Rebeck is a theater aficionado’s delight. A stage manager and two actors – one an overpaid film star and the other a struggling pure artist –connect in a rehearsal for a Broadway production of an undiscovered masterpiece by Franz Kafka. As the run-through proceeds, celebrity film actors who get starring roles in theater are deftly and comically skewered. The play, given light-hearted and subtle direction by Scott Ellis, is one of the best of the season. The cast is excellent.
It starts with a light ball setting off two figures; she is in black underwear. Hot Latin drums keep a frenetic double time. Then for a change of pace comes a Lady in white silk and a man in a tux; they waltz and execute twirls through the air in a way you hadn’t seen. After that, 20s/30s jazz dancing; the guy wears a fedora and vest. A sailor and his partner jitterbug. A woman in pink is squired by a guy in a black leather jacket. (Costumes are by Janet Hine.)
The conceit of this bizarre, whimsical play could be dismissed as an absurd allegory except that it is based on true facts! Take men who don‘t have a clue about women’s sexuality, add a few wives who feel malaise, throw in a guy who’s unhappy that he can’t find a female partner, and send them to a doctor with a very unusual prescription. It’s often comic, albeit, like the bad sex it skewers, ultimately unsatisfying.
Melissa James Gibson has a clever way with words. In this stage-of-life play, she uses that talent to examine the lives of four college chums who have stayed close friends, for good and for ill, into their late 30s. It’s not a deep play, but it’s engaging. In a sympathetic, non-judgmental way, she deals with friendship, the dissolution of marriage, adultery, personal loyalty, death, and the desire for a meaningful life.
For over a quarter of a century, a trio of witty Brits has been amusing audiences with pointed political musical satire and a few jabs at social mores. The latest version in the Brits Off Broadway Festival includes some numbers that you won’t find even from hot American satirists.
Ragtime is a cinematic, visionary, heart-stopping view of America of the early 1900s. The power and sweep of the bittersweet mix of true history and invention take your breath away. The characters are meant to be symbols, as the play mixes real people with invented ones, true events with imaginary ones. Fictional people come from three families”upper-middle class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, socialist immigrant Jewish from Latvia, and Harlem black – who represent American dreams and the tragedies that ensued during the struggle for justice. They play also shows the transformative power of the new 20th century.
There’s a whiff of television in Tracy Letts’ dark comedy about a sixties radical coming to terms with his life and a society that continues to have an underclass. The story is intriguing if a bit formulaic. It’s as if Letts said, Well, we need a middle-aged white ex-hippie with a pony tail, a brash young black man, a couple of cops of mixed colors and genders and some bad guys to prevent the story from cloying too much. That said, there is some charm in what he came up with, even if it’s not great drama. Tina Landau directs at an agile pace that highlights the laughs.
When theater actress Lily Darnley (Kristen Johnston) kisses her image in the mirror, it might be taken as an exaggeration. It’s not. It’s the quintessential moment in this funny backstage comedy about self-absorbed celebrity divas who, alas, were just as much among us in the 1920s as today.
There’s a genre of musicals that is supposed to be for kids, but is just as much for adults. I include The Lion King and Wicked and now Shrek the Musical. I loved them all. What they have in common is strong moral politics. The characters in the first play fight oppression, the second combat racism and Shrek does a bit of both. Like the others, it proves that shows about ideas are more interesting and fun than empty-headed fluff.
This social and political back story of Rhythm and Blues is a vibrant sometimes sketchy, but visually exciting story musical with terrific sounds that range from R&B to gospel. It’s 1951 on Beale Street, and Huey (Chad Kimball) wanders into a hot music joint. He’s found the music of his soul. The only problem is that this is the black part of town, and he’s white.
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s powerful plays are written in the dark poetry of lives marked by the desperate seeking of love etched against routine misfortune and tragedy. Yet the characters often exhibit joyous defiance against the odds of disappointment.
The friends and family whose lives make up the stories McCraney tells reside in the projects in the mythical city of San Pere in the bayou of the Louisiana Delta, south of New Orleans. There’s little sense of an outside world.
Directors in modern times have enjoyed playing with Shakespeare, often modernizing his plays, putting actors in scenes and clothes that are not of the period described. But Brian Kulick, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company and the adapter/director of this play, entwines Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, set in Troy during the Trojan War, with The Iron Age by Thomas Heywood, a contemporary. Shakespeare’s is the more personal play, but much of the macho jousting seems inspired by Heywood’s war story. The amalgam is a worthy effort, though I think I’d rather have seen Shakespeare’s play. This one often lacked his poetry.
Nightingale is Lynn Redgrave’s less-than-completely-truthful memoir of the women of her family, their men and their unhappiness about marital sex. Redgrave as an actress of course does a fine professional job. And the dialogue is smart. But for a tell-all memoir, mostly about sex, it manages to eke the most lively sections out of the one part of the story that is totally made up.
Alan Ayckbourn’s mordantly funny satire of middle class marital life – a staple of his genius through 70 plays — is significantly enhanced by the presence, almost as a fly on the wall, of 9-year-old Winnie (Ayesha Antoine). Winnie’s school assignment for the next day is to write about My Wonderful Day, and she methodically records the marital spats and infidelities she observes, generally with a blank expression and fidgeting as any kid might. Ayckbourn is a master of subtle slapstick, the one liner, the bizarre situation. His dark wit is displayed here with perfect comic timing.
If there’s a king and queen in this production of The Royal Family, the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber 1927 parody of the Barrymore acting dynasty, they are Jan Maxwell and Reg Rogers, who steal the show with their theatricality.
The device of the play is that Julie Cavendish (Maxwell) and her daughter Gwen (Kelli Barrett) are torn between their love of the stage and their desire to have married lives. Julie’s mother Fanny, (Rosemary Harris), the grande dame of the family revels in having had both.
A Steady Rain by Keith Huff, a television script writer, is a thriller about two beat cops, partners, friends from childhood, that would seem to belong on TV. On the other hand, some of the events they describe are so bloody, that I’d rather see them described in the two interlocking monologues that make up the play rather than watch them in full color.
The stories are gripping. On the other hand, like most TV, you forget them pretty quickly.
Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie is a psychological thriller, a rich drama that has three characters enmeshed in a web of conflicts that shift the upper hand from one to the other, depending on whether the field of battle is class or gender.
If it’s about class, then Miss Julie (Sienna Miller), the rich daughter of a lord, is on top. If it’s about gender, then it’s John (Jonny Lee Miller, no relation), the lord’s chauffeur-valet. But that holds only if the woman is as neurotic as Julie. Or a woman defeated by her time.
Jude Law drives Hamlet with an animal energy and naturalistic fervor that overwhelm the stage. This is not the tentative or tormented Hamlets we are used to. This Hamlet is a thriller and Hamlet the vengeful detective. The excitement is palpable. It’s a brilliant interpretation you won’t soon forget.
Nathan Louis Jackson’s play about a black family in Kansas City struggling to achieve a middle class life avoids the pitfalls of sitcom due largely to the four accomplished actors and director Thomas Kail, who breathe life into what on its face is a rather predictable story.
It hangs on whether Malcolm King (an appealing Alano Miller), who has managed to get a masters degree in Connecticut, will give up chances of a good university teaching job under his mentor, an environmental professor, or will he stay home to care for his father William (a warm-spirited Wendell Pierce) who has muscular dystrophy.
Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage smartly shows the disintegration of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps people civil. Reza, perhaps coming from the salon culture of France, has a habit of locating her dramas in living rooms. These tête-à -têtes ought to show the height of culture. Instead, they display the dark sides of polite society.
This story begins with a touted civilized meeting between two couples, one clearly upper class, the other middle class, one couple chic, the other dowdy, to deal with fact that son of the first hit the son of the second. They start out honest, each admitting the family faults. As the evening gathering of nice people progresses, they descend from throwing words into throwing things. Taken further, we see the basic failure of ethical man. It is a fascinating transformation.
This charming, vivid musical biography tells the story of two American composers who changed the idiom of western popular music. The curious parallel personal tragedies of Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin exist in contrast to their generally upbeat lively sounds.
In the early 1900s, the two musicians created musical sounds that established a new American music that would echo across this landscape and the world. Both were consummate outsiders: one the son of a slave, the other a Russian immigrant who had escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms with his parents. Mark Saltzman’s play – with the stunning music of Joplin and Berlin – is a lively, appealing, often fascinating look back at what motivated these American musical giants. The motivations and the men were quite different.
About the political and personal struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, the play underlines the eternal reality of struggles for power. Written by Friedrich Schiller in the 18th century and adapted by Peter Oswald, it is a political thriller that gets a memorable staging by Phyllida Lloyd.
Alan Ayckbourn’s play is an ultra-sophisticated comedy that verges perilously close to sitcom, then skirts around it. The round-robin of three plays is what the clever British author posits against the normal sequential serial, a Rashomon style
The idea behind Noel Coward’s play is quite promising. Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett), a middle-aged murder mystery novelist – obviously quite successful in writing or marriage, from the country villa he inhabits – invites a medium (Angela Lansbury)
