Bea Arthur On Broadway: Just Between Friends
Booth Theater

Demi-goddess Bea Arthur has subtitled her autobiographical solo, "Just Between Friends," an apt description of a show in which she casually offers bawdy jokes, novelty songs, show-tunes, and once-over-lightly career recollections. It's all charming, amusing, and just a little dull. Even if Elaine Stritch weren't seven blocks away giving a one-woman show for the ages, this look at the Arthurian legend would be disappointingly thin. For example, with her trademark croak-voice, the Golden Girl gets a big laugh by saying Jerome Robbins was "a genius.. Pure genius..

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Erotic Adventures in Venice
La MaMa ETC - First Floor

If the prolific and lauded playwright Mario Fratti (adapter of Fellini's film "81/2" that became Nine, the Broadway musical) has secured a solid international standing for his satiric considerations of serious subjects (Cage, Suicide, Victim, Che Guevara), the plays of his that I have seen suggest to me that Americans may not be tuned in to the specific and possibly too-subtle ironies that propel Fratti's largely political and socially-conscious work.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Four
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

One of the choice bits in David Lynch's delectable Hollywood mindwarp, "Mulholland Drive" is where a director remarks upon the completion of audition scene between a young, would-be starlet (Naomi Watts) and an older, grayed once-lothario (Chad Everett): "Very good. It was forced, maybe, but still...humanistic." Christopher Shinn's remarkable 1998 play Four succeeds in being the very opposite. It is humanistic simply in how un-forced it is.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Almost Holy Picture, An
American Airlines Theater

Kevin Bacon is an extremely popular movie star (36 films are credited in the playbill). He is also half of the much publicized musical group, The Bacon Brothers, and is currently all over the tube in at least two highly-visible commercials, one promoting New York, another Visa. This is also his eighth listed appearance onstage. Those credits alone are enough of a draw to fill a large Broadway theater, and the Roundabout Theater Company must be very aware of all this.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Almost Holy Picture, An
American Airlines Theater

I happened to catch an A&E "Biography" special last month on actor Kevin Bacon, and while watching, I was taken aback by how much work he had done that almost nobody gives him any credit for. Now in his early forties (and still looking as youthful as in his "Diner" days), Bacon has become synonymous with ubiquitous celebrity, having a Six Degrees-type game named after him and generally appearing as a supporting player in various Hollywood pictures. But what the actor may not realize is that placing him in this "he's everywhere" state is no insult.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Almost Holy Picture, An
American Airlines Theater

After 9/11, a little spirituality on a Broadway stage isn't a bad thing, but Heather McDonald's static solo play isn't likely to give anyone religion. Kevin Bacon plays a man saddled with Job-like troubles, including witnessing a school bus crash, enduring three miscarriages, and raising a child with lanugo, a rare disease that causes hair to grow all over her body.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Afghan Woman
Theater for the New City

Bina Sharif has presence -- even under a burqa. (And this one is not the Afghan light blue but a dramatic combination of aqua, purple and orange silk with iridescent eye slot.) In her new solo show, Afghan Woman, Sharif gives voice to what unfortunately must be an average mother's plight in Afghanistan. Hemmed in by war, poverty and a medieval regime, her character, Narges Hazrat, can moan over her dead children with the security that no person can change this fate of hers.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
Brutal Imagination
Vineyard Theater

Here's the concept: the black guy that South Carolina mom Susan Smith conjured up as a scapegoat when she drove her two kids into a lake takes on a life of his own and becomes various metaphorical representations of how America treated black people in the past century. Apart from an impressive lighting design and a host of familiar agit-prop gimmicks, that's the most imaginative idea to be found in Cornelius Eady, Diedre Murray and Diane Paulus's poetic satire. There's no drama here, only lots of narration, free-verse blather, emoting and oh-so-familiar liberal guilt.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
Brutal Imagination
Vineyard Theater

The horrifying details of the crime of Union County South Carolina resident Susan Smith are given a pretentiously lyrical but also compelling resonance in Brutal Imagination. Smith was charged and convicted in 1994 of the death of her two young sons, Michael, age 3, and Alexander, age 14 months. Smith had strapped them securely in the back seat of her car that she then pushed into a lake. The incidents surrounding the case are shown through an abstracted fiction laced with factual reportage. That particularized fiction is called Mr.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
Cymbeline
Lucille Lortel Theater

Well-intentioned, occasionally lively mounting ultimately thwarted by an uneven cast and the schematic nature of the play itself. After 3 ½ hours that feel like four, we need the poignance of Winter's Tale or the burlesque joy of Midsummer Night's Dream and not just a pleasantly happy ending.

Best touch: the comic villain's fabricated horse, which rides up and down the aisles and even swishes its tail.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
Flaming Idiots, The: What Goes Up
New Victory Theater

Belying the subtitle of their own show, The Flaming Idiots, a trio of Flying Karamazov-style comedians/jugglers/stupid-human-tricksters, keep an audience "up" for two hours, and we never come down. Juggling bowling pins and circular rings may be old hat, but the verbal jokes feel fresh and are delivered with gusto. The odder moments -- Gyro constructing a bologna sandwich with his feet; Pyro juggling fire atop a very large audience volunteer -- prove even more diverting. Sheer fun, and extra- welcome for that reason.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
Arms and the Man
Bouwerie Lane Theater

Jean Cocteau Rep's production of George Bernard Shaw's always-relevant Arms and the Man is a delightful evening. Director Ernest Johns and his fine cast enliven Shaw's basic view of the ridiculousness of war, giving it a proper romantic/satirical edge that keeps us engaged and smiling.

Outstanding in the cast is Jason Crowl, as the soldier who crawls in the window and into the heart of a young enemy noblewoman. He has the charisma, the edge, to go far in all media of show business. The excellent set by Robert J.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Criss Angel MINDFREAK
World Underground Theater at WWF New York

Mindfreak? More like a hunky guy who wears Marilyn Manson-style leather and mascara, plays Squonk-meets-Moby-like techno music, and offers a bunch of big and small magic tricks. Though in interviews Angel has pooh-poohed the "cheesy" nature of standard magic shows, his disappearances, quick changes and levitations are really standard Blackstone-Copperfield stuff -- a bit of a letdown considering the impressive costumes and post-modern flashiness.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Jackie Wilson Story, The
Beacon Street Hull House

What are they waiting for? The Jackie Wilson Story has been playing to sellout houses since it opened in February 2000, it quickly became the hottest ticket at the 2001 National Black Theater Festival, and every newspaper, magazine, website, radio and TV station in town has caroled the praises of Chester Gregory II's portrayal of the song stylist whose fame and the price of such has served as a cautionary tale for aspiring entertainers to this day.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
By Jeeves
Helen Hayes Theater

Who can knock a gentle, good-natured little musical with a droll sense of humor and a couple of pretty songs? I can, when said musical is more than two and a half hours long, visually boring, drearily inconsequential, and often dull as a dishrag.

Certainly dozens of chuckles (though nary a guffaw) pop up in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn's tribute to the P.G.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
By Jeeves
Helen Hayes Theater

British humor has always seemed oxymoronic to me, and I am admittedly unacquainted with the works of P.G.Wodehouse about the bumbling, though good-natured, wealthy idler, Bertie Wooster (engagingly played by John Scherer), and his omniscient, manipulative butler, Jeeves (impeccably played by Martin Jarvis). One also cannot avoid the global reputation of Andrew Lloyd Webber, although, in this case, the production is so uncharacteristically undersized, just a few moments into the evening, its creator is soon forgotten.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Big Apple Circus: Big Top Doo-Wop
Damrosch Park Tent

With a nod to 1950s music and kitsch and a typical array of acrobatics, animals and clown antics, the latest installment of the Big Apple Circus is, while not especially thrilling, still a guaranteed-good- time family night out. Big Apple veteran clown Barry Lubin (as "Grandma") wins our affection as ever, especially with an amusing bit on a stairmaster.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Christmas With The Crawfords
Chelsea Playhouse

This is a return engagement for the ultra campy en travestie charade that is once again setting its sights on the presumably responsive gay set. That it will surely fail to humor anyone else on the planet is a major drawback. Perhaps the show's San Francisco admirers, during its six-season run in the 90s, saw something special in this audaciously costumed but mostly poorly-acted parade of famous film stars. The premise, however, has potential.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Dragapella With The Kinsey Sicks
Studio 54

If the only barbershop quartet lyrics you know are to "Sweet Adeline," get thee over to the cabaret room upstairs at Studio 54 and catch this quartet of drag queens who mix filthy double-entendres, Yiddish quips and audience participation with their eclectic a cappella song stylings. A little of this parody stuff would ordinarily go a long way, and the foursome do overstay their welcome a bit, but their vocal arrangements are rich and intricate, and their rhymes are often fiendishly clever.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Elaine Stritch: At Liberty
Public Theater

Elaine Stritch doesn't just work in showbiz, she is showbiz. Now in her seventies, and in a new show highlighting her long, rocky career path from Broadway ingenue to industry survivor, Stritch doesn't pull any punches in relaying how she got where she is right now. And she doesn't apologize for any of it.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Elaine Stritch: At Liberty
Public Theater

Elaine Stritch's gravel-dusted voice bears witness to a lifetime of roaring successes, strange interludes, and hard times. But that voice also provides a stirring and sassy solo tour through this artist's sometimes funny, sometime frenetic, and more-often-than-not frenzied life in the theater. Although the trim and attractive Stritch is ill-served by the foolish-looking black tights that costumer Paul Taxewell has chosen for her to wear throughout the performance, she is otherwise brilliantly served by material she and John Lahr, as co-constructionists, have devised.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Everett Beekin
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Richard Greenberg's latest is a frustratingly elusive comedy, one that tracks two generations of a very Jewish family, the first in 1940s lower Manhattan, the second in 1990s La-La-Land. We're encouraged to play the inter-generational connections game (e.g., how was the sister in act one reflected in the daughter in act two?), but Everett Beekin's two parts really don't connect that well, the focus is often unclear, and the finale feels blah.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Everett Beekin
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

If there are skeletons to be found in a family, you can count on Richard Greenberg to exhume them. At least two, of his many excellent plays, Three Days of Rain, and Safe as Houses, are notable for their generation-bridging tremors and traumas. This time Greenberg shows a concern for the fate of a Lower East Side Manhattan Jewish family in the 1940s. If Greenberg makes their present and their future amusing to watch, he also keeps everything else about them obscure and strangely illusive.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein, An
Atlantic Theater

In An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein, six actors with range and flair play a series of extremely off-center characters in Silverstein's bizarre, quirky, mostly insightful short plays. It's sometimes outrageous, sometimes overdone, but most of it is lots of fun. Good abstract set by Walt Spangler, good lighting by Robert Perry, zany costumes by Miguel Angel Huidor, and snappy direction by Karen Kohlhaas contribute to an odd but enjoyable evening.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Ann Hampton Callaway
Feinstein's at the Regency

She opened her set with the Cy Coleman/Carolyn Leigh standard "The Best is Yet to Come" and Ann Hampton Callaway, in her debut at Feinstein's at the Regency, was not kidding. Two minutes later, we were getting our kicks as she went bouncing along Bobby Troup's "Route 66."

Just as the aforementioned are closely identified with Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole, respectively, so are the rest of the tunes Callaway has chosen identified as "signature" songs for some of the greatest jazz and pop vocalists of our time.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Are You Dave Gorman?

What a fabulous idea: Londoner Dave Gorman got it into his head to meet as many other Dave Gormans as he possibly could -- even if it meant flying to New Zealand, Italy, the South of France or wherever else to meet them. In his genial solo, Gorman tracks his encounters, furnishing snapshots and tape recordings as proof.

At first it's amusing how he charts the miles traveled against the number of meetings to come up with a graph of an ideal ratio -- 400-500 mpdg (miles-per-dave-gorman).

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
By Jeeves
Helen Hayes Theater

Now that we've all had our fill of critics telling us "what we need right now" (one would hope), I'm going to come right out and say what we don't need: lackluster Broadway shows that have found residence on the Great White Way out of a desire to fulfill audiences' cravings for frivolity, an excuse to suck away two hours or more of time and be convinced they're doing some good to the theater community. By Jeeves could the most odious example yet.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Blue
Gramercy Theater

Phylicia Rashad makes a triumphant return to the stage in Blue, a breezy, wonderfully pleasing new work by Charles Randolph-Wright. Seeing how effortlessly she commands the stage, you wonder why she isn't on one more often. Best known as Claire Huxtable on the wildly popular "Cosby" shows, Rashad seems born to the stage, with her unmistakable presence and quiet gravity.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
First Love
New York Theater Workshop

The premise of Charles Mee's experimental comedy is laudable: compress a lifelong romantic relationship (and, metaphorically, all relationships) into its high and lowpoints -- first meeting, restaurant date, sharing of cultural signposts and sexual appetites, dish-smashing fight, mournful farewells, reunions, and resigned resumptions.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
Adding Machine, The
14th Street Theater

Elmer Rice wrote The Adding Machine in 1923. It was the first American foray into expressionism, and its best scenes successfully Americanize the bleak comedy of Carl Sternheim. It's the story of poor Mr. Zero, a bookkeeper who's replaced by an adding machine. Worse, he's executed for then murdering his boss. Thereafter, we find our hero in the afterlife. Imbued with the American work ethic, he escapes heaven in a panic when he learns that all they do there is enjoy themselves. He elects instead to count, summing up sand and pebbles.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
August 2001
Adding Machine, The
14th Street Theater

If Elmer Rice were writing plays today, he would probably take on the pernicious effects of globalism as applied to the little guy. Writing in 1923, Rice's metaphor for negative changes that new technology brings was the adding machine. In Jonathan Silver's adaptation of The Adding Machine, Mr. Zero (Paul Marcarelli) has been slaving away at a department store for ten years doing exactly the same job: adding sales receipts by hand. Precisely on his anniversary day, his boss (Joshua Dickens) fires him.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2001
Blue Window
MCC space

Julia Gibson's remarkable restaging of Craig Lucas's acclaimed 1984 play Blue Window is further evidence that instead of mounting lackluster new plays by such playwrights, maybe we should just relive their older, great ones. In the wake of David Rabe's horrifying The Dog Problem (a real dog if there ever was one on stage), David Mamet's trite The Old Neighborhood, and even Lucas's own misguided folly Stranger recently, we seem to need to be reminded of why we once thought they were great.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Cirque Plume: Melanges
Big Top in Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center Festival 2001 presented Cirque Plume for its annual foray into noveau cirque.  The group is the oldest one of this kind in France, where the genre originated.  After presenting street theater for a few years, they created their first show in 1984, even before this kind of show had a name.  Melanges (Opera Plume) is part street theater, part mime and part bravura acts with a generous dose of the poetic thrown in.  The overall concept brings a four-member ragtag rock band together with assorted odd types.  A feisty

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine
City Center - Stage I

I can't wait for the movie version of Warren Leight's Side Man. Many plays make for very awkward, stagy films, but Leight's wonderful ode to jazz musicians and their tumultuous offstage lives, I think, will translate beautifully. It seems that way because Leight writes his characters not unlike the 1950s heyday of the motion picture, where actors were given great dialogue that seemed a little larger than life but true to their natures, not to mention that it was great to listen to from an audience perspective.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Blur
Manhattan Theater Club: Stage II

Quite possibly the worst production to grace the usually strong stages of Manhattan Theater Club, Melanie Marnich's Blur couldn't possibly be more like its title. Hazy, plodding and lacking any genuine emotion, this production (helmed by MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow), chronicling the regressive eyesight of a LOA (Leber's Optic Atrophy) patient, shows a lack of eyesight on the part of its makers as well, turning a potentially interesting, loopy play into a "what-are-they-thinking?" spasmodic mess.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Book Of Liz, The
Greenwich Street

I don't agree with a friend who thinks that Comedy Central's wacked-out sitcom "Strangers With Candy" is the best thing on television, but I can certainly see why he would think so. It is a comic program that is truly, genuinely odd and operates on such gonzo logic, it becomes addicting. You just can't wait to see what weirdo will pop up next and what he'll say, and the show's refreshing bravado is appreciated in this age of sanitized blurs mistaken for ace comedy.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Butterfly Dreams
Bank Street Theater

The best stories of all are the ones that teach us something, still better if they are true. This Chinese tale is based on the life of Zhuang Zhou, noted philosopher of the Confucian school. He absented himself from society for long periods to continue his quest for wisdom (Tao). Even coming closer to his goal did not prevent him from misjudging human nature.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Candida and her Friends
Theater For The New City

A college professor (Brian Runbeck) is about to have his comfortable worldview upset.  He accepts an invitation to visit a former student, Candida (Caroline Strong), but instead finds she has become a siren with a live-in transvestite "slave" Rudolph (Neil Levine).  Candida peppers her reminiscences about the Italian classes she attended nine years previous with Latin sayings and suggestive remarks.  Her offer of a fun time in the bedroom prompts the professor's hasty retreat.  As he muses in his office over this episode, another former student appears. 

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Compania
Teatro La Tea at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center

Quick mood shifts, absurd happenings and unexpected consequences -- this is Eduardo Rovner's fast-paced comedy. Since its premiere in 1995 Compania has been widely performed throughout Latin America and Spain, but incredibly this is its first appearance on New York stages.  The tranquility (and boredom) that empty nesters Ana and Osvaldo enjoy is broken when he returns late one evening.  It seems he has met a woman, Magda. Too excited to notice Ana's increasing unease, Osvaldo tracks his adventure from glances to hand holding to renting a hotel room.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 2001
Eli's Comin'
Vineyard Theater

Revue uses songs by the late Laura Nyro to tell minimal, allegorical story of various women overcoming addiction. Despite the 50s-infused, stoned-soul pop tunes, it's a repetitive drag till the last couple of songs, when the show finally gets its groove on.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
June 2001

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