Freedom of the City, The
Lincoln Center Festival `99

Brian Friel wrote The Freedom of the City in 1973, one year after the terrible Bloody Sunday massacre in Londonderry, in which 13 civil rights marchers were fired upon and killed by British soldiers. In his play, Friel artfully creates three unfortunate innocents: Lily (Sorcha Cusack), a mother of 11, the streetwise young Skinner (Michael Colgan), and the more serious and astute Michael (Gerald Crossan).

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Gathering, The
Playhouse 91

President Reagan's decision to go to Bitberg, West Germany in 1985, to visit the cemetery where German soldiers are buried amidst numerous Nazis understandably created a stir among Americans, both Jews and non-Jews. In Arje Shaw's engrossing new play The Gathering, as produced by the Jewish Repertory Company, the proposed visit prompts more than a mild verbal protest from Gabe, a widower, and a survivor of the Holocaust and the concentration camps.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Cronica De Una Muerte Anunciada
Repertorio Espanol

Like a cherished ritual, each of the townsfolk recount the fateful Monday morning when the Vicario twins (the nearly identical Donald Lopez and Francisco Martinez) took their revenge on Santiago Nasar for deflowering their sister. Any one of dozens of people might have been able to stop the brutal knifing right on his doorstep, but somehow the moment eluded them. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez says they called it a death foretold, meaning that destiny had decreed Nazar's fate.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
East Is East
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage I

Arriving from the London stage, this play lies smack in the middle of the perennial noisy family farce tradition but with a few intriguing twists. Author Ayub Khan-Din injects many themes -- bi-culturalism, international politics, religious identity, inter-generational conflict -- in this loving but frank portrayal of Pakistani immigrant George Khan's household. George's marriage to his English wife Ella has produced a brood that is more accepting of their father's culture than his Muslim religion. Alternately domineering and loving, George (a very believable Edward A.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Into The Woods
Theater Charlotte

With its cunning cottages and sequoia-scaled trees -- plus a hardy beanstalk overarching the proscenium -- this Sandra Gray set is the most awesome set I've ever seen at Theater Charlotte. Sandra isn't the only Gray who's responsible for the glitter of Into The Woods. As tech director, George Gray peppers the proceedings with a variety of fireworks to accompany the fits and spells of the resident witch.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Novecento
Sala Grande, Teatro Colosseo

Born aboard The Virginian to immigrant parents, Danny Goodman (aka Lemon Novecento) never left that ship his entire life. A vicarious traveler, he knew the tiniest details of London and Paris streets, gleaned from conversations with crew and passengers. Out of the blue, his natural gifts for jazz piano came to the fore, and he made a completely new take on that form, to the delight of the trans-Atlantic voyagers. The high point of his life was a competition with a disdainful Jelly Roll Morton, the latter reluctantly conceding Novecento's gifts.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 1999
Annie Get Your Gun
Marquis

Let it be said at the outset that I came to Annie Get Your Gun already armed with good will; I'd heard that despite the show's emphasis on marksmanship and shooting matches, not a single gun is fired on or off stage. As someone who loathes unnecessarily loud and startling noises, I felt grateful to director Graciela Daniele for finding clever and completely convincing ways of representing gun shots other than the piercing blasts New York theater too often accepts (Les Miz, Everybody's Ruby -- are you listening?).

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1999
Death of a Salesman
Eugene O'Neill Theater

By special arrangement with the Roundabout Theater Company, Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theater is the new home for the Goodman Theater of Chicago's acclaimed production of Arthur Miller's great, tragic social drama, Death of a Salesman. As imaginatively staged by Robert Falls (the Goodman's artistic director), and empowered by a trio of extraordinary performances among many fine ones, this Salesman comes as close to a fresh approach as you are ever likely to have seen.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
February 1999
Forbidden Broadway: Cleans Up its Act!
Stardust Theater

There's a mouse in the house. No, that's not a reflection on the Stardust Theater, the new home of Forbidden Broadway after its years uptown. The rodent in question is Walt Disney, which figures repeatedly into the new line-up of Gerard Alessandrini's revue of Broadway spoofs. Not only is there an extended Lion King parody, but the four-member troupe often (perhaps too often) tweak the Disneyfication of Broadway, seeing it as the manifestation of Mayor Giuliani's campaign to G-rate all New York entertainment. It's an easy target and not the show's funniest.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 1999
De La Guarda: Villa Villa
Daryl Roth Theater

New York is hosting a company from Buenos Aires named De La Guarda in a work titled "Villa Villa." It's an acrobatic piece that wants description above all: the audience stands in a big, dark, vacant room (it used to be a bank lobby, actually). Overhead, paper is spread across the entire ceiling, back-lit (or top-lit, if you prefer). We watch shadows of people swinging above it. Then the performers break through the paper, and a couple of showers rain down on us (really). Paper falls on us, confetti, balloons, plastic frogs...

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
July 1998
Cabaret
Studio 54

[Reviewed at Kit Kat Klub space]

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1998
Chicago
Ambassador Theater

It's hard to tell which aspect of Chicago makes us feel more nostalgic, the look of Bob Fosse's rhythmic, pelvic choreography; the ricky-ticky jazziness of its archetypal Kander and Ebb score; or simply the fact that in 1975, when Chicago first hit Broadway, America wasn't yet ready to believe that a cold-blooded murderer with a good lawyer could get away with everything. Now Chicago's cynicism feels almost quaint. We don't need to be told the media attacks every scandal in a feeding frenzy and then drops the carcass when another meal appears.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1996
Boys in the Band, The
Lucille Lortel Theater

Happy and gay. Which is not the same as gay and happy -- two words that, at least in theater terms, can be as far apart as Pat Buchanan and tolerance. It was 1968, before AIDS, before Torch Song Trilogy, before Stonewall -- and Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band hit the New York theater scene. For a thousand performances at off-Broadway’s Theater Four, seven gay characters gathered at Michael’s New York apartment to celebrate the birthday of their outrageous mutual friend, Harold.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1996
Buried Child
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Odd, but whereas the dread and loathing of A Delicate Balance (which also won the Pulitzer Prize at its premiere) makes me shrug my shoulders and wonder whether its meaninglessness is worth the effort, Buried Child, Sam Shepard’s 1979 essay on familial rot, tickles my funnybone and keeps me engrossed up to the final, famous image.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Big
Shubert Theater

It’s big...and it’s good. For a while now my colleagues and I have been complaining about the dearth of imagination on Broadway, wherein new musicals -- which used to rely on novels for their storylines -- now turn to the movies for their ideas.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea
City Center - Stage 1

I just got back from Miami Beach and its justifiably famous seashore, but even there the sands aren’t as white and inviting as the sand on Michael McGarty’s set for By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea. McGarty even gives us a starlit night backdrop to complete the picture of an idyllic beachscape where three unrelated one-acts, all directed by Leonard Foglia, all featuring Timothy Carhart, Lee Brock, and Mary Beth Fisher, take place.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Arts and Leisure
Playwrights Horizons

It’s just as well Steve Tesich’s latest drama at Playwrights Horizons isn’t any good; if it were, it would probably put me in therapy for a decade. Arts & Leisure is an externalized, interior monologue for a theater critic.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk
Ambassador Theater

What better way to tap into the roots of black American history than with tap itself, a dance form that affords freedom in its movement, anger in its staccato, sadness in its sweeps, and hope in its rhythms? The conceit for Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk weds a potent theme -- the 300-year journey from slave ships to street corners -- with choreographed numbers that incorporate tap into slice-of-life vignettes.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1996
Fantasticks, The
Sullivan Street Playhouse

Three was not the charm when I returned for a third visit to New York's only 36-year-old current musical, The Fantasticks, still ensconced in the Sullivan Street Playhouse, still packing in crowds of young teens and seniors with long memories. It's about a boy and a girl, of course, and the two fathers who keep them apart with the express interest of getting them together. Papas Hucklebee and Bellomy hire a dashing bandito to aid their scheme, which works brilliantly -- except "happily ever after" isn't always what it seems.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1996
Master Class
John Golden Theater

In his late, lamented opera show on New York's WKCR-FM, Stefan Zucker and his call-in listeners were constantly torn between the merits of expressive singing and pure Bel Canto loveliness. Even for these opera buffs, Maria Callas was an acquired taste, thrilling in her best moments, shrill and ululating in her worst, but most precious for what she represented: opera as a way of style, of purity, of life.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1995
Alice
Brooklyn Academy of Music

What with Calvin Klein forced to remove their nubile waifs and wafers from the sides of buses because of their “troubling” sexuality, this may be just the time to consider Charles Dodgson and his photographic obsession with a girl named Alice. Of course, Dodgson kept it in his pants—and on the page, his letters to Alice burned by her mother. But the book he wrote as one “Lewis Carroll” has inspired more adaptations than perhaps any other work of fanciful fiction.

"Alice in Wonderland," like all picaresque adventures, has its pluses and minuses as a dramatic vehicle.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1995
Dangerous Corner
Atlantic Theater

The only thing dangerous about this production of Dangerous Corner is the way it turns the play’s malevolent irony into a sarcastic joke, second-guessing the audience’s laughter at J.B. Priestley’s often improbably revelations by staging each pronouncement with arch body language punctuating stilted dialogue. David Mamet doesn’t just fall into this trap, he leaps in, director’s manual first. He spreads the cast out across the Atlantic Theater’s vast stage, robbing Priestley’s cocktail-party-turned-murder-mystery of its tension.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1995
Big Wind on Campus
Don't Tell Mama

Taking a page from the Family Secrets book, Gregory Henderson comes up with one of the more impressive solo turns in recent memory. As impressed as we are by his skill at metamorphosing into old men, good ol’ boys, and gay majorettes, we’re also grateful that the seven vignettes comprising Big Wind on Campus have enough humor and forward momentum so as not to depend totally on Mr. Henderson’s enviable skills as a characterizer. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 1995
Ann Hampton Callaway
Rainbow and Stars

There’s magic at Rainbow and Stars, with a hot cappuccino and a sharp, swingin’ cabaret artiste who works the crowd with a sweep of her head and the glint of her bugle beads.

Though a foggy night clouded the window view atop floor 65 of Rockefeller Center, this was still the place to celebrate autumn’s arrival in New York, with Ann Hampton Callaway the ideal hostess to usher the season in.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1994
Betsy Salkind: The Lady is a Squirrel
Don't Tell Mama

Not just a squirrel but a tomcat, a seagull, a cow, and a stand-up comedienne. Such are the many personae of Betsy Salkind, visually a dead-ringer for MTV celebrity Kennedy, stylistically an offshoot of Lily Tomlin, Reno, and Andrea Martin. Salkind ties all her bits together with an animal theme, be it an unfunny cat that complains about second-class treatment or a very amusing squirrel that nibbles a giant piece of matzoh down to its last farfel.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1994
Blue Man Group
Astor Place Theater

Gonzo performance art that may be the most fun you've ever had with your clothes on. Even if the thought of paint-filled marshmallows, cascading waves of toilet paper and fish-as-art doesn't fill you with anticipation, go anyway; maybe they'll let you wear the spurting gorilla suit. A recent look-in saw Blue Man going ever-so-slightly more commercial (including an opening sequence of verbal messages to the audience) and still burdened with one too many musical interludes, but hey, even heaven must have a rusty harp or two.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1994
Boys from Syracuse, The
Fashion Institute of Technology - Haft Auditorium

There are quite a lot of people up on F.I.T.’s Haft Auditorium stage; some are British, most are American, and a couple of them even know what the hell they’re doing. The rest are at a loss, as is this under-rehearsed, unmanageable production of one of the first great musicals of the modern era. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1994
Dressing Room Divas
Duplex

Dressing Room Divas, a one-act comedy that combines a couple of fictional characters with caricatures of five forceful movie stars, is a paean to the 20th century sensibility of camp. The show's premise is too inane to bear scrutiny, but it involves Meryl Streep, Bette Midler, Julie Andrews, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins and two florists being held hostage in a tiny dressing room prior to a benefit at Radio City Music Hall.

Charles Wright
Date Reviewed:
July 1994
Amphigorey
Perry Street Theater

Charles Addams is no longer the only macabre cartoonist co-opted by the lively arts. Now Edward Gorey (he’s the one who does the opening animation for TV’s “Mystery” series) gets another off-Broadway revue (Gorey Stories came previously), with musical numbers derived from his mildly nasty ditties.

As a visual presentation, Amphigorey works splendidly; powder-faced actors (many with huge, darting eyes) cavort on the ink-on-white set, walking at odd angles, striking eccentric poses, and truly getting into the spirit of sepulchral comedy. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1994
Beauty and the Beast
Palace Theater

Am I the only one on this planet who didn't see the movie? If so, lucky me because I enjoyed Disney's virgin theatrical venture, Beauty and the Beast, far more than those who gripe that it's a pale (and slavish) imitation of the animated film. One can say that Disney concentrated on spectacle, but ironically, the sets and "illusions" aren't particularly impressive.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1994
American Enterprise
Theater at St. Clement's

Recently in danger of closing its doors due to funding gouges, New York State Theater Institute has survived and continues to bring serious theater to Troy, NY— and sometimes down into Manhattan. After a charming Beauty and the Beast and a ham-fisted Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, the company is back with American Enterprise, Jeffrey Sweet’s bio of entrepreneur George M. Pullman (John Romeo).

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1994
Broken Glass
Booth Theater

In Broken Glass, his remarkably vital return to Broadway, Arthur Miller tries to connect three concurrent tragedies: a middle-aged woman’s sudden paralysis, her husband’s impotence and the subsequent hardening of their marriage, and Kristallnacht - happening a continent away but on the front page of every newspaper. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1994
Avenue X
Playwrights Horizons

Put aside worrying about how close Avenue X’s Italian vs. black underclass strife comes to West Side Story’s white vs. Hispanic underclass since both musicals involve frustrated youth and simmering street violence, and this a cappella musical will hook you quickly and for keeps.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1994
As You Like It
Theater at St. Clement's

I must admit to some prejudice here: it’s getting pretty hard to do an As You Like It as I like it, since I’ve reached the saturation point with Shakespeare’s romantic comedy (three productions in two years, four in three). Like Twelfth Night, this tale of woodland wooing reaches an appealing climax when four couples finally pair off, but unlike Twelfth Night and other Shakespeare plays, As You Like It is short on impetus.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 1994
Any Given Day
Longacre Theater

On any given day in, say, 1953, one could stroll to the theater district and see a solid, well-crafted drama such as Frank D. Gilroy’s Any Given Day. The show would doubtless be about a dysfunctional family, perhaps with one member dying of a protracted illness, another sleeping with another, and a dominant, stoic parent-figure presiding over all the misery. Audiences would then leave the theater depressed but braced by the author’s ability to craft something satisfying from such familiar material.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 1993
All in the Timing
Primary Stages

No other recent American playwright has won so much respect and admiration for his one-acts, and the six entries chosen for All in the Timing are a testament to David Ives’s linguistic ingenuity. But he’s more than clever; Ives has the craft and stamina to turn his seemingly one-joke ideas into hugely satisfying comedies.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 1993
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

Static but not uninvolving look at Honest Abe's early years, when hard drinking, impetuousness, awkwardness and crippling self-limitation nearly consigned the future present to law-practice oblivion. Within each scene, Robert E. Sherwood works up a good lather - be it about Lincoln's tragic romances or the political arguments with friends and opponents. It's the between-scene craft that falters most.

At the end of act one, we suffer dutifully with Abe as he mourns the loss of his true love, Ann Rutledge (Marissa Chibas).

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 1993
Angels in America: Perestroika
Walter Kerr Theater

The great work continues. Several scenes in this epic of gay life colliding with America’s laws, mores, madness, and confusion, are as thrilling as any in modern theater history. The lacerating Roy Cohn returns, as do Prior, Lewis, Harper, Mrs. Pitt, Belize, and the angel. Ironically, it is only when said angel (Ellen McLaughlin) appears that Tony Kushner’s breathtaking fantasia tumbles back to earth.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1993
Bibliomania
American Place Theater

When you’re dealing with someone as talented and literary as Roger Rosenblatt (name an upscale magazine he hasn’t written for), there’s a temptation to view his deep-seated need to think aloud as smug pedantry. That side of Rosenblatt burst into ugly flower in his off-Broadway show, and. However, Rosenblatt shows off his best side when it’s just himself in a lecture-style presentation. It worked in 1991’s Free Speech in America, and it works again in Rosenblatt’s paean to books, Bibliomania, currently at the American Place Theater.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1993
Blown Sideways Through Life
New York Theater Workshop

Every job is different; all jobs are the same. That’s the axiom borne out by Claudia Shear’s gripping whirlwind of a monologue, Blown Sideways Through Life, currently presented at New York Theater Workshop.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1993

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