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Ira Levin's Deathtrap is a perennial favorite of theater audiences as well as a delightful film. OnStage Playhouse is currently running the production to appreciative audiences.
Dance of the Vampires is a cheery cartoon with happy dancing and trivial songs. It's an unsophisticated, entertaining, harmless fairy tale, all tongue-in-cheek, with a cast of fine voices and real dancers and acrobats -- sort of a humorous tale by Grimm, for the whole family. The music by Jim Steinman seems like lesser Lloyd Webber, with a little Gilbert and Sullivan on occasion. But when Michael Crawford opens up his pipes, there's a show.
Def Poetry Jam on Broadway is a poetic outpouring of ethnic frustration and rage -- the pain of the poor. The darker people (black, Latin, Asian, Arabic and various mixtures) and their working-class neighbor express their inner turbulence and anger -- for people in high-priced Broadway seats. It's made up of very inventive poems of protest, life, love, all parallel to or tangential from the main stream, performed by their creators, including a teeny Puerto Rican woman (Mayda Del Valle) who is very heavy and a big heavy guy (Poetri) who is the lightness in the show.
Harvesting the creme de la crème of the burgeoning poetry slam circuit, producer Russell Simmons and director Stan Lathan have honed a new theatrical format that uses rap and performance art as its twin launching pads. The result is nothing like a musical.
After a first scene that's as dull and expository as only openers of American comedies from yesteryear can be, Dinner at Eight quickly reaffirms its status as a classic by layering character quirks and tangled relationships into a story both funny and still satirically stinging. As soon as preening Carlotta Vance (the ever-treasurable Marian Seldes) arrives at her old beau's office seeking financial advice, the machinations click into high gear and stay there till the slightly deflated ending.
Time: 1997 (with flashbacks starting just after D-Day, WW II). Occasion: Lecture by Federal Justice Frank Johnson. Place: Harvard Law School. Like the new graduates whom he addresses, we hear "Stars Fell on Alabama" and soon fall into fascination with the Alabama boy who became the judicial star of the Civil Rights Movement.
With a poetic word-setting of a cold winter morning in Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright, represented by Will Stutts, gives a lecture about his life and work being perpetuated at Taliesin. We are to fancy ourselves prospective students or, fulfilling his theory of education, apprentices before the master architect. It is said that in his later years "at home," Wright often spoke thus, giving center stage to his ego and his theories of organic architecture, for his following, his neighbors, and visitors.
David Henry Hwang has totally rewritten the book for the revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's abortive San Francisco treat of 1958. PC pulsewatchers will be glad to find our heroine Mei-Li has been upgraded from an illegally immigrating mail-order bride to a political refugee whose father was martyred back in Red China. But there's no rehab performed on the R&H score, which pales next to the oriental splendors of the team's South Pacific.
Rosina Reynolds and her excellent cast have brought playwright Moises Kaufman's work to a new level in the Diversionary production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. David Weiner's set is elegant: heavy in reds, drapery, and gilded trim. Costumer Liam M. O'Brien provides stylish tails, brilliantly patterned vests, and authentic English barristers' garb. The image, accented by lighting designer Jennifer Setlow, speaks well of the end of the 19th century.
This intensely researched script, pieced together by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen from public records and personal interviews, is as much a crusade as a drama. A bunch of A-list talent has mobilized behind the cause since this reading stage production opened in October, including Richard Dreyfuss, Jill Clayburgh, Elliott Gould, Judy Collins, Lynn Redgrave, Mia Farrow, Mary Steenburgen and Debra Winger.
Agatha Christie delights in planting extremely funny dialogue within the investigation of a murder. We find that, while everybody loves everybody else, there are those who consider many of the others with absolutely no regard. The Hollow is set in the fall of 1951, at the Angkatell estate, a mere 18 miles south of London.
To see outstanding talents struggling with a flawed script, head up to Off-Tryon Theater in NoDa and you'll find a powerfully acted production of a dubious comedy, Wendy MacLeod's The House of Yes. Meghan Lowther stars as Jackie-O, prime nutball in a radically dysfunctional household. MacLeod's weird walpurgisnacht on the 25th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination is lashed by incest, infidelity and a hurricane. Glenn Griffin directs grimly, so the eccentrics onstage never strike us as witty or goofy.
As snappy, smart and entertaining as much of Imaginary Friends is, Nora Ephron's ficto-biography of feuding literary lionesses Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy can't overcome a basic stasis in its premise: both writers are dead from the outset and quarreling in retrospect. Director Jack O'Brien can trick this up with video and vaudeville turns (with generally ephemeral, period-style songs by Craig Carnelia and Marvin Hamlisch), but that just makes the piece feel like a Dirty Blonde wannabe.
Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron is an odd, experimental play -- two famous writers, Lillian Hellman (Swoosie Kurtz) and Mary McCarthy (Cherry Jones), in a fantasy that works theatrically. The women are great foils for each other as they literarily and theatrically jab enmity back and forth. There is great style in the play's inventiveness, although the verbal encounters are a tad over-written.
When Lillian Hellman reached the pinnacle of her second career, switching from the stage to personal memoirs, the esteemed novelist/essayist/critic Mary McCarthy had the temerity to attack the grand dame. "Every word she writes is a lie," she smiled, guesting on The Dick Cavett Show, "including 'and' and "the.'" Hellman, catching the nationwide telecast, responded swiftly, slapping McCarthy with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit calculated to financially crush her detractor.
This Chicago import from Lookingglass Theater Company made a big splash last March when it opened at Circle in the Square, my favorite Broadway venue. About a dozen of the fabulous myths narrated by the great Roman poet Ovid are retold around and inside a spacious pool of water. The medium is perfect for simulating the mutability of mortals who become playthings of the gods. Trouble is, the Lookingglass gloss on Metamorphoses strips away the sensuality and the wit of Ovid, overlaying a mocking comedy of its own.
You go to a play called Hank Williams: Lost Highway for the music of the legendary singer, and your favorites are all there, played live by a dynamite country band, in the production now at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater. It's all framed in a bio-entertainment that is pure bio-charm. It's a good dramatic play as well about the self-destructive life of Williams, with a fine cast, all first rate musicians, led by Jason Petty as the singer/songwriter in a recreation that is almost a reincarnation.
Frank Gorshin has an impressive arsenal at his disposal as he engagingly recounts the century-long odyssey of George Burns, who rose to stardom from humble beginnings as Nathan Birnbaum in the Lower East Side. There are antique photos of the hood projected behind Gorshin onstage, followed by authentic movie and TV clips. Simulations of old Burns & Allen radio shows, recorded with Didi Conn, seem to emanate on cue from an ancient Philco.
From director Joe Dowling comes a misfired Moliere that points up Tartuffe's structural weakness: all of the first half centers on papa Orgon refusing to listen to anyone. If he would just shut up for thirty seconds, there'd be no play. This leads to some labored, even annoying patches, especially with an uneven cast trying to put this Roundabout mounting over. Brian Bedford's always a pro but he feels a bit by-the-numbers here; Henry Goodman makes an interestingly earthy, almost Shylockish title character - I'd like to see his Tartuffe in a better production.
Moliere's Tartuffe, now at the American Airlines Theater, is a great contemporary production of a 340-year-old play in a marvelous rhymed translation by Richard Wilbur. It's played against a somewhat ponderous period set by John Lee Beatty, with super costumes by Jane Greenwood which amplify with wit the characters' foibles. The first-rate cast includes Henry Goodman as the loathsome, slimy Tartuffe -- Goodman gives good loath and marvelous slime -- his eyes sparkle with glee in his villainy.
The Tony-Award exploits of Sutton Foster are still on view in the title role of Thoroughly Modern Millie, more than sufficient reason to take advantage of "Season of Savings" discounts available at 1-800-ILOVENY and ilovenytheater.com. This budding superstar belts, taps and charms with the best of them. And the award-winning villainess, Harriet Harris, is still stopping the show with her dragon-lady shtick as Mrs. Meers.
Bartending is a classic, noble profession. You have to be everyone in one day to all strangers, you have to make everyone feel at home, welcoming and attentive, and knowledgeable and smart and fast. So says Louis Mustillo in his revelatory opus on the minds and hearts of bartenders he's known and loved.
Adult Entertainment is Elaine May's hilarious spoof on the porno industry and Robin Byrd's TV show, the morons involved in it, and what happens when they start to read books and plays. It's written in May's unique comic voice, and her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, has the great dead-pan delivery of her mother. We start with comedy and segue into real humor as the porn stars delve into literature.
American Ambassador to England Harry Douglas (gleaming-eyed Don Walker) wants to use his weekend country home to rendevous with sexy neighbor Marian (sophisticated Alison Dietz) while his wife Lois (Jenny Aldrich, so lovely you wonder why her hubbie would stray) visits a spa. Little does amorous Harry know, when he solicits butler Perkins (Ron Halvorsen, veddy proper) to be "the soul of discretion," that Perkins has just made the same promise to Debbie Douglas.
A note on the just-closed Boston Marriage by David Mamet: This attempt at a 19th-Century comedy of manners dotted with deliberate anachronisms is Mamet's shot at Wilde, and it wildly misses. Occasional humorous quip aside, this style experiment falls short, as does the acting of Kate Burton. She says all the lines quite clearly, but her foil, Martha Plimpton, does better (the latter also has an inner life for her character).
What made Arthur Schnitzler's 1896-97 (not staged until 1921) round of sexual sketches history-making were its explicitness and dramatizations of Freudian findings. With his updated full circle of couplings, moved from Vienna to New York, David Hare says nothing new about their psychology or any other phase of the human condition. Nor does he shock. About all I can figure of the play's box office success in NYC and London is that audiences wanted a glimpse of Nicole Kidman nude.
With Kate Buckley, the director of Among The Thugs and A Few Good Men, at the helm of this year's Christmas Carol, audiences might have anticipated the Cratchit children marching through the streets of London on a rampage. Most noticeable about Buckley's interpretation, however, is its singularly un-violent nature. Gone are the searing images and volatile emotions associated with the Henry Godinez Carol of recent years, replaced in this 25th anniversary production by a more even-tempered verging-on-bland ambiance.
Despite its overwhelming commercial success since premiering in 1995, the question of whether The Christmas Schooner is to be a solemn historical pageant or a razzle-dazzle musical has made for an uneven progression in its development. But Phil Gigante recognizes the fundamental task of a director is to make everything look like it belongs on the same stage and has assembled a meticulously-integrated show, playful without being cloying, with carefully-crafted personalities and stage business rooted therein assigned each last chorus member.
Crowns is an exhilarating evening of music and message. Emblazoned around the edge of the proscenium is the following credo: "OUR CROWNS HAVE BEEN BOUGHT AND PAID FOR: ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS WEAR THEM." The "crowns" are hats that the women in this all-black cast wear with pride, dignity, steely determination and a healthy dose of pure vanity! Through them, an entire culture is revealed, as is the psyche of the women wearing them. "We are queens and these are our crowns" they proudly state.
New York audiences and press have been unkind to gothic rock and roll spoofs, from goofy sleepers like Zombie Prom and Zombies from the Beyond to the truly zany Bat Boy. That's not likely to change with Dance of the Vampires, a gigantic cauldron of puns, kitsch, heavy satire, and shameless Mel Brooksian mugging that would be a lot more fun were it not so long and so aggravatingly LOUD (even non-musical dialogue is miked at teeth-rattling levels).
They're young, they're vibrant, they're full of words and ideas, and, for the most part, they're a treat to watch as they share their thoughts about food, sex, womanhood, machismo and race. Considering that Def Poetry Jam is a Broadway show, the level of anger expressed at the American government's policies is also heartening, if occasionally misplaced or put in far too black-vs.-white terms.
The first thing I knew I had to do before I went to Def Poetry Jam was to try and put out of my head whatever pre-conceived notions and prejudices I have about the current street culture, how it does nothing for me and why it doesn't speak to me, including hip-hop music and rap. (I do remember when rap used to be called patter and Gilbert and Sullivan had the market.) So I was completely unprepared for the exhilarating experience I ended up having courtesy of hip-hop mogul/entrepreneur Russell Simmons and his collaborator and director, Stan Lathan.
In 1927, no one knew that the stock market would soon crash, plunging citizens secure in their affluence into poverty -- not even Philip Barry, whose explorations in the Land of Plenty contrast those who earn their own money with those who inherit it, and those who use it to enjoy themselves with those who allow themselves to be imprisoned by it.
The joy of word pictures! Truman Capote reflects on his childhood in Holiday Memories. Placed in the depression dirt poor-south, "The Thanksgiving Visitor" and "A Christmas Memory" bring the audience the meaning of the holidays, of family, and of values.
As a spine tingling who-dun-it, Agatha Christie's The Hollow doesn't quite rate up there with her masterpiece, The Mousetrap. However, The Hollow will have no trouble pleasing Christie's legions of fans which, by now, extend around the globe.
A.R. Gurney stretches his wings by satirizing the kind of brittle, WASPy drawing room comedies by which he earns his keep. The premise - that a white suburban woman (Sandy Duncan) keeps a wall of her living room blank to represent the world "out there" -- is a tad flimsy for ninety minutes, but Gurney fills the evening out by spoofing the conventions of playwriting, the expectations of audiences, and the socially-constructed fallacy of American hegemony. And, yes, the laughs are there.
The only thing "radical" (and, to my mind, objectionable) about Baz Luhrmann's production of La Boheme, which is re-set in mid-1950s Paris, is that he gets a little cute with the subtitles, both in modernizing the slang and in using kooky fonts for emphasis. Otherwise, it's a tasteful and emotionally faithful mounting of Puccini's opera, boasting a ravishingly beautiful mise-en-scene for the cafe scene and a group of appealing performers.
Those expecting more of the brilliantly colored, feverishly paced phantasmagoria that Australian director Baz Luhrmann and his designer wife Catherine Martin created for their movie musical, "Moulin Rouge," are in for a big let down. This bare-bones, shadowy production, far from glitzy, is downright gloomy. A huge neon sign, L'Amour, embellishing a Parisian rooftop is the only element Moulin Rouge-ish. The rest of the set, as designed by Ms. Martin and barely lit by Nigel Levings, is subdued and depressingly colorless.
Baz Luhrmann's brilliant production of La Boheme by Puccini, set in 1967, is a truly spectacular spectacle. The inspired design by Catherine Martin and lighting by Nigel Levings take the physical production of opera into a new, flashy, eye-filling dimension. The beautiful young people in the show, with their magnificent voices, make this powerfully-directed opera, with exciting, imaginative physical action in the staging, a great theatrical experience.
In times of great woe, there's something about Man of La Mancha both reassuring and sad; reassuring because the musical, even more than the picaresque book, calls for courtesy, nobility and personal freedom as antidotes to a hostile environment. The unhappy part is that doddering Don Quixote's delusions cause as much harm as help -- as do so many well-meaning idealists.
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