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Generally absorbing, downbeat hostage story of an Irish hoodlum (a convincing Brian d'Arcy James) in over his head.
From the pit up pops a spiked-curled, tux and black-tied, shaking conductor who bounces to recorded music, as up spring formally attired "violinists" to surround him. It's a zany start to one of the funniest plays ever, witnessed throughout and catered to by two zany-like servants. When the pit is vacated, the stage fills with a curtain (one of many to come) suggesting the Parthenon on mountains, being put there by a painter on a scaffold on wheels.
One can visit this revival of Dale Wasserman's mental-institution drama about individuality vs. conformity and men vs. women without paying too much attention to those somewhat clumsily handled themes. It's enough to relish Gary Sinese taking a role utterly identified with another actor and giving it a compelling spin all his own. (By contrast, Amy Morton's Nurse Ratched is too reminiscent of Louise Fletcher's hushed control freak.)
Despite what you've heard, it's not as great as the film, nor is it the shining beacon of American musicals. The Producers is, however, an utter delight, from the unexpectedly winning songs to Nathan Lane's endlessly wonderful antics, from a new sequence that puts Leo (Matthew Broderick) quitting Whitehall & Marx in context to a hilarious song- and-dance number ("Keep It Gay") at the Debries residence.
The latest disappointment imported from overseas, Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets is a play that dares to blast the opinion that smaller and more efficient is better, having two actors fill the roles of a cast of nearly fifteen. The set-up is: two extras, Jake (Sean Campion) and Charlie (Conleth Hill), find work on an Irish film set where a new picture is being shot, complete with order-barking director, a vain, accent-challenged ingenue; an overzealous production assistant and various others who pop in and out of the story.
While not among the evergreens, Bells Are Ringing has enough pleasures to be a legitimate example of the "good old days" of Broadway musicals. Tina Landau's proficient but bland revival simply has the bad luck to be up against a lively crop of spring shows and suffers by comparison. Taken on its own terms, however, this Bells certainly entertains. Faith Prince and Marc Kudisch are individually good, though they lack romantic sizzle. The subway scene remains a can't-miss joy.
A year after the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (the pioneering musical that dealt profoundly with box lunch socials), musical theater collaborators Harold Arlen (composer), E.Y. Harburg (lyricist) and Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy (book writers) would opt for more social significance with their 1944 tuner, Bloomer Girl. Bloomer Girl did not achieve the immortality of "Oklahoma," but its quaint charms, enlivened by adapter David Ives, were recently revived for the popular Encores! Series at the City Center.
Boy Gets Girl, the latest from up-and-coming playwright Rebecca Gilman, represents a 2-for-2 in terms of promise unfulfilled for this new voice in the theater. Critics have been singing her praises ever since the debut of her racially-charged drama, Spinning into Butter, at Lincoln Center last year, citing her willingness to hit on hot-button issues and bring forth topics relevant to modern society but are rarely explored in theater. Few, however, seems to mind that she starts with potentially explosive premises that completely deflate before your very eyes.
One of the most beautiful, moving theater happenings in NYC is Breaker: An Aerial Fairie Tale, performed by five women trapeze artists and a four-piece jazz group. A circus rises into the air from the sea, and we fly with them.
Is it pretentious or is it fun? This is the question I must ask about provocative and puzzling Big Love, written by Charles Mee, which was the hit of the 2000 Humana Festival of New American Plays, now on the Main Stage of the Long Wharf Theater. The playwright, also an historian, has used for the basis of his wildly inventive-Millennium piece, the classic Greek fable, The Suppliant Women; by Aeschylus. In this drama, thought to be the world's oldest, fifty sisters murder 50 brothers, in actuality, their cousins, rather than marry these young men with whom t
The Yale School of Drama annually presents its Graduate Acting Class in a separate production from Yale Rep's regular schedule. It is an event I've looked forward to and attended, with few exceptions, for more than 20 years, for it offers an opportunity to see potential stars of the future. Many productions have been of Shakespeare plays, the most memorable one featuring Jane Kazmarek and Kate Burton. This year, the choice is a free-wheeling adaptation of Aristophanes' classic, The Birds. Written by Len Jenkin, playwright and teacher, and directed by Christopher B
Tell me it's not true. Say it's just a story, Something on the news. Tell me it's not true, Though it's here before me. Those are the touching words that open Blood Brothers, the musical that the far-sighted Executive Producer Richard Hallinan brought 13 years ago on an incredible journey from England to the Downtown Cabaret in Bridgeport for its American Premiere. It was a courageous act. Here was a theater known best for its good solid revivals. Would its audience support an unknown work? The answer was a resounding YES!
What a feast this play is! Like the art of Robert Rauschenberg himself it's a feast for the eye, the brain, the heart, and the funnybone but also a feast for the ear because of Charles L. Mee's gloriously clever and involving script.
Prior to WWII, mathematician Alan Turing, age 24, distinguished himself at Cambridge with his published work, "On Computable Numbers..." During the war, he broke Germany's Enigma code, and his theories led to the invention of the computer. Winston Churchill presented him with the Officer of the British Empire, the empires highest civilian award. In the mid-fifties, after admitting to homosexuality, he died, allegedly at this own hand.
Linda Kline and Lonnie Price take a moving, hilarious, and three-dimensional look at the lovable lunatic that was Edward Kleban, lyricist for A Chorus Line. Beautifully crafted yet more "real" than most musicals, the show is filled with moments to savor (such as Kleban forced to present at Lehman Engel's BMI workshop, and the way he, Michael Bennett, and Marvin Hamlisch arrived at "one singular sensation").
Short comic works by Irish playwright Flann O'Brien make for a thoroughly delightful piece of "Pub Theater," with live Irish music performed by one of the finest acting ensembles in town, directed vividly by Macdara Mac Uibh Aille. There is no better actor on stage anywhere than Sean Powell.
In a glass case in the lobby are Michael Bennett's first tap shoes, bronzed, with other memorabilia. In the audience at Press Night were Helen Bennett, Michael's mother who lent the artifacts, as well as his brother. She's a strong supporter of her "son's show" as well as the Golden Apple, where A Chorus Line holds an all-time performance longevity record. In 1985-86, the Apple had to extend its first production, wedge repeats in between other shows, and replace another planned for the next season.
Sitting through Mac Wellman's pedantically titled Description Beggared; or the Allegory of WHITENESS, (the caps and punctuation are his) commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville for this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays, is a trying experience. Trying to make sense of it, to figure out what is going on and why, yields slim results. Yet the play's visual and verbal effects are striking, even as they confound us.
This attractive, nicely appointed revival of Noel Coward's 1933 gemstone seems designed not for living, but for loathing of critics who will sneer at its embellishments. Director Joe Mantello (The Vagina Monologues) heightens the homosexual current that was already run through it (including a more-than-friendly smooch between leads Alan Cumming and Dominic West) and Robert Brill's seductive, massive sets suggest a tour of Europe via Larger-Than-Life Land.
Joe Mantello's revival of Noel Coward's most envelope-pushing work starts as strong drama, meanders into mildy amusing comedy, and ends as sour farce. Alan Cumming's adorable until he turns into a hammy transvestite freak; Jennifer Ehle's Gilda would be more at home in a Lillian Hellman potboiler than here. By the time Gilda ditches upright Ernest for her desperate friends, we're ready to take out the menage a trash.
Jane Martin's peculiar, outlandish title for her/his latest foray into the American Zeitgeist makes perfect sense when you realize this comedic assault is inspired by cross-breeding the schtick of those lame old "Code of the West" B-movies with the platitudes and conventions of horror flicks.
McBean's Sam is, like many restaurant employees, an aspiring thespian. An Indiana boy, whose father would like him to be home for Christmas, he auditions every chance he can get. All he needs is one break. He has the talent, but it's often who you know that leads to the right audition and the right time with the absolutely right person. He is currently waiting for a call back on an important role.
Look at me! George M. Cohan is supposed to have commanded. So, too, says Steve Dawson, recreating the man who once "owned Broadway" on his road there, through vaudeville and road shows with his family act and finally as star and producer. Unfortunately, one has to look for too long at Steve surrounded by much lesser talents (notably excepting sweet Cassie Abate as sister Josie and practiced Vicki Kite as George's second wife). His "parents" would be too weak for anything but an amateur production like The Players'.
From the portentious narration that accompanies the opening film clips to everyone's tendency to speechify, this is nothing if not earnest stuff. Thank heaven for George Grizzard's humor and restraint as a homespun judge. Maximilian Schell's just fine until he starts gobbling the scenery. Michael Mastro's mentally-challenged witness will likely cause debate, but it's a strong and fascinating acting choice. Nice work, too, from Robert Foxworth, Peter Francis James and a charming Marthe Keller.
Nearly a year into its Broadway run, Aida remains an unqualified audience hit. Many critics have grumbled about this show, which had its Atlanta debut in 1998, but the musical is still packing `em in at the Palace Theater.
Poor Bobbi Boland. Left behind in the wake of the tumultuous sixties, she just doesn't get it. She's caught in a time warp, and she can't get out. She clings desperately to her past, symbolized by the rhinestone tiara resting on a shelf in her living room etagere. It represents the high point of her life -- when she was crowned Miss Florida 20 years ago. As the play opens, we find Bobbi giving lessons on social graces to a young girl who lives down the street.
At best, Big River bears the same relationship to Mark Twain as Oliver! to Charles Dickens, but Apple Tree's recent production emphasized the story -- as much out of despair at staging big song-and-dance numbers in a tiny mallfront space as out of literary reverence (though the density of both Roger Miller's score and William Hauptman's text tend to discourage extended spectacles that could stretch the running time to Wagnerian lengths.) Marriott's audiences want Musicals, however; so its staging is focused on showcasing vocal talent, often compromising plot, p
This production is a rare revival of a melodrama co-written and originally directed by George Abbott. The play premiered in 1926 and was directed by Abbott in New York again the year he turned 100. Though Abbott was known for his touch with musicals, this is a straight play in three acts, one of Abbott's earliest successes as a director and playwright. The setting is backstage in a nightclub, so we see rehearsing of musical numbers and we hear the beginnings of songs when the performers exit through an upstage curtain to go onto the club stage.
Stand-up comic Jack Simmons turns serious in this monologue about the mystery of death, though he does try to lighten the subject with little sprinkles of humor. His approach is strictly personal: the Buddy in question is his late father, patriarch of a large Irish-Catholic family, who was diagnosed with incurable liver cancer in his late fifties.
While much has been said and argued about on the merits of revising once and future musicals, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart did just that to their own 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee (adapted from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain).
Sometimes good acting is not enough. Sometimes interesting directing is not enough. Not enough, that is, to mask slow, ponderous writing. Crumbs From The Table of Joy, on the Cassius Carter Centre Stage, depicts widower Godfrey Crump's (Bryan Hicks) move from Florida to Brooklyn with his two daughters Ernestine (Melany Bell) and Ermina (Audra Alise Polk). It is 1950, and blacks don't "belong" in white neighborhoods a feeling strongly held in many large-city neighborhoods. This established, playwright Lynn Nottage burdens the tale with too many sub-plots.
The Fantasticks seems to be staged somewhere every year. It is cute, has some "rememberable" songs, and has been the longest- running musical in Manhattan. At least three productions reached San Diego county in the last three years, each with its own uniqueness. Scripps Ranch Theater had one of the best El Gallos I've heard; Moonlight tended to be overly choreographed. At Patio Playhouse, The Fantasticks production is nicely balanced and fits the small venue, since the show requires no set but much ingenuity.
Troy Maxson speaks from his gut. Life has not been easy on him, nor has he been easy on life. His home is in a Pittsburgh ghetto, where he lives with his wife and youngest son. He is a sincere man, a driven man, and he rules his family with a heavy hand. He builds fences around his small plot of land, fences to keep people out and, quite possibly, to keep the family in.
All of New York City circa 1915-33 is on Theatre Works' intimate stage, but it doesn't seem crowded - except with talent. Fiorello! capsulizes the career of Manhattan Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The lively musical shows him "On the Side of the Angels" from his days as a lawyer for "the little people."
The storm-tossed survivors who were swept onto "Gilligan's Island" will never, never be the same. TheatrX repertory company has launched Gilligan's Island - A New Musical. The Skipper, alas, is forced to spend the entire production indisposed and confined to the outhouse. The rest of the cast, however, make up for his lack of mobility. There have been a few changes from the original sixties television show. Of course it is a musical. Characters now represent the deadly sins, but didn't they always? Mr. Howell is greed, Mrs.
Simplicity makes this revue soar. No mindless, cutesy chatter mars Rhonda Coullet's delineation of the purposes and place of Harry Chapin's folk music. The opening set foreshadows the singing instrumentalists' musical journey, starting with an incremental "All My Life's a Circle" by Chapin.
Playwright John Patrick mixes a southern American with a Brit, an Aussie, a Kiwi, a Scot and a non-English-speaking African in The Hasty Heart, which takes place in the convalescent ward of a temporary British hospital in Southeast Asia. The effect is a seriocomic, sometimes deep look at culture and class. Scot Lachie, played effectively by Richard Baird, has been shot in the kidney and has nothing but borrowed time on the remaining kidney.
Alan Ayckbourn must be as fond of puzzles as Anthony Shaffer was reputed to have been. Having demonstrated his expertise at writing comedies that leap through time, he now presents us with two plays that leap through space. The plot of House and of Garden concerns itself with crises affecting participants in a spring fair on the country estate of a British bigwig. House shows us the events unfolding indoors, and Garden, those occurring outdoors at the same time.
Leslie Ayvazian's autobio solo is thinly conceived but lively. The gimmick of having audience members cue her with dialogue (instead of using pre-recorded voices) keeps things percolating.
For those of us in the mid-curve of the Baby Boom generation, this show needs no introduction. The Rocky Horror Show is an indelible image in our past. Rocky, viewed two decades ago by high school and college students in movie theaters across the country, was our first taste of the erotically absurd. Although few of us would admit it, most of us could identify with Brad Majors, the nerdy hero, and his squeaky clean fiance, Janet Weiss. We hadn't met -- much less become -- the bizarre creatures they encounter on one cold and stormy night.
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