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
B.S.: The Completely Improvised Hospital Drama
Ivanhoe Theater

In a city full of improv companies, the Free Associates have to be one of the hardest working.  Not satisfied with Cast On A Hot Tin Roof, The Completely Improvised Play Not By Tennessee Williams, and Pick-A-Dick - The Completely Improvised Select-A-Detective Play, the group have added B.S.: The Completely Improvised Hospital Drama. The facility in question is Benevolent Saints Hospital, "One of Chicago's finest."  Even the program hype is a stitch: "Located somewhere between here and Belmont and eternity, B.S.

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
February 1995
Cats
Winter Garden Theater

Innovative for its time but terribly overrated mish-mash. The make-up and theater decor are wonderful, but the dancing is unexceptional, as is much of the music. The second act picks up with a shaggy fish story and "Memories," but it's too little, too late.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
1994
Miss Saigon
Broadway Theater

Nearly nine years have passed since hype and controversy overshadowed the actual content of Boublil/Schonberg's "Madame Butterfly" riff, Miss Saigon. On first viewing, I was stunned by John Napier's set design -- not so much for its furniture and spectacle but its incredible sense of space; the upstage area seemed to extend past infinity. I had quibbles with the sometimes iffy lyrics and the unmoving love story, but every time Jonathan Pryce slithered across the stage, all was forgiven.

While my admiration for Mr.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1994
Phantom Of The Opera, The
Majestic Theater

Late in the first act, there are fifteen glorious minutes when everything comes together: music (the title song, "The Music Of The Night"), set (candelabras rising from the mist as the Phantom and Christine gondola their way across the prettiest sewer you ever saw), performance -- everything. When the Phantom first brings Christine down to his lair, the show is transported to the realm of legend.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1994
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
Grease!
Eugene O'Neill Theater

Well, I thought it was going to be fun. After a pre-show warm up by a smarmy, lip-synching dee-jay, Miss Lynch waddles to the stage as a prim but lovable homeroom teacher, bantering with the audience and getting laughs just by fixing her widened eyes on a "student" and devastating him with a shocked exclamation of "GUM???" But all too soon, the amps kick on and Grease! becomes the equivalent of a transistor radio on the beach: loud, canned-sounding, and too staticky to entertain.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 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
Cannibal Cheerleaders On Crack
Torso Theater

Set in a future "sooner than you think," Bermingham's warning to an America on the brink of self-destruction leaves no taboo unviolated, punctuated by flying body fluids, copious "sim-sex", and up-to-the-minute topical commentary.  This zap-splat-boom brand of satire may be too much for the weak of heart (or stomach), but at a time when so many artists claiming to be "daring" and "outrageous" shrink from anything approaching extreme, Torso Theater at least has the courage to walk as it talks.  If you don't see this with your own eyes, you'll never believe it when you read ab

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
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
Able-Bodied Seaman, The
Manhattan Class Company Theater (MCC)

Although theater history is unlikely to remember Alan Bowne’s The Able-Bodied Seaman, its author, in his all-too-short life, was able to carve a tiny place for himself there. Though Beiruit, A Snake in the Vein, Sharon and Billy, and Forty Deuce will stand as Bowne’s legacy, at least Seaman, his earliest drama, has some of the qualities that made him so briefly, and perhaps immortally, vital.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1993
Bathtub, The
Theater for the New City

Does 60-year-old Russian satire close on Saturday night? It sure does when it’s as patronizing, juvenile, and moronic as Paul Schmidt’s adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bathtub, staged with all the subtlety of a gang rape by Russian director Ivan Popvski. Apparently, fellow countryman Gennadi Bogdanov spent months teaching the Phoenix Ensemble’s actors Biomechanics -- that is, to move like caffeinated wind-up toys, shout every unfunny joke, and push their bodies into ungainly calisthenics.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1993
Born to Rumba!
Duo Theater

“Pick a rumba from one-to-ten,” Groucho used to quip, and that’s about the only pun that isn’t used in Michael Alasa’s cacophonous, carnal, and kooky musical, Born to Rumba!. The plot, about a disciple of Europe’s famed Colette (Angela DeCicco) who joins a Cuban nightclub-cum-brothel run by lothario Alasa, is too scrambled to follow, possibly by design. Still, a little less chaos and a little more structure might make Rumba! feel more like a musical and less like a bawdy blitzkrieg. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1993
Annie Warbucks
Variety Arts Theater

At last, the second coming of the red-headed orphan with a saggy dog and empty eye sockets. The victory of a producing team that saw two Broadway-bound Annie sequels collapse under bad press and fraudulent funding. The continuation of a story that was essentially complete in its original form but, with the addition of a couple of juicy villains, can charm anew.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1993
Lend Me a Tenor
Ivoryton Playhouse

No doubt some evil genius is designing a stopwatch to gauge the effectiveness of farces on purely statistical terms: how many laughs per minute, what percentage of gags come off. Though applying such faceless data to any comedy that aspires to deep — or even facile — sentiment would surely prove inadequate, some farces, for all their doorslamming, dress-dropping clamor, have the delicate workings of Swiss timepieces, and almost beg to be meticulously metered.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 1993
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Walter Kerr Theater

Let’s forgive a play that has everything in it but the second coming (wait, this is only part one) for being hailed as the second coming itself, but let’s also take it for what it is: a sprawling, very long, but not boring work of throbbing emotion that has moments of genius balancing its pretension, overwriting, and more-familiar elements. The great stuff is Roy Cohn’s as he grooms young aide, Joe Pitt, for unethical politics. But the married Mormon wants no part of it.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1993
And Baby Makes Seven
Circle Repertory

Somewhere in the top five key rules of playwriting is this one: the more mystified you leave your audience, the bigger the payoff had better be. In The Baltimore Waltz, Paula Vogel took the risk. Much of that play, with its wild, slapsticky take on spy-movie cliches, seemed to operate in its own heady ozone layer, yet the finale offered a revelation so potent that everything before it was instantly justified. No such luck with Vogel’s latest, though.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1993
Blood Brothers
Music Box Theater

Blood Brothers’s plot, concerning a working-class woman who gives up one her sons only to see the two become friends, rivals, and, finally, brothers again in tragedy, is the kind of penny-dreadful that’s so melodramatic, it’s nearly farcical. If only author Willy Russell had gone in that direction. Instead, his lighter moments are incidental throwaways in a musical that wallows in portentous hooey. There’s even a somber narrator who strides on every five minutes to deliver some cautionary doggerel -- complete with ominous musical underscoring. Ooohh.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1993
Another Time
American Jewish Theater

At first it seems Ronald Harwood, in his generational family drama, is putting his play through an elaborate artifice that gets in the way of the subject at hand. After all, despite its South African setting, Another Time has the usual kitchen/porch permutations, first in the early 1950s as young Leonard (James Waterston) copes with the loveless marriage of his self-pitying dad and overcompensating mom; then thirty-five years later as Leonard, now a father--and now played by Malcolm McDowell, the father of Act One--struggles to communicate with his son.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1993
Beau Jest
Lamb's Theater

Old-fashioned, schematic, but undeniably warm and funny, it’s the story of a nice Jewish girl who tries to fool her nosy jewish mother by hiring a male escort to play her perfect doctor/boyfriend.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 1993
Boy Who Saw True, The
Theater at 224 Waverly

In the late 1800s, when a sweet-natured eight-year-old boy saw visions, his parents treated his ability as a mental aberration and dragged him to various doctors, his school teacher ridiculed him, and his peers treated him with derision and contempt. If a child were to see the same visions today, his parents would drag him to Oprah, his teachers would grant exclusives to the "Enquirer," and his peers would treat him with derision and contempt. (Well, kids will be kids.)

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1992
Anna Karenina
Circle in the Square

From the outbreaks of disdainful snickers during a press-night performance of Anna Karenina, you’d think the production was so misguided that when the heroine threw herself under a train, she jumped singing “Clang, Clang, Clang, Went the Trolley!”. The truth is, while Peter Kellogg/Daniel Levine’s musicalization of Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel ultimately falls far short of being a compelling musical work, it isn’t the preposterous pastiche the sniggers suggest.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1992
Big Al / Angel of Death
American Jewish Theater

The American Jewish Theater goes out on a limb with its one-act double bill, Brian Goluboff’s Big Al and Charlie Schulman’s Angel of Death.

Actually, the only reason Big Al makes for unusual Jewish theater is that there’s nothing Jewish about it except (forgive the assumption) the author. Which isn’t to say this creepy, funny play, about a guy so obsessed with writing a screenplay for his idol, Al Pacino, that he sheds his own blood and terrifies his best friend, isn’t worth a look. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1992
Akin
La MaMa ETC

In this brief life, three little words are supposed to make all the difference. Three little words that excuse immaturity, lapses in judgment, and self-indulgence. Let’s whisper those three little words together: “work in progress.” When confronted with a show bearing that tag, critics are put in the impossible position of having to encourage the playwright and point him in the right direction, while simultaneously cautioning the paying audience against a disappointing evening.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1992
After the Dancing in Jericho
Episcopal Church of Heavenly Rest

A fellow critic confessed to having little use for the proliferation of current plays with nasty people doing ugly things. “It would be perfectly fine for me,” he sighed, “to watch five hours of a family just being nice to each other.” While I can’t go that far, I must admit to a sense of pleasure at encountering a play in which essentially decent people—who, nonetheless, have problems—try to get through life by hurting each other as little as possible.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 1992
Brother Theodore
13th Street Theater

Brother Theodore was hurling insults before I was born, and he may well be doing it after my great grandchildren die—but not before grandpa makes them catch his act.

To call him Sam Kinison before there was a Sam Kinison is only half-right; Theodore’s more absurdist, German expressionist, more weird. A must for the adventurous, but returnees beware: the material stays pretty much the same.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 1991

Pages