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
And the World Goes `Round
Westside Theater

A good if not incendiary cast in an entertaining tribute to composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago, Zorba, The Rink). Although the originals remain unforgettable, Brenda Pressley holds her own against Streisand (“My Coloring Book”) and Liza Minnelli (“Maybe This Time”). Best of all are the two hilarious duets between Pressley and Karen Mason, “Class” and “The Grass is Always Greener.” (Yes, you’ll hear “New York, New York” and “Cabaret”—and you won’t even mind.)

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1991
Black Eagles
City Center - Stage 2

Entertaining, admirably performed drama about a corps of black fighter pilots in World War II. It’s repetitious and somewhat formulaic (lose that stupid puppet!), with situations that are more absorbing than the characters, but it sure isn’t boring.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1991
Advice from a Caterpillar
Lucille Lortel Theater

Terrified of anything even remotely like a complicated relationship, a young artist (Ally Sheedy) settles for easy sex with a married man—until she falls for her gay roommate’s bisexual lover. Would you believe this is a lighthearted, conventional, even “old fashioned” comedy? And would you believe that, thanks to clever lines, a winning Sheedy, and an outrageous Dennis Christopher, author Douglas Carter Beane almost pulls it off?

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1991
Big Love, The
Plymouth Theater

Based on the memoirs of Florence Aadland (who?), The Big Love examines a woman who sacrificed everything for her daughter’s career--including her daughter. Pretty 17-year-old Beverly was introduced to movie heartthrob Errol Flynn at a Hollywood nightclub. Flynn poured on the charm, and it worked so well he ended up raping the kid. Oh, but Flynn wasn’t such a bad egg--he became smitten with Beverly, and the two actually embarked on a romantic, almost dreamy, Hollywood love affair.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1991
Blue Heat
Intar - Theater 2

Four video screens, a “swimming pool,” a cross-dressing dancer, and two exorcisms. The interplay between live action and scenes recorded on a video monitor is interesting, but why do avant-garde artists still confuse ludicrous hogwash for innovation?

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1991
Candida
Playhouse 91

George Bernard Shaw’s delightful tale of a woman who must choose between her “wrong,” complacent husband (Guy Paul) and the immature, passionate poet (Don Reilly) who craves her. Despite a few labored touches, Shaw is rarely done so well on these shores. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1991
Buddy
Shubert Theater

Classic Buddy Holly songs punctuate and redeem Alan Janes’s lame, cliched bio. As Buddy, Paul Hipp’s the spitting image, right down to the hiccups, and he makes the final concert—a recreation of the now legendary Holly/Big Bopper/RItchie Valens last stand—rousing.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1990
As You Like It - Fresh
RAPP Arts Center

Visitors to the Forest of Arden in R. Jeffrey Cohen’s As You Like It—Fresh! will find more accents than leaves, not to mention some non-traditional casting that would scare even B.D. Wong. However, since this production envisions Frederick’s dukedom as Wall Street and Madison Square Garden, and Arden as the South Bronx, such pluralism drives home Shakespeare’s points about the unpredictable nature of love and Cohen’s theme of the violence bred by prejudice and injustice.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1990
Aunts, The
47th Street Theater

Theatergoers know they’re in trouble when set design is the most believable part of the evening. That’s not to denigrate Atkin Pace, whose insta-pulpit was a highlight of last year’s overrated Cantorial, and whose middle-income row house in The Aunts is carefully detailed right down to phone plugs and wall sockets. No, Mr. Pace has created a real home. Unfortunately, playwright Gary Bonasorte has filled it with artificial people.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1989
Aristocrats
Theater Four

Do you get the feeling that if an Irish theater company were to mount a production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, everyone from the dramaturg on down would come up with a thousand political subtexts? “The title,” they’d say, “represents Ireland walking with bare feet on the treacherous ground of English law. And the newlywed couple really stand for Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, split apart by outside forces. And what about the foreigner (PLO) who seduces Cory’s mother (ITA), huh?”

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 1989
Buzzsaw Berkeley
WPA Theater

I should be jealous. After all, Doug Wright graduated not only from my alma mater (NYU), but from the same department (Dramatic Writing) with the same degree (MFA), a year after my own commencement. Now here I am, a frustrated critic, while Mr. Wright’s plays have already won HBO and MacArthur Awards and have been staged at Yale, the Actors Theater in St. Paul, and the Mark Taper Forum.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1989
Arms and the Man
Union Square Theater

Arms and the Man, one of George Bernard Shaw’s earliest plays, was originally subtitled “a romantic comedy.” Correctly sensing that the public would get the wrong idea, the playwright redubbed the work “an anti-romantic comedy,” an appellation both clever and fitting. Love triangles, concealed passions, and gallantry take a back seat to Shaw’s estimation of what really makes a soldier or a lover.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 1989
Cafe Crown
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Once upon a time there was a magical place called Second Avenue. Honest, weary working folk, linked by a common history and language, could venture there and see their dreams enacted, their culture celebrated, and their troubles shared. But soon the elderly began to die, and the next generation didn’t take its place. Second Avenue withered away, and life went on. Memories remain, though, as those who were there recall the vital wonder of the Yiddish theater.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1989
Born Yesterday
46th Street Theater

I was not born yesterday. I’ve lived a reasonably interesting life up to this point, having read hundreds of books, seen dozens of plays, and watched innumerable movies, among them George Cukor’s "Born Yesterday" starring Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford. It’s been many years since I last viewed that acknowledged classic, and I remember enjoying the film and agreeing that the leads were perfectly cast, but since I was not born yesteryear, the flick didn’t seep into my consciousness and become one of my all-time favorites, either.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1989
Cantorial
Lamb's Theater

Diverting but utterly lacking divine inspiration, Ira Levin’s gentle comedy brings us a yuppie couple whose Manhattan co-op is haunted by the ghost of a synagogue cantor. Anthony Fusco does nicely as the young man who slowly becomes obsessed with rebuilding the shul, as well his own religious background. Heavy issues are touched on lightly, advancing the cute plot but little more. 

Cantorial moved to the Lamb's after running at the tiny Jewish Rep on 14th Street, where it must have been more at home.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1989
Black and Blue
Minskoff Theater

Like their previous Tango Argentino, Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli’s musical dance pastiche Black and Blue hits the Broadway boards after completing a hugely successful run in Paris. The French have long been fascinated by the American jazz and blues idioms, treating it with more reverence than Americans do. But one needs no nationality to appreciate the artistry of the show’s three leading ladies or of its talented corps of hoofers.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 1989

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