The greeting is “Meine Damen und Damen.” In German, it means “My ladies and ladies.” Amaluna in Latin means mother and moon. Clearly this is a woman‘s show, by and about women. There‘s even a moon goddess. It‘s not feminist in the sense it has a political message.
But showing women circus performers in roles other than their bodies being tossed around by men is certainly feminist and very welcome. Comparing this to other Cirque du Soleil production‘s I‘ve seen, the distinction was that the women exhibited grace above proficiency in tricks. They are aerialists, trapeze artists, acrobats, tumblers, balancers.
Can an early 18th century French play be hysterically funny and up to the minute in New York? Yes, if the author is David Ives who has turned a 1708 restoration comedy by Jean-FranÒois Regnard into a very witty commentary on greed, including the ethics of cut-throat capitalism. Plus Òa change…
The masterful director is John Rando, who gave us the political satires “Urinetown,” “The Toxic Avenger” and Ives‘ “All in the Timing.” This is one of the best plays of the season.
Ives has crafted a broad modern on a tale about greed written in rhyming couplets at the turn of the century – that is the 17th-to-18th century. It‘s aristocratic (1%) France. Gilt chandeliers adorn a rich man‘s sitting room. His nephew, Eraste (an appealing Dave Quay) in an aquamarine velvet coat, has been waiting around for years to collect a lucrative inheritance. He wants to marry the fetching Isabelle (charming Amelia Pedlow in violet gown), but her mother Madame Argante (a tough, take-no-prisoners Suzanne Bertish) won‘t consent unless he has ready cash.
The Stolen Chair Company did last year‘s brilliant (and Drama Desk nominated) production, “The Man Who Laughs.” So it is no surprise that this season‘s offering is a supremely inventive and clever site-specific production at a Soho bar. It takes place in the People Lounge on Allen Street south of Delancey Street. The admission includes three very exotic, interesting, tasty cocktails!
But more than that, the production is an intimate look – from your fly-on-the-wall vantage point – of what happens at a bar between the bartenders and the patrons and, especially, their romantic connections.
Sarah Ruhl is a very funny clever playwright. Her Stage Kiss is a witty play about acting, especially what happens when two ex-lovers get cast in a play that requires a lot of kissing. That‘s a physical “mannerism” that has a lot of physical impact. I mean, even staged fights don‘t land real blows.
The two actors, She (Jessica Hecht) – is this a satirical jab at Albee? – and He (Dominic Fumusa), both now in their mid-40s, are doing a play from 1932 Broadway. Hecht, one of my favorites, seems always slightly mentally off-key, a comic pose, and Fumusa is a very good slightly angry romantic lead. Angry at this impossible woman, but still turned on by her.
Clever, charming, sometimes funny, this show is always schmaltzy and delightful. I should connect to Carole King, since we both went to Queens College in the early 60s, but I admit I didn‘t know her then. Maybe she was one of the arty folks who hung out in the small cafeteria. Like Paul Simon.
But I connect now! King was an icon of her time, getting past the limitations set for her (˜be a teacher,‘ said her mom), reflecting women‘s desires and hurts, and then great talents. The play is fascinating not only as King‘s story, but as a look into the status of women and the music business of the time.
This musical play about the Cotton Club in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, a time of the big-band songs of Duke Ellington, is jazz lite. While the numbers are charming, especially those by the five-person dance team and a performer who conjures up Billy Holiday, it‘s missing the gritty reality. It‘s more Broadway than jazz. It‘s what Broadway does to jazz.
Then again, though the Cotton Club performers were black, the patrons were mostly white, and it‘s probably what they wanted.
This collaborative, inventive multi-media play with music is based on a Samizdat dialogue the Czech dissident Havel wrote in 1987, using the device of a popular rural pastime – roasting a pig – to satirize the communist government. It was inspired by the true story of Havel trying to find a pig to roast for his friends.
The performance starts with the excellent mood device of Czech singer Katarina Vizina and Jenny Lee Mitchell of Cabaret Metropol, doing European songs to music redolent of Kurt Weil.
Caryl Churchill is one of my favorite playwrights (“Serious Money,” “Top Girls”) and a major dramatic commentator on the feminist and the political. I am therefore sorry to report my disappointment in her latest work, “Love and Information.” It‘s a pastiche that seems thrown together from notes that needed editing.
The play occurs in a black box lined with graph paper. It pretends to be a commentary on what currently is going on in our technological lives. But it is pedestrian compared to what she has done before. Much of it is incomprehensible.
Let‘s start with the best. A couple meets after years, but their memories don‘t sync. Neither remembers the others memories. It‘s called “EX.” It’s worth quoting in its entirely because it is very clever Churchill.
John Patrick Shanley‘s charming play about two lonely people who don‘t know how to express their feelings is a delightful channeling of Irish black humor. One should add that the two, Anthony Reilly (Brian F. O‘Byrne) and Rosemary Muldoon (Debra Messing) are both quite attractive, so their social awkwardness appears the result of living in an isolated farming corner of Ireland that lets you believe that people can exist for months, even years, without even talking to their neighbors – which when it comes to those two is the case. (So, suspend reality.)
Harold Pinter liked to play games in his plays, teasing the audience, suggesting facts and realities that might or might not be true. He does this in “No Man‘s Land,” written in 1974. It is an acerbic commentary on human nature, with a particular aim at the jugular of the literary set. Pinter‘s prickly style is well served by director Sean Mathias and finely acted by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, with well-honed support from Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley. If you like intellectual diversions and mysteries, this play is for you.
The setting is a villa, in a strange living room enclosed in round walls of gray squares, almost like a tomb, unusually bare except for a silver bar, a blue/gray rug, a few chairs. Spooner (Ian McKellen) and Hirst (Patrick Stewart), men in their sixties, are getting drunk.
Beckett‘s metaphor for the human condition, of people clutching to each other in the face of man‘s inhumanity to man, turns absurdity into tragedy and occasionally black comedy. Director Sean Mathias has staged, almost choreographed, a dazzling cast in a haunting performance of a poignant, classic play.
Gogo, diminutive of Estragon – that‘s French for tarragon — with bulbous nose and scraggly hair, is portrayed by the excellent Ian McKellen with a Lancashire accent. His jerky, unsteady motions show a man in physical decay.
Didi, diminutive of Vladimir, with a worn suit jacket that may reflect a lost self-image, is played with subtlety by Patrick Stewart, still more in charge of himself, still aware of the irony of their situation. He tells Gogo, “You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited.”
A woman is trapped in a system, caught in a machine (machinal, from the French of or pertaining to machines), that turns her into a victim any way she looks, whether she accepts her plight or fights it. Sophie Treadwell‘s powerful and inventive play is a feminist treatise about women forced into marriage and then self-destruction, because they have no alternatives. It‘s a stunning drama, given a rich, subtle, moving performance by British actor Rebecca Hall in this Roundabout Theatre Company revival.
Treadwell, who most of us haven‘t heard of (why not?), an extraordinary sophisticated woman for her time or any time, wrote this play in 1928, and it was produced at the time in New York to rave reviews and not seen since on Broadway. It was inspired by the execution that year of Ruth Snyder for the murder of her husband. Treadwell, a journalist who covered murder trials and was also a playwright, wonders and imagines why.
This early Brecht play, first staged in 1926, is disappointing. It presages some of the elements of his later works, especially the Mother Courage character who here is Widow Begbick (the good Justin Vivian Bond as a modern red head with a sinful low voice), who owns a beer wagon that follows the soldiers to serve up brew and herself.
And there are the soldiers, victims of imperialism, which has turned them into mindless fighting machines.
But though the elements are often engaging, due in large part to the colorful staging by Brian Kulick and the talent of the actors, the play somehow doesn‘t hold together.
The nuggets of Brecht‘s ideas, opposition to war and the stupidity and brutality of the imperialist military, are there. But it doesn‘t have the wit and sharpness of his later productions. It seemed forced and lacks subtlety.
I don‘t like modern pop/rock music; it lacks musicality. But this hip-schmaltzy staging of work that Burt Bacharach wrote from the late 1950s through the 1980s makes one take another look at the new inflections.
It features multi-talented 20- and 30-something performers playing, singing and circulating in a production that is infectious and charming.
This political circus is quite out of the ordinary. It is in the tradition of the great political clown, Charlie Chaplin. “Cirkopolis,” by Cirque Éloize of Montreal, is a commentary on the metropolis that is filled with political symbolism. Call it a circus for our times.
The twelve performers are acrobats, contortionists and jugglers, but instead of familiar circus space, they inhabit offices and factories. The decorative themes are gray clothes and cogs and wheels representing the soul-destroying place of modern work. We see Greek statues — uplifting culture — and, behind them, the cogs and wheels of a factory — dreary reality.
Let‘s start with saying that rock and roll was never my style, which favors jazz. That said, Mary Bridget Davies does an excellent job of channeling Janis Joplin who became a rock star in the late 1960s.
She begins remembering her childhood in Fort Arthur, Texas, in an era where rock and roll, blues, R&B were flourishing, and takes us through her musical development, especially playing tribute to the singers who influenced her, Odetta, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, who are played by four black singers. (Interesting that the influences on this southern white women were all black.)
If you haven‘t seen Mark Rylance glide across the floor in fast tiny steps which, if it isn‘t a dancer‘s couru, makes you think he is on wheels, you have missed the funniest bit of stage business I can readily recall.
The exceptional Rylance, playing Olivia in this all-male production of Shakespeare‘s comedy of mistaken identities, gives a bravura performance, petulantly regal and flirtatious, a lady truly overwhelmed by love. You will never see the show without remembering him in the role. Though you don‘t for a minute believe that Rylance is a real woman. The casting makes the play a bit hokey, but still a lot of fun.
Mark Rylance‘s portrayal of the malevolent Richard III is a complex and original psychological study. Let‘s take this beyond what was expected of power seekers in Elizabethan times, that they might be rapacious and without morals. (Plus ça change, as they say.) Shakespeare doesn‘t just assume the pathology of 15th-century English politics, but wonders what is wrong with a man who plots to kill everyone, including family members, that stand between him and the throne.
Jack O‘Brien‘s staging of “Macbeth” at Lincoln Center puts the emphasis on “stage.” The physical production is minimal and stunning, with high backdrop curtains painted with noble shields and lighting aimed like lasers at key figures or diffused to bathe actors in shadows. There is fine pageantry and music.
Unfortunately, Ethan Hawke, as the ruthless, power-hungry noble who seeks the throne of Scotland, forgets he is on a stage, where one needs presence, and not in the movies, where it‘s okay to be laid-back. Hawke speaks too low and too fast, and sometimes even mumbles. He appears timid, frightened, even distraught, with the demeanor of a drug addict.
Julie Taymor‘s extravagant sets and staging gloriously overwhelm this production. A billowing sheet the size of the stage is lowered, and the brilliant Kathryn Hunter, who plays a red-headed Puck, drops through a middle opening. Scampering woodland animals – deer and foxes – wear heads that made one think, “Lion King!”
Fairy Queen Titania (a charming Tina Benko) descends from the ceiling in white and glittery wings, complete with lights that make her truly ethereal. Candles flicker, jewels sparkle; there‘s never been a Fairy Queen who looked like this.
Harold Pinter‘s play of modern sexual mores shows men and women betraying each other with casual composure, as if they were discussing a love match at a tennis game instead of the love game in their lives.
The play discourses on the civilized trappings of personal infidelity. The triangle is a writer, his wife and the writer‘s literary agent. Three friends — members of the literary-artistic intelligentsia — engage in sexual unfaithfulness with such sang froid, that they ask after lovers’ spouses and children, and one has lunch with the friend he is cuckolding, while suggesting that any other behavior would be downright uncivilized.
Fiona Shaw is one of the grand actors of our time who could pull drama out of reading a phone directory. Her “Medea” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2002 was at once elevating and chilling.
Her latest appearance at BAM marries the same artistry and fancy to tell a story about a mariner‘s shooting of an albatross and its awful effect on the boat and its crew. Her text is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by the early 19th-century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
My ancestors have been in America since the early seventeenth century. And for the first two hundred and forty-four years we never had a problem finding a job, he says with pointed irony. But since 1863 it’s been hell.
So begins August Wilson‘s elegant, tough, poetic memoir of his life in America. It is smartly created by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who knew Wilson and acted in many of his plays.
This projection/play by the Canadians Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon is fascinating as an artistic piece, gorgeous as staging and projection. Unfortunately, the plot and text are rather silly. Perhaps it should have been done as a dance theater piece, without voices.
Think of the fall as the prelude to the end of life, the difficult bumbling interval preceding finality and death. It‘s a time that presents more misery than joy in Samuel Beckett‘s “All That Fall,” a 1957 BBC radio play being staged with exquisite tenderness by Trevor Nunn at 59E59 Theater. But there‘s also a quirky and bizarre sense that makes you marvel for a moment at peoples‘ ability to hang on and assert themselves even as their physical beings are failing. “Fall” here is the verb.
This production is anchored in brilliant performances by Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, among Britain‘s best actors, as the frail married couple who retain just enough energy to flail and thrash at each other. Old life is passing, new life is budding, or is it nipped in the bud?
