Aaron Sorkin’s rethink of Alan Jay Lerner’s book of “Camelot” takes it smartly into the present, with more contemporary male-female attitudes and a heavy emphasis on social justice. The politics is solid, albeit presented in a hokey fashion (this is a musical), and the magical/mystical parts of the 1960 version have been cut, though the personal stories are still rather fanciful: the doomed romances are hard to believe. Just relish Frederick Lowe’s glorious music and Alan Jay Lerner’s sophisticated lyrics, overpowering and magical. And appreciate the politics in an era of Western warmongering.
Bob Fosse is the only theater choreographer whose name trips off the tongues of most theater-goers. OK, Twyla Tharp, but she has written mostly for dance venues, not theater. This is a reimagining of a show that opened on Broadway in 1978. It starts with the promise of no plot, no messages. Wish it were so. Forty-five years later, we are smothered in woke.
“Bad Cinderella” is entertaining and fast-paced, a lot like Andrew Lloyd Weber’s other musicals. It’s camp, which is what ALW does best. And it has terrific politics! In a subtle way, it’s about the UK. Brits will get this more than Americans. Just think British royals. (Director Laurence Connor runs the story smoothly as some typical pop musical production and then slyly inserts the politics.) With witty lyrics by David Zippel. Not one of the musical greats, but I liked it.
“Parade” is a tragedy about the 1913 trial and 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jew, in a Georgia still smarting from the loss of the Civil War. Fifty years later in Atlanta their descendants chant, “We gave our lives for Georgia” and wave Confederate flags. The few blacks on the scene are discomforted.
In a curious way, Jamie Lloyd’s powerful production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” stark, with black-clad actors sitting on white spindle chairs or standing ranged across the back, seems more real than if it had a traditional set, with 19th-century furnishings matching the 1879 story date. (In fact, “1879” displayed on the backdrop is the most prominent part of the “set.”)
Samuel Beckett’s surreal vision of dueling human nastiness and compassion, misery and hope takes place in a nondescript walled space. Outside the world has ended, but somehow these people have survived the apocalypse. The Irish Repertory Theatre production, powerfully directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, envelopes you in a bleak mood conveyed by the gloomy dialogue as well as the dark red bricks.
Betty Smith is famous for her 1943 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but before that she was a playwright. Her 1930 work “Becomes a Woman” is about class and sexism. It has a bit too much soap opera for today’s tastes (except as a soap opera!), but is fascinating as a look back at a feminist view of the 1920s. Remember, this was not long after women got the 1920 ratification of the 9th amendment for the vote.
“Memorial” purports to be the story of how young architect Maya Lin got the U.S. government to build her design of a Washington Mall memorial to the U.S. veterans of the American war against Vietnam.
The invite was to a play featuring Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in “Why is the Government in My Soup?” promoted as an evening of political humor and insight. Sounded interesting. I haven’t seen a clever political comic I liked since Mort Sahl. This wasn’t it. But there were some surprises.
Key West – It takes a while before you begin to figure out the truth of this mystery that excoriates the capitalist oppression of the working class. And I won’t spoil it. Priestley, a British socialist, wrote it in 1945, setting it in 1912. It gets a terrific production, helmed by director Patrick New, expertly cut in half from the original three-hour script.
Key West – Ken Ludwig’s delightful two-hander is an affectionate memory of his parents’ epistolary courtship during World War II when his father was a small town doctor working in army hospitals and at the front and his mother was an aspiring actress from Brooklyn. Cody Borah is perfect as the low-key Jacob S. (Jack) Ludwig and Jessica Miano Kruel is excellent as the tough, sometimes cutting New Yorker, Louise Rabiner.
In this dysfunctional family near-soap opera by Stephen Adly Guirgis, the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are all con men, or women. The venue, a middle-class apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, is a place for drive-by scams and attacks that have you shifting the characters between the hero and villain columns. And asking some questions for which answers are never there. That said, the acting, headed by lead Stephen McKinley Henderson, and direction by Austin Pendleton are fine, as complex but also as hokey as you are likely to see on TV.
“How did you get to be here?” A common question often rephrased in conversation. But this Stephen Sondheim – George Furth production takes it dramatically smarter in multiple musical flashbacks, each chosen year before the previous one. And each vignette is a surprise.
Brilliant, clever, trendy, stunning, wonderful, the best musical of the season, every number a show-stopper. It’s 1933 Chicago, time of depression and prohibition. A couple of musicians, Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), sax and a double bass players looking for a gig in a show bar, see a gang murder by mafioso Colombo, known as “Spats” (Mark Lotito), and his confederates. Witnesses will be killed. They run into a dressing room and appropriate the clothes and wigs which of course yields the costumes of the girl band.
A novella is not a play. The 75-minute drama by Adrienne Kennedy is largely a monologue, delivered expertly by Audra McDonald, but still a monologue. It was first produced thirty years ago, but this is the first time it’s been on Broadway.
Deirdre O’Connell is wonderful as Becky, the neurotic inheritor of the mantle of 17th century Salem’s witchcraft victims. She is as out-front and aggressive as her flaming red hair. But the Sarah Ruhl play she inhabits is a confusion of current issues (depression and opioids), fantasy witching (potions to make people fall in and out of love) and suggestion that the present echoes the bad historic past.
I saw David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy in 2001. It was clever and funny, as his works tend to be. About a girl who has a disease that ages her very fast so while in high school she looks like she’s 72. What a difference a couple of decades makes. Now it’s a musical, with Lindsay-Abaire doing lyrics and Jeanine Tesori the music. And more school kids have been added.
“Ain’t No Mo’” by Jordan E. Cooper is a fantastical surreal in-your-face satirical pastiche of American black experience. It targets blacks (read the black bourgeoisie) as well as whites. You won’t find anything as adventurous on or off Broadway. Which makes it sad it has posted a closing notice for Sunday, Dec. 18th, just two weeks after its opening. So here is what you will see if you go and what you will miss if you don’t.
It is Aug 13 2021. Henry Naylor is a topical comedian looking back at the Taliban departure from Afghanistan a decade before. Naylor was a writer for the British TV satire show “The Spitting Image” and a stand-up comic. He likes satires on war like Mash, Catch 22, Dr. Strangelove. A decade earlier, he had a chance to do a show on BBC comedy radio, and he wanted to talk about the Afghanistan conflict, but the state-funded broadcaster said Afghanistan is not funny. Too many dead bodies. He noticed that journalists talking about Afghanistan were not really there. They gathered on the border. Including a BBC reporter who faked reports. Yes, the BBC was full of fakery. Naylor wanted to expose the media lies. So, flashback.
A history of American jazz in 90 minutes? The Anderson Brothers’ “The Journey of Jazz” does so in fascinating pastiche of music and visuals, starting with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” smartly performed by pianist Dalton Ridenhour, and finishing with Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” They show along the way how styles evolved, how jazz composers were affected by classical music (think Thelonious Monk) and went on to influence the music of Broadway and popular culture (Richard Rodgers).
In 1918, at age 18, Noël Coward wrote a feminist play about a novelist who gave up working to be wifely support for her less talented playwright husband. Coward was a great admirer of George Bernard Shaw, and this is due homage. It is an amazing feminist play for the time. And gets a fine production from the Mint Theatre which specializes in bringing out plays of many years past.
It’s not quite Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man,” but Ed Weinberger attempts a take with two 3500 year-old geezers wandering in the desert on Moses’ famous trek to “the promised land.” Lou (Josh Mostel) complains his boots are too tight and “How come in all these 30 years, not once has anybody — ever — had the decency to tell us the truth? We’re lost…. We’ve been lost ever since we left Egypt.”
Bud (Richard Masur) red robe, black glasses, tells him to have faith in God’s miracles.” Who dropped manna from Heaven? Who brought forth water from a rock?”
August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” is not about learning how to play the piano. It is about the powerful lesson an old ornately carved piano teaches about history and about the respect and honor one owes one’s forbears, especially when they suffered greatly to preserve the dignity they bequeathed to their children. It’s about slavery.
KT Sullivan, a doyenne of jazz through the Mabel Mercer Foundation she heads, presented the Cabaret Convention’s Great “American Songbook: American Standards,” at the three-day event’s finale at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Oct 28. This thrilling event brought singers from the U.S. and abroad to an annual gathering of cabaret fans. And as they are standards, it’s worth noting who wrote them.
Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays is about fantasy and fakery, the desperation and dysfunction of the underclass. The brothers Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen H) and Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) had parents who cheated on each other, left when the sons were 13 and 16. He had women on the side, she had her “Thursday man.” “Why do you think they left us? They were struggling.” Well, a lot of parents are struggling.
