I saw Maureen McGovern at Birdland, the iconic jazz club on West 44th Street in New York. It always amazes me to hear her smooth mix of jazzy, a soupçon of folk, and lyrics that are as smartly political as they get. These are not the standards you might expect at a cabaret. At 61, McGovern channels the 60s and 70s, and her rendition of the Beatles When I’m 64 is the best I’ve ever heard. She presents an ethereal version of Up, Up and Away (Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon.) She also conveys a feminist idiom: A woman is a fighter, a mighty force of nature. On the folk side of the era, this very versatile performer does a powerful If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), noting that Pete Seeger has always been a hero of mine. And McGovern has long been a favorite of mine.
Michael West’s play is a charming, stylized, fantastical imagining of a Dublin theater troop that gets caught up in the Irish independence movement over a hundred years ago. It tells the story of some actors’ efforts to found the Irish National Theatre of Ireland and the conflicts and dangers that arise because some of them are also committed to the Cause.
The Elevator Repair Company’s often entertaining, sometimes puzzling parody of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel was maybe not intended to be the second. But the production, which cuts but doesn’t change a word of the book, makes one wonder how anyone could have taken Hemingway seriously. Or maybe that’s a result of this hokey presentation of Hemingway’s lines.
I hated this play by English playwright and film director Jez Butterworth. Yes I know it got plaudits and awards, but I thought it was pretentious drivel. The friend I took also hated it. Lest you think that was just an off night, her friend who attended at another time hated it. Nevertheless it was so powerfully acted by Mark Rylance and so vividly directed by Ian Rickson that we were annoyed and even angry, but never bored.
Maria Callas’ brilliance, as articulated by her dazzling stand-in Tyne Daly, was as much about discipline and courage, presence and presentation, as about hitting the right notes. Playwright Terrence McNally shows that through an imagined master class Callas gives late in her career. Working with students, she focuses on what makes a great star rather than a skilled performer. But McNally also creates a feminist parable of a woman who sold her soul for the lifestyle offered by a billionaire.
In a fascinating and occasionally lurid take on sex and hypocrisy — as current as it ever was five centuries past — The Public Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure opens with horned demons slithering around stage. They will appear again at a bordello and elsewhere. Suddenly, a cover is pulled off a mound on a bed and horrific creatures scamper off, leaving the Duke of Vienna (Lorenzo Pisoni) awake and distraught at his sexual fantasies.
This is a terrific feminist juke box musical. It is based on the true story of Florence Greenberg (Beth Leavel), a New Jersey housewife who discovered the Shirelles, four Passaic, NJ, high school coeds, who she would make into a major singing group. She would, in the process, move to Manhattan, shed her traditional husband and take up with a young song writer. This was in 1958, before feminism became a mass movement. Also before Motown, before the Beatles. The visionary Flo and pop music would never be the same.
This is a Shakespeare sex play. Didn’t know he did those, did you? The playbill for the production has a cover that says, Shakespeare in bed. And the comic Reg Rogers, whose signature style of exaggerated and plosive speech makes him recognizable anywhere, delivers a long near-tirade to the play’s heroine, Helena (the generally cool and often hot and always excellent Annie Parisse) about the importance of getting rid of one’s virginity.
Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy is a delightfully clever political romp which pits a crooked businessman and a bought U.S. Senator against a supposedly dumb kept woman who gives everyone a civics lesson while taking the bad guys down a few notches.
Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play is a very funny, ironic, grungy and cautionary tale where four-letter words, sex and betrayal are mixed in equal parts in the down and dirty milieu of New York City drug addicts and their relatives and friends. It starts at a residential hotel in Times Square. Jackie (Bobby Cannavale), just out of jail and on parole, is ready to take up again with his sweetheart Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), but then he notices a man’s hat on a bedroom table.
John Guare’s 1970 dark comedy, in a brilliant revival by David Cromer, shifts between humor and tragedy as it traces the path that links illusion to delusion. As one morphs into the other, the differences appear increasingly subtle.
It was 1935 Warsaw, and a small traveling troop of Jewish actors were playing the shtetl circuit, as they half affectionately, half mockingly called it. They did vaudeville, they did Shakespeare, they did the Bible. Raisel (Donna Murphy) as Moses’ wife: You’re going to do what? You can’t even part your hair! The times are dark and the troop reaches for answers in absurdity: A pogrom is not an easy act to follow.
Michael Halberstam’s chamber music version of Shaw’s Candida is a charming and exhilarating production about male-female relations in earlier days of the battle for women’s sexual freedom. The story is adapted by Austin Pendleton from Shaw’s 1898 version of the play, which he revised in 1930, when post-flapper era so much in society had changed. At the turn of the century, women were even more psychologically and materially dependent on their husbands.
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia plays with truth and illusion and shows how easy it is to be deceived. It sets true intellectuals devoted to search and discovery against glory-seeking scholars who invent convenient truths. Stoppard, as he is good at doing, mixes truth about historical figures with fantasy about their connections with the protagonists in a way that adds to the fascination of the plot.
The struggles of the working class are starkly depicted in David Lindsay-Abaire’s striking portrait of a handful of friends in Boston’s Southie neighborhood. At a time when economic decisions by the government leave millions of workers in the dust, it’s a political as well as social commentary.
Like the wind and rain storm that swirls around him as he wanders lands he once oversaw, Derek Jacobi blows fiercely in fury at his faithless daughters. His face is red almost to bursting in disbelief. His eyes could sear with their gaze. Yet, in Jacobi’s powerful, dominating portrayal in the Donmar Warehouse production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this King Lear’s howling anger at how his royal state has been eclipsed is the other side of a royal flaw. It is the mistake of the self-absorbed and powerful who believe the ingratiating lies of their courtiers. And relatives. Both Lear and his loyal Earl of Gloucester (Paul Jesson, quietly moving in his misery) are outmaneuvered by evil progeny.
Charles Busch’s very funny campy satire of Catholic nuns hits all the bases, extending to a stereotypical Jewish philanthropist, a Da Vinci Code style mystery with a German faux-nun and a brown-robbed monk, and even a detour back to thirties movies about diligent good-guy reporters
Benefactors begins in 1968, during an era when England was building controversial housing projects. It was written in 1984 by Michael Frayn, who two decades later authored Democracy, the powerful recreation of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s early 70s dealings with East Germany. In both cases, in overlapping eras, the personal becomes political, and there is a strong ideological message that expresses Frayn’s general concern about democracy, writ small and writ large.
Personal and family connections are fraught with psychological peril, disappointment, sometimes joy. It’s the stuff of many, even most, plays, films, novels. Bathsheba Doran weaves those strands into a complex web and network that connects and sometimes sustains lovers, friends, parents and children. It is a slim but appealing fabric, made richer by Sam Gold’s smooth, light touch.
Alfred Uhry’s charming, moving play is part of his Atlanta trilogy about Southern Jews in the middle decades of the last century. Through the conflict and then growing warmth between an elderly middle-class white woman and a middle-aged working-class black man, one gets a sense of how human contact can break or at least crack the barriers of color and class. The production is tour de force for Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones.
This is an unlikely melodramatic potboiler about American slavery and a Jewish family in Richmond, Va., that turned its slaves into believers. It’s an unlikely premise in spite of historical documentation, but you no sooner get to the point of accepting one unlikely premise, than playwright Matthew Lopez throws you another. The play is full of action and mystery, secrets and surprises, but is somehow unsatisfying.
Jamie Jackson’s musical satire is the funniest political skit I’ve seen in years and is a highlight of This Ain’t No Tea Party! Jackson, who played one of the multi-characters in the demanding and hilarious The 39 Steps Off-Broadway last year, is a compleat actor. He was one of six performers at this political cabaret sponsored by Laughing Liberally, which promotes progressive politics.
This vibrant rock production about youthful rebellion in the face of a fraudulent society is in the tradition of Hair. But it’s not Hair with the memorable tunes that we still remember decade later; it’s more like MTV. Fast, often driving, and the kind of hard rock of the 28 Green Day tunes that doesn’t much distinguish it from anything else of that genre.
The genius of Oscar Wilde’s skewering of the British upper classes circa 1895 is that his satire is rather gentle, even affectionate, but his pointed steel neatly pierces the targets. In his deft and delightful The Importance of Being Earnest, he manages to get a few licks in at the literary establishment as well. All is done with enormous wit and panache, and not a trace of meanness, owing much to the flawless direction and acting of Brian Bedford.
