When theater actress Lily Darnley (Kristen Johnston) kisses her image in the mirror, it might be taken as an exaggeration. It’s not. It’s the quintessential moment in this funny backstage comedy about self-absorbed celebrity divas who, alas, were just as much among us in the 1920s as today.
There’s a genre of musicals that is supposed to be for kids, but is just as much for adults. I include The Lion King and Wicked and now Shrek the Musical. I loved them all. What they have in common is strong moral politics. The characters in the first play fight oppression, the second combat racism and Shrek does a bit of both. Like the others, it proves that shows about ideas are more interesting and fun than empty-headed fluff.
This social and political back story of Rhythm and Blues is a vibrant sometimes sketchy, but visually exciting story musical with terrific sounds that range from R&B to gospel. It’s 1951 on Beale Street, and Huey (Chad Kimball) wanders into a hot music joint. He’s found the music of his soul. The only problem is that this is the black part of town, and he’s white.
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s powerful plays are written in the dark poetry of lives marked by the desperate seeking of love etched against routine misfortune and tragedy. Yet the characters often exhibit joyous defiance against the odds of disappointment.
The friends and family whose lives make up the stories McCraney tells reside in the projects in the mythical city of San Pere in the bayou of the Louisiana Delta, south of New Orleans. There’s little sense of an outside world.
Directors in modern times have enjoyed playing with Shakespeare, often modernizing his plays, putting actors in scenes and clothes that are not of the period described. But Brian Kulick, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company and the adapter/director of this play, entwines Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, set in Troy during the Trojan War, with The Iron Age by Thomas Heywood, a contemporary. Shakespeare’s is the more personal play, but much of the macho jousting seems inspired by Heywood’s war story. The amalgam is a worthy effort, though I think I’d rather have seen Shakespeare’s play. This one often lacked his poetry.
Nightingale is Lynn Redgrave’s less-than-completely-truthful memoir of the women of her family, their men and their unhappiness about marital sex. Redgrave as an actress of course does a fine professional job. And the dialogue is smart. But for a tell-all memoir, mostly about sex, it manages to eke the most lively sections out of the one part of the story that is totally made up.
Alan Ayckbourn’s mordantly funny satire of middle class marital life – a staple of his genius through 70 plays — is significantly enhanced by the presence, almost as a fly on the wall, of 9-year-old Winnie (Ayesha Antoine). Winnie’s school assignment for the next day is to write about My Wonderful Day, and she methodically records the marital spats and infidelities she observes, generally with a blank expression and fidgeting as any kid might. Ayckbourn is a master of subtle slapstick, the one liner, the bizarre situation. His dark wit is displayed here with perfect comic timing.
If there’s a king and queen in this production of The Royal Family, the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber 1927 parody of the Barrymore acting dynasty, they are Jan Maxwell and Reg Rogers, who steal the show with their theatricality.
The device of the play is that Julie Cavendish (Maxwell) and her daughter Gwen (Kelli Barrett) are torn between their love of the stage and their desire to have married lives. Julie’s mother Fanny, (Rosemary Harris), the grande dame of the family revels in having had both.
A Steady Rain by Keith Huff, a television script writer, is a thriller about two beat cops, partners, friends from childhood, that would seem to belong on TV. On the other hand, some of the events they describe are so bloody, that I’d rather see them described in the two interlocking monologues that make up the play rather than watch them in full color.
The stories are gripping. On the other hand, like most TV, you forget them pretty quickly.
Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie is a psychological thriller, a rich drama that has three characters enmeshed in a web of conflicts that shift the upper hand from one to the other, depending on whether the field of battle is class or gender.
If it’s about class, then Miss Julie (Sienna Miller), the rich daughter of a lord, is on top. If it’s about gender, then it’s John (Jonny Lee Miller, no relation), the lord’s chauffeur-valet. But that holds only if the woman is as neurotic as Julie. Or a woman defeated by her time.
Jude Law drives Hamlet with an animal energy and naturalistic fervor that overwhelm the stage. This is not the tentative or tormented Hamlets we are used to. This Hamlet is a thriller and Hamlet the vengeful detective. The excitement is palpable. It’s a brilliant interpretation you won’t soon forget.
Nathan Louis Jackson’s play about a black family in Kansas City struggling to achieve a middle class life avoids the pitfalls of sitcom due largely to the four accomplished actors and director Thomas Kail, who breathe life into what on its face is a rather predictable story.
It hangs on whether Malcolm King (an appealing Alano Miller), who has managed to get a masters degree in Connecticut, will give up chances of a good university teaching job under his mentor, an environmental professor, or will he stay home to care for his father William (a warm-spirited Wendell Pierce) who has muscular dystrophy.
Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage smartly shows the disintegration of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps people civil. Reza, perhaps coming from the salon culture of France, has a habit of locating her dramas in living rooms. These tête-à -têtes ought to show the height of culture. Instead, they display the dark sides of polite society.
This story begins with a touted civilized meeting between two couples, one clearly upper class, the other middle class, one couple chic, the other dowdy, to deal with fact that son of the first hit the son of the second. They start out honest, each admitting the family faults. As the evening gathering of nice people progresses, they descend from throwing words into throwing things. Taken further, we see the basic failure of ethical man. It is a fascinating transformation.
This charming, vivid musical biography tells the story of two American composers who changed the idiom of western popular music. The curious parallel personal tragedies of Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin exist in contrast to their generally upbeat lively sounds.
In the early 1900s, the two musicians created musical sounds that established a new American music that would echo across this landscape and the world. Both were consummate outsiders: one the son of a slave, the other a Russian immigrant who had escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms with his parents. Mark Saltzman’s play – with the stunning music of Joplin and Berlin – is a lively, appealing, often fascinating look back at what motivated these American musical giants. The motivations and the men were quite different.
About the political and personal struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, the play underlines the eternal reality of struggles for power. Written by Friedrich Schiller in the 18th century and adapted by Peter Oswald, it is a political thriller that gets a memorable staging by Phyllida Lloyd.
Alan Ayckbourn’s play is an ultra-sophisticated comedy that verges perilously close to sitcom, then skirts around it. The round-robin of three plays is what the clever British author posits against the normal sequential serial, a Rashomon style
The idea behind Noel Coward’s play is quite promising. Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett), a middle-aged murder mystery novelist – obviously quite successful in writing or marriage, from the country villa he inhabits – invites a medium (Angela Lansbury)
The mystery of Samuel Beckett’s play about two down-at-the-heels hobos who watch an overbearing master abuse a pathetic slave is the division of the audience into those who laugh and those who don‘t.
Simon Cato (Gavin Lawrence) in his gold and purple stripes is cheeky, witty, a charmer as a jockey. Step back. This is 1861 and he is black; cheeky translates to impudent, (a challenge to power). A witty black man probably had no translation. Colonel Wiley Johnson (Chris Mulkey), who has hired Simon to ride his racing horse, pleads, Will you try and behave like a slave for just a few minutes!
August Wilson’s powerful, moving play conjures up a mood that is both poetic and surreal, though on the face of it, it is completely naturalistic. Perhaps it’s the distance of time, nearly a century ago, 1911, when blacks, only 50 years away from the start of the Civil War, were living on the border between slavery and freedom. Or it could be the ethereal staging by director Bartlett Sher, who excellently follows Wilson’s intent to turn the characters into symbols of their kind as well as real people. Sher starts that by showing the characters first in silhouette.
Exit the King is Ionesco’s witty satire on the corruption of those in power, given a tongue-in-cheek staging by Neil Armfield with a bravura performance by Geoffrey Rush as King Beringer, the man with only 90 minutes to live. Berenger loves parties. Well, the party’s over. Or about to be. The party, of course, is life.
I have never seen anything like the three acrobatic contortionists who twisted and bent to the sound of Indian music under the Cirque de Soleil tent on Randall’s Island. Their movements created living sculptures that shifted and held and then moved to another pose. Clad in colorful, patterned skin-tight leotards (costumes by Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt), they were stunning. Memorable.
What moves the creative and intellectual mind? Where does beauty lie? Those questions animate “33 Variations,” the provocative play written and directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring Jane Fonda. The production doesn‘t quite reach the level of intellectual stimulation to which it aspires, but it deserves plaudits for dealing with ideas as well as sentiments.
How can you satirize torture and torturers? If you’re comically stinging playwright Christopher Durang, you stick pretty close to the truth till weirdness and absurdity overtakes the brutality. In this brilliantly funny play, Durang blunts the edge of what might appear to be gruesomely violent by turning reality into farce. He gets a lot of help from director Nicholas Martin who transforms right-wing psychopaths into figures of comedy.
Stanley (Hunter Foster) was an investment banker, a master of leveraged buyouts. As Foster tells it in song and dance, he was an overachiever of insider trading, moving a step up the ladder of legalized crime. Then, at 42, he had a massive heart attack. And died.
Now he’s the conductor on the train in this whimsical pastiche by John Weidman (often clever lyrics by Michael Korie, tuneful music by Scott Frankel) about people on the way to the netherworld – via a New York subway car with silvery benches — instructed to remember the best moments of their lives. It’s where they will spend eternity.
