Don’t ban great white male authors, rewrite them! What would happen if a feminist Anne Hathaway did a revision of husband Will Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”? Where Juliet and other female characters in the story turn out to have agency? It’s a musical delight (book by David West Read, music and lyrics by Max Martin), even for someone who is not a fan of pop rock. Match that with bravura performances by Lorna Courtney in a star-turn as Juliet and Betsy Wolfe as a tough, appealing Anne, add smashing R&B and rock dancing. I loved it.
British playwright-director Robert Icke is fast becoming one of the most important English-language theater makers. Taking the anti-Semitism at the center of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” to illuminate today’s identity madness, he has created an essential work.
What you have to understand about this play by Doug Wright is television. It’s not just about television, it is television. It’s not just about the Jack Paar Show of the 1950s, or much of it, it is the show. So, forget subtlety. Push up the jokes. And hit on celebrities. Jane Mansfield is not there, but let’s talk about her.
“Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” is fake hagiography about a man who signed off on CIA coups that killed democracies and multi-thousands of people.
Dwight David Eisenhower was U.S. president from 1953 to 61. This play by Richard Hellesen fits perfectly into the 1950s media pablum of “Father Knows Best” and “Ozzie and Harriet” that spoon-fed audiences the fake lives of families without dark spots. This play invents a president who had a few minor defects, but nothing serious. Nothing that could be called violations of international law. Or define a war criminal of which the U.S. has had many.
This play is proof that Lorraine Hansberry had several lives, not just that of a black woman telling a civil rights story in her famous “A Raisin in the Sun,” but also a Greenwich Village bohemian among arty people, in this script an actress and wife of a would-be folk café impresario whose friends and neighbors include a playwright, painter, and a bookstore staffer.
“Prima Facie” and “Walking with Bubbles” are about two women who get into terrible situations with men, a casual lover and a husband. In the first, a smart 20-something barrister at a London “chambers” routinely goes to bars with friends and gets drunk. After one drinking bout, she invites a colleague to her apartment. They previously had sex in his chambers office. She doesn’t want sex now; the booze made her throw up. He carries her from the bathroom to the bed and rapes her. It is fiction.
The opening is a rooftop that reminds one of an Edward Hopper painting. It’s New York post-war 1946. People are jitterbugging. Perched on fire escapes of tenements. There is a jazzy feel. A stunning number, a showstopper in a show that is full of them, features a dozen construction workers on a dizzying high girder in Hoboken with a view of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline tap dancing along and around it. I don’t recall a dance number like it!
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.
