Glen Close is a terrific actress. Too bad she is starring in such a bad play. She makes it worth watching, even if you cringe at Jane Anderson‘s hokey script that walks straight out of television, dumbing down events of the 15th century so viewers can connect as they do to their favorite sit-com. Anderson has done a lot of TV, and we see the result.
It‘s 1981 in Northern Ireland. The body of an IRA militant who disappeared ten years before has been found, preserved in a bog. An IRA chief, Muldoon (the threatening Stuart Graham) is worried how Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), the man‘s brother, will react, because he is a former IRA activist and knows or suspects how the victim died.
“The Nap” is about a championship game of snooker, a game that’s a variety of billiards or pool. The nap is the pile on the surface of the table. But that’s not really what this play is about. That’s only on the surface. Think hokey comic mystery.
Howard W. Campbell, an American-born Nazi propagandist and double agent, served evil too well and good too secretly. That is the subtle moral of the Kurt Vonnegut story adapted by Brian Katz in a fascinating albeit not totally successful stage presentation. Still better than most of what you will see in New York theater at the moment.
Janet McTeer is a charmer with ego as Sarah Bernhardt the greatest actress of the 19th century who performed on the Euro-American stage. And to bring the story up to date, her artistic challenge is a feminist one. We see it as a play within a play, and Theresa Rebeck‘s script sticks closely to reality, except for an affair with French playwright Edmond Rostand, who was a friend but not necessarily a lover.
It‘s a working-class crowd and the talk is of neighborhood, the boundary of their lives. The scene is a bar and music place, the sounds are of the 50s and 60s, the voices are rich and jazzy. I never realized Leiber and Stoller created so many of rock classics, jazzy torch and doo-wap. I didn‘t like this music then: “Gonna Find Her,” “Jailhouse Rock,” the hokey “Poison Ivy.” I like it now. Most of it.
Here‘s a Cinderella story which would not quite make it today. Because it‘s about a prostitute who reforms her John. It was a movie hit 20 years ago, but that was an epoch away. So, suspend belief and politics. A story for our times about a billionaire Edward Lewis (Andy Karl) without morals, who would destroy a shipbuilding company and fire its workers, but learns something from a hooker.
I‘m not too sure who the cursed child is. Albus (Sam Clemmett), the son of the grown-up hero Harry Potter (Jamie Parker), or Scorpius (Anthony Boyle), the son of his nemesis, Draco Malfoy (Alex Price). But mixed in with the magic and terrific scenery, there‘s a lot of stuff about fathers and sons, which is really the theme of the play, or the two plays which you can see on succeeding nights or a one-day marathon.
Take a luckless cowboy, his novitiate sister, a (mostly) upstanding sheriff, a saloon dancer with a sideline, a governor who demands sex for favors and a drunken priest who admires Nietzsche.
Edie Falco is powerful as the acerbic, in-your-face, sometimes crude-talking Polly Noonan, a real operator in Albany‘s Democratic Party machine politics for about four decades. She was the confident and advisor to long-serving Mayor Erastus Corning. The play takes place in 1977, five years before he died. Director Scott Elliott makes it a combination soap opera and political drama.
Lillian Hellman’s play about a labor conflict in a small town in Ohio in 1936 has some fine moments giving only hints of stronger plays such as “The Little Foxes” where she takes on the corrupt, manipulating rich who exploit workers.
John Rando is the best comic theater director I know. The creative wit who oversaw “Urinetown,” “The Toxic Avenger,” “The Heir Apparent” and “All in the Timing” takes a deliberately jokey rock musical by Ken Davenport and, with excellent timing and staging, pokes fun at the genre as well as the state of New Jersey. I don‘t much like rock. I liked this play.John Rando is the best comic theater director I know. The creative wit who oversaw “Urinetown,” “The Toxic Avenger,” “The Heir Apparent” and “All in the Timing” takes a deliberately jokey rock musical by Ken Davenport and, with excellent timing and staging, pokes fun at the genre as well as the state of New Jersey. I don‘t much like rock. I liked this play.
Every once in a while, you see an actor who could read the phone directory and make it a brilliant play. That is Patrick Morris, who portrays Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, in “Bloominauschwitz,” as he travels through history to investigate his identity as a Jew. And issues of identity.
This is a stunning political thriller and a true story. “Let‘s make a bonfire of the truth” starts out as a song. Smoke and flames. The character William MacRae (Andy Paterson) is about 40, a Glasgow lawyer, square faced, serious. It‘s 1985, and he is being watched by spies. He will take us back to 1974. Paterson is stunning as the character he has written. And the story is as powerful as anything (not) written in the media.
When I go to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as I have for the past five years, I know I want to see Mark Thomas at the Traverse. That theater is Edinburgh’s most politically important year ˜round stage, and Thomas is always the most prescient writer/perfor
How does a sports champion deal with political morality? What does she care about? Personal achievement? A sense of justice? How does she ignore that her sponsors are killing her people?
Fascinating to see play written in 1925 that has the politics of a play that could be written today. It was penned by Miles Malleson, a prominent playwright, screenwriter and actor of the time who used his work to promote progressive politics. He was a socialist, pacifist and supporter of women‘s suffrage. This is very finely, subtly directed by Jenn Thompson.
“Rosa Luxemburg Karabett” is an historical play with music about the life of the Russian revolutionary who became an activist in German politics, opposed WWI, was imprisoned and, after the war, was murdered. The production reflects the tradition of the German political cabaret.
For clarity about politics, “Brexit” at the Avignon Theater Festival does as well as any pundits. It‘s a clever mime and vaudeville comic take by a pair as a verbally dueling father and son.
Brit Henry Naylor‘s play about the moral choices of people trapped in the Middle East horror and the western reporters of it could not be more timely, or more searing. The dialogue is stirring, often tough, and poetic. It is part of a series he has presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the last few years about the human suffering and the ethical challenges posed by the region’s crises.
“Win That War!” sing workers in a parachute factory in a town about 1,000 miles south of Chicago. It‘s a striking transformation of Georges Bizet‘s opera “Carmen,” about a worker in a Spanish cigar factory in 1820, to wartime US in 1943 with a book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.
Shakespeare‘s “Othello” at the Delacorte in Central Park seemed more about racism to me than it ever had before. Under the clear, commanding direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson and featuring the mesmerizing, almost painfully gut-wrenching acting of Chukwudi Iwuji as Othello, you imagine what a lifetime of racial slights has done to his judgment and trust.
More than 60 years after its charm overwhelmed the American stage, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s“My Fair Lady,” with revivals through the years, is back, and this time there‘s a feminist kick. And some class solidarity. They are changes from America’s reactionary 1950s when it premiered. Credit director Bartlett Sher. The street flower seller Eliza (Lauren Ambrose) is a sweetheart, and you get the sense of a supportive society among the sweepers and other night workers at Covent Garden
“Travesties” is a glorious kaleidoscope of famous people, fiction and events that converge in Zurich during World War I and raise questions about radical politics, the meaning of art, and the validity of memory to link it all. Tom Stoppard pays homage to and questions absurdist and revolutionary art in a play which presents three of the great figures of the time through the clouded memory of a retired British diplomat posted in Zurich during the Great War. It is a brilliant historical fantasy directed by Patrick Marber.
This Saint Joan (Condola Rashad) is a charmer. At the same time, she is no farm wench but a tough young woman of 17. She hears voices. She vows to make the English occupiers leave France.
