This play is about body image and politics. I’ll take the politics first. A group of Latinas at a dress-making workshop in Los Angeles succeed in a challenge to produce a big turnaround of dresses that a buyer wants because another producer suddenly failed. I like that. I want women to get ahead. And I like Estela (Florencia Cuenca), the feisty factory manager.
Jonathan Groff starts this jukebox musical about Bobby Darin as himself, saying he will tell Bobby Darin’s story. “I’m Jonathan, I’ll be your Bobby Darrin tonight.” The show indeed shows off the voice and pizzaz of Groff as he recreates Darin. He is every bit as good as a singer and performer.
The best thing about this play is Jasmine Amy Rogers’ star quality debut on Broadway as Betty Boop. The next best is the 17-year-old ingenue Angelica Hale as Trisha, a fanatic Boop fan. Rogers and Hale both have powerful voices and presence. Rogers’ is chirpy in a good way, which goes along with her New York accent.
This musical play by Will Aronson and Hue Park, set in South Korea, is about two robots who are sentient. That is taken for granted and not explained. In fact, they each have very different personalities, akin to real people. The only difference is that instead of food they get electric charges to survive. And they have liked being servants of humans. In fact, the male robot, Oliver (Darren Criss), loved his master, James. Calls him his friend. Claire (Helen J. Shen) had a complicated relationship to her master. If these servants were black slaves, the story would get quite a different reception.
This sci fi play is an allegory of how the U.S. military brainwashes recruits to make them kill even when they don’t want to. How it takes “normal” young men and turns them into killer “monsters.”
David Mamet’s play, staged on Broadway in 1984, getting a revival with movie star Kieran Culkin, pits a collection of real estate salesman against each other as if they were in an MMA combat. (That is mixed martial arts, for the non-cognoscenti.) A punch here, a kick there, blood on the ground. That is to say that under Patrick Marber’s direction, it is overwrought, overacted and implausible. The office and inhabitants resemble a mental institution more than a tough, competitive real estate sales office. This forty-year old play doesn’t age well.
Why would one want to do a play about a man trapped in cave in rural Kentucky in the winter of 1925? A true story. The book is by Tina Landau who also directed and presented it first in 1994 in Philadelphia. This is the Broadway premier.
This is the kind of theater piece I really don’t like except I really liked it! Portentous, pretentious, full of cymbals crashing. Tacky show girls with feather sequins and glitter. Tacky men with buttocks poking out of g-strings. This is Las Vegas! Maybe not.
It’s a charmer. A bit silly, but that’s part of the deal. If you’ve never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, a charming take on British class oppression. Can those words go together? At a time when such subtlety was required. Still works.
“Sondheim’s Old Friends” is producer Cameron Mackintosh’s love letter to Stephen Sondheim’s greatest shows. Which he had produced. Better than a memorial service. For the rest of us, it’s also a chance to see Lea Salonga, a brilliant actor as well as singer.
It’s the Marilyn Monroe story, “Bombshell,” no really her story. Though it takes a while to figure that out. (Clues abound.) It starts in typical Broadway musical fashion with dance to jazzy music, with the Marilyn figure Ivy Lynn (Robyn Hurder), doing a “Let Me Be Your Star” number. Seems cliché. Disappointment. But wait!
At a time of book-banning, what could be more timely than a look back at the trial of nearly 100 years ago where earlier yahoos were upset at the 4-letter words in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” That probably got a lot of people to read, or at least start the book. And it is the basis for an engrossing and very entertaining reenactment by Colin Murphy.
Kimberly Belflower’s takedown of “The Crucible” is clever and sophisticated with a dénouement that will take you by surprise even if the parallel story has been out there all along to be discovered.
Sarah Snook is brilliant as Dorian Gray and all the other 25 characters in this morality play about the decadent British upper class.
The Oscar Wilde novel, written in 1890, is about a young self-centered fop who doesn’t want to grow old, and, after his portrait is painted by a friend, makes a pact with the devil (as it were), to have his face stay the same while the ravages of time and his excesses are shown on the painting secreted in his childhood playroom.
“Good Night, and Good Luck,” the smartly-staged story of how news reporter Edward R. Murrow helped bring down the malicious “junior senator from Wisconsin,” Joseph McCarthy, occurred in the early 1950s but could have been set today.
Written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, directed by David Cromer, it’s about how a powerful political figure targeted people he charged were communists or sympathizers and destroyed their lives. How the country’s politicians stayed silent. How he was abetted by malevolent media figures and their cowardly supporters. And how citizens were smothered into lethargy by TV’s breads and circuses.
Amy Sherald’s exhibit at the Whitney Museum is a collection of portraits of people who are black but who could be anyone from the nature of the lives they project: a worker, a tractor driver, a lady with a bicycle, an equestrian. And Michele Obama, which is what got Sherald some fame. The faces are flat, the flesh colors are black but cool. Sherald, born 1993 in Columbus, GA, shows what black people would look like sans racism. Workers. Doing sports. Being the smartly dressed wife of a president. (She also has a painting of Breonna Taylor.)
“Glass,” “Kill,” and “What If If Only” are smart Caryl Churchill plays, surreal metaphors of how people live as individuals and in societies. Of course, they are metaphors, and it takes Churchill’s inventiveness and director James MacDonald’s direct realistic portrayals to make them engage you. They were first presented in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 2019.
Moral hypocrisy never goes out of style, and Norwegian playwright Hendrik Ibsen was a master at demolishing it. “Ghosts,” then called Gengangere (“the ones who return,”) published in 1881 and presented at that time in Norway and the US, aroused the fury of the smug burghers on both sides of the Atlantic with its searing portrait of an honorable gentleman as sexual predator. Perhaps because Ibsen not only took on forbidden subjects such as sexual abuse and venereal disease, but because pillars of society such as clergy were shown to share guilt for the evil done to “polite” society’s victims.
The Anderson Brothers’ performances at Birdland and other venues are more than just jazz. They have become icons of jazz history performance. They delight audiences with the stories of the jazz eras and musicians that they then bring to musical life. The other night at Birdland, Will and Peter on the horns went through decades from Dixieland to Coltrane.
“The Buena Vista Social Club” is about a Cuban band founded in 1996 made up of musicians that had played decades earlier, in the late 1950s, importantly on the cusp of the 1960 Cuban revolution. Their album released in 1997 became an international success. Some performed in the U.S. and Europe, and the band was the subject of a Wim Wenders documentary in 1999.
Usually, I don’t like family dramas. But this one is different, not hokey or predictable. “Purpose” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has more twists than a corkscrew. Though the drinks here are hard liquor, not wine. And director Phylicia Rashad, also a fine actor, keeps the pace so fast but smooth that you almost run to keep up. It is a not-to-miss play by an author who has become one of today’s not-to-miss playwrights.
“Vanya” is a gay play imagining the characters of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” where the men are somewhat interesting and the women are pseudo females that no real women would ever recognize.
This slow-moving political thriller sets a State Department official in Senegal (or does she work for another agency?) against young Peace Corps volunteer who “reallocated” U.S. government bags of concrete to help build a community garden instead of fortifying his house against deep state expected Muslim terrorist attacks. (They haven’t happened.) She will send him home unless he cooperates on a plan to catch a purported terrorist. It builds slowly and gets exciting only in the last third of the 80-minute show.
The best part of “Redwood” is the realistic climbing and aerial dancing off and around the trunk of the massive tree. The vertical movement that blends contemporary dance and climbing was created by Melicio Estrella of the dance company Bandaloop. The performers use harnesses and ropes and instead of just climbing up, they move out and soar and twist like circus acrobats. The moments when Idina Menzel and other actors climb and fly out over the audience are thrilling.
This is the most pretentious and boring show I’ve seen in years, sometimes seeming to last as long as the span of years 1816 to 2240 when the actions take place. For a science fiction play about artificial intelligence, it is utterly devoid of imagination.
