The fellow on stage looks familiar. He wears an 18th-century blue coat and gold buttons and is rapping. But the words are not being played on Broadway, they are what some of us were thinking when we saw the original. Instead of hearing Thomas Jefferson sing “What Did I Miss?” we get, “What Did You Miss?” “What did you miss…..the lyrics so fast ….my diction is muddled.”
Here’s a hit Broadway musical take on women and marriage in the mid-20th century, pre-second-wave feminism. First produced in 1964, starring Carol Channing, based on Thornton Wilder‘s 1955 comedy “The Matchmaker,” this is about a woman, of middle years, in the turn of the last century in New York, whose job is arranging marriages. The plot comes from an 1835 British play.
The terrific 40s sound and dancing – choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler – raises the level of a rather corny and predictable musical about a World War II vet who puts together a swing band to compete in a song contest. (Blankenbuehler is also the director.)
Donny Novitski (Corey Cott) in 1945 is home after four years in the military overseas and can‘t get the job he wants as a piano player at a club. He hears about a contest for a swing band to do a song for the troops. And he reaches out to musicians back from the war who are also struggling.
This imagining of the lives of two powerful women who founded cosmetics empires has been created by men – book (Doug Wright), music (Scott Frankel), lyrics (Michael Korie), direction (Michael Greif), choreography (Christopher Gattelli). It‘s a great production. But think of it as guys‘ take on women.
The invented heroines are Helena Rubenstein (Patti LuPone) and Elizabeth Arden (Christine Ebersole), real women who built their fortunes on the desires for beauty of rich ladies of the 1940s.
Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil found worldwide success with Les Misérables, a drama of the political. The personal stories were of Jean Valjean, the man imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread, and the masses of the oppressed he represented. There was a minor love story. But in Miss Saigon, the star-crossed lovers are the major focus, with the crisis of America‘s war in Vietnam and how it destroyed the country just a backdrop. So, this play is often hokey and not very satisfying.
Oskar Eustis, director of a mesmerizing Public Theater staging of Shakespeare‘s play about taking down an incipient dictator, says that Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.
This Delacorte Central Park enactment may be one of the best of the plays inspired (or provoked) by the election and presidency of Donald Trump.
One of the stars of this play is not human. It‘s the set for the riotous slapstick comedy put on by (real) British actors about a disastrous production of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” by a fake university drama society. Sometimes slapstick is silly, but this is exceedingly clever. It‘s co-written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields who also act in the play. Director Mark Bell does brilliantly at making everything go so wonderfully effortlessly wrong.
New York TV weatherman Phil Connors (Andy Karl) is in Punxsutawney, PA, to cover the annual groundhog-comes-out-of-his-burrow-and-sees-or-doesn‘t-see-his-shadow day. If he sees it, there will be six more weeks of winter. (But how do they know?) It‘s a pretty silly made-for-media fake news story. With a made for TV weatherman.
Complex, fascinating and gorgeous, this fantasy tale of the young woman who might be the surviving daughter of Czar Nicholas of Russia is a colorful musical mystery with elegant singing, marvelous dancing and costumes that light up the stage.
With a book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, it features the top talents of Broadway. That goes for director Darko Tresnjak and choreographer Peggy Hickey, who have “big Broadway show” written all over them.
Fifteen years after she slammed the door, Nora returns to Torvald‘s house as the Betty Friedan of 19th-century Norway. As created by Laurie Metcalf from the script by Lucas Hnath, she is smart, witty, sarcastic, tough and likely to make women cheer. I did!
Lillian Hellman‘s 1939 play is a family battle where the antagonists are class and gender. The title comes from the Song of Solomon in the King James Bible: Take [from] us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. The Manhattan Theatre Club, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan, gives it a stunning production.
The place is a small Alabama town in 1900. The little foxes are the members of the Hubbard family of shopkeepers who lust after the pedigree and money of the cotton aristocrats. They attempt to move up the social and economic ladder through marriage, one to the naïve daughter of a plantation owner, the other to a banker. They will indeed spoil what they touch.
You can see why an ingénue, femme fatale and ex-wife are smitten with Garry Essendine, the self-absorbed hammy stage star played by Kevin Kline in Noël Coward‘s delightfully funny sophisticated 1943 play, “Present Laughter.” Because, so are we, smitten.
It is 1939 in London. Garry, 57 going on 37, lives in a stylish duplex apartment furnished with lots of modern art, books, a baby grand piano and a very idiosyncratic staff, including a dry, sardonic secretary, a dour Swedish cook and a laid-back butler. He is cosseted by his ex-wife, who helps manage his theatrical affairs, and he is targeted by women, whose advances he deplores and enjoys.
Sarah Ruhl satirizes a midlife crisis that turns two ordinary and apparently happy couples in their forties to group sex. They have been inspired by a three-some of 20-somethings and think they might be missing something. So they fall into a pretty joyless ménage à quatre. It‘s funny, if not profound. And the cast is fine as schmoozy, nice folks getting into trouble with their what are we missing that the young folks have?
Drawing on the crises of the Middle East, London playwright Henry Naylor has produced two powerful, insightful plays about women who struggle to defeat the machismo that incites Islamic militants. And which is hardly limited to the Islamic world. Naylor, 51, is a man with a strong feminist sensibility and a keen eye for drama. He shows in works that are political as well as theatrical how the domination and abuse of women is part of the psyche of political repression.
You might never see a more powerful, stunning production of Eugene O‘Neill‘s “The Hairy Ape” than this one directed by Richard Jones and starring Bobby Cannavale at the Park Avenue Armory. It‘s a very early O‘Neill work, first produced in 1922, a time of radical ferment in the U.S., and it is imbued with the young man‘s poetic and fierce attack on capitalist exploitation of workers and the inequality that engenders. Which makes it a very modern play as well.
This play is a charmer. I didn‘t expect to say that. I thought a story about the passengers who force-landed in Gander, Newfoundland, because airspace in the U.S. was closed on 9/11 and who were welcomed by the locals, would be hokey and sentimental. It is not.
Glenn Close is masterful in Norma Desmond‘s final mad scene. Suddenly camp becomes real drama, tragedy of the Shakespearean sort. Till then the has-been silent film star, the grande dame who flounces around in glittery gold and silver sweeping gowns and capes, is hard to take too seriously. The camp is exaggerated by butler/major-domo Max (Fred Johanson), whose dark mood and piercing eyes could have come out of a Mel Brooks Frankenstein spoof. “Goulish” is a word to describe them both, and the haunted house they live in.
Macabre and whimsical, dark and comic at the same time, a clever satiric pen pointed at self-absorbed aristocrats of the early 1900s, Katherine Rundell‘s “Life According to Saki” is a delicious evening of theater.
You can feel the humanity pulsating and striving through the drab surroundings of the car service office in “Jitney” by the great American playwright August Wilson, who died in 2005. The protagonists, moving in an orbit around the solid Becker (a resolute, moving John Douglas Thompson), who set up the cooperative 18 years ago, are working class guys with jobs, if you want to include the numbers guy, Shealy (Harvy Blanks).
It‘s a knock off of “West Side Story,” here Italians vs blacks, and very hokey, but “A Bronx Tale” has a certain charm and pizazz nonetheless. The place is Bedford Avenue, tenements with fire escapes and pushcarts. And kids singing doo-wop. They are working class Italians, circa 1960.
This immersive, hokey, utterly engaging production is one of the memorable plays to see this season. In fact, it almost feels as if you don‘t just see it, you are in it. The audience is dispersed around a gorgeous set, seated at rows and tables, some on the stage, backed by red drapes and paintings, as actors move through the aisles and on risers. Sometimes lighted chandeliers descend or disco lights flash. Everything seems red, white and black.
Nathan Lane is superb as the over-the-top newspaper editor Walter Burns in this near 90-year-old noirish comedy that has some political nuggets hidden in its hokey scenario. It‘s given a fine, only slightly tongue in cheek, reprise by director Jack O‘Brien. Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had been Chicago reporters, and the action takes place in the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building. The courts building shares the gallows courtyard with the county jail. Then anarchist Earl Williams (John Magaro), who is accused of killing a policeman and is going to be hanged, escapes.
An Egyptian police band, the grandly named Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, in 1996 is supposed to play at an Arab cultural center in Israel, but gets the town‘s name wrong at the bus station and ends up in an Israeli backwater.
Haled (Ari‘el Stachel), a trumpet player who loves Chet Baker, sings “My funny valentine” to female soldiers at the bus station. But the diversion plus imperfect English turns Petah Tikva, the city with the Arab cultural center, into Bet Hatikva. And so hangs the tale, and a charming, moving, slightly sentimental gem of a play.
I seem to be using the word a lot lately: hokey. Chandeliers with lit candles descend to sounds of operatic “ah ah” and pretentious violins. The story is based on a French epistolary novel written in 1782, and meant as a satire. But with the direction by Josie Rourke, you get the feeling that audiences are invited to enjoy the sex stuff. It‘s basically about a guy putting notches on his bedpost. (“Sex in the 18th-century French City”?)
The anti-hero Valmont (Lev Schreiber) is conspicuously charming. His former lover the Marquise, played by a take-no-prisoners Janet McTeer, wants revenge against her former lover Jacour, who has announced that he is going to marry a rich young girl. And Valmont wants to seduce married women known for their high morals.
It‘s light fluff, but if you love 40s music, as I do, just forget the silly plot. Besides, the production and the actors are charming. And there is 40s scat. Also jazzy music, dance kicks, swing and tap. The show is based on a 1942 movie, but a lot of the songs have been added.
