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?
“Quand le Piano Fait son Cinéma” is a charming, clever production in which two talented pianists in a four-handed recital make you think there‘s an orchestra on the small stage. Doing four-handers takes some alacrity as the hands repeatedly cross each other.
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.
It starts with cavemen with bows and arrows. Stick and string become like bass. A stick turns into a musical pipe. A clap is rhythm. A move to wood and metal. Then a bagpipe with a symbol of the British lion. This production by Richard Navarro of Le Rouge Groupe at the Avignon Theater Festival OFF is delightful and fascinating and shows how music came from paleo grottos to the electronic sphere. It is clever, witty, and quite an original.
“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.
Marin Ireland is compelling in the Transport Group‘s minimalist production of Tennessee Williams‘ “Summer and Smoke.” Her lovely slow southern accent is all the decoration the stage needs. Director Jack Cummings III does a fine job in evoking time and place with no accoutrements required.
Edward Albee‘s 1991 play “Three Tall Women” is the attempt of a gay male to get into the psyches of three women, or rather of one women at three stages of her life, played by three actresses on stage at the same time. It is reportedly inspired by his adoptive mother, whom he despised. So, you get a clueless young girl marrying a rich man for money, morphing into a cynical lady in her 50s, and a nasty old woman past 90. Mostly about their interactions with men, nothing about their own hopes or dreams.
In Kenneth Lonergan‘s smart, serious, funny morality tale of the big city, a cop angling for a promotion visits a hooker in a high rise while his newbie female partner waits below, a clueless young security guard in the lobby has a propensity to blather, and his supervisor has a crisis when his brother is implicated in a killing, The “hero” is the one who can‘t help telling the truth.
Federico GarcÃa Lorca was a poet and playwright in Spain in the 1920s and 30s. In 1934 he wrote “Yerma,” about a peasant woman who is obsessed with the desire to have a child. Her husband is a farmer, but she has nothing in life but to be a mother. Lorca was gay. Don‘t know how that affected his attitude toward women who defined themselves only by what they could do with a uterus. Or if he used the story as a critique of women he viewed as crazed baby-making machines. The lady gets no sympathy.
Clever, funny, challenging, not totally persuasive, “Admissions” tells of the family crisis when Charlie (the terrific Ben Edelman), son of parents with top jobs at Hillcrest, an expensive second-tier prep boarding school in rural New Hampshire, doesn‘t get into Yale. The father runs the school, the mother is admissions officer, and they are committed to diversity. But Charlie thinks his friend Perry – child of middle class black father and white mother– got in because he checked the “black” box.
When I saw this amazingly timely play by Sarah Burgess, about corporate Democrats attacking a progressive Texas candidate, I thought people might think, that really is a stretch. But no, it was real. It‘s at the Public Theater, but have you checked the news? Do you know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has just in recent weeks attacked Laura Moser, a terrific progressive female candidate for Congress from Houston, Texas?
Don‘t arrive late to this charming, surreal and politically sharp-edged play. When you claim your seats, you may be almost touching distance from a sandy oval filled with a few chairs, discarded plastic bags and cups, a real goat being fed by a peasant guy, and a caged rooster that is grabbed and petted by a peasant lady. A lake is edged in sandbags. The livestock will disappear, but the sense of magical realism created by director Michael Arden will not.
