If you thought television invented sitcoms, with nutty family members and their wacky friends, you are wrong. Just go back to 1936, when George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart presented “You Can‘t Take it With You.”
Maybe Americans liked it, because it took their minds off the Depression. The Pulitzer jury gave it a prize, which I think was stretching. It‘s occasionally a cute and quirky play, but never a great play. Makes one wonder why director Scott Ellis wanted to revive it. Other than to show where sitcoms came from.
It creeps up on you, this fascinating play that highlights a gripping Kathleen Chalfant, which at first seems like something from the years‘ ago “ban the bomb” movement. And then you realize that it is an up-to-the-minute chilling warning of a threat hanging over our heads. And you wonder why it disappeared from the media.
India ink may be indelible, but this Tom Stoppard play fades from memory. The 1995 work, based on a 1991 radio drama, is a confused, flat attempt to deal with the confluence of cultures in a colonial era, this one the British rule over India.
Sept 29, 2014 –
Last week (Sept. 22), I went to a Metropolitan Museum of Art event about a new exhibit, Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age.
It included a talk by Secretary of State John Kerry and some speeches by art experts. A theme was the destruction that the “bad guys” have wrecked on historic art and archeological places in the Syria-Iraq region.
“Love Letters” is a charmer, but also rather sexist. A.R. Gurney‘s play, which premiered in 1988, emphasizes the woman character as flaky, neurotic, self-absorbed and the man as solid, intelligent, all patience and understanding. All but perfect. You wonder why the female character is swaddled in flaws while the man has nary a one.
Mia Farrow plays Melissa Gardner, daughter of a very rich but somewhat dysfunctional family. Not much parental love from a distant divorced father and alcoholic mother.
Can a director and a set designer destroy a play? The production of Samuel Beckett‘s “Embers” at BAM provides a strong argument.
A huge skull sits in the center stage. Inside are two actors (Andrew Bennett and Ãine NÃ Mhuiri) who read the lines of the various male and female characters of Beckett‘s play. I thought the production was dreadful. And I thought that maybe the play was also dreadful.
But then I read the script. I realized the play is much better than this production would have you believe. Beckett‘s play is about a man, an unsuccessful writer, who is thinking over his life and relation with his father, who may have committed suicide by walking into the sea. His father had told him that he was a “washout,” a failure.
This is Jefferson Mays‘ show from start to finish, and he is brilliant in it. It‘s a smart clever musical with definite anti-aristocratic politics. A fantasy moment when so many of us are trying to figure out how to get rid of the bad guys.
The story was told in the 1949 British film “Kind Hearts and Coronets” starring Alec Guinness. That was based on the 1907 novel “Israel Rank: the Autobiography of a Criminal” by Roy Horniman.
Take a trip back to Berlin circa 1930. Inside a cabaret, red lamps light round black tables, a waiter brings wine and food for you, and scantily clad musicians play jazzy music. It‘s a charming evening for a sophisticated audience – or is it?
The decadence is represented by the master of ceremonies (Alan Cumming), who is in-your-face crude, sexual, raunchy, almost elegantly so with his white faced, glinty eyes and red lips, white suspenders pulled over a nude chest and twisted around his crotch, nipples colored red. He has a German accent.
Wrapped in a white gown, an iconic white gardenia in her hair, Audra McDonald channels Billie Holiday — her voice, her accent, her manner — till you believe you are sitting in the slightly tacky Philadelphia dive where Holiday sang her last songs. “What a little moonlight can do” becomes a magical mood changer. It‘s helped by the dreamlike direction of Lonny Price.
One great –McDonald — sings another great, Lady Day. Her imitation is brilliant. She has mastered Holiday‘s accent, a slight trill, a broad vowel. Lady Day did blues with a jazz beat, following mentors Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.
The Edinburgh Fringe in August, the largest theater festival in the world, presents hundreds of plays as well as musicals, dance, comedy, cabaret and spoken word performances.
I chose political plays, and nine out of ten I saw were excellent. I divided them into three groups, repression, war and politics. Here‘s the third group, party politics. The parties ought to be the solution to the first two. But maybe not so much.
The Edinburgh Fringe in August, the largest theater festival in the world, presents hundreds of plays as well as musicals, dance, comedy, cabaret and spoken word performances.
I chose political plays, and nine out of ten I saw were excellent. I divided them into three groups, repression, war and politics. Here‘s the second group, about war. “The Bunker Trilogy” and “Private Peaceful” about World War I and “The Collector” about more organized cruelty in Abu Graib.
The Edinburgh Fringe in August is the largest theater festival in the world, with hundreds of plays as well as musicals, dance, comedy, cabaret and spoken word performances.
I chose political plays, and nine out of ten I saw were excellent. I divided them into three groups, repression, war and politics. Here‘s the first group, about repression.
These riveting plays dealt with periods centuries apart. They are “A Players Advice to Shakespeare” set in the 1600s, and two mirror plays of the 20th century, “Animal Farm” in Stalinist Russia and “Chaplin” in McCarthyite 1950s America. In each case, the playwrights and actors bring out the psychology of repression and rebellion.
“Violet” is like an expressionist painting with brush-stroked characters. We see the visual depth of the central character (Sutton Foster), and the others that interact with her add bits of color.
It is a picture with sound. The production by Brian Crawley (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music) is a chamber operetta, with Foster‘s strong, rich voice underpinned by deep sweetness. The score moves through a terrific panoply of southern music, from country in Nashville, to blues in Memphis and gospel in Tulsa.
John Steinbeck‘s play, which he adapted from his novel, is a poignant narrative about human connections among people leading lives of what is wont to be called quiet desperation.
Sensitively directed by Anna Shapiro, it tells the story of George (James Franco), a California ranch worker who in the Depression has hooked up with Lennie (Chris O‘Dowd) a mentally retarded fellow who is too strong for his own good. They work as itinerants on farms and ranches. They stay together out of undefined affection that defeats the loneliness that would otherwise engulf them. (It was first produced on Broadway in 1937.)
Gerard Alessandrini is the best musical theater critic in New York. Incisive, clever, right on the mark. And he does it in the idiom of the productions he critiques!
By now, everybody knows that since 1982, Alessandrini has produced nearly yearly revues that satirize Broadway musicals. He does it with a cast of four performers, different ones through the decades, whose voices are as good or better than most of what you find on Broadway. The numbers are enhanced by brilliant costume and wig designers. And by David Caldwell on piano.
The stone-faced women who anchor this play are as flinty as the rocks that litter the landscape and pile up to create the rough walls of people‘s houses. The young, tough, fierce, violent Helen (the excellent Sarah Greene) tells of being groped by a priest. She kills a duck and a cat on order; she smashes eggs on the head of her brother Bartley (Conor MacNeill).
Faces appear in permanent frowns. Where the climate and scenery is harsh, so are the relations between people. But curiously all of them have a warmth they do their best to hide and which playwright Martin Donagh pulls inevitably out. A hidden sympathy and compassion.
It‘s a dark comic look at the cruelty and caring that exist side by side in barren seaside place in Ireland.
There‘s nothing like providing a sense of place by starting out a play in Italian when the director has set it in Sicily. Don‘t worry, the dialogue switches to Shakespeare‘s English soon enough. But Jack O‘Brien‘s touches do a lot to mix fantasy with reality. Like the vegetable garden where Beatrice (Lilly Rabe) and Benedick (Hamish Linklater) meet. And where he picks a carrot to munch on. (And there are some nice looking tomatoes.)
There is also a stone villa that belongs to Leonato (John Glover), the governor of Messina, circa 1900, with an orange tree and white wrought iron tables and chairs. As the Delacorte stage is in the middle of Central Park, the set blends in nicely.
There‘s nobody better than the Brits to do plays about class. And in this case, also male/female. Ayckbourn, who is 77, gets it. I think he always has.
These three very different plays at 59E59 Theaters all deal with personal crises, but do them as a thriller, a melodrama and a farce. Not bad. And they use Ayckbourn‘s theatrical tricks to do reversal/mirror image and time shifts. We see things happening from different viewpoints and in different times. And we have the good fortune that the plays are directed by the master himself, with just the right bits of sorrow, tragedy, comedy, silliness.
In Arrivals and Departures, the most powerful play, Ez (a terrific Elizabeth Boag), is a soldier assigned to protect Barry (also brilliantly played by Kim Wall), a provincial traffic warden who has been brought to London to identify a terrorist who is expected to arrive at the train station.
“If/Then” (book & lyrics by Brian Yorkey) takes up life‘s “fork-in-the-road” problem. What if a person takes this job instead of another, goes out with this guy instead of another, gets married or doesn‘t.
Elizabeth (Idina Menzel) 38, an urban planner, is the subject of this non-scientific experiment, or fantasy. Menzel is a fine performer, with presence and pizazz, if a little loud in the vocal department. She is unfortunately burdened with a confusing, let‘s-put-in-the-kitchen-sink plot.
This is a gorgeous, moving play by Terry Teachout, who we know as the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal, but who is obviously a cut above most of the playwrights he reviews.
It‘s helped, of course, by the brilliant performance of John Douglas Thompson, an accomplished Shakespearean actor. Thompson is known for a memorable Othello as well as the title character of Eugene O‘Neill‘s “Emperor Jones.”
Thompson plays two characters, the performer Louis Armstrong and his agent, Joe Glaser. Armstrong, like Thompson, of course is black. Glaser is Jewish. Thompson shifts seamlessly between the two. Thompson does a great tough New York-accented Glaser.
The story moves back in time from 1971 when Armstrong is waiting in his dressing room to go on at the Waldorf in New York. The dressing room has bright light bulbs and a large recorder. But it‘s not a musical play. It‘s a drama about a gifted musician who had to maneuver through the world of segregation and racism.
Ionesco‘s absurdist satire is a vivid dark commentary on the popular refusal to acknowledge the horrors of the rise of Naziism. And the belief of some Germans that Hitler was ushering in an era of shining, sparkling glory. They could ignore that some people were disappearing, perhaps murdered.
Director Darko Tresnjak staging is part straight, part bizarre, to make every line resonate in contemporary reality.
Desperate, full of hope and dreams, wracked by despair, succored by religion, the members of the Younger family spill their humanity in various ways in Lorraine Hansberry‘s 1959 play about a black family‘s struggle. The work is based on the experience of her own family, who moved to a white Chicago neighborhood, was attacked by neighbors, and won a 1940 Supreme Court decision ruling restrictive covenants – agreements not to rent to blacks – illegal.
Kenny Leon‘s smart direction elevates to realism what might have been sentimentality and melodrama. The story is gripping and richly presented.
It starts in a Georgetown drawing room. Now you already know half the juicy story by Anthony Giardina, presented by Lincoln Center Theater. It‘s Washington politics. Insider stuff. In this case, as usual, a conflict between liberals and conservatives. With a little morality thrown in. You know which ones are moral and which are opportunists, right? (They say that liberals become playwrights and conservatives become bankers.)
Giardina‘s play, directed with panache by Doug Hughes, is a very clever and entertaining take on dealing in Washington over the decades from Jimmy Carter to the inauguration of Barak Obama. With a family drama to tie up the loose ends. Accomplished director Hughes keeps it this side of TV drama, of which there are now several of the genre.
