A café performance of “Midsummer Night‘s Dream” is quite a delightful way to spend any mid-summer eve. And the actors of this production, who double passing out tapas and wine to patrons, are as good as any you‘ll see on the boards. In fact, most of them have been there.
A bit of summer fluff, slightly hokey, but with a good underlying message, this play by Joe Iconis, Lance Rubin, and Jason Sweettooth Williams, is about an “older woman,” Annie (Annie Golden) who can no longer get roles in theater and is scooped up by a bounty hunting firm on the track of a drug trafficker hiding out in the jungles of Ecuador.
Stories about men pretending to be women walk a fine line between skewering sexism and practicing it. “Tootsie” falls on both sides of that divide.
And this one, book by Robert Horn based on the 1982 film, is somewhat outdated. Real gender-bending stuff makes it unbelievably tame. And those stereotypes just don’t go away. But it gets a good breezy production by director Scott Ellis, including a Fosse-style chorus line. And there is a cacophony of funny new topical one-liners.
In the 1920s, an original, a young black woman with a fanatical devotion to the quintessential American sport, fought racism and sexism to become the first woman to play in professional baseball as a regular on a big-league team. She played in the Negro Leagues.
This is the best juke box musical since “Motown” and “Jersey Boys.” In fact, it‘s about a Motown group that also started in Detroit and had the famous manager Berry Gordy. As one local explains, in Detroit, “you either sang or you join a gang. If you can‘t do neither, better learn to run.”
Director Daniel Fish puts the iconic American musical “Oklahoma” in a country setting with a modern sensibility. And it sizzles.
It’s the Oklahoma territory in the early 1900s. A very feminist take on men and women is established by a strong cohort, Aunt Eller, her niece Laurey (Rebecca Naomi Jones) and Ado Annie (Ali Stroker).
“Hadestown,” written and composed by Anaïs Mitchell and directed by Rachel Chavkin, is a very radical play. It takes the audience to Hell, which is peopled by oppressed workers who have been indoctrinated to fear those who are poorer. Though that is probably not how it is described in the reviews you have read in mainstream media. It won the Tony for best musical play. But you probably have no idea what it is about. I call it the censorship of cultural ideas.
It opens with sensual and noisy sex in the bed, the bodies turning and pushing against each other, the familiar noises with great realistic direction by Arin Arbus. And then not quite what you might expect. Frankie falls out of bed. And the post sex conversation; he compliments her breasts. She is not pleased. Is this how a love affair begins?
It could be the corruption of a convention where Bernie Sanders is set against a corporate Biden. State signs are set behind banks of seats. The music is of the 40s. Flags on the wall have 48 stars. Author Danny Rocco and director Shannon Fillion create an ambience that makes you think you are there.
Part Commedia dell‘arte, part pageant, part ballet, with a touch of music hall comedy, “Masquerade” is a visual feast. Presented by the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia in Moscow, it is directed by Rimas Tuminas of Lithuania. Though the major actors are all prominent in Russia, Tuminas is the unseen star of the show.
A large banner on the brick house says “Stacey Abrams 2020.” It‘s next spring. Abrams, who last year lost a close race for governor of Georgia amid reports of voter suppression, had talked then about running for president. The relevance of the sign is that Abrams is a black woman, and this version of Shakespeare‘s play about love and trust – or mistrust — sets it not in Messina, Italy, but in modern-day Atlanta, with a black cast speaking in familiar accents.
Wildly funny and clever, this play by Taylor Mac, directed by George C. Wolfe is one a serious theater-goer cannot miss. It‘s a terrific campy surreal take on murderous war from the point of view of the workers who have to clean up the mess, the bloody bodies of Shakespeare‘s “Titus Andronicus.”
This “Lear” with Glenda Jackson as the king is sometimes brilliant, sometimes annoying. Jackson is a brilliant actress, her voice and demeanor might be male, but she didn‘t persuade me she was a king. Or perhaps she was on the edge of madness very early in the plot, after her daughters‘ duplicity. As the play went on, I wasn‘t sure if she would shrivel or explode.
You are hit by the overwhelming sadness of everyone involved in Hillary Clinton‘s 2008 New Hampshire primary campaign against Barack Obama. Playwright Lucas Hnath and director Joe Mantello create a landscape of utter sleaze and despair. It‘s January. Even the hotel sitting room seems chill and desolate. There‘s one chair and the floor.
This is a feminist theatrical. A very political play. If you don‘t want to go to a lecture about what is wrong with how the US government treats women and minorities, it‘s more interesting to go to a play. Such as “What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s take on how the Constitution is honored in the breach, “rigged” as the copy she carries says. Adult audiences in New York and other liberal enclaves nod their heads, and it‘s a good teaching moment for kids. Higher marks for politics than for drama.
“The Sun” is a popular newspaper for the undereducated British masses. It was a broadsheet started in 1964, then reinvented as a tabloid five years later by the Australian Robert Murdoch and Larry Lamb, a North Englander he named as editor. They were outsiders to the London Fleet Street crowd and felt it.
Jack O‘Brien‘s crisp staging of Arthur Miller‘s iconic 1947 American morality play lays bare the corruption underlying the normalcy of American society. This story of 70 years ago could be easily replicated today. Oh, so easily.
How do you take a 40s musical built around a sexist Shakespeare play and make it delight today‘s audiences? With pizazz and charm, if you are Roundabout Theatre director Scott Ellis. In this version of Cole Porter‘s and the Spewacks‘ “Kiss Me Kate,” the feisty heroine gives as good as she gets, and she and her erstwhile spouse playing Katherine and Petruchio land some good kicks to the others‘ derrieres.
This very funny, clever, often campy satire of black life and stereotypes by Jordan Cooper hits every button, starting with a noisy evangelical church service for Brother Righttocomplain who is being interred because he was murdered by the election of First Negro President of these United States.
Truth and a bit of fantasy. A quite extraordinary play of how generations of an immigrant family create a major financial institution that starts as a southern cotton farming supply shop and ends as a multinational bank whose crash helps bring on the Great Recession of 2008.
The story is contemporary, subtle and surreal. Anne (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert), who has done nothing in life except be a mother, plays out scenarios about her husband, her son and his girlfriend. The very inventive Florian Zeller writes this not as a narrative that moves smoothly through time, but as a time-shifting, repeating replay of the same events. Under Trip Cullman‘s smart, austere direction, it vividly becomes apparent.
A satire about media ought always to be in fashion. The current revival of the film “Network” as a play works brilliantly to skewer corrupt television.
This revival of Sam Shepard‘s satire about the Hollywood movie business doesn‘t hit that mark. Maybe it worked in 1980 when it premiered, but nearly 40 years later, it‘s too over-the-top. Interesting as a piece of the times. The centerpiece is a faceoff between two brothers, one clean-cut Austin (Paul Dano) a screen writer with a mild, almost milquetoast demeanor. The other is scruffy bearded Lee (Ethan Hawke), who once made money with a pit bull in dog fights and talks in either a threat or a sneer.
The backdrop is a full mirror that captures the audience and, above them, a photograph of a plantation mansion. A way of subtly saying this play is also about the viewers. A piano is playing as if for a cotillion.
In Tom Stoppard‘s “Travesties, Dada artist Tristan Tzara cuts up a page of text, throws the fragments into the air, and collects them to make a new work. I had the same feeling about how Stoppard wrote “The Hard Problem.”
It‘s astonishing how the politics of Network and the reason for its success have not changed since the Paddy Chayevsky film was screened in 1976. Nearly fifty years, and the story is still based on the reality that a corrupt upper class screws the middle class and the poor to take for itself the wealth everyone else produces and give others the dregs and the shaft. While the “media” glorifies neoliberalism, theatrical “fiction” is the only mainstream place such ideas are permitted.
