This is a play about an important problem for journalism that begins with a trivial arguments over whether the bricks in a building were red or brown. Or maybe what seems like minutae are the building blocks that lead to more serious inventions. As the play by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, Gordon Farrell is based on a nonfiction work about a real fact-checker, Jim D‘Agata, I assume it followed its trajectory.
Bertolt Brecht‘s brilliant 1941 allegory of fascism and the rise of Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is set in a Chicago that appears helpless to ward off gangsters. A good choice since Al Capone ran the mob for so long there in part by paying off police and politicians. In this satire, the gang is taking over the city‘s cauliflower business, strong-arming merchants into making them “partners.”
Brexit, the decision of Britain to leave the European Union, is the setting for a very clever look at the corruption of politicians on all sides. There are arguments for and against doing a “hard Brexit,” meaning with no agreement with the EU. Prime Minister Masters picks members who oppose each other and lies to each. This play begins to be credible!
This stunning play, sometimes surreal, tells the story of Basra, Iraq, in 2007, from the point of view of the people who lived there, the residents and the militias. The main character, Hero (Karen Alvarado, who also directs), is a woman in search of her disappeared husband, Aqeel (Sufi Malhotra), who was a translator for the British. As counterpoint are militiamen who comment on events in an almost comic fashion.
A firetruck circles houses, watching for threats of arson. Inside one home, a lady serves red wine. Her husband comments, “You open a newspaper, another house burned down.” They are days of mistrust.
A woman‘s body stained with blood is on the ground. The maid (a terrific Hannah McClean) in white cap, black dress and stockings, arrives with bloodied hands and apron and holding a knife. Backtrack to see how this scene developed. Author Madeline Gould and director Madelaine Moore keep you on the edge of your seat.
Kurt Vonnegut‘s 1970 surreal satire dissects the extreme alpha male, a 40ish guy who sometime, in his breathing, his grunts and body movement, seems to turn into an ape. It connects machismo to violence to war. It gets a very good production by the Wheelhouse Theater Company, directed by Jeff Wise.
Glen Close is a terrific actress. Too bad she is starring in such a bad play. She makes it worth watching, even if you cringe at Jane Anderson‘s hokey script that walks straight out of television, dumbing down events of the 15th century so viewers can connect as they do to their favorite sit-com. Anderson has done a lot of TV, and we see the result.
It‘s 1981 in Northern Ireland. The body of an IRA militant who disappeared ten years before has been found, preserved in a bog. An IRA chief, Muldoon (the threatening Stuart Graham) is worried how Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), the man‘s brother, will react, because he is a former IRA activist and knows or suspects how the victim died.
“The Nap” is about a championship game of snooker, a game that’s a variety of billiards or pool. The nap is the pile on the surface of the table. But that’s not really what this play is about. That’s only on the surface. Think hokey comic mystery.
Howard W. Campbell, an American-born Nazi propagandist and double agent, served evil too well and good too secretly. That is the subtle moral of the Kurt Vonnegut story adapted by Brian Katz in a fascinating albeit not totally successful stage presentation. Still better than most of what you will see in New York theater at the moment.
Janet McTeer is a charmer with ego as Sarah Bernhardt the greatest actress of the 19th century who performed on the Euro-American stage. And to bring the story up to date, her artistic challenge is a feminist one. We see it as a play within a play, and Theresa Rebeck‘s script sticks closely to reality, except for an affair with French playwright Edmond Rostand, who was a friend but not necessarily a lover.
It‘s a working-class crowd and the talk is of neighborhood, the boundary of their lives. The scene is a bar and music place, the sounds are of the 50s and 60s, the voices are rich and jazzy. I never realized Leiber and Stoller created so many of rock classics, jazzy torch and doo-wap. I didn‘t like this music then: “Gonna Find Her,” “Jailhouse Rock,” the hokey “Poison Ivy.” I like it now. Most of it.
Here‘s a Cinderella story which would not quite make it today. Because it‘s about a prostitute who reforms her John. It was a movie hit 20 years ago, but that was an epoch away. So, suspend belief and politics. A story for our times about a billionaire Edward Lewis (Andy Karl) without morals, who would destroy a shipbuilding company and fire its workers, but learns something from a hooker.
I‘m not too sure who the cursed child is. Albus (Sam Clemmett), the son of the grown-up hero Harry Potter (Jamie Parker), or Scorpius (Anthony Boyle), the son of his nemesis, Draco Malfoy (Alex Price). But mixed in with the magic and terrific scenery, there‘s a lot of stuff about fathers and sons, which is really the theme of the play, or the two plays which you can see on succeeding nights or a one-day marathon.
Take a luckless cowboy, his novitiate sister, a (mostly) upstanding sheriff, a saloon dancer with a sideline, a governor who demands sex for favors and a drunken priest who admires Nietzsche.
Edie Falco is powerful as the acerbic, in-your-face, sometimes crude-talking Polly Noonan, a real operator in Albany‘s Democratic Party machine politics for about four decades. She was the confident and advisor to long-serving Mayor Erastus Corning. The play takes place in 1977, five years before he died. Director Scott Elliott makes it a combination soap opera and political drama.
Lillian Hellman’s play about a labor conflict in a small town in Ohio in 1936 has some fine moments giving only hints of stronger plays such as “The Little Foxes” where she takes on the corrupt, manipulating rich who exploit workers.
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.
