"Cyprus Avenue" is a chilling play. Something happens that I believe has only happened once before on stage, in Edward Bond's "Saved" from 1965. That play has seldom been mounted since because of the disturbing nature of an act of violence. There are some things that even a very sophisticated theatre-goer has trouble wrapping one's mind around. Stephen Rea is crushing as Eric, the Belfast protestant who has seemingly lost his mind and believes that his new granddaughter Mary Mae is Gerry Adams (the leader of Sinn Fein the Catholic Republican political organization often sited for it's terrorists acts). Dan Ireland's play is masterfully directed by Vicky Featherstone with superb performances from the entire cast. It's powerful and raw and I caution you not to go if you have a low threshold for violence but, that said, try not to miss it in it's limited run at the The Public Theatre.
Lauren Yee's "The Great Leap" at the Atlantic Theater Company is also a political play but much, much tamer. Directed by Taibi Magar who recently directed the outstanding "Is God Is" at Soho Rep, this play takes on the Cultural Revolution by way of a basketball game between an American college team and their Chinese counterparts with a son/father relationship thrown in for good measure. It's not a great play but Magar continues to impress me as a director and the performances from B.D. Wong and Ned Eisenberg as the coaches Wen Chang and Saul hold the play up. And while not terrible, Tony Aidan Vo the young Chinese-American player and Ali Ahn as his cousin are a little to showy for the the material.
I finally got around to seeing "The Band's Visit" the week before it won the Tony for Best New Musical. While I would not have necessarily put it in that category as it's a play with music rather than a musical, given the competition ("Spongebob Squarepants" for one) I'm not surprised it took the big prize. I was especially smitten with the song "Omar Sharif" which is sung by Katrina Lenk as Dina. She also came away with a Tony as did my favorite performer in the play Ari'el Stachel as the Egyptian musician who dispenses advice to a lovelorn Israeli. I'm not sure why Tony Shalhoub won the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical for Tewfiq the conductor of the Egyptian Orchestra since he talks his way through part of one song and that's it. I actually saw a different actor in the part, the very fine Dariush Kashani who I admired in both "Oslo" at Lincoln Center and "The Invidisible Hand" at NYTW. A shout out to David Yazbek and Itamar Moses who wrote the music and the book respectively and to the always fine director David Comer.
Elevator Repair Service's "Everyone's Fine With Virginia Woolf" at the Abrons Arts Center on the LES is serviceable. The company takes classics and turns them on their heads but have yet, for me, to have a production that measures up to their "Gatz," a seven hour 'reading' of "The Great Gatsby." For example, they were off the mark with their last production, "Measure for Measure" at the Public which was good fun but deteriorated into silliness at the expense of Shakespeare. Here they are obviously taking on Albee and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." The director Kate Scelsa is an ERS regular who has performed in "Gatz," "The Sound and the Fury" and and others. Her "Virginia Woolf" lays it bare the subtext in Albee's play. The production opens brilliantly but eventually deteriorates into a bizarre free-for-all vampire story and slow journey to Hell led by a robot (why?) which basically wrecks everything they have set up before. This is disappointing because Vin Knight and Annie McNamara as George and Martha Washington really give Tracy Letts and Amy Ryan a run for their money.
"Fairview" is another disappointing production from Soho Rep who had redeemed themselves in my eyes with Aeshea Harris's brilliant "Is God Is" earlier this season. This is not the first time I have disagreed with Ben Brantley of The New York Times who wrote "You begin watching by feeling mildly amused, then uneasy, then annoyed, then unsettled." The only thing I felt was annoyed. This is a play about race and the playwright Jackie Sibbiles Drury wants us, the audience, to feel uncomfortable in our whiteness (those of us in the audience who are white) but she does not EARN this from us. It's a flawed play with equally flawed direction by Sarah Benson who is an excellent director when she has something of real worth to work with like Sarah Kane's "Saved" or Branden Jacobs-Jenkins "An Octoroon" but gets lost when directing messy not fully realized work like this. Such was also the case with her direction of the impossibly convoluted and disjointed Richard Maxwell play "Samara." Perhaps the play needed a black director as had "Is God Is," but I still think it would not have been enough. Plus I am getting really tired of second act climaxes where the actors wreck the stage. This is lazy writing/direction. Spoiler alert! The final moment of the play when the white members of the audience are ordered to come on stage and the black actors take their place in the audience felt forced. My discomfort was for the actors and the playwright not for my whiteness.
Saving the best for last, the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia production of the Friedrich Schiller "Love and Intrigue" at BAM is dazzling. Where have I been? How did I not know about this company? Lev Dodin has adapted and directs a extremely pared down version of the original five hour play. At two hours and 15 minutes (no intermission) he still manages, according to the BAM program notes, to add text by Jean-Jaques Russo (as my theatre companion quipped, "You know, that philosopher from New Jersey") and Otto von Bismark. The two lovers, Ferdinand and Luise are starred crossed lovers, much like Romeo and Juliet but with a German duchy, the Duke's aristocratic consort and political intrigue thrown in. The production is stylized and there's a little too much walking, dancing and sliding across long wooden tables but the performances are clean and tight, the costumes exquisite and the set like I like it, almost bare... an empty space.
Monday, June 18, 2018
Friday, May 25, 2018
A Splendid Marin Ireland
The splendid Marin Ireland almost made me love Tennessee Williams with her performance in The Transport Group's "Summer and Smoke" at CSC Rep. Her Alma, a Southern spinster who harbors feelings for her childhood friend and neighbor John, is staggering. Perhaps Williams intended Alma to be as fragile as Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie" or as delusional as Blanche in "Streetcar" but Ireland gives Alma a strength of character that is lacking in Williams other heroines. She has some of Stella's groundedness right up to the end when she finally gives in to the despair that she will never have her great love. I was taken by Nathan Darrow's John whose work I had previously not known. He was grand and a match for Ireland. Jack Cummings III, the Transport Groups co-founder and artistic director, directed this jewel of a production.
It was a long long long "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the BAM Harvey. Lesley Manville's morphine-addicted Mary was one note and Rory Kennan's portrayal of Jamie as an ADHD young man barely out of adolescence distracting and annoying. Matthew Beard as Edmond was less so but seemed to be channeling Edgar G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney via Martin Scorsese with his accent throughout the play. I lay the fault for the disjointed performances at the feet of the director Richard Eyre (or SIR Richard Eyre as he is called in the program). Only Jeremy Irons was convincing as the parsimonious patriarch of the family, James Tyrone. And his is a marvelously complex and moving performance.The play is as close to autobiography as O'Neill got. I would say closer except that O'Neill's older brother had already died of alcohol by the time the events of the play take place. So taken in historical context Jamie is really a ghost which makes sense since his character never feels fully a part of the play. The string of monologues delivered by each of the characters feels like a tired theatrical device, one I'm sure that O'Neill would have worked out of the play if he had lived to see it produced. And are standing ovations now de rigueur for having sat through an extremely long play? Baaaah...
On a minor note, while in L.A. earlier this month I caught Amy Herzog's "Belleville" directed by Jenna Worsham at The Pasadena Playhouse. While I was not a huge fan of either "4,000 Miles" or "Mary Jane" at least the latter addressed with great delicacy and understanding the very real dilemna of having a severely handicapped child without unlimited resources. "Belleville" has little intrinsic value and, in fact, borders on the absurd. A young American couple in Paris obviously have marital issues but what it turns out to be behind their issues, at least on the husband's side, stretches the imagination. Although I am admirer of Thomas Sadoski's work (he was brilliant opposite Marin Ireland in Neil LaBute's "reasons to be pretty"), his character as written lacks credibility. Anna Camp is, however, at least to me, a revelation. She's a fine stage actress lost in a muddled production of a poorly conceived play. I also liked Moe Jeudy-Lamour who plays the enterprising very young Senegalese-French landlord and though I found the performance of Sharon Pierre-Louis who plays his strict Muslim wife unnecessarily wooden. A directorial note: If you're going to have a character slash his wrists in the bathroom don't keep tantalizing us with the possibility he will jump off the balcony.
It was a long long long "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the BAM Harvey. Lesley Manville's morphine-addicted Mary was one note and Rory Kennan's portrayal of Jamie as an ADHD young man barely out of adolescence distracting and annoying. Matthew Beard as Edmond was less so but seemed to be channeling Edgar G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney via Martin Scorsese with his accent throughout the play. I lay the fault for the disjointed performances at the feet of the director Richard Eyre (or SIR Richard Eyre as he is called in the program). Only Jeremy Irons was convincing as the parsimonious patriarch of the family, James Tyrone. And his is a marvelously complex and moving performance.The play is as close to autobiography as O'Neill got. I would say closer except that O'Neill's older brother had already died of alcohol by the time the events of the play take place. So taken in historical context Jamie is really a ghost which makes sense since his character never feels fully a part of the play. The string of monologues delivered by each of the characters feels like a tired theatrical device, one I'm sure that O'Neill would have worked out of the play if he had lived to see it produced. And are standing ovations now de rigueur for having sat through an extremely long play? Baaaah...
On a minor note, while in L.A. earlier this month I caught Amy Herzog's "Belleville" directed by Jenna Worsham at The Pasadena Playhouse. While I was not a huge fan of either "4,000 Miles" or "Mary Jane" at least the latter addressed with great delicacy and understanding the very real dilemna of having a severely handicapped child without unlimited resources. "Belleville" has little intrinsic value and, in fact, borders on the absurd. A young American couple in Paris obviously have marital issues but what it turns out to be behind their issues, at least on the husband's side, stretches the imagination. Although I am admirer of Thomas Sadoski's work (he was brilliant opposite Marin Ireland in Neil LaBute's "reasons to be pretty"), his character as written lacks credibility. Anna Camp is, however, at least to me, a revelation. She's a fine stage actress lost in a muddled production of a poorly conceived play. I also liked Moe Jeudy-Lamour who plays the enterprising very young Senegalese-French landlord and though I found the performance of Sharon Pierre-Louis who plays his strict Muslim wife unnecessarily wooden. A directorial note: If you're going to have a character slash his wrists in the bathroom don't keep tantalizing us with the possibility he will jump off the balcony.
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
Storms of April
The RSC brings "King Lear" to BAM Harvey director by the RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran and starring the inimitable Antony Sher in the title role. Sher's performance is idiosyncratic and engaging but the performance of the night is that of Pappa Essiedu at Edmond, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, solidly enacted by David Troughton. Essiedu is already making a name for himself at the RSC and one can see why here. His Edmond is a pure evil, a textbook sociopath. Sexy, smart and soooo laid back, he easily manipulates his father and his naive and trusting brother Edgar. His seduction of Goneril and Regan is smooth, effortless if you will. In his performance one can see a callous college frat boy chocking up his wins and sneering at the ease of it. In another stand-out performance, Antony Byrne brings a youthful buoyancy to the part of the older Earl of Kent, Lear's most loyal subject and protector. I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast. Mimi Ndieweni's Cordelia is pretty much by the book, Nia Gwynne's Goneril is weak, Kelly Williams Regan is cartoonish and Oliver Johnston does not give Edgar/Mad Tom the complexity the role requires. Graham Turner as Fool also disappoints in a role that is usually a win-win. His performance is disjointed and one never feels his real despair over the banishment of Cordelia. But Essiedu's Edmond is more than reason enough to weather through the four hours at The Harvey.
The revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW forty years doesn't come together this time around. Directed by Rachel Chavkin a NYTW Usual Suspect and whose work I generally admire even when the material falls short, this "Light" fails to shine. Chavkin has assembled a motley crew of actors of various ability and training and it shows. An old trouper like Vinie Burrows who was a delight at 89 as Mustard Seed in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dreams" is not matched in talent or ability by the other cast members with the exception of the height-challenged actor Matthew Jeffers who engages and delights in his various roles. Even Rob Campbell who is a regular in Churchill's plays disappoints. It feels almost as though he is saying "This is an amateurish production. What am I doing here? Why even try?" Evelyn Spahr in particular is appalling as she mugs her way through various roles in this period piece about the Civil War in England in 1642 led by Oliver Cromwell.
"Dance Nation" at Playwright's Horizons and directed by Lee Sunday Evans is Clare Barron's latest and, while I thought that her two previous plays "You Got Older" and "I'll Never Love Again" were superior, the risks she is willing to take like the cross generational casting of her teenaged protagonists, a devise she used to ever better effect in "I'll Never Love Again," have electrifying results. The play is searing in addressing the pain of female puberty and how that pain plays out later on in life. This is where her use of actresses of different ages to play the seven young dancers really clicks. Lucy Taylor the 40ish actress playing Ashlee alone on stage and spotlit, delivers a devastating monologue that carries her from her 13 year old self to the sexually unsure mature woman she has become. The monologue destroys... But everyone in the cast is excellent from Eboni Booth as the insecure Zuzu who is expected to fulfill her mother's dream to Dina Shihabi's Amina, the star dancer of the company who realizes that she must build a shell around herself if she wants to succeed. There's a moment at the beginning of the play that that is intentionally reminiscent of "A Chorus Line." The audience recognizes this and it brilliantly sets the stage for what is to come. Barron has the ability to mine other plays for bits that she makes her own. I continue to be astounded.
The revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW forty years doesn't come together this time around. Directed by Rachel Chavkin a NYTW Usual Suspect and whose work I generally admire even when the material falls short, this "Light" fails to shine. Chavkin has assembled a motley crew of actors of various ability and training and it shows. An old trouper like Vinie Burrows who was a delight at 89 as Mustard Seed in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dreams" is not matched in talent or ability by the other cast members with the exception of the height-challenged actor Matthew Jeffers who engages and delights in his various roles. Even Rob Campbell who is a regular in Churchill's plays disappoints. It feels almost as though he is saying "This is an amateurish production. What am I doing here? Why even try?" Evelyn Spahr in particular is appalling as she mugs her way through various roles in this period piece about the Civil War in England in 1642 led by Oliver Cromwell.
"Dance Nation" at Playwright's Horizons and directed by Lee Sunday Evans is Clare Barron's latest and, while I thought that her two previous plays "You Got Older" and "I'll Never Love Again" were superior, the risks she is willing to take like the cross generational casting of her teenaged protagonists, a devise she used to ever better effect in "I'll Never Love Again," have electrifying results. The play is searing in addressing the pain of female puberty and how that pain plays out later on in life. This is where her use of actresses of different ages to play the seven young dancers really clicks. Lucy Taylor the 40ish actress playing Ashlee alone on stage and spotlit, delivers a devastating monologue that carries her from her 13 year old self to the sexually unsure mature woman she has become. The monologue destroys... But everyone in the cast is excellent from Eboni Booth as the insecure Zuzu who is expected to fulfill her mother's dream to Dina Shihabi's Amina, the star dancer of the company who realizes that she must build a shell around herself if she wants to succeed. There's a moment at the beginning of the play that that is intentionally reminiscent of "A Chorus Line." The audience recognizes this and it brilliantly sets the stage for what is to come. Barron has the ability to mine other plays for bits that she makes her own. I continue to be astounded.
Monday, April 9, 2018
April Is Not The Cruelest Month
Glenda Jackson in "Three Tall Women" is magnificent. Reason enough to see the current revival on Broadway at the Golden Theatre. Also, Albee. Directed by Joe Mantello (usually not his biggest fan having disliked intensely the recent critically acclaimed "The Humans" and "Blackbird") with recent Tony winner Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill (miscast IMHO), Albee's play soars on the the wings of Jackson's performance. "Three Tall Women" is Albee's letter to his mother, a wealthy socialite who adopted him as an infant but failed to nurture him and rejected him for being a homosexual. But this is not a harangue. It feels rather as if Albee understands and even admires his mother if at times she feels like the devil She's not a nice woman but does that matter? In the first act the 90 (or is it 91?) year-old A is confined to her room and attended by B, a health-care aide (Metcalf), and C, a young lawyer (Pill) who has been tasked with attending to her bills. In the second act Pill and Metcalf play A at earlier stages of her life with varying degrees of success. Metcalf is convincing but I didn't believe Pill in that role. It's hard for either of them, superb actors that they are, to measure up to Jackson even after her 22 year hiatus from the stage.
Bedlam's "Pygmalion" (on which "My Fair Lady" is based) is also not to miss although you will probably have to. The show closes after a very limited run at The Sheen Center on Bleecker street on April 22nd and is currently sold out. Bedlam is able to populate whole universes with 4, 5, 6 or 7 as they do here. Shaw was a genius at creating strong women characters, ones who don't need men to give them a feeling of self-worth and it is especially evident in the character of Eliza Doolittle, here played to perfection by Vaishnavi Sharma who appeared in two previous Bedlam productions, "The Seagull" and "Sense and Sensibility." Eric Tucker not only directs but is outstandingly irritating as Henry Higgins and Beldman regulars Edmund Lewis and Nigel Gore return to play Mrs Higgins and Henry Pickering respectively as well as a host of other characters. The newcomers to Bedlam are Annabel Capper as the exquisitely imperious Mrs. Pierce and Rajesh Bose as the unctuous but charming Alfred Doolittle. What a joyful production.
Then hasten to "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center to see Lauren Ambrose make the role of Eliza Doolittle her own. While watching "Pygmalian" I kept expecting the characters to burst into song at any moment. Here they do! Who knew that Lauren Ambrose had a voice to rival Kelli O'Hara's (who I must admit I had imagined in the role)? Norbert Leo Butz has a raucous and engaging turn as Alfred Doolittle; "Get Me To The Church On Time" is always a show-stopper. But every word, every song of this great musical is imprinted on our memories, those of us of a certain age, and it's thrilling to hear them sung to such perfection. Bartlett Sher, who it seems directs every musical at Lincoln Center (his "South Pacific" and "The King and I" were both extraordinary), has put together a marvelous company that includes, in addition to Ambrose, Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins, Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, Allan Corduner as Colonel Pickering and newcomer Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill. There's nothing like a musical at Lincoln Center when it's done right.
You may have already missed seeing Billie Piper in "Yerma" at the Park Avenue Armory. Hers is a tour-de-force performance but the Lorca play doesn't really work as reinvented for yuppies in today's London. Lorca's "Yerma" is specific to a time and place (1934, Spain) when a woman's most important role in life was to be a mother. Her descent into madness is the result of her inner struggle with not being able to fill this role. Transposed to a yuppie professional woman in her 30's who has only just had the idea that to complete her life she must have a child when she has never wanted one before, does not like children and has no motherly instincts, it fails to make sense. "Her" as she is called in the current production simply wants something that she is unable to have. She goes mad for not being able to get what she wants but it's really not about having a child. She would have found something else to obsess on that would drive her over edge if having a child was taken out of the equation. She is spoiled and entitled and I had very little sympathy for her. However, the production, as directed by Simon Stone, is beautifully staged in a glass/plexiglass box with audience on both sides and the performances are all terrific.
The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Travesties" directed by Patrick Marber with Tom Hollander is a miss in my book. The revival of Stoppard's 1974 play about an English official, Henry Carr, in Zurich during WWI who has either real or imaginary encounters with James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin, all in Zurich at the time, misses the mark. The performances are uneven and the play never reaches the frenzied pitch it requires in order to embrace the absurdity of the subject.
Do you need to go to every Shakespeare production on in New York? Then you could do worse with Theatre for a New Audience's "The Winter's Tale" directed by Arin Arbus. See it, if only for Anatol Yusef's powerful Leontes, the jealous king who exiles his loving wife and condemns her newborn daughter to death but lives to regret it. Or better yet to see Antigonus, in Shakespeare's arguably most famous stage direction, "Exit, man pursued by a bear."
Bedlam's "Pygmalion" (on which "My Fair Lady" is based) is also not to miss although you will probably have to. The show closes after a very limited run at The Sheen Center on Bleecker street on April 22nd and is currently sold out. Bedlam is able to populate whole universes with 4, 5, 6 or 7 as they do here. Shaw was a genius at creating strong women characters, ones who don't need men to give them a feeling of self-worth and it is especially evident in the character of Eliza Doolittle, here played to perfection by Vaishnavi Sharma who appeared in two previous Bedlam productions, "The Seagull" and "Sense and Sensibility." Eric Tucker not only directs but is outstandingly irritating as Henry Higgins and Beldman regulars Edmund Lewis and Nigel Gore return to play Mrs Higgins and Henry Pickering respectively as well as a host of other characters. The newcomers to Bedlam are Annabel Capper as the exquisitely imperious Mrs. Pierce and Rajesh Bose as the unctuous but charming Alfred Doolittle. What a joyful production.
Then hasten to "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center to see Lauren Ambrose make the role of Eliza Doolittle her own. While watching "Pygmalian" I kept expecting the characters to burst into song at any moment. Here they do! Who knew that Lauren Ambrose had a voice to rival Kelli O'Hara's (who I must admit I had imagined in the role)? Norbert Leo Butz has a raucous and engaging turn as Alfred Doolittle; "Get Me To The Church On Time" is always a show-stopper. But every word, every song of this great musical is imprinted on our memories, those of us of a certain age, and it's thrilling to hear them sung to such perfection. Bartlett Sher, who it seems directs every musical at Lincoln Center (his "South Pacific" and "The King and I" were both extraordinary), has put together a marvelous company that includes, in addition to Ambrose, Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins, Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, Allan Corduner as Colonel Pickering and newcomer Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill. There's nothing like a musical at Lincoln Center when it's done right.
You may have already missed seeing Billie Piper in "Yerma" at the Park Avenue Armory. Hers is a tour-de-force performance but the Lorca play doesn't really work as reinvented for yuppies in today's London. Lorca's "Yerma" is specific to a time and place (1934, Spain) when a woman's most important role in life was to be a mother. Her descent into madness is the result of her inner struggle with not being able to fill this role. Transposed to a yuppie professional woman in her 30's who has only just had the idea that to complete her life she must have a child when she has never wanted one before, does not like children and has no motherly instincts, it fails to make sense. "Her" as she is called in the current production simply wants something that she is unable to have. She goes mad for not being able to get what she wants but it's really not about having a child. She would have found something else to obsess on that would drive her over edge if having a child was taken out of the equation. She is spoiled and entitled and I had very little sympathy for her. However, the production, as directed by Simon Stone, is beautifully staged in a glass/plexiglass box with audience on both sides and the performances are all terrific.
The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Travesties" directed by Patrick Marber with Tom Hollander is a miss in my book. The revival of Stoppard's 1974 play about an English official, Henry Carr, in Zurich during WWI who has either real or imaginary encounters with James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin, all in Zurich at the time, misses the mark. The performances are uneven and the play never reaches the frenzied pitch it requires in order to embrace the absurdity of the subject.
Do you need to go to every Shakespeare production on in New York? Then you could do worse with Theatre for a New Audience's "The Winter's Tale" directed by Arin Arbus. See it, if only for Anatol Yusef's powerful Leontes, the jealous king who exiles his loving wife and condemns her newborn daughter to death but lives to regret it. Or better yet to see Antigonus, in Shakespeare's arguably most famous stage direction, "Exit, man pursued by a bear."
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Backwards Through March
I saw Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," in a sense, backwards. Two weeks ago my flight to New York from Berkeley was canceled so I didn't make it back in time for Part 1: Millennium Approaches although I did catch Part 2: Perestroika the next night. I was later able to snag a single ticket for Part 1 so, in a sense, I saw it backwards. As always with Kushner, I was blown away by the breadth of his intellect and the magnificence of his stagings. For anyone who doesn't already know, the play addresses the issues of mortality, specifically with respect to the AIDs epidemic in the 80's when there was little hope for a cure. The acting, under the direction of Marianne Elliot, is tight. The revival comes to Broadway after a hugely successful sold-out run at The National Theatre in London. It should be no surprise that Elliot has directed several of the most original plays in recent times: "Heisenberg," "The Curious Incident..." and "War Horse" and I look forward to her upcoming revival of Sondheim's "Company." In keeping with the recent National productions of "War Horse" and Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," Elliot makes great use of sophisticated puppetry for the Angel who was played by Amanda Lawrence in Millennium Approaches and by her understudy Glynis Bell in Perestroika, both wonderful. It's hard to single out a performance above the others from this mostly British cast. Everyone on Broadway appeared in the National Theatre production except for Lee Pace as Joe Pitt. Seeing the plays backwards had a curious effect on me. Performances that I didn't respond to in Perestroika moved me in Millennium, specifically Pace and James McArdle as Louis and Andrew Garfield's Prior Walter seemed to have more depth. However, other performances I found more nuanced in Perestroika: Denis Gough's Harper Pitt, Susan Brown in her incarnations as Mormon mother and Ethel Rosenberg, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the magnificent nurse/friend Belize, a part that Geoffrey Wright owned in the original production. But this was especially true of Nathan Lane who brought much of his schtick from "The Producers" to the character of Roy Cohn in Millennium Approaches and let it fall away in Perestroika. Ethel singing a Jewish lullaby to Cohn on his deathbed was always and will remain my favorite moment in the the play.
The Vineyard Theatre Production of "Harry Clarke" which recently moved to the Minetta Lane Theatre is an absorbing and entertaining one-man show. I'm not big on one-man/woman shows but the play, by David Cale, about an accidental conman is fun and Billy Crudup delivers a stunner of a performance as the duplicitous and possibly sociopathic title character. Leigh Silverman who helmed another recent excellent one person show with Marin Ireland, "On The Exhale," directs. You're in for a bumpy ride.
Go see "This Flat Earth" at Playwright's Horizons, a musing on the effects of a mass shooting in a suburban middle school. The playwright Lindsey Ferrentino is having a moment. She has two plays running simultaneously ("Amy and the Orphans" is currently running at the Roundabout). Directed by Rebecca Taichman who directed Paula Vogel's "Indecent," "This Flat Earth" supposes a school shooting in a middle school in a posh suburb on New York. How timely. The play was of course written before the Parkland shootings but after Sandy Hook and the countless others. It's a play about a 13 year old girl and the end of innocence. Ferrentino was herself inspired to write the play from her own experience as a naive 13 year old at the time of the attacks on the twin towers. The performances are all stellar, especially newcomer Ella Kennedy Davis as the 13 year old Julie. I don't know how old the actress is but based on her still-developing body certainly no older than 14. She has talent well beyond her years. Watch for her in the future.
You can miss "The Lucky Ones" at Ars Nova unless, of course, you are a 30-something living in Williamsburg and nostalgic for "Hair" and "Godspell." I was not a fan of The Bengsons recent autobiographical show "Hundred Days" at NYTW for some of the same reasons I could not respond to "The Lucky Ones," the self-indulgent naval-gazing for starters. I have to say I'm a little disappointed with the fine director Anne Kauffman( "Sundown, Yellow Moon," "You Got Older," "Mary Jane") for hitching her star to their wagon. The pointless hippy dippy dance sequences only made this production worse in my opinion, Kauffman's idea or the Bengsons'? Their music is not terrible though. Perhaps they should try to write about something other than their own personal experiences.
The Vineyard Theatre Production of "Harry Clarke" which recently moved to the Minetta Lane Theatre is an absorbing and entertaining one-man show. I'm not big on one-man/woman shows but the play, by David Cale, about an accidental conman is fun and Billy Crudup delivers a stunner of a performance as the duplicitous and possibly sociopathic title character. Leigh Silverman who helmed another recent excellent one person show with Marin Ireland, "On The Exhale," directs. You're in for a bumpy ride.
Go see "This Flat Earth" at Playwright's Horizons, a musing on the effects of a mass shooting in a suburban middle school. The playwright Lindsey Ferrentino is having a moment. She has two plays running simultaneously ("Amy and the Orphans" is currently running at the Roundabout). Directed by Rebecca Taichman who directed Paula Vogel's "Indecent," "This Flat Earth" supposes a school shooting in a middle school in a posh suburb on New York. How timely. The play was of course written before the Parkland shootings but after Sandy Hook and the countless others. It's a play about a 13 year old girl and the end of innocence. Ferrentino was herself inspired to write the play from her own experience as a naive 13 year old at the time of the attacks on the twin towers. The performances are all stellar, especially newcomer Ella Kennedy Davis as the 13 year old Julie. I don't know how old the actress is but based on her still-developing body certainly no older than 14. She has talent well beyond her years. Watch for her in the future.
You can miss "The Lucky Ones" at Ars Nova unless, of course, you are a 30-something living in Williamsburg and nostalgic for "Hair" and "Godspell." I was not a fan of The Bengsons recent autobiographical show "Hundred Days" at NYTW for some of the same reasons I could not respond to "The Lucky Ones," the self-indulgent naval-gazing for starters. I have to say I'm a little disappointed with the fine director Anne Kauffman( "Sundown, Yellow Moon," "You Got Older," "Mary Jane") for hitching her star to their wagon. The pointless hippy dippy dance sequences only made this production worse in my opinion, Kauffman's idea or the Bengsons'? Their music is not terrible though. Perhaps they should try to write about something other than their own personal experiences.
Thursday, March 15, 2018
Wrapping up February
Edward Albee's "At Home At The Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story" at Signature is a pretty perfect evening of theatre. Directed by Lila Neugebauer, who directed the stellar "The Wolves" at The Playwright's Realm last year, and starring Robert Sean Leonard, Paul Sparks and the divine Katie Finneran, this is an evening of pure intellectual and artistic satisfaction. The scenic design by Andrew Lieberman takes the Cy Twombly squiggles that serve as a backdrop for the exploration of a marriage in "Homelife" and replicates them in the pattern of the park benches in the encounter between two strangers in "The Zoo Story." Albee always forces us to dig deeper and to think more about our preconceived beliefs of who we are. Signature is often hit or miss but they always get Albee right. Bravo!
The latest offering from The Playwright's Realm is a bit of a miss although an enjoyable one. Since their above-noted production of "The Wolves" and the equally impressive but less lauded "The Moors" their offerings have not been up to the mark. In Don Nguyen's "Hello, From The Children of Planet Earth" a lesbian couple who are having trouble in their attempts to conceive contact a male classmate and friend of one of the women, now a NASA scientist keeping track of the Voyager satellite, for help. Jade King Carroll adeptly directs the able cast but the subject matter is pretty old-hat. I feel like I've seen this play many times before. The most interesting aspect of the production is the character Farthest Explorer portrayed here by Olivia Oguma who as Voyager 2 muses about the universe from their place in space. I suppose there are parallels to be had to the situation on Earth but mainly I just enjoyed her performance.
"Hangmen" at Atlantic Theater Company is Martin McDonagh's latest, coming on the tail of his enormous success as writer/director the Academy Award nominated "Three Billboard Out of Ebbing, Missouri." I wasn't a fan of the film but his plays, most recently the "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM, are always powerful. "Hangmen," which had it's debut at The Royal Court Theatre in London, has retained it's director Matthew Dunster and much of the original cast including the mesmerizing and edgy Johnny Flynn as Mooney, a presumed rapist and murderer, and Mark Addy as Harry, one of the hangmen in question. Ultimately the play is a Wild West story of vigilante justice, superb in it's telling.
The Soho Rep is finally back in their home space on Walker Street with "Is God Is" by Aleshea Harris. The play is directed by Taibi Magar, who most recently directed the acclaimed "Underground Railroad Game" at Ars Nova. Twin sisters who were badly burned in a fire set by their father are sent by their dying mother who they barely know to find him and murder him. Dame-Jasmine Hughes and Alfie Fuller are terrifying as the sisters but then everyone in this gothic revenge play is pretty terrifying. I also couldn't stop feeling the influence of Sam Shepard throughout. Props to Soho Rep for producing a really fine play with black characters, a black playwright and a black director. That's what I call making it real. I'm back on board with Soho Rep!
I hate to end this blog post on a downer but Joshua Harmon's "Admissions" at Lincoln Center is a total fail in my book. The subject is tired and the direction and acting do nothing to raise the material. The son of the white admissions officer at an elite (but second-tier) prep school whose mantra is diversity is not accepted to the Ivy of his choice but his (half) black friend and classmate who has lower grades, test scores and fewer extra-curriculars has been. Crisis for the privilaged white family! Yawn. The biggest problem with the play though, directed by Daniel Aukin, is that there are no people of color in the cast. Or the audience at the performance I attended. I don't even know what to say about that...
The latest offering from The Playwright's Realm is a bit of a miss although an enjoyable one. Since their above-noted production of "The Wolves" and the equally impressive but less lauded "The Moors" their offerings have not been up to the mark. In Don Nguyen's "Hello, From The Children of Planet Earth" a lesbian couple who are having trouble in their attempts to conceive contact a male classmate and friend of one of the women, now a NASA scientist keeping track of the Voyager satellite, for help. Jade King Carroll adeptly directs the able cast but the subject matter is pretty old-hat. I feel like I've seen this play many times before. The most interesting aspect of the production is the character Farthest Explorer portrayed here by Olivia Oguma who as Voyager 2 muses about the universe from their place in space. I suppose there are parallels to be had to the situation on Earth but mainly I just enjoyed her performance.
"Hangmen" at Atlantic Theater Company is Martin McDonagh's latest, coming on the tail of his enormous success as writer/director the Academy Award nominated "Three Billboard Out of Ebbing, Missouri." I wasn't a fan of the film but his plays, most recently the "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM, are always powerful. "Hangmen," which had it's debut at The Royal Court Theatre in London, has retained it's director Matthew Dunster and much of the original cast including the mesmerizing and edgy Johnny Flynn as Mooney, a presumed rapist and murderer, and Mark Addy as Harry, one of the hangmen in question. Ultimately the play is a Wild West story of vigilante justice, superb in it's telling.
The Soho Rep is finally back in their home space on Walker Street with "Is God Is" by Aleshea Harris. The play is directed by Taibi Magar, who most recently directed the acclaimed "Underground Railroad Game" at Ars Nova. Twin sisters who were badly burned in a fire set by their father are sent by their dying mother who they barely know to find him and murder him. Dame-Jasmine Hughes and Alfie Fuller are terrifying as the sisters but then everyone in this gothic revenge play is pretty terrifying. I also couldn't stop feeling the influence of Sam Shepard throughout. Props to Soho Rep for producing a really fine play with black characters, a black playwright and a black director. That's what I call making it real. I'm back on board with Soho Rep!
I hate to end this blog post on a downer but Joshua Harmon's "Admissions" at Lincoln Center is a total fail in my book. The subject is tired and the direction and acting do nothing to raise the material. The son of the white admissions officer at an elite (but second-tier) prep school whose mantra is diversity is not accepted to the Ivy of his choice but his (half) black friend and classmate who has lower grades, test scores and fewer extra-curriculars has been. Crisis for the privilaged white family! Yawn. The biggest problem with the play though, directed by Daniel Aukin, is that there are no people of color in the cast. Or the audience at the performance I attended. I don't even know what to say about that...
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Easing into February
I think it's the enda Enda for me. With "Ballyturk" at Saint Ann's Warehouse Enda Walsh returns to a set-up he used in "Arlington"(also at Saint Ann's Warehouse) of characters trapped in a room in the perhaps not-so-distant future "waiting", obviously an homage to another well-known Irish playwright whom we need not name. And to add to the already yawn-worthy premise he uses the Ivo Van Hove trick of throwing garbage all over the stage for what reason I'm not sure although it's quite the thing these days. The fictional village of Ballyturk and its occupants that the two trapped characters create recalled Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood" and gave me a glimmer of hope that the play might have something other than its fatalistic outcome up its sleeve but it was not to be. However, the performances by Tadhg Murphy, Mikel Murfi and Olwen Fouere as a third character (the devil?, angel of doom?, god?) are superb.
"He Brought Her Heart Back In A Box" from the African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy currently at Theatre for a New Audience is admirable if a bit static. It stars two young Yale School of Drama graduates Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka and is directed by Evan Yionoulis, the resident director at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Unfortunately the 45 minute play feels more like a history/civics lesson on race relations in the South than a window into Kennedy's person history. The 1940's. A boy. A white boy. A girl. A black girl. A black girl who can "pass." A love story. A tragedy. You can guess the rest. However, Christopher Barreca's scenic design is delicious. a single long staircase divides the set representing the divide between the lives of the characters which they must not but do cross. The lighting by Donald Holder is dreamlike and Justin Ellington's score which incorporates period songs and Noel Coward's "Bitter Sweet" is hypnotic. And it's worth the trek to Brooklyn to see what the 86 year old Ms. Kennedy is up to even if it's not such a much. It's still a much more than most.
"An Ordinary Muslim" directed by Jo Bonney now in previews at NYTW is just that: ordinary. Hammaad Chaudry, a first time playwright from Edinburgh has nevertheless amassed quite an impressive string of playwriting awards for a thus far unproduced playwright so forgive me for expecting more. I felt no empathy for the central character Azeem, the spoiled son of an Anglo-Pakistani family. He is "an angry young man" struggling with what it is to be a Pakastani in England and, although his is a real dilemma, the character does not look to any solutions other than to reject everything that is offered him and Sanjit De Silva was unable to make his character likable or even understandable. Andrew Hovelson as Azeem's work friend David who bends over backward to support his friend and Angel Desai, who briefly appears as Azeem's sister Javaria, are the only characters who elicit any sympathy. The plays follows a pretty straightforward narrative and there's not much original to be had here. The Pakistani Joe Orton Chaudry is not.
"Returning to Reims" now playing at St. Ann's Warehouse is more of history lecture than a play until the last 15 minutes but you may have fallen asleep or zoned out by then. This is not to say that the content is not interesting but it's not theatre. An actress called Katy, Nina Hoss, arrives at a recording studio and immediately starts to record the narration for a documentary. The confusion begins when we discover about 20 minutes in that the narrator is a gay French man, the French writer Didier Eribon, and not a straight German woman so all our assumptions up to that point we must discard. This is just one of the ways the director Thomas Ostermeier attempts to straddle the bounderies of gender as well as nationality and political thought but it's just confusing as opposed to revolutionary. The documentary within the play follows Eribon's autobiographical book about growing up gay in a working class enclave of Reims, France. He not only records his own development but that of the working class and their move from political progressiveness to the embrace of the nationalist movement and Le Penn. There are certainly parallels to the current climate in this country and in this sense the play is timely and presumably the reason for the production being presented here. Hoss is an exquisite actress (If you haven't seen the 2014 film "Phoenix" set in Germany in the aftermath of WW2 add it to your Netflix queue) and even given the relatively flat delivery of the narration her voice is intoxicating. But the real meat of the play comes in the final 15 minutes or so when Hoss begins to tell the her own story and we discover that her father is Willi Hoss who himself came from working class beginnings and went on to co-found the Green Party in Germany. In my opinion this should have been the the beginning...
"He Brought Her Heart Back In A Box" from the African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy currently at Theatre for a New Audience is admirable if a bit static. It stars two young Yale School of Drama graduates Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka and is directed by Evan Yionoulis, the resident director at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Unfortunately the 45 minute play feels more like a history/civics lesson on race relations in the South than a window into Kennedy's person history. The 1940's. A boy. A white boy. A girl. A black girl. A black girl who can "pass." A love story. A tragedy. You can guess the rest. However, Christopher Barreca's scenic design is delicious. a single long staircase divides the set representing the divide between the lives of the characters which they must not but do cross. The lighting by Donald Holder is dreamlike and Justin Ellington's score which incorporates period songs and Noel Coward's "Bitter Sweet" is hypnotic. And it's worth the trek to Brooklyn to see what the 86 year old Ms. Kennedy is up to even if it's not such a much. It's still a much more than most.
"An Ordinary Muslim" directed by Jo Bonney now in previews at NYTW is just that: ordinary. Hammaad Chaudry, a first time playwright from Edinburgh has nevertheless amassed quite an impressive string of playwriting awards for a thus far unproduced playwright so forgive me for expecting more. I felt no empathy for the central character Azeem, the spoiled son of an Anglo-Pakistani family. He is "an angry young man" struggling with what it is to be a Pakastani in England and, although his is a real dilemma, the character does not look to any solutions other than to reject everything that is offered him and Sanjit De Silva was unable to make his character likable or even understandable. Andrew Hovelson as Azeem's work friend David who bends over backward to support his friend and Angel Desai, who briefly appears as Azeem's sister Javaria, are the only characters who elicit any sympathy. The plays follows a pretty straightforward narrative and there's not much original to be had here. The Pakistani Joe Orton Chaudry is not.
"Returning to Reims" now playing at St. Ann's Warehouse is more of history lecture than a play until the last 15 minutes but you may have fallen asleep or zoned out by then. This is not to say that the content is not interesting but it's not theatre. An actress called Katy, Nina Hoss, arrives at a recording studio and immediately starts to record the narration for a documentary. The confusion begins when we discover about 20 minutes in that the narrator is a gay French man, the French writer Didier Eribon, and not a straight German woman so all our assumptions up to that point we must discard. This is just one of the ways the director Thomas Ostermeier attempts to straddle the bounderies of gender as well as nationality and political thought but it's just confusing as opposed to revolutionary. The documentary within the play follows Eribon's autobiographical book about growing up gay in a working class enclave of Reims, France. He not only records his own development but that of the working class and their move from political progressiveness to the embrace of the nationalist movement and Le Penn. There are certainly parallels to the current climate in this country and in this sense the play is timely and presumably the reason for the production being presented here. Hoss is an exquisite actress (If you haven't seen the 2014 film "Phoenix" set in Germany in the aftermath of WW2 add it to your Netflix queue) and even given the relatively flat delivery of the narration her voice is intoxicating. But the real meat of the play comes in the final 15 minutes or so when Hoss begins to tell the her own story and we discover that her father is Willi Hoss who himself came from working class beginnings and went on to co-found the Green Party in Germany. In my opinion this should have been the the beginning...
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