The Glass Menagerie

photo: Joan Marcus

No matter how many times you've seen tragedy unfold for the Wingfield family - Amanda desperately selling those magazine subscriptions by phone, Tom taking those codified night time trips to the movies, Laura blowing out her candles - you're likely to be astonished by this current off-Broadway revival. This "new interpretation" of the Williams classic (from Roundabout by way of Long Wharf) may not quite qualify as a reinvention, but it's nonetheless fresh and surprising. The most defining of director Gordon Edelstein's contributions is his decision to have the memory play spring to life as Tom tortures it out of himself on a typewriter, anesthetized by booze. This may seem a minor distinction, but in the playing it's remarkably powerful. The conceit allows Patch Darragh, brilliant as Tom, to bring a booze-soaked toxicity to some of his line readings, and it allows some of the more charged exchanges between Tom and Amanda (Judith Ivey, superb) to play like black comedy. Bold choices also distinguish the play's other 2 performances - Keira Keely may over-emphasize the handicap, but she otherwise doesn't play Laura as a physical weakling: you can feel Laura's strength every time she walks across the stage in a broken but determined stride. Even Jim, Laura's "Gentleman Caller", feels freshly imagined thanks to a surprising, underplayed aloofness in Josh Charles' characterization.

New Islands Archipelago

photo: Darien Bates

Talking Band's latest experimental piece, currently at 3LD Art & Technology Center, is that rare example of multimedia theatre in which video projections are used judiciously, presented artfully, and kept in disciplined service of the story. Set on a cruise ship, with just enough visual theming to qualify as environmental but not so much as to become kitsch, the unpretentious, often whimsical collage-like play drifts from vignette to vignette as it tracks an increasingly strange trip at sea. We meet specific, vivid characters, and we learn some backstories, but there's an engaging ambiguity to the piece as it builds: its meaning is more meant to be intuited than explicitly spelled out by narrative. Gradually, the show's mix of music (by Ellen Maddow), scenes (writer-director Paul Zimet), movement pieces (Tigger!), and multimedia (Simon Tarr) combine to evoke the feeling of a gentle, waking dream. This has to be one of the most theatrically sound and memorable pieces I have yet to see at 3LD.

Banana Shpeel

photo: Kristie Kahns

Most of the acts in the latest Cirque du Soleil show are of the same variety and of the same jaw-dropping, viscerally exciting quality you expect from the brand: a trio of Asian contortionists, a hold-your-breath thrilling Russian male acrobat who seems to walk sideways around a pole, a juggler who spins carpets on her legs, hands and head simultaneously. But the show's unfortunate, vaudeville-themed framing story adds a lot of head-scratchingly unfunny business to the mix and keeps grinding the show to a full halt. The conceit - that our Master of Ceremonies holds a talent contest using three talentless audience members (read: obvious plants) who infiltrate the show rather than return to their seats as they're told - isn't at all developed: it's all set-up and no punchline. The only practical use of the vaudeville setting is that it allows an excuse for tap dancing but those numbers, which haven't been choreographed to build, are among the show's weakest. There is some Cirque du Soleil magic here, but it's diminished by way too much that's beside the point.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

Reviewed for Theatermania.

De Novo

photo: Alyssa Ringler

The message is blunt and the conclusion is forgone, but the 70-minute documentary drama De Novo is nonetheless absorbing and effective. The show, part of the Americas Off Broadway festival at 59e59, is scripted entirely from court transcripts, letters and interviews concerning the judicial treatment of a Guatemalan teenager who fled his country once marked for death (at the age of 14) by street gangs. Both a bracing glimpse into the life of an undocumented immigrant minor, and a maddening look at the tragic consequences of our immigration laws, the play is purposeful and unblinking. Despite its exclusive use of found texts, it's brought to life with just enough theatricality to involve as drama rather than simply as an informative, well-meaning lesson. The budget is modest but the choices are rich - boxes of government files upstage, and clotheslines clipped with court papers on each side of space, make us always aware that this story is, unfortunately, not unique. Even more effective is the use of Donna DeCesare's graphic images of gang culture, which vividly remind us what is at stake.

Fences

Reviewed for Theater News Online.

American Idiot

photo: Paul Kolnik

Green Day's niche and the secret to their cross-generational appeal is that their songs combine the brash anger of long-passe punk rock with insanely catchy pop melodies: their righteous anger is radio-ready enough for the bubble gum set to sing along with it. The distinction of their smash hit album American Idiot was in its timing: the band was raising a fist at knee-jerk post 9/11 patriotism just as mainstream youth were ready to brave a turn to the left. It's a huge disappointment then that the same-named musical based on the album doesn't honor this and lacks, except in the most generic way, political content. More like Movin' Out than Hair, but far less satisfying than either, the show amounts to a numbing 90 minute music video on stage. The cast is uniformly sensational, and the show's mix of performance and high-tech imagery brings to Broadway a brand of razzle-dazzle that concertgoers have been used to for decades. (The staging for "Wake Me Up When September Ends", in which the ensemble move while on their backs as if falling, reminded me of one of the dance ensemble pieces in David Bowie's Glass Spider tour, circa 1987). But since the story (of three buds - one who goes to war, one who stays home glued to the TV, and one who goes to the city and promptly gets hooked on heroin) is a well-worn cliche, and the show doesn't rally around any great theme besides "everything sucks", American Idiot succeeds only as spectacle.

The Aliens

Reviewed for Theatermania.

The Subject Was Roses

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Langston In Harlem

photo: Ben Hider

When I saw a workshop of this vibrant, original musical two years ago at The Public, it was clear that the show was special and that there would be a full production sooner rather than later. A loosely-shaped biography of Langston Hughes (Josh Tower) that sets his writings to a rich, original jazz-heavy score (by Walter Marks), the musical is formally unconventional and often spellbinding. It's a portrait of the poet etched mostly by his own words, with sophisticated, evocative music that honors rather than disturbs the rhythms of his poems. The book scenes (by Marks, along with director Kent Gash) are kept at a bare minimum - there's just enough dialogue to set the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance (shout out to Kenita Miller, memorable as Zora Neale Hurston) and to move us through some of the events in Hughes' life that inspired his writings. If the book scenes and musicalized poems - among them "The Negro Mother", "Genius Child", and "Troubled Water" - form a biography of Hughes' artistic life more than his personal one, it's a small price to pay for the musical's multitude of pleasures.

The Addams Family

photo: Matt Hoyle

Near the top of the second act of The Addams Family, Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlain) turns to the audience to ask if we think that the story will all work out in the end, or if we think we'll go home in an hour vaguely depressed. The story works out of course, insofar as there is a story, but we're likely to leave vaguely depressed anyhow. Impeccably designed and blessed with the enormous good will of the audience (whose affection for the characters is so strong that most snap along with the TV theme song in the overture) the ill-conceived musical comedy would be forgiven a lot - including its bungled storyline - if it was funny. But even Nathan Lane, committing completely with the full force of his clowning genius as Gomez, can't make it so. He works his ass off - mugging here, spinning a line there - but since he hasn't been given even one single genuinely funny line, his determination starts to reek like flop sweat. For a show about endearingly macabre, outside-the-box characters, the musical is awfully square, from Andrew Lippa's show tune score (which lacks cohesion - one number has a bossa nova beat while another sounds like a Kander-Ebb trunk song) to the love-conquers-all theme that doesn't suit the characters. There are moments - for instance, Fester's number in the second act, in which he seems to swim through a sky of chorus-girl-faced stars up to the moon, has a quirky, magical charm that shames the rest of the show's boulevard coarseness. And the sight of Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia, dancing with Death's sickle around her waist and leading a chorus line of ghosts, is more amusing than what passes for jokes in the show. Jackie Hoffman scores some laughs - I'm not sure that depicting Grandmama as an aged Woodtsock hippie with a peyote stash in the attic was the best way to go, but at least a decision was made that translates the character to the real world.

Million Dollar Quartet

photo: Joan Marcus

In order to dramatize the one-time, impromptu 1956 jam session between Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, writers Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux have constructed the thinnest of books while playing fast and loose with the facts. (As they have our narrator Sam Phillips (Hunter Foster) tell it, the session was also the occasion when 3 of the 4 music legends ditched Phillips' Sun Records label.) But why argue with the false, formulaic excuse to showcase the music, when the music is the main attraction and it rocks the roof off the place? Foster commits to his narrator role with skill, in earnest, and Elizabeth Stanley delights in her minor functionary role (I adored her rendition of "Fever"; she's done her homework) but the show is all about the quartet. As you watch the 4 actor-musicians tear into some vintage rock in character, you are reminded of the icons' musicianship and get a sense of what it must have been like to see these men perform way back when rock was the world's brand new, dirty fascination. Apart from Eddie Clendening, whose acting is often tentative as Elvis, the performers do more than impersonate the icons - they seem to connect to them as fellow musicians, and find their personalities through the legends' performance styles. Levi Kreis attacking the piano with jackhammer force as Lewis; Robert Britton Lyons rolling his shoulders as Perkins as if his guitar riffs are expressing his body; Lance Guest as Cash demonstratively staring down the crowd as if in challenge: these are pleasures that will make any vintage rock fan ecstatic.

Red

photo: Johan Persson

With its pronounced lack of subtext and its relentlessly unimaginative seriousness, John Logan's two-hander about painter Mark Rothko and his fresh-faced assistant is certainly of a piece. Due to high production values, chief among them Neil Austin's purposeful lighting, it's also visually compelling. It isn't, unfortunately, especially believable: despite the actors' efforts these are two opposed sides of an argument, not flesh and blood characters. The 90-minute one-act casts Rothko (a committed, focused Alfred Molina) as the self-absorbed last gasp of "serious" art, holding the gates closed against the Pop Art barbarians who are making his work increasingly irrelevant, circa 1958. His speeches, which sound like interview quotes researched and cobbled together, are spat at the generally passive assistant (Eddie Redmayne) for 2/3rd's of the play's 90 minutes. It's like a somber Devil Wears Prada for middlebrow snobs. The teacher/student device is as dramaturgically limp as it sounds, more so once the assistant reveals a backstory that scores a perfect zero for believability. The play eventually gets going in its last half hour, when the assistant finally stands up to the bullying boss and calls him a sell out for making pictures to adorn the new Four Seasons restaurant. It isn't the old art vs. commerce conflict that gives late life to the play but the overdue deeper depiction of Rothko - he's suddenly exposed to us as an old man who sees that the times have moved beyond him and who worries how time will judge him. It isn't hard to be moved by that, even in a contrivance such as this.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

photo: Joan Marcus

A smart bad-ass show that illustrates the 7th U.S. President's celebrity and maverick status by anachronistically depicting him as an Emo rock god, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson pokes snarky fun at rock musicals (Spring Awakening, especially) while putting over some provocative ideas about Andrew Jackson’s legacy. Was he a hero or an American Hitler? Was the populism he preached a recipe for pure democracy or for chaos? The often snarky pop musical (songs by Michael Friedman) isn’t out to make a definitive statement and it steadfastly refuses to get too serious until the very end, but that’s part of its infectious appeal. As written and staged by Alex Timbers, it’s silly and smartypants at the same time. (Has any other show, ever, made jokes about both Cher and Susan Sontag?) Benjamin Walker is right on target as Jackson, simultaneously no-nonsense and whiny adolescent, heading a cast that is well-attuned to the jokey spirit that guides most of the material.

Lend Me A Tenor

photo: Joan Marcus

Ken Ludwig's screwball farce, in which a milquetoast has to pass for a world-famous opera star, may take too long to get going to be counted as a truly top-drawer example of the genre, but its opportunites for physical comedy make it a stitch anyhow. I doubt it could be shown off to more hilarious, fast-paced advantage than in the current Broadway revival, which packs in more laughs than minutes. Under Stanley Tucci's direction just about everyone in the cast, from Justin Bartha (as the milquetoast) to Anthony LaPaglia (as the opera star) to Jan Maxwell (as the opera star's wife), plays with the zest of a seasoned farceur. Actors can easily push this kind of slamming doors comedy too hard - aggressive mugging is an occupational hazard of the genre - but the exaggeration here isn't out of scale with the stakes the material demands. Perhaps the finest example of this is Tony Shalhoub's central performance as the Opera company's increasingly unhinged executive director: he could bellow his way through the character and score himself easy laughs, but instead he simmers just below the boiling point. The play is ultimately funnier for it. Special hats-off to the curtain call, a zany fast forward through the whole play in 3 minutes.

Come Fly Away

photo: Ruven Afanador

Twyla Tharp's evening set to Frank Sinatra songs doesn't add up to a musical in the way that her Billy Joel show Movin' Out did, partly because Joel's catalog came pre-equipped for the stage with characters and a narrative specificity that Sinatra songs lack. While each of the principal dancers is playing a character and expressing a distinct personality, the show isn't organized by a plot as much as by a general theme (of romantic love). However that's more than enough, thanks to Tharp's artistry and to the phenomenal abilities of her dancers, to hold Come Fly Away together as a transporting, often spellbinding show. By any standard I know, the dancing is spectacular. Tharp's choreography is highly expressive and individuated to her performers, whether pitched for comedy (Charlie Neshyba and Laura Mead, depicting a clumsy courtship) or for drama (Karine Plantadit and Keith Roberts, depicting a bruising love affair). Except for a curtain call that borders on the Vegas brand of tacky (in which the stars in the sky form a constellation to honor Ol' Blue Eyes), the show is artful and intelligent, the aesthetic opposite of this season's other Broadway dance show Burn The Floor.

The Diary of A Teenage Girl

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Ching Chong Chinaman

Reviewed for Theatermania.

When The Rain Stops Falling

photo: T. Charles Erickson

Andrew Bovell's dour, downbeat play, which flashes back and forward on several Anglo-Aussie family connections over four generations and eighty years, isn't for passive theatregoers; its ambitious structure demands patience and concentration just to connect who is who (despite the characters' family tree in the Playbill). While anything but formulaic, the structure is too clever by half: we're too often engaged with figuring out why the scenes are laid out as they are than with the emotional content. The reason for the challenging structure seems to be that it allows the playwright to delay the defining, key event that clarifies most of the play's characters, but to what end? Despite a sterling production (under David Cromer's direction) and many superb, detailed "kitchen sink" performances - particularly Mary Beth Hurt as an emotionally isolated alcoholic, and Victoria Clark as a wife slowly losing her sanity - the play is only involving as an intellectual puzzle.

All About Me

photo: Joan Marcus

Even if you are a fan of both Michael Feinstein and Dame Edna, as I am, you may feel that watching them take turns on, fight over, and share a stage in their duo show All About Me is a case where two equals less than one. The reason these unique, considerable talents have been put together probably has to do with the economic realities of today's Broadway, because nothing else about pairing Feinstein's elegantly phrased romantic crooning with Dame Edna's acerbic shtick seems to make potential sense. It's like chasing champagne with Scotch all night - one kills your taste for the other. Faced with the task of writing material that makes an evening out of two people who don't belong on stage together, Christopher Durang has basically tried to capitalize on the mismatch by underlining it - the show's conceit is that both stars think they are in a solo show but, accidentally double-booked into the same theatre, are forced to share the spotlight. It's the kind of blatantly artificial set-up that went out with yesteryear's TV specials - Judy answering the doorbell for daughter Liza, who's dropped by "unexpectedly" to delighted applause from the studio audience. It takes a certain know-how to sell that kind of pretend, and neither Dame Edna - whose humor is caustic with a smile - nor Feinstein - so earnest when he tells us between his first songs that his childhood was lonely - are that brand of player. The thin plot business is interminable (save for a stage manager, played by Jodi Capeless, who sends the bickering stars off stage to entertainingly steal the spotlight for herself) - you tolerate it waiting for each star to do what he does best. Despite Dame Edna's more outsize stage personality, and her hoot and a half rendition of Beyonce's "All The Single Ladies" that is the show's comic highlight, it's Feinstein who more regularly satisfies his fans. His polished, often sublime American songbook vocal stylings, whether accompanying himself on piano or working the stage backed by the 14 piece orchestra, are swank and swell. (My one complaint: it's 2010, but even this out gay performer changes the "he" in Oliver!'s "As Long As He Needs Me" to "she".)