Julius Caesar

What does an all-female Julius Caesar teach us that we don't already know about Shakespeare's tale of betrayal, ambition, and male stupidity? Not that much, really--but it does make the things we know fresh and vivid. And, anyway, the Donmar production currently at St. Ann's Warehouse is so thrilling and intensely hard-hitting that it doesn't matter what gender the actors are; it just matters that they're so damn good.

On the other hand, how wonderful that the cast is all female. How wonderful that they get to strut their stuff and be tough and play complex challenging roles. I can't help but imagine that, after stays and corsets and bustles, acting in trousers is liberating, and the performances certainly feel liberated: vibrant, fervent, and deeply heartfelt.

So, it's the usual story: Cassius convinces Brutus that Julius Caesar is too ambitious and too weak and therefore bad for Rome. Brutus has misgivings but persuades himself that murder is the only solution, despite his love for Caesar. The assassination is carried out, and no good comes of it.

In this production, the show is being performed in a women's prison. This accounts for the women playing men, and it also provides a nice edginess; some of these performers may actually be murderers. And the taut direction by Phyllida Lloyd--with electrifying support from Bunny Christie (design), Neil Austin (lighting), Tom Gibbons (sound),  Gary Yershon (music), Ann Yee (movement), and Kate Waters (fights)--maintains a breathless level of tension and conflict throughout.

And the cast, oh, the cast! Everyone is outstanding, though Harriet Walter (Brutus), Frances Barber (Caesar), Cush Jumbo (Mark Antony), and Jenny Jules (Cassius) get the most opportunity to strut their stuff--and strut they do! But there are no weak links here--everyone contributes to the beauty and glory of this excellent production.

Men playing women's roles is so commonplace as to be a bit tiresome, and there is often a level of cartoon to the performances. Women playing men's roles occurs less often, and, I think, has more to offer. Here's to an all-female, oh, Lear, or Henry V, or Much Ado About Nothing! I'm ready.

(very audience right; six row; tdf ticket)

The Film Society

Jon Robin Baitz's 1988 play The Film Society, which takes place in South Africa in the 1970s, explores racism, compromise, the closet, friendship, and many other interesting themes. Unfortunately, the Keen Company's current tepid production of the play, directed by Jonathan Silverstein to be both monotone and monochromatic, fails to tease out the themes, develop the relationships, or land the jokes. Only the stalwart, reliable Roberta Maxwell manages to bring dimension to her character; under Silverstein's uninspired direction, the rest of the cast ranges from wooden to okay.

(6th row on the aisle; press ticket)

Tamar of the River

The glorious Tamar of the River, running through October 20 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, is a must-see for anyone interested in nontraditional, engaging, and accessible musical theatre. Based on the biblical story of Tamar and Judah and his sons, Tamar of the River presents an active Tamar who is a prophet and pacifist and who exists on her own, not just as wife/mother/sex object. After the river tells her she is a prophet and gives her an assignment, she sneaks into enemy territory. There she ends up more or less involved with Judah and each of his sons as she tries to convince them of the importance of peace. The show is compelling, sexy, sometimes funny, and deeply emotional.

Composer/libretist Marisa Michelson, lyricist/librettist Joshua H. Cohen, director Daniel Goldstein, and choreographer Chase Brock create a vivid and magical world. Michelson's contribution is particularly vivid; using only voice, piano, violin/viola, dulcimer, percussion, and cello, she presents people, nature, love, mistrust, unity, hope, and great, great beauty.

The books and lyrics, as well as scenery by Brett J. Banakis, costumes by Candida K. Nichols, lighting by Brian Tovar, and sound by Jeremy J. Lee, are simple, clear, and strong, and the movement and dance work hand-in-hand with the music to bring wonder to this story and this show.

Tamar is played by Margot Seibert, soon to be playing Adrian in the musical Rocky on Broadway. She is a bit contemporary for the role of Tamar, but excellent nonetheless. The whole cast is wonderful, with magnificent voices; they are Ako, Jeremy Greenbaum, Erik Lochtefeld, Mike Longo, Vince B. Vincent, Jen Anaya, Adam Bashian, Margo Bassett, Troy Burton, Tamrin Goldberg, Aaron Komo,and Mary Kate Morrissey.

I might not have seen this if a friend hadn't invited me. I owe her a great vote of thanks.

(fifth row; discount ticket)

Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play

Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play is not warm or fuzzy or uplifting or heartbreaking.  Its characters are not especially finely wrought or deeply nuanced, and do not Learn Something Important About Themselves Or Others by the curtain call. It is not propulsively plot-driven. Tidy exposition is never once slipped conveniently into the dialogue. The show is not really even about The Simpsons in the end--at least no more than, say, Gogol's "The Nose" is really about a nose.


Mr. Burns is mostly about how popular culture works, and the ways it flows, changes, and conforms--both immediately and in the long-term--to the changing needs of a changing populace. It is one of those dense, endlessly layered, brilliantly written pieces that commands your full attention and quietly blows your mind, even during passages when you don't fully understand what the hell is going on. And trust me, you won't always know what the hell is going on, because Washburn captures the way people talk--about pop culture, about themselves, about each other, about their world, about trauma and disaster--so exceptionally well that easy conveniences like exposition are sent packing. Which is as it should be, because when it comes to constructing and reconstructing cultural memory, being unable to fill in all of the gaps--or, sometimes, electing to fill the gaps with material that satisfies a collective need, even if it isn't as graceful or clear or accurate as it might be--is an enormous part of, if not the whole point.

What we do learn in the first act of the play, which is set "Near. Soon.": A random group of people have found one another after a series of nuclear disasters has wiped out most of the population of the country. As one would expect--since post-apocalyptic scenarios themselves are, after all, so deeply-rooted in American pop culture--supplies are dwindling; the power has failed; everyone carries guns and assumes the worst of strangers until convinced otherwise. The survivors don't have much to do but wait out the immediate future in the hopes that they will not die. Fighting off sorrow, dread and panic, they sit around a campfire and set about reconstructing as much of the "Cape Feare" episode from the fifth season of The Simpsons as they can. The act of linking themselves to a shared past, and thus to one another, is powerful balm for these mournful souls. Reconstructing a particularly beloved episode from an enormously popular show is certainly more pleasurable for them than the other activity they collectively engage in later in the scene, when a (friendly) stranger joins their group: taking turns listing the names and ages of their loved ones in hopes that the newcomer has seen or heard of them during his lonely, extensive wanderings. He hasn't. But he does have a really good memory, he performed in an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan troupe before disaster struck, and he knows some of the choicest lines from The Simpsons episode in question. And so, just like that, he becomes a member of the group.

This first scene is talky in the best sense of the term. Washburn's talent for dialogue is immediate and seductive. The scene also relies on spare, effective use of subtle movement: a furtive glance or the touch of a shoulder keys the audience in to the fact that two of the women in the group are deeply concerned about a sadder, more distant third. We learn little about these characters' bigger pictures--their pasts, their identities. One was married; one was from a very small town; one lived in the house the group is camping outside of. The gaps in their stories are--and remain--tantalizingly absent, but then, we don't share our lives with one another in times of crisis, now, do we? We worry after relative strangers, we dedicate ourselves to the issues at hand, we take care of what needs to be done, we help one another survive. And part of helping lies in working together toward the kind of comfort that camaraderie and shared memories provide.

The second act, set seven years later, has the same group--plus one new wanderer--frantically rehearsing what they've managed to reconstruct from the "Cape Feare" episode, complete with commercials. Again, we get only just enough backstory: the country is still a dangerous, semi-anarchical place; radiation sickness is still a cripplingly terrifying concern; a few of the characters seem to have paired off romantically; a few are less obviously traumatized than they were in act I. Accurate memories of popular culture before the disaster have become precious commodities that competing  troupes will pay for and jealously guard. Clearly, it is not just this group of survivors that prioritizes collective memory; the greater community does, too. As it rebuilds itself, then, this futuristic society gamely looks to the future while burying itself in the cozy, fleeting comforts of the increasingly-distant past.

Yet as preciously guarded as they are, the carefully amassed cultural indicators of the past have nevertheless begun to transform, to fuse into one another, to start to mean different things. Little details that no longer matter have begun to get lost as the past grows more distant (does it really matter, anymore, to this group of survivors that The Simpsons premiered in the 1990s, and not the 1970s?). Other details not only refuse to die, but have become larger, more relevant, more precious. The commercial the troupe rehearses in this act neatly demonstrates all of this, especially as it becomes clear it is not being used to sell anything. The commercial, which features a woman eager to take a long, hot bath after a hard day in the office, initially seems to be for a Calgon-like product. But as it plays out, it not only goes on for much longer than any contemporary commercial does, it also devolves into a long, chatty list of creature comforts that Americans once held dear, and that are slowly trickling away: hot baths, chilled wine, cans of soda, ice cubes . . . and the whole complicated structure of commerce that came along with it all. Commodity fetishism has become a weirdly longed-for phantom limb.

The final act, set 75 years later, is a full performance of "Cape Feare," which has changed slowly, if dramatically, over the many years that have passed. Like most aging popular culture references, it has been subject to a generations-long game of telephone, and now resembles a Kabuki-tinged operetta-cum-morality play, shot through with a dizzying number of pop culture references that have been drawn liberally (and not always accurately) from the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. Washburn's packed, referential "script" has departed from the original episode in telling ways: Sideshow Bob has slowly morphed into Mr. Burns. Bart is the sole survivor in his family's struggle against this personification of evil "nucular" power. The show is still enormously layered and referential, but it is no longer funny. As an added plus, it features musical numbers by Michael Friedman, who is easily the most meta theater composer working today. References to songs, expressions, and actions that just will not die--lines from HMS Pinafore, sports chants, the macarena, that damned Des'ree song--float through the air and, just as you place them in their original time and setting, pop like soap bubbles.

What makes this play, and its show-within-a-show (within a show), so satisfying, intelligent, and effective is how brilliantly it demonstrates the symbiotic and sometimes directly contradictory relationship a culture has--and, Washburn implies, always will have--to its popular entertainments. We change them, they change us. They comfort us, they challenge us. They isolate us, they bring us closer together. They generate nostalgia, they propel us forward. They take us out of our lives, they become central to our lives. In short, to quote what I think I remember Homer saying once, in an episode I saw a long time ago, Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play is funny because it's true.

The Metamorphosis

Kafka's The Metamorphosis is, for all its terse language, sparse emotional display, and brevity, a tale with some pretty huge themes about family dynamics, the personal and professional world, the nature of routine, and the mind-soul-body connection. Its simple, even flat, prose and its curiously passive main character work to contradict the horror of its central plotline: a profoundly ordinary man who lives a life of deadening routine goes to sleep one night, has some bad dreams, and wakes up a huge bug who can understand but can no longer communicate with the people he comes into contact with. His horrified family locks him into his room, where he remains for most of his slow, sad demise. His sister and mother initially attempt to connect with him in their own ways, while his father, never close to him, spurns him, sometimes violently, and always with rage. Eventually, the entire family tires of him, and his only visitor becomes the family's new charwoman, who suffers no nonsense and barely cleans his increasingly filthy room. Aware of what a burden he has become, he dies, mournfully and alone.

When I read The Metamorphosis in college, I don't remember being able to get past the basic outrageousness of the tale: "Oo, dude's a bug. Gross. His family rejects him. Lame. He dies. Bummer." But now, having re-read it in middle age, I can only see it as a metaphor for serious, incapacitating illness, and its impact not only on the individual but on the extended family and the community. To say, then, that the tale feels realer, scarier, more haunting to me now than it did then is a vast understatement.

A stunning interpretation of The Metamorphosis is being performed at the Joyce through September 29, and if you get the chance--even if, like me, you're typically more confused than you are thrilled by dance--you should rush out to see it. The big picture is worth the price of admission, really: Edward Watson, who plays Gregor, is an astoundingly limber, flexible, intuitive dancer who was clearly born to perform this piece; the supporting cast is excellent, too. The choices the production has made--to update the piece to the 1950s; to imply more overtly than the book does that Gregor's transformation is, indeed, symbolic of some kind of grave illness; to make Grete a dancer instead of a violinist; to gradually cover the stage with oozing, brown muck; to suggest a slightly different (if still devastatingly sad) ending--are daring, but they all worked for me. So too did the strange and appropriate score, played entirely by the multi-instrumentalist Frank Moon, and the bits of humor that frequently lightened the piece (the three boarders were awesome, and the charwoman, hilarious in the book, transferred perfectly to the stage).

But for all the astoundingly limber bodies, the big sounds that emanated from Moon's one-man-band (set up off stage right, and often as fascinating as what was happening on stage), and the jerky movements Watson--an enormous man with a strange, believably insect-like physique--executed throughout the piece, I was moved most frequently by the subtlest of moments. Throughout the piece, various characters haltingly reach out to touch Gregor as a means to connect with him despite his transformation, or look sorrowfully at one another, or stare blankly at the television, the wall, one another. The sorrowful looks only intensify; the attempts to connect with Gregor dissolve into frustration, exhaustion, disgust. It is the touching of hands, and then the absence of such touching, that lingers with me, as does the haunted, sorrowful way that Gregor--bathed in muck, fully isolated, and tucked pitifully into an almost improbably tight fetal position--looks dully up at the light when the charwoman opens his window for him and lets in a little light just prior to his death. Such tiny moments serve as important, if endlessly haunting, reminder of how fragile human connections are, and how devastating their absence can be.

Shakespeare's Sister

In her sweet mash-up Shakespeare's Sister, director/adaptor Irina Brook serves the audience Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and actual soup.

As the audience enters, five women are already onstage, which is an attractive, fully equipped kitchen. They chop, they stir, they cook, they sing, they dance. And they talk and talk. The words are those of Woolf and Duras, and many are familiar.

In fact, there is a dated-ness to the piece, as though it were the 1970s instead of the 2010s. On the other hand, the content is unfortunately still timely, particularly to Brook, who herself balances the many quotidian and extraordinary responsibilities that are the lot of the female artist. And it is certainly true that most woman still lack a "room of one's own" (as do most men, really).

Beyond reminding us of the intricate pressures of being a woman--and the joys of being women together--it is hard to understand totally what Brook is trying to do here. The dances are fun, but it's not clear why they are there or what they signify. The sexual interlude is downright confusing: is it satire, is it self-expression, is it something else altogether? It feels as though Brook is trying for something deep and expressive, yet the results are more pleasant than hard-hitting.

The quintet of performers are Winsome Brown, Joan Juliet Buck, Nicole Ansari, Yibin Li (who also plays violin), and Sadie Jemmett (who also plays guitar and sings). In many ways, they don't coalesce as a whole--not in tone, talent, personalities, or technique. However, the heterogeneity is part of the charm of the piece. The inviting set design is by Noelle Ginefri.

It is possible that the constant pairing of Brook's name with that of her legendary father, director Peter Brook, does her a disservice, setting inappropriate expectations. I understand the publicity value of this connection, but it's an odd way to sell a piece that is so strongly about women.

(press ticket; 8th row on the aisle)

Philip Goes Forth

George Kelly's Philip Goes Forth at the Mint is an uneven production of an uneven play that nevertheless entertains and satisfies. Written in 1931, Philip Goes Forth treads familiar ground with its story of a young man, the titular Philip, who chooses to become a playwright rather than go into his father's business, much to his father's dismay and anger. Philip ends up at a boardinghouse with the customary artists and eccentrics, each of whom represents a way of going for your dream: living it, faking it, failing at it, letting it go. Philip becomes friends with them, gets a day job, and works on his plays at night.

Rachel Moulton
Photo: Rahav Segev

In some ways, Philip Goes Forth seems to be in the tradition of Holiday (1928), the movie version of  Stage Door (1936), and You Can't Take It With You (1936), but it has a pragmatic underpinning that those lack. It is a tribute to working toward one's dreams, but only as long as one has the drive and the talent to achieve them.  Where Holiday has the famous, "If he wants to come back and sell peanuts, Lord how I'll believe in those peanuts," Philip Goes Forth would have, "If he wants to come back and sell peanuts, we'll have to see if he's any good at selecting the best peanuts, setting up a stand, and making it work."
Or, as the landlady says,

You know, there are millions of people all over the world that are spoiling their lives regretting that they didn't do something, or take up something, or keep on with something; when it's the blessing of God that the majority of them did just what they did; for they'd have only found out what you are finding out—that liking a thing, or talking a lot about it, is not an ability to do it.

Ouch.

Women or Nothing

I went to see Ethan Coen's Women or Nothing with some misgivings due to its tagline: "Women or Nothing is a play about two women so desperate to have a child that one of them will even sleep with a man." Stories written by men about lesbians sleeping with men tend to be tedious and/or annoying and very much about the men, with the lesbians almost as props rather than people.

As it turns out, Women or Nothing is so bad and so pointless that for it to be annoying in that way would have been a step up.

Here are some of the problems with Women or Nothing--with spoilers, I suppose, but how can you spoil something that is no good to begin with?

• The title makes no sense.
• The premise--that a woman, Gretchen, would push her partner, Laura, to sleep with her coworker Chuck because she mistrusts the genes that might come with anonymous sperm--is dumb.
• The many reasons that Gretchen gives Laura to get her to sleep with Chuck are unconvincing, pointless, and stupid.
• That Laura would succumb, when she doesn't want to sleep with Chuck and has never slept with a man, is ridiculous.
• Although we are supposed to believe that Gretchen and Laura are a much-in-love couple, there is nothing in the writing or acting to support this.
• The couple--Halley Feiffer as Gretchen and Susan Pourfar as Laura--have no chemistry, which further makes their relationship unconvincing.
• Chuck does not know that Laura is Gretchen's significant other or that Gretchen is gay. It seems unlikely to me that Gretchen would be closeted at work, but, okay, I'll accept that one.
• Laura does indeed have sex with Chuck, after telling him that she is a "gold star lesbian" (i.e., that she has never slept with a man).
• The all-important discussion between her telling them that and their ending up in bed is missing. Wouldn't he find it weird that she wanted to go to bed with him after knowing him 45 minutes or so? Wouldn't he find it strange to have sex with her in what he has been led to believe is Gretchen's apartment and bed? Wouldn't he put on a condom????
• If they did have unsafe sex, wouldn't he wonder what's going on, since it's unlikely that a gold star lesbian would be on the pill or have a diaphragm?
• Doesn't it occur to Laura--and Gretchen--that although that Chuck is a nice guy, he still might unknowingly have one of the many sexually transmitted diseases that can be symptom-less in men?
• Why are Gretchen and Laura so sure that Laura will become pregnant? Laura is 40, an age at which many women do not easily conceive.
• Why is Dorene, Laura's mother, even in the play? And how could Coen, a person at least partially responsible for the brilliant Fargo, write such a one-dimensional, sitcom version of a human being? Dorene comes across as a Neil Simon character trying to be edgy. It is not a pretty picture.
• And why would Chuck have decided not to father a child with his (now ex-) wife because there's depression in his family? Choosing to have your wife use anonymous sperm instead of your own is a great big deal. Depression can be awful and devastating, but enough to have a stranger father your child? In order for me personally to buy this reasoning, there would have to have been depression and the breast cancer gene and serial murderers in Chuck's family. (Obviously, Coen is seeking irony, since we know that Gretchen has chosen Chuck because she thinks his daughter is wonderful and wants Laura's child to have those genes. But, really!)
• And why would Chuck put Dorene's wet umbrella in the closet of what he believes to be Gretchen's home? (Other than Coen wanting him to see some photos that are stashed there?) Who even opens the closet door of an apartment they've never been in?
• And, once Chuck has seen the photos, which presumably reveal that Getchen and Laura are a couple, why does he not react? Here's a man who doesn't want to father his own child; wouldn't he be pissed that he possibly just fathered someone else's?
• And wouldn't Gretchen show the teeniest-tiniest bit of jealousy when she learns that Chuck and Laura had sex more than once?

You Never Can Tell

Watching the delightful production of George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell being presented by the Pearl Theatre Company and the Gingold Theatrical Group, I had to periodically remind myself that I was not watching a play by Oscar Wilde. Following The Importance of Being Earnest by two years, You Never Can Tell shares its cheerful skewering of societal mores, its witty dialogue, and even a character declaiming fervently, "On my honor I am in earnest." The Importance of Being Earnest is probably the better play; You Never Can Tell has occasional languors, and Shaw's laugh/minute ratio doesn't quite equal Wilde's (whose does?). On the other hand, Shaw's politics are more interesting; for example, written in 1897, You Never Can Tell both teases and respects feminism.

What's most important is that You Never Can Tell is great fun. It includes romance, a family reunion, a costume ball, dentistry, and an entirely satisfying denouement, courtesy of an attorney-ex-machina. As directed (and lightly adapted) by David Staller, it moves along at a good clip (except for those languors) and lands its laughs with joyful precision. Some parts are a little overdirected and cutesy, but it's a small fault, and Staller's use of music and dance to sail through scenery changes is charming. (The scenery itself is a fabulous example of the wonders that a smart and tasteful designer, Harry Feiner in this case, can create on a limited budget.)

A show like this relies heavily on its cast to navigate that thin line between heightened acting and overacting. Under Staller's leadership, the Pearl stalwarts and non-Pearl-ians all acquit themselves energetically, earnestly (!), and with excellent timing. Particularly impressive are Sean McNail (who is always particularly impressive), Amelia Pedlow (who brings a sincerity to her role of reluctant lover that adds poignancy to the humor), and Zachary Spicer (who is perfect in a small but pivotal role).

I've said this before, and I hope I get the opportunity to say this again: The aptly named Pearl is a shining jewel in the New York theatre scene.

(2nd row center; press ticket)

A User's Guide to Hell Featuring Bernard Madoff

While watching Lee Blessing's mediocre A User's Guide to Hell Featuring Bernard Madoff, I found myself writing Caster's Rules of Satire.


General Rules

Rule 1: A satire should be entertaining.

Rule 2: A satire should reveal new truths or present old truths in such a way that they feel new.

Rule 3: A satire should have the courage of its convictions and not cop out at the end.


Tenets

Tenet 1: If a satire uses a character such as Mengele or Mohammed Atta for humor, the depiction had damned well better be funny.

Tenet 2: Arguments about God and religion must actually be interesting

Tenet 3: Blue-collar men with New York accents are not automatically entertaining

Tenet 4: Anal rape is not by definition a laugh riot and treating it as such is lazy writing.


So, anyway, Bernie Madoff (the serviceable Edward James Hyland) is in hell. His guide is Verge, a blue-collar New Yorker, played with little personality by David Deblinger. All the other characters are played by the excellent Eric Sutton and even better Erika Rose, the show's two redeeming features. The direction, by Michole Biancosino is uninteresting.

The program features a note from the playwright that begins, "Hell is funny." I don't know if that's true, but I do know that the version of hell depicted in  A User's Guide to Hell Featuring Bernard Madoff is tedious.

(press ticket; 5th row)

Fetch Clay, Make Man

What does a playwright owe a living person on whom he or she bases a character? What does a playwright owe the audience who comes to see a play "based on actual events"? Some people argue that the playwright owes nothing to either the person or the audience; the playwright needs to be true to his or her personal vision. And I understand their point; I think I may even agree with it, intellectually.

Ray Fisher, K. Todd Freeman
Photo: Joan Marcus

Emotionally, however, I find bioplays--e.g., Buyer and Cellar, The Audience, and Fetch Clay, Make Man, the focus of this review--distasteful. The playwrights piggyback on the fame and accomplishments of another person and present their fantasies of the person's life as art.

Another problem with bioplays is that wondering what is true and what isn't takes me out of the play. In Fetch Clay, Make Man, Muhammad Ali invites Stepin Fetchit to his training camp before his repeat bout with Sonny Liston. Ali attacks Fetchit, calling him a coon and threatening to beat him. This turns out to be a joking hazing, mostly. Did it happen? If so, Ali is pretty creepy. If not, playwright Will Power is possibly doing Ali a great injustice; the scene is ugly.

Later, Fetchit tells Ali's wife that she should discard her all-white, body-and-hair covering abaya and dress as the vibrant woman Fetchit knows her to be. And she does! We next see her looking impressively hot in heels, make-up, and a short, form-fitting dress. Did this actually happen? If so, did Ali really respond in such a low-key manner?

There are dozens of other questions of this sort, and even the trivial ones are distracting.

Putting these complaints aside, Fetch Clay, Make Man has the assets of energy and creative staging, along with some vibrant acting. Ray Fisher is a completely convincing Muhammad Ali. K. Todd Freeman as Stepin Fetchit effectively depicts a man trying to hold on to a dignity he is not 100% sure he deserves. And Power's exploration of what it has meant to be a black man in America is intermittently stirring.

The direction is by Des McAnuff. The projection design, which adds a great deal of energy but subtracts some clarity, is by Peter Nigrini.

Fetch Clay, Make Man ultimately left me with this question: I know what Power got by co-opting Ali's and Fetchit's lives, but what did he give in return?

(second row, press ticket)

Soul Doctor

Soul Doctor is not the greatest show on the planet, for sure, but it's certainly not the worst, either--and while there are problems with the show that have been cited repeatedly by critics and other bloggers, I found myself enjoying it immensely nonetheless.

Shlomo Carlebach might not be a household name (at least not in non-Orthodox Jewish households, or in households that are even a few miles from the Carlebach Shul on West 79th Street), but his approach to synagogue worship was both revolutionary and enormously influential. An early Schneerson follower, he was prominent in the baal teshuvah movement (in which a comparatively secular Jew "turns" toward Orthodoxy), and instrumental (pun intended) in infusing the contemporary worship service with music. If you've ever been to a synagogue service--whether Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or Reform--in which congregants sing ecstatically, dance in the aisles, and intone extensive niggunim (Hasidic chants), you've likely witnessed Carlebach's influence whether you knew it or not. A devout Jew who devoted his life to outreach through music, Carlebach would seem to serve naturally as a central character in a musical.

Old Familiar Faces

The real-life siblings Mary and Charles Lamb lived in the 1800s in London and wrote together. The fictional (but-somewhat-based-on-Vivien-Leigh-and-Laurence-Olivier) Lee and Oliver are former lovers in present-day New York. The four personae share an intense love of Shakespeare. Perhaps more importantly, the four share the play Old Familiar Faces, written and directed by Nat Cassidy and late of the Fringe Festival.

Tandy Cronyn, Sam Sam Tsoutsouvas

Old Familiar Faces cannot help but bring to mind Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, as the characters overlap in scenes and interests from century to century. But the comparison isn't quite apt; where Stoppard connects his characters in location and history, Cassidy connects his in language and sensibilities.

Language is the play's raison d'etre. Combining quotations from Shakespeare and his own blank verse, Cassidy presents us with much that is beautiful and moving. To combine his own writing with Shakespeare's takes, what?, daring, courage, ego, balls? But Cassidy pulls it off, and the play is an aural pleasure.

Cassidy also presents us with three fascinating characters. Mary Lamb is seriously mentally ill; in a past attack of insanity, she stabbed her mother to death (true story!). Her brother cares for her and tries to make her life bearable, at obvious cost to his own. But while their lives as people are painful, their lives as writers challenge and fulfill them. They seem truly happy only when discussing their Tales From Shakespeare and what might go into the next volume. It is an odd, sad, emotional sibling love story.

Oliver is snarky, self-pitying, difficult, immature, mean, smart, and funny. He definitely gets some of the best lines in the play, as in:

You are insanely beautiful, you know that? Like, literally, Nietzsche-stare-into-the-abyss insane. You have the single most perfect ears. These little spirals that would make Fibonacci cry. Even this little thing here, what is it, a scar? It’s so perfect it’s unfair to the rest of the world, it’s almost treason. You should be beaten to death in the square for how beautiful you are. Where’d you get this little scar?

Lombardi Case 1975

My ten-year-old daughter, a native New Yorker, is occasionally bummed that we don't have space for a dog, that she has to share a bedroom with her little brother, and that we don't yet let her go too terribly far from our apartment without adult supervision. But otherwise, New York suits her just fine. She has been exposed to every culture and language you can imagine (and maybe some you can't). She's been to the Met, to Broadway, to the MOMA, and to Carnegie Hall many times (even though she never practices). She has developed a genuinely convincing menacing stare. She has heard and is unperturbed by the filthiest language you can come up with, practically since birth, whether on the street, in the subway, or, let's face it, out of her mother's mouth (I can't help it--I suspect I'd be able to make Ethel Merman blush). She is, in short, not easily phased by anything (except flying insects, but that's another story, and one that only bolsters my argument that she's a city mouse through and through).

I mention all this as a means for justifying the fact that when I got an offer to see LiveInTheater's Lombardi Case 1975--in which actors reenact a composite of several particularly seamy murder cases investigated on the drug-addled Lower East Side during the 970s--I promptly invited my kid along to see it, even though the description on the website, which you can read here, makes it clear that the show is rated R. Don't get me wrong: I was a little hesitant about bringing her, and I did plenty of explaining before we got on the subway and headed up to Ludlow Street. "This is a show about a murder, and it's set during a really rough time in New York's history, so the characters will probably talk a lot about drugs and sex and violence, and will probably use some pretty harsh language, but I think you'll be able to handle it," I told her, probably a few times more than I needed to. She shrugged, told me she was game, put on a sequined tank top that she deemed fancy enough for the theater, and then bitched about having to ride the subway from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, and then about having to walk from the subway station to the Living Room, a whole four blocks away.

The Living Room, a bar with a small theater in the back, served as our meeting place. We took our seats at one of the small cocktail tables and were quickly approached by Officer O'Donnelly, who asked us repeatedly if we were ready to help solve the case. As more spectators began to trickle in, I noted that the audience was among the most ethnically and racially diverse group of spectators I think I've ever seen (seriously, Broadway, what the fuck? You should study this troupe, because damn if they don't do a good job of bringing representatives from just about the whole damn city together in ways that you still just don't). I also noticed--not as quickly as my daughter did--that she was the only kid in the room. "I sorta wish I'd invited someone to come with me," she mumbled, a few minutes before the show started. We sat tight, despite our misgivings. We're both so glad we did.

Love's Labour's Lost

Love and the fools it makes of us sets the background for The Public Theater’s world premiere of a new musical version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the second show of The Public’s 2013 free Shakespeare in the Park season at the Delacorte. The 90-minute musical opened yesterday.

The team that created Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Alex Timbers (director and book adaptation) and Michael Friedman (songs) takes one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays and remakes it into a story about the rekindling of relationships at a liberal arts college’s reunion, done Vaudevillian style. Besides adding some cleverly fashioned tunes, the team trims down some of Shakespeare’s dialogue while beefing up the women’s roles, creating more nuanced characters. Some of this works well: Jaquenetta, for instance, played by the wonderful Rebecca Naomi Jones (Murder Ballad and American Idiot) appears world-weary and wistful in the knockout ballad, “Love’s a Gun.”

The main story tells of a three-year chastity pledge a group of young men make while pursing intellectual insight. As soon as the King of Navarre (Daniel Breaker) and his three friends – Berowne (Colin Donnell), Longaville (Bryce Pinkham) and Dumaine (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) grudgingly make their promises, like a madcap bachelorette party, four girls arrive to tempt them: Princess (Patti Murin) and best buds Rosaline (Maria Thayer), Maria (Kimiko Glenn), Katharine (Audrey Lynn Weston).

The addition of music both dilutes Shakespeare’s verse and makes it more accessible. Many of the lyrics appropriate the original prose, and all the songs intimate a wink-wink sense that the audience is in on a joke; as when the boys sing “Young Men” with such foreshadowing lyrics as, “Young men are supposed to be callow and cavalier about things that later they will have to think are important.” The best line of the night references the Public’s free summer theater, itself, with one character musing: “Rich people. They pay for better seats in plays that should be free.”

Love’s Labour’s Lost, both heartfelt and zany, appropriates many musical styles, from Madrigals to doo-whop, and pays homage to popular Broadway shows such as A Chorus Line (with a terrific sneaker tap worthy of Savion Glover) and Grease (in a Shakespearean teen angel number). But the impact of the play’s ending is diminished in exchange for hilarity and over-the-top parlor tricks as an entire marching band plays its way Music Man style on stage (a huge budget expense for a little laugh) and a slinky cat dances amidst the crowd in a random Andrew Lloyd Webber homage.

Sometimes it seems that more surgical cutting might benefit the musical. After all, Love’s Labour’s Lost, like much of Shakespeare’s works, remains a carnival of activity. Besides the ins and outs of five potential relationships, the play balances multiple themes—the flirtation between the frivolity of youth and the responsibility of adulthood, the role knowledge contains in having a well-lived life, the rich versus the poor—and several subplots. Simply some things don’t fit after all the musical numbers are added, such as the periodic appearance of pedantic professors and a bumbling local cop. The sideshow of Holofernes (Rachel Dratch) and Nathaniel (Jeff Hiller) may offer a reason to have the concluding pageant that wraps up the show yet both performers seem so dreadfully underutilized that their removal from the action might benefit the musical. Armado (a deliciously hapless and out-of-his-mind-with-love Caesar Samayoa) could have continued that subplot by himself.

The scenic design by John Lee Beatty exploits the outdoor setting and uses the looming Belvedere Castle as a background university building. Also from the Bloody team is choreographer Danny Mefford, who keeps things high-spirited, the boorish academic Hiller and the multi-tasking Justin Levin (Moth/music director/co-orchestrator).

Ultimately, the trim hour and 40 minute show, with no intermission, provides frolic and fun. Like a summer romance, though, it charms and beguiles without long-term engagement.

Runs through August 18.