Oliver Twist

photo: Michael J. Lutch

This highly stylized production, a new adaptation of the Dickens novel, presents the story with menacing penny-dreadul imagery and Brechtian theatrical devices. Its vision is consistent and vivid and the stagecraft is impressive; you haven't seen an Oliver Twist like this before, and yet it's often more remarkably attuned to the authoral voice in the novel than any other version I've seen on stage. However, it is slow-going for the first half of the first act - with everyone forced into heightened posturing, it gets a little ponderous watching the initial parade of gleefully awful grotesques, and some of the devices (such as having the ensemble address the audience in grim musical speak-song) take some getting used to. Once little orphan Oliver is curled up at Fagin's den of thievery and the plot is relentlessly in motion, the show starts to have urgency and feeling and its distinctive style begins to seem shrewd, a way to wring more out of Oliver Twist than just melodrama.

Also blogged by: [David]

Number 14

photo: David Cooper

Back in town almost ten years after its first Drama-Desk nominated run, the Axis Theatre's Number 14 is a wonderful physical comedy (with masks! Lots of borderline-creepy cool masks!) that parents will be more than happy to sit through for the sake of their six to ten year olds. All of the skits involve strangers interacting on a city bus and almost all are winners: the buck-toothed neatfreak who has to share his seat with a slob who's hacking up a lung, the two hipsters who negotiate a date by holding up different pictures from the magazines they're reading, the line of suit and tie corporates who move as if one. Sure, the show is slapdash and isn't held together by anything more than the sentiment in one of its song lyrics ("Everyone is human on the Number 14"), and the show veers off course once or twice with (benign) social commentary, but with a runtime of just over an hour and so much giggle-inducing slapstick and jokery, the grin doesn't have time to leave your face.

fuckplays

****1/2

Working Man's Clothes Productions

Never underestimate the power of a good title. I was curtly chided for showing up a few minutes after 7:30 to collect my ticket and was put on stand-by status as the house was completely sold out. Happily, there was one seat left for me and happily this collection of 8 lusty short plays by 8 lusty playwrights was as slutty and fun as its title. Ranging from naughty to downright crass, every one of these plays was actually very well written and very well performed. My favorite was "The Impotence Of Being Ernest" which featured the stiff (in more ways than one) husband of Gwendolyn (from the Wilde play it spoofs) recounting to his best friend a failed attempt at "coital relations" with his new wife. Such frank language over a spot of tea indeed! And the final play's dialogue was so hysterically raunchy ("...she shit in my mouth!... about two shot glasses full") that I would like to ask the playwright's hand in marriage. The "lights up!"/crew exposed/"cue the bed!" cacophony in between the scenes made us feel like we were on the set of a porn shoot. Great idea!

Face The Music

photo: Joan Marcus

I was delighted by the opening number, a witty ditty that depicts the Astor and Rockefeller-type Manhattan bluebloods so pinched by the Depression that they've taken to dining and schmoozing at the Automat. By the second number, a dynamite little "forget your troubles" tapdance that showcased wonderful Jeffry Denman and Meredith Patterson all but gliding on air, I was almost giddy with pleasure. I fell positively and officially in love with this show by the third number, a mock-patriotic spoof that promotes thrift in tough times (Why give three cheers when two will do?/Let's cheer the red and the white but not the blue!) Where in the world has this spiffy, clever, tuneful little Irving Berlin backstage musical been hiding? And how has Encores! managed to do it so wonderfully right, from the flawless casting to the spare but stylishly evocative sets to the pulse-quickening orchestrations? Judy Kaye, Walter Bobbie, Mylinda Hull, Eddie Korbich, Felicia Finley, and so on: there isn't a bum performance in the bunch, and every performer is on the same page of era-specificity and accuracy. If the stated mission of Encores! - to mount concert productions of little-known musicals which respect the material - is the kind of thing you like, then Face The Music is the kind of thing you will love. The time machine has coughed up a diamond.

The Secret Agenda of Trees

Struggling semi-white-trash single-mom families are nothing new to the theatrical canon, nor should they be: they make for great drama. Drunk one-night stands with strange, domineering men that turn into lengthy, tainted-love relationships: those are no surprise neither. But The Secret Agenda of Trees handles the two with such a succulent grasp of language that Colin McKenna's play rises above its stereotypes and major dramatic cliches (like a drug overdose and rather restrained recovery). It also has one final trick up its sleeve: a gifted daughter who styles herself after Rosemary Clooney and lives in a fantasy world, but who also nurses her own addiction to a wannabe Salvatorian-gangbanger named Carlos (Gio Perez is, unfortunately, the one character in the play who doesn't surpass the stereotype). That's original, or at least Sarah Lord's brilliant portrayal of her is, flushed as it is between monologuing dream narratives and fearless real-world experiments. Make no mistake, Veronica is the heart of this piece, and she pumps with such ferocious strength that there's more than enough blood to circulate even through the limper, less defined vessels of the show.

Doublethink

***1/2


PS122 (where else?)

After severely disliking last year's An Oak Tree, I was leery about this production of Doublethink which, like ...Tree, features performers who walk into Act 1, Scene 1 completely unknowing of what the hell's gonna happen over the course of the show. In ...Tree it was a long list of orders: "Okay, stand here now". "Say this". "Now look over there". etc. It got very tedious and I could sense the actor's frustration with being micromanaged. Doublethink generally begins with the same concept (though here there are two actors who cannot see each other who are performing the same tasks). It is when another layer of reality (which I shouldn't give away here) is added that this performance art experiment really pops and becomes this trippy, fascinating, avant garde study in human behavior. These actors, like in ...Tree , still have those "what on earth have I gotten myself into?" looks on their faces but that's exactly what the creators of Doublethink were hoping for.
Also blogged by: [Aaron]