Lower Ninth

One of the four offerings during the Summer Play Festival's first week, Lower Ninth crackles with good dialogue as it depicts two men waiting on a rooftop to be rescued from a devastating flood. The dead body of a friend, pulled from the polluted water, lies at their feet: a reminder that rescue may come too late. Since SPF plays are not meant to be open for review, I'm only going to say that the writing here shows promise, and that after another pass to strengthen the play's thematic content, I could see that this play would merit a subsequent production.

What Do Men Want?

Two one-acts at the Fresh Fruits Festival. The first is a monologue callled Lay Me Down And Love Me Again and the less I say about it the better; I confess that I had no idea what brand of humor it was aiming for. The second, a cute forty five minute satirical chuckle called The Naked Dead Elephant In The Middle Of The Room, lightheartedly spoofs the typical gay play. The conceit is vaguely [title of show]ish, as a playwright at a laptop sweats out the play that we are watching, leading here to a lot of fun, if usually predictable, play-within-a-play business (I laughed the hardest at the successive, increasingly silly on-the-spot revisions of the obligatory sex scene). An especially cranky and verbose theatre critic character is the one-act's crowdpleasing running gag - he periodically pops in to complain about the play thus far - and there's even a small bit when an audience member is cajoled to make a cameo. Unfortunately I lost the insert in my program and can't single out any of the actors, but all four are fun and bring the right spirit to the material.

Universal Robots

Mac Rogers has upgraded Karel Capek's R.U.R. by installing Capek himself into the new show, appropriately titled Universal Robots. The strong storytelling and superb acting (especially from the ridiculously robotic Jason Howard) make the play at least as good as Capek's original, but it's the freshly updated emotional core that makes this a much-needed overhaul. The two plays are really only the same at face-value: both are about robot drudges who eventually evolve beyond humans ("You say unnecessary things") only to find that in replacing them, they become them. However, Rogers' script has added drama from the brother-sister relationship between Karel and Jo, and also between the eccentric Rossum and her sheltered and lovestruck daughter, Helena. Also, by adding a narrator, Rogers is able to play tricks with the progression of scenes, not to mention the insertion of monologued asides that flesh out the world and show off the ensemble.

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Forbidden Broadway: The Roast Of Utopia

photo: Carol Rosegg

This "special summer edition" of the long running, ever-changing spoof revue is hit and miss, as it usually is, but at least the show feels fresher than usual at the moment with an especially appealing current cast and several new skits in the mix. The Company send-up is easily the best of the what's fresh - "No strings/No bass/No drums/Unaccompanied!" - and features James Donegan doing a dead-on Raul Esparza "Being Alive" parody (now called "Being Intense"). There's a decent Grey Gardens number and a Mary Poppins bit that mocks, what else, the Disneyfication of Broadway. The revised Hairspray skit picks up near its finish when John Travolta is lambasted - that's getting a welcome jump on things, as the movie isn't out until late next week. Another big plus is that the terrificly funny Les Miserables parodies are back, thanks to the currently-running revival: those spoofs are among the all-time best of Forbidden Broadway's twenty four years. The bad news is that a couple of new skits I was eagerly looking forward to are duds - the Drowsy Chaperone number just, um, sits there witlessly, and while the Spring Awakening spoof looks great, it doesn't have any bite: it seems more like an advertisement than a skewering. And I wonder....why is there still no Spelling Bee?

Gypsy

URGENT: Music theatre fans should get tickets for the Encores production of Gypsy. Immediately. Don't even read the rest of this review, because there is nothing I could say that you aren't going to hear again and again over the course of the three week run, and beyond. You're going to hear that Patti Lupone is a sensation, the vital bulldozing force of nature that many of us have been waiting for in a Mama Rose. You'll hear that from the first moments of the overture, the score is brought to glorious goosebump-raising life by the full orchestra. You'll hear that this is, at last, a Gypsy in which everyone is bringing their best game and every moment works, even the ones you might think you are tired of. There'll be richly deserved praise for Boyd Gaines, the most substantive Herbie since Jonathan Hadary, and for Laura Benanti, the most convincing Louise I have ever seen. But praise is deserved top to bottom here: this is a dream Gypsy, in which great care and wisdom have been spent on putting across both the music and the story; I haven't seen the dynamics of the central characters' relationships made as clear ever before. A better Gypsy than this I don't expect to see in my lifetime. And yes, I know, that's a lot of praise for anything to live up to, but since you are buying tickets instead of reading this, you can find it all out for yourself.

The Witches Of Eastwick

photo: Joan Marcus

The musical of John Updike's The Witches Of Eastwick - revamped for its American premiere at the Signature in Virginia - is the kind of not-so-guilty pleasure that can turn grown-up music theatre lovers into happy grinning idiots: it's bawdy, silly, bump and grind fun. Subtle and nuanced it ain't, as three New England divorcees unwittingly conjure up a horny devil as their dream man who turns out to be the Devil himself, but who's looking for subtlety from a ribald R-rated lampoon like this? Like Bye Bye Birdie, this show is all about the pelvis. The show's occassional breaks in the rhythm - a blandly overearnest subplot, just one or two songs that don't fly as well as the rest of the score - can't stop the undulating, irresistible beat. As the horndog Devil, Marc Kudisch's hip-thrusting, lip-licking, sex-on-legs performance manages to be as blatantly cocky and raunchy as it is funny and winning: the audience falls in love with him on sight. And the three actresses who play the witches of the title - Emily Skinner, Christiane Noll, and Jacquelyn Piro Donavan - are a formidable dream team: individually each is perfectly cast, and collectively the three have completely believable best friends chemistry and a heavenly blend of singing voices in their trio numbers (one of which ends with them flying up and out over the audience - sure beats Elphaba hoisted up behind a giant poncho, folks)