The Ritz

There are towel-clad hotties prowling the three-tiered cherry red bathhouse for sex, but we only get to glimpse them: the gay men we spend time with in Terrence McNally's The Ritz are sexless cartoons, strategically safe for the straight audiences of yesteryear. This comedy probably provided a whiff of naughtiness when it premiered over thirty years ago, before the AIDS pandemic shut down the city's bathhouses and before Generation XXX absorbed gays into mainstream culture. Now, minus any kind of dirty kick, it's just a flimsy farce that plays like a bad Abbott and Costello movie: it's busy, but it's rarely funny. Joe Mantello's direction doesn't help; he keeps the doors slamming and the bodies moving but he doesn't guide the actors to the high-stakes performances that are needed to drive a farce. Kevin Chamberlain gets high marks for his fresh take on his character, and Brooks Ashmanskas manages to bring some dignity to the thankless stereotype he's asked to play, but the one performance that completely triumphs is given by Rosie Perez. As Googie, a washed up lounge performer with more determination than talent, Perez is riotously on-target and turns Googie's lousy and overambitious bathhouse act into the highlight of The Ritz.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] [David]

Scarcity

Photo/Doug Hamilton

Scarcity is a thuggish play, with loose scenes shuffled over by the violence (implied or not) of a raised fist. There are moments of great strength in Lucy Thurber's script, as when the perpetually drunk patriarch, Herb (the excellent Michael T. Weiss), asks if he's ever hurt his daughter, or whenever his struggling but strong wife, Martha (the fiery Kristen Johnston), tries to keep up the lie. Their relationship is believably intense, and we can see how such a routine would affect its two children, Rachel and Billy. I'll be the meanie though, and say that this is where the play falls apart: the young actress playing Rachel (Meredith Brandt) is awful, and although Jackson Gay can have her pace around the kitchen, implying that it's a prison and that her father really has molested her, her lengthy scenes don't seem precociously chilling, they seem planned. Billy (Brandon Espinoza) is more believable, wound so tightly that he can finally look at his father without flinching. While his romantic entanglement with his teacher (Maggie Kiley) is also bold and explosive, there's little explanation for why she, who seems to have suffered so little, desires the sort of life on display in Scarcity. The show comes across as essentially true, but exaggeratedly so, particularly with the final subplot, which always looks like it's being played for easy (albeit uncomfortable) laughs. Martha survives by mentally prostituting herself to her cousin, Louie (Todd Weeks); in exchange for the food and bills her husband can't provide, she leads love-struck Louie on, letting him think he's a part of the family, though it's obvious everyone (including his own wife, Gloria) despises him. That's a play in of itself, but as with so much in Scarcity, it's lost in the violence.

[Also blogged by: Patrick | David]

Xanadu

Let's call a disco ball a disco ball: Xanadu is just another bit of self-referential pomp and substanceless circumstance to grace the Broadway stage. Douglas Carter Beane's book bleeds new one-liners across the shallow remnant of the movie version, director Christopher Ashley manages to make the play look as if it's been more than just bedazzled, and performances from Jackie Hoffman and Mary Testa keep the balloon afloat with their helium ranges. The good and bad songs balance each other out, but there's not much variety: "Evil Woman" and "Suddenly," are the opposite ends of the show, and "Strange Magic" and "Dancin'" come across as very good reiterations of the same poles. The play can't afford any dead spots in what's already a brisk 85 minute laugh-off; unfortunately, Tony Roberts isn't alive, no matter how much the chorus of Muses may try to sing that one off, and while Kerry Butler and Cheyenne Jackson are pitch-perfect, her Australian rendition of Olivia Newton-John didn't make me laugh, and his vapid beach artist only had that one dimension to it. So you tell me where's the love.

[Read on] [Also reviewed by: David | Patrick]

A Glance At New York

**

Axis Company

A troupe of 9 very earnest actors desperately follow the bouncing dialogue (Who's talking now?! What are they saying?! Hurry! Listen!!) in this revival of this 1848 vaudevillian melodrama about "Big Mose, the toughest man in the nation's toughest city". Stylistically, this hyperactive and busy concept worked for about 5 minutes before I started to feel assaulted and began to tune out. The rapid pace at which the lines were being delivered made it next to impossible for me to make sense of this 160 year old dialogue and I wasn't sure where I was supposed to look as 9 actors were all pulling focus with their own jaunty tasks. There was one moment towards the end of the play when everything stopped and the cast joined together and sang a soft, haunting melody. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous moment. As gorgeous as Lee Harper and Matthew Simonelli's ghostly, dusty costumes that look as though they were discovered in a forgotten trunk in the basement of this historical theater in Sheridan Square.

A View From 151st Street

photo: Monique Carboni

There's a compelling authenticity in this new play by Bob Glaudini (presented by LAByrinth, in residency at The Public): you believe that the Gulf War vet crack addict, the rapper drug dealer, the Spanish Harlem schoolteacher, and everyone else in this play would say the things that they do and you believe how they say them. That credibility goes a long way to mitigate the play's frustrating structure (we spend way too much time with the drug dealer whose raps, musicalized by an on-stage jazz trio, add too little to the narrative) and its disappointing ending, which seems a pedestrian wrap-up to a story that often takes unexpected turns. Despite these problems, the play is well worth seeing for its slice-of-life credibility and its sincerity: the relationship at the heart of the play, between a Narcotics cop who recovers from a gunshot wound and his war buddy who recovers from crack addiction, is believably depicted and quietly affecting.

Townville!

I've been told that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. But because I like Collaborationtown so much (The Catharsis of Pathos and, to a degree, 6969), I want to clear the air about their horrible new play (with music!), Townville! That hokeyness, with the swing-open cardboard sets, the bright color-coordinated wardrobe, the high-pitched voices, and the smiles, that's all intentional. All the actors involved, in case you can't tell, are capable of real emotion, like Boo Killebrew. But the show is so busy satirizing something -- I guess it's to do with the slow slip of America into totalitarianism? -- that there's no truth for the actors to latch onto, just jokes, very very bad, cheap jokes. The direction, by Matthew Hopkins and Ryan Purcell, is at least consistent, and sustains the image of a sparkling yet sinister commune, where everyone is happy, or else. But the plot, pieced together by the company, just jumps from point to point, recycling the same character jokes (how many times must we watch Geoffrey Decas belittle TJ Witham?) in an effort to hold out long enough to make meaning appear. Hint: when your show within a show is avant-garde, and the show itself has musical numbers, yet is not a musical, reason is not likely to come riding in on a white horse.