Die Mommie Die!

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New World Stages

Finally I have seen Charles Busch onstage in drag. I am an official New Yorker now. This old-school satire lampooning the cinematic melodramas of yesteryear features Busch as the sinister(?) matriarch of a dysfunctional Hollywood family. At times gut-bustingly hilarious and at others a bit tedious and wordy, the script sometimes gets bogged down in a little too much exposition and explanation. The magic of this production lies not only in the naughtiness (a Chad Hunt sized suppository. HA!) but in those campy comedic flourishes that come in the form of an evil backwards glance or a panicked breakdown after a well placed slap across the face. This production was most entertaining when Busch, decked out in gorgeous gown after gown, makes grand entrance after entrance and milks the sick glamour for all it's worth.

Also blogged by: [Patrick]

The Brothers Size

photo: Michal Daniel

The breakout hit from the most recent Under The Radar festival, written by a twenty-seven year old playwright named Tarell McCraney, The Brothers Size is in many ways an impressive piece of theatre and a promising piece of writing. The dialogue is often highly lyrical, the presentation (in the manner of African storytelling) highly stylized. Yet I found the play unsatisfying: the story, loosely adapted from West African mythology according to press notes, is pedestrian and predictable and lacks, well, the size that we associate with myth. Until an especially vivid monologue in which one of the two brothers of the title recounts his despair in prison, I didn't feel the slightest emotional engagement with the material. The play also has its baddie making a dramatically unnecessary, unwanted (homo)sexual advance on one of the brothers: that made me cringe, and not in the "challenge my world" way.

1001

Photo/Evan Sung

Jason Grote's new play, 1001, reminds me of an ingenious string of computer code I once saw: filled with nested for loops, these endlessly sharp lines (specific and yet filled with broad generalizations that left room for hundreds of back and forth variations depending on the value) were a pleasure to browse, yet at the end did no more than perform a routine task on the PC. Grote's play has wider ambition than the routine, and he uses the conceit of storytelling -- and not just those of The Arabian Nights (though he riffs on it well, with one scene more melodramatically staged than a '50s Hollywood romance) but the stories of our history, from fabulists like Borges (and his ingeniously infinite stories) to the spooky narratives of people like bin Laden (now staged alongside a clip from Michael Jackson's Thriller). The plot parallels Scheherezade and Shahriyar with that of their modern equivalents, Dahna and Alan, and Ethan McSweeny's beautifully inventive staging unites the scenes, with an ancient tome appearing also as a suitcase nuke and a laptop and the sky blue theme popping up in both costumes or as the waves of Sinbad's voyage, giving way to the bed of two trapped lovers. These two leads, a bewitching Roxanna Hope and the serious and seriously talented Matthew Rauch bring life to the play, allowing the politics to exist around them, but Grote doesn't manage to contextualize the majority of his dreamlike characters (from one-dimensionally Arab-hating Jews to a grossly comic Flaubert, mystic Borges, and digital Dershowitz) and that turns the exotic postmodernism into little more than the present, filtered, gutted, and paraphrased through the haze of fiction. I was happy to lose myself in the story (Grote is a sort of Rumpelstiltskin, spinning yarns into golden prose), but disappointed that all this labyrinthine storytelling had such vague messages.

The Turn of the Screw

Photo/Wandrille Moussel

One of the best things about a ghost story should be the lighting, and thankfully I have nothing but praise for Karl Chmielewski's thick-shadowed design in Jeffrey Hatcher's stage adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. But unfortunately, I have nothing else positive to say about this Wake Up, Marconi! production: Don K. Williams allows the actors to prance about the stage with broad strokes and as a result never gets anywhere near the specific tension that Henry James's novel tried to conjure up with symbolic ghosts and unreliable narration. It's not an easy adaptation to do, especially since "The Man" (Steve Cook) plays everything from an old maid to a precocious child, but it's made worse by adding verbalized sound effects (whispered footfalls and creaks). The script has some merits to it -- the dialogue it has added to James's rambling text is, at times, punchy -- but delivered as it is by a creepy Cook and his overdone counterpart, Melissa Pinsly, it's hard to see the ghost story as anything other than a comedy.

[Read on]

Things We Want

photo: Monique Carboni

I have nothing but praise for the ensemble of this current production from The New Group: all four actors, under Ethan Hawke's able direction, give natural and vibrant performances. (And Zoe Kazan, the lone female in the group, is by now enough of a reason to see anything she's in: she's easily one of the best and brightest young actors of today.) But the play, despite some snappy dialogue, too often smacks of contrivance: the first act concludes with an exchange between Kazan and Paul Dano that is meant to convincingly move their characters' relationship from strangers to something else, and the fact that it doesn't convince can only be blamed on the playwrighting.

Macbeth

photo: Ken Howard

The Met Opera has been on such a roll with their most recent new productions that a bummer was bound to happen sooner or later, and here it is with Adrian Noble's staging of Verdi's Macbeth. The production means to set the story in post WW2 Europe, but the conceit never takes hold thanks to inconsistent visual design. Worse, Noble seems to follow every good idea with a bad one: the moments of simple and effective theatricality (for instance there's a neat effect with a banner during the banquet scene) are ultimately undone by the more common moments of counterproductive theatrical business (for instance, Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene happens here on chairs that her attendants keep rearranging so that she doesn't fall: while that may make some poetic sense, it dillutes the scene's dramatic impact). When the beleagured people congregate in the last act to rise up in rebellion, there's a minute of some Les Miserables-like scampering forward before everyone is lined up downstage in bland formation, way too common an occurence in this production. Of course, strong performances could overcome a mediocore presentation like this one, but despite James Levine's tight, tense conducting in the pit, this Macbeth was musically problematic. Cursed with the mismatch of a sometimes vocally underpowered and underplaying Zeljko Lucic in the lead role, and a histronic, screechy overacting Maria Guleghina as Lady Macbeth, the loudest applause at this performance was for Macduff (Dimitri Pittas).