Sive

I suppose in retrospect Sive is an all-too predictable tale of what happens when money clouds judgment, but John B. Keane's 1959 drama caught me entirely by surprise. I was so blinded by the overblown antics of the matchmaker Thomasheen Sean Rua (Patrick Fitzgerald) that I genuinely believed that the young lover, Liam (Mark Thornton) would rush in at the last moment to save Sive (Wrenn Schmidt) from her marriage to the old, rich Sean Dota (Christopher Joseph Jones). Or that Sive's Nanna (Terry Donnelly) would manage to convince Uncle Mike (Aidan Redmond) to follow his heart. Or that Mena (Fiana Toibin), Sive's step-aunt and Mike's wife, would get past her stubborn resentment of her ward's comparative freedom and not cruelly condemn her to a life without love. And I had every cause to believe: save for the one-dimensionally written Thomasheen, Keane's play is a long struggle of convictions, customs, and character, and there were many well-paced moments of hope. Ultimately, I was emotionally blindsided by Ciaran O'Reilly's steady direction, and then forced to linger in tears by some terrifically human performances out of Mr. Thornton and Mr. Redmond (and the two somewhat jokey musicians, played by Donie Carroll and James Barry).

Die Zauberflote

photo: Beatriz Schiller

Julie Taymor's spectacular production of Mozart's most popular opera leaves you almost giddy with happiness: it's a carnival of theatrical delights to captivate both young and old. The jaw-dropping puppets, the dazzling visual effects, the eye-popping sets: I've never seen a production of The Magic Flute as dynamic and as boundlessly inventive as this one which manages to make so much of the opera's potential for both grand spectacle and intimate fairy-tale charm. But I'm coming late to that bit of news: the production was such a success when it premiered a few years ago that the Met has promised to bring it back (albeit, sometimes as a heavily abbreviated English language one-act) every other season. This particular performance marked one of German soprano Diana Damrau's last-ever-anywhere appearances as The Queen Of The Night: she's chosen to retire the famously difficult role from her rep after triumphing with it all over the globe. If the demands of the arias ever lost her a night of sleep you would never have known it, as her ringing coloratura was precise and exciting, each note thrillingly delineated and shaded with feeling.

The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide

Photo/Heather Clark

South Park gets away with its fourth-grade antics because it's an animated comedy. Sean Graney's play, The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide, has a harder go of it, since the adult actors are so obviously not nine years old. The contrived introduction, in which the fourth graders introduce the play within the play they're about to perform (a suicide note of a drama left behind by their friend, Johnny), makes things worse, as the actors play characters who will soon be playing characters, but they're assisted by Graney's quaint kid-speak ("I am over with him" signifies a break up; an argument is a "shouting-at") and Devin Brain's confident, Lynch-like direction. Things start simply, with Johnny (Joseph Binder) crushing on Rachel (Jennifer Grace) and fretting about a warm juice box, but they slowly grow more adult (and therefore tragic): popular Sally (Stacy Stoltz) forces Johnny to date her, even though this enrages her ex, the bullying Mike Rice (Tim Simons), and it isn't long before there's a balletic death scene between two animal-masked children (industrial strength glue is toxic, go figure!), a suicide ala rat poison, and a magical moment with a gun that leaves a pool of ketchup in its wake. Given this ending, the awkward moments (like a singer who hovers ominously on stage) help the show more than hurt, but it's perhaps just a little too disaffecting.

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The Medea

Is there anything new and fresh that a fledging theatre company can bring to the oft-told ancient story of Medea? Yes, as it happens. The inaugural show from Wide Eyed Productions doesn't fuss much with the popular Gilbert Murray translation of the play - the dialogue is as it has often been heard for about a hundred years - yet this production has an intimacy and a restraint that make it identifiably contemporary and emotionally immediate. As judiciously played by Amy Lee Pearsall, this Medea is a trapped and broken woman whose extreme actions are made to seem logical, inevitable: even in the wake of her horrific crime, it's possible to understand her psychology and to identify it as all too human. While the production doesn't quite pull off its anachronistic design concept (among the Chorus, there's a dagger on one man's belt loop while another man carries a briefcase) the ensemble, under Kristin Skye Hoffmann's sharp direction, more than compensates by ably mining modern characterizations from the text. I'll certainly be on the lookout for what Wide Eyed does next.

Sister Cities

Photo/Gili Getz

Sister Cities has all the right elements for a comic drama: four bickering half-sisters, each intellectually sharp and as different in attitude as in their namesake cities: out-of-control Baltimore (Jaime Neumann), warm and maternal Dallas (Emberli Edwards), liberally controlled Austin (Maeve York), and uptight Carolina (Ellen Reilly). And yes, Carolina isn't a city -- in fact, it isn't even a state -- but that's just one of the many lovable quirks that Colette Freedman has written into the show, in this case as an example of their mother's whimsical mannerisms (also up there, "Match your panties and knickers or the policemen will give you snickers"). From the small moments over a game of Scrabble (look up zooerastia if you ever want to impress and disgust your friends), to the big moments spent coping with their mother's suicide, Freedman's writing is always genuine and entertaining. My only complaint is that the excellent shock of Act One is squandered in a redundant flashback (and unnecessary intermission); aside from that, I enjoyed my time in Sister Cities.

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Young Frankenstein

Photo/Paul Kolnik

From the "there, wolf" visual pun that appears during a hay ride through a computer-generated forest to Igor's admission (after an oddly enunciated phrase) that he doesn't know why he's talking like that, it seems obvious that nobody really knows how any of the humor in the show actually got there. Sure, some was scavenged from the film version, by producers (Mel Brooks among them) operating like gravediggers in the night, and some came from a roulette wheel of sight gags spun by Susan Stroman, marching around like angry villagers, wielding torches, pitchforks, and whatever else they could get their hands on. But the score is incredibly weak, the talents of comic actresses (like Andrea Martin) and fabulous dancer/everythings (Sutton Foster) are put to waste, and few of the highly budgeted special effects offer anything that hasn't been seen on stage already (the trembling double-vision of a dream-sequence segue stands out as an exceptional visual moment). Even Roger Bart, as Frederick Frankenstein, brings little to the role beyond his wooden affability, shrill shrieks of astonishment, and quick little tongue (the patter of "The Brain" is one of the few songs that actually sticks, along with "Listen to Your Heart"). Diversions, like the Hermit and his "Please Send Me Someone," jut out of the framework because a suitable context hasn't been found for them, and too much of the stage version is disconnected from the plot itself. Musical theater needs to be more elegant than putting together Ikea furniture: it can't just be banged together by people too busy to follow the directions.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]