August: Osage County

photo: Joan Marcus

I'm not convinced that Tracy Letts' tragic/comic portrait of a dysfunctional family is ultimately a great play, but there's no doubt it's greatly entertaining melodrama and frequently very funny: it never lags, even at three and a half hours. (Its length is part of what's exciting about it: you don't expect the play to be able to sustain its juicy mix of comedy and soap opera over three acts but it does). As our attention is led around the rooms in the three-tiered house that is the play's set, the lurid subplots pile up one on top of the other - drugs, secret affairs, pedophilia, and so on - and although the inspirations may be some laughing-gassed mix of Sam Shepard and Chekhov, the result feels more like Robert Altman's film A Wedding: we laugh as we watch the colorful characters and their telenovella-level problems but we're halted at irregular intervals by something inescapably painful and sad. Letts' writing is textured and his dialogue lively and involving - he's given everyone in the ensemble some sensational material to play - and this is obviously a departure from earlier plays like Bug and Killer Joe. It restores the good name of melodrama, and that's more than enough to make it one of the year's best, but I suspect that August Osage County will turn out to be a warm-up for something with more depth and more thematic resonance from Letts in the future.

The Farnsworth Invention

Photo/Joan Marcus

The Farnsworth Invention is a clever, well-written, exciting piece of semi-fiction. Those expecting it to be more are clearly watching the wrong play: I mean, this is a show about how television -- the thing that brings you the latest dose of Kitchen Nightmares, but only after reruns of Cops -- was essentially stolen. It bends truth on purpose ("The ends justify the means; that's what the means are there for"), allowing each of the two central characters, Philo T. Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson) and David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria) to narrate each other's story, a point which leads to them bickering about factual inaccuracies or to admissions of pure fabrication. The result is a play about the perversion of truth, with parallels drawn to how false perceptions led to the stock market crash and how hopeful dreams brought us into space. The play has to conflate a lot to do so, but Des McAnuff (who just did the compressed jukebox biopic of Jersey Boys) has no problem zipping from scene to scene; he's just dealing with a different type of song now, that of Sorkin's hypnotic banter. It probably helps him that the set is essentially the same two-tiered affair as in Jersey Boys (what a surprise to find that Klara Zieglerova did both), but the aesthetics here are the weakest part of the play. Then again, before television, it wasn't about looks, it was about sound, and Azaria and Simpson sound great. Best of all are their little indignant reactions to the ways in which they're sometimes portrayed or referred to, a nice bit of humanity to all that gloss and polish.

Is He Dead?

Photo/Joan Marcus

No, he's thankfully alive and kicking in drag! Not Mark Twain, silly -- his recently rediscovered play is but inspiration -- Norbert Leo Butz, who plays the role with such self-awareness (his bray of a laugh never gets old) that the show stays spry and full of "con"plications. The text is filled with puns (a chimney sweep leaves behind a "sootprint"; he's a real "impressionist") and a bright and likable cast. Aside from the bread and butzer of the show, Jean-Francois Millet faking his own death as his implausibly eccentric twin sister Daisy Tolou (that's "to you" to you), there's also his friends: "Chicago" (Michael McGrath, channeling Nathan Lane), "Dutchy" (Tom Alan Roberts, fittingly playing the Pumbaa of the bunch), and Phelim O'Shaughnessy (Jeremy Bobb); his adorers, the Leroux family (John McMartin, Jenn Gambatese, and Bridget Regan); and David Pittu, who fills in everything else. The weak link is the evil yet frequently lovestruck usurist, Bastien Andrew (Byron Jennings), who simply isn't inflated enough. The highlight is adapter David Ives -- having flipped through the original script during intermission, it's clear that Ives understands it's all in the timing (to be fair, so does Blakemore, a veteran of that venerable Noises Off), and he's compressed most of the jokes down so that they have a faster rhythm and a less confusing pace; without him, we'd be asleep long before all the doors start opening and closing in act two.

[Also blogged by: Patrick | David]

The City That Cried Wolf

Photo/Oliver Jevremov

Even though the acting isn't nearly animated enough and the directing belabors sight gags over substance, The City That Cried Wolf will have you simultaneously groaning and laughing thanks to Brooks Reeve's hysterical puns. Whereas Jasper Fforde works the plot into a coherent strand, Reeve tweaks the story (whether it fits Jack B. Nimble's investigation of Mayor Dumpty's murder or not) to pack in anything that might get a laugh. His best moments are perversions of the classics: Little Bo Peep is a dancer at the Hey Diddle Diddle (best known for its "hickory dickory daiquiris"), and for a price, you can sample Miss Muffet's toffets. A pity the rest of the show isn't as clever.

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Cut to the Chase

It takes Cut to the Chase little under five minutes to do exactly that: hyperactive Dilly (Laura Dillman), clad in a bellhop's costume and armed with an infectious laugh, introduces the cast: Dobson (Mike Dobson), the dour drummer; The Great Jeske (Joel Jeske), the director; Julietta Massina (Juliet Jeske), the singing diva; Kasper (Ryan Kasprzak), the lovable scamp; Little Angela (Andrea Kehler), the annoying tease; and Roland Derek (Derek Roland), the lanky illusionist. In of itself, that's not impressive; however, this talented ensemble then continues to entertain both the young and the young at heart for the next hour in a mash of silent comedy and parodies of old song standards like "Shine on Harvest Moon." Mark Lonergan's direction seamlessly uses three farcically placed doors and a few sliding curtains to break out (among many many other things) a tap-triggered light show and a balloon-drumming exhibition. Great fun, for all ages.

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Scapin

What you're looking at above is the almost unbearably bright production of Scapin currently running at the Turtle's Shell Theater, and at Jay Painter (with guitar), the man who is running off with the show. You'll laugh hysterically at the over-the-top antics to be found in this production, but it's hardly Moliere's Scapin anymore (though even he couldn't write all that much clever into this straightforward farce), it's Scapin! with an exclamation point. The problem the show faces is that Painter makes all the other actors look sluggish, so unless he's on stage (a tricky challenge, since he mainly plays pre-show and mid-show entertainment along with being a porter), Shawn Rozsa's direction seems pretty flat. There are some nice moments, particularly from John Freimann's pitiable Geronte (one of the two misers Scapin tricks out of their money -- for the sake of their sons!), but the glass of this scatterbrained production seems half-empty all too often.

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