A Bronx Tale

photo: Joan Marcus

***1/2 (...out of five stars)
Walter Kerr



Would someone who is obsessed with Kiki and Herb and who listed Xanadu as his favorite musical of 2007 be able to connect to a one man play about growing up around gangsters in the Bronx? Well it IS Chazz Palminteri and he was in Bullets Over Broadway- which means he can do no wrong- so I was open to giving it a shot. About a boy dipping his toe in the water of organized crime and the father who intervenes, Chazz presented this mostly fictional story as though it were an intensely personal memoir. Though the synopsis touts that Mr. Palminteri plays eighteen people, it was really eighteen variations on one streetwise tough guy who says "whasssamaddawitchyou?!" a lot. It would have been fun to see him play the black teen girlfriend but I don't assume tough guys from the Bronx do that sort of thing. What I really connected to was the local color of the piece. Chazz is a Bronx native and his script and performance were loaded with nuance that gave us a three-dimensional tour of a specific place and time. I feel like a more seasoned New Yorker having seen this production. Any one person plays about Staten Island out there? Bring it.

Also blogged by: [Patrick]

Ragtime

I'd have thought that two pianos and less than two dozen cast members would not be enough to bring Ragtime to life, but I'd have thought wrong. Although I have to say that the show's biggest numbers (including the curtain-raiser) sounded thin and looked underpopulated, this staged, costumed, off-book concert version (in White Plains) otherwise served the show splendidly. Despite technical glitches, the projections of early twentieth century photographs behind the actors turned out to be a nice (and unobtrusive) directorial touch. Essentially, this was a triumph of "less is more". Several performers stood out from the ensemble: Jerry Dixon, especially strong communicating Coalhouse's determination; Brian Charles Rooney, who bullt credibly to Younger Brother's angry monologue; and Rosena M. Hill, a compelling Sarah . Best of all was David Villella, the most poignant Tateh of the half dozen I've seen.

Offending the Audience

Photo/Max Ruby

Of all the philosophical, anti-theatrical contradictions in Peter Handke's forty-year-old play Offending the Audience, director Jim Simpson may have achieved the best one by casting The Flea's young theater company (The Bats): they bring the talk of inaction to life in a wonderfully active way, trilling their lines, merging powerfully together as a Greek chorus, and looking extremely attractive in the process. I wasn't offended at all by the production; though some people may be unsettled by the eye-contact that most of the actors threaten to make, or by the stretches of silence and repetitious lines of questioning, I think that most audiences who "stumble" into this hip underground theater, to see a play that explains what it aims to do, are going to enjoy it no matter how hard anybody tries (not very hard) to make it otherwise. Extra credit to Annie Scott, who I found to be the most engaging (and no, not just because she's gorgeous, though sure, extra credit for that, too).

[Read on]

Fabrik

photo: Nordland Visual Theatre

It’s only January, but I can be sure that Wakka Wakka's very special, brilliantly realized Fabrik will be on my Best list at the end of the year. As I stumbled out of Urban Stages, choked with emotion and high on the cathartic power of theatre of quality, I wondered how and why this intimate three-actor puppet show had so deeply moved me. The story, of a neighborly Jewish businessman in Norway who is arrested and persecuted by the Nazis, is not essentially new, but the way it is told - in the manner of a musical folk tale, with the devices of childrens’ theatre -is freshly disarming, and the cumulative power of its many small theatrical wonders makes it newly devastating. The seventy minute show, never less than inventive and captivating, tells the story not only with a variety of highly expressive puppets but also on chilling occasion with the actors in masks, a purposeful mix that makes for strong dramatic imagery. Perhaps the power of Fabrik is that it tells a story of us at our brutal worst, with a creativity that us at our joyful, humanity-affirming best. Yes, that is its magic.

Jerry Springer The Opera

photo: Seth Wenig

There are singing and dancing Klansmen, and songs about the joys of pants-pooping or of pole dancing, but the most shocking thing about this obscenity-laden protest-provoking musical take on the trash-tv show is that it’s boring and dated. The first act, which mostly seeks to musicalize an episode of the show, passes by mostly on the promise of its one-joke conceit, but how many laughs can be wrung out of the incongruity of filthy-mouthed trailer trash singing faux-operatically? The answer is about half as many as are tried for. The freakshow passions of the talk show guests - the guy who wants his fiance to indulge his diaper fetish, the chick with a dick who is lovesick for a two-timer, etc: - are treated as lurid pageant as on the tv show and then mined for "meaning". They have their crazy needs and demands but deep down they just want to be loved. That’s about as deep as we get, and since the show eventually puts them all in Hell anyway, it could hardly be said that the characters are written with anything like genuine compassion or dignity. The second act, which imagines God and Satan as the sparring guests in Springer’s afterlife, has always felt pretentious and entirely superfluous: in this concert version it was also interminable, since it demanded so much of Harvey Keitel, miscast and off the mark as Springer. He played him like a milquetoast. The show is a sendup of America as its British writers see it, but it’s not particularly sharp or insightful stuff, and with the television show now long gone from our pop culture radar, the musical now lacks even the illusion of cultural relevancy. I have one good thing to say about the evening and it’s that Max von Essen’s cheerfully sassy turn as transexual Tremont pumped a few minutes of real juice into this sucker. Otherwise, Jerry Springer The Opera hit New York dead on arrival.

The Devil's Disciple

photo: Carol Rosegg

Although it's his only play set in America and it functions atypically as a farcical spoof of the melodramatic conventions of its day, you nonetheless know right from the first scene that you're in the land of Shaw's wit, as newly widowed Mother preaches God-fearing goodness and charity while emotionally neglecting the bastard child in her care. Set during the Revolutionary War, the quick-paced, enormously entertaining comedy (at Irish Rep) takes sure but gentle aim at the notions of good and evil: it's not one of Shaw's more complex plays, and it's a cinch that he writes the "good" people who are the quickest to proclaim love of God or of country as the true bad guys, but it's mostly lively, merry fun, put over by a game cast who - if perhaps sometimes a tad too broad - know how to get the laughs out of the material and how to let us savor the succinct jagged gems sprinkled among Shaw's dialogue. This was easily the most enjoyable time I've had at Irish Rep since Mrs. Warren's Profession: maybe they should do a Shaw every season.