Sunday in the Park with George

Photo/Joan Marcus

I don't buy the shift between the first act and the second, either in tone or in music, but I'll take everything else about this masterful revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, especially the integral projection design of Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, a seamless effect that allows us to see what the music makes us feel for George Seurat's passion. Jenna Russell deserves to steal the spotlight as Dot, the model-turned-lover that Seurat abandons for his drawings, and then again as her granddaughter, the aged but saucy old Marie: she nails the patter of "Sunday in the Park with George," slides resignation into the yawning notes of "Everybody Loves Lewis," and puts the pain in painting for the tragic, "We Do Not Belong Together." She's also one of the few people aside from Patti LuPone who can sing a groan. But credit where credit is due to Daniel Evans, who dabs his notes in "Color and Light" as if he were painting rather than singing, and finds the high playfulness and low seriousness as he explores his subjects -- two dogs -- in "The Day Off." I say little about the songs in the second act because the first act's already done them right, although "Putting It Together" does well to show the fixed smiles and strains associated with modern art. If "pretty isn't beautiful/beautiful is what changes before the eye" then it's no wonder that the first act, with a set scribbled in and out of existence, is so marvelous.

The Slug Bearers Of Kayrol Island

photo: Carol Rosegg

This deadpan-hip sung-through musical is visually strange and strangely hypnotic: the actors move about a stage full of flat projections of colorful drawings and animations, an alternate reality in which the characters live in cartoon apartments in a cartoon Manhattan. The visuals, along with the melodically simple music, give the sensation that we're watching a modern-day urban fable: when the bored-with-life daughter of a moneyed philanthropist is suddenly compelled to right one of the world's wrongs (specifically, she travels to an island where exploited workers toil for the metal slugs that wind up, for no good reason except to give the illusion of heft and value, in modern appliances) we're prepped for a gentle condemnation of misguided liberal do-gooders. (The fact that the new beau on her arm adores and collects instruction manuals, and expects the workers to embrace such "poetry", seals the deal). But this message is confused with another cross-purposed one early in the second act and thereby doesn't land as it should; I'll simply say, in the interest of not giving anything away, that the workers' exploitation is not what it seems. And although I wouldn't call it monotonous, the show's music becomes fatiguing in its sameness after about an hour: you want to say "get on with it already!" during most of the recicative, when the music does little except protract simple conversation. The material cries out to be cropped down to a one-act. All this said, I wouldn't warn anyone who values the offbeat away from this show. There's thought and invention here, and more than a little bit of visual magic.

The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island (or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower)

Photo/Carol Rosegg

I found Ben Katchor's The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island to be about as satisfying as I imagine the codeine-laced Kayrol Cola used to drug the stevedore population of slug bearers would be: stuporterrific in the theater, while under constant dosage, and bemusedly benign afterward. The direction, performances, and music are all strong enough to even out the intentionally broad strokes, and the play is decidedly jubilant in mood and satire, but there's no development, simply a roughly hewn plot. There's also a slight design issue: Katchor's art, animated and projected onto both a foreground and background scrim, so as to perpetually sandwich the actors in the midst of wacky colors, looks good, but not up in the first few rows of seating (the illusion doesn't work). Ultimately, the actors in the play are like the metal slugs from the title: they weigh down flimsy thoughts with their presence, from the maniacal rictus found on Stephen Lee Anderson's face to the determined naivety of Bobby Steggert or the contrasts between Peter Friedman's strong paternal presence and Tom Riis Farrell's comically maternal characters. I'm detecting a linguistic theme in the Vineyard's programming this season, but whereas the upcoming God's Ear has a extreme focus, The Slug Bearers comes across as entertaining largely for being defiantly different, not for being extraordinarily engaging.

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Killing the Boss

Photo/Martin Snyder

Save for the fierce power of the play within a play in Catherine Filloux's new play Killing the Boss, I feel that this show is killing time more than anything else. The autobiographical parts of this play are buried in the nightmare-like presentation (both figurative and literal), and the play suffers from refusing to commit enough to any idea long enough for us to feel for it. I understand that the setting is unnamed, but since it's most likely Cambodia, the choice to embody the show with so little atmosphere or culture just leaves it floating in a void (much like the cryptic goldfish bags of water that make up the "set"). Worse still, the majority of the script shies away from the clever observations Filloux made in her last collaboration with director Jean Randich (Lemkin's House) and toward flippant dark humor (when an MS-riddled character, is told that he's "on the ground" of the embassy's attempts to locate his missing wife, he promptly falls out of his chair and says, "I guess so"). The play does not achieve the "strange existential kind of hilarity" with jokes like those, and the lack of substance drowns even the better actors in the shallows of empty talk.

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Grace

photo: Joan Marcus

As the title character, a staunch "naturalist" who has long held firm that religion is ignorant superstition that is largely to blame for the world's horrors, Lynn Redgrave is riveting, electrifying. She gives Grace both crusty arrogance and near-consuming passion . As the sometimes provocative one-act drama unfolds, out of chronological order but always with clarity, we see Grace's belief system shaken to the core when her son (Oscar Isaac) decides to become an Episcopal minister. Their dynamic, lucid arguments are the meat of the play, each unwavering (until tragedy intervenes) at what seems to be an impossible emotionally charged impasse. Engrossing as the arguments are, and effective and memorable the performances, the dialogue often makes the two sound like walking mouthpieces rather than characters engaged in real-life debate. But if you can look past that, as I did, Grace is thoughtful and absorbing and scores high on the Talk About It After Over Drinks punchcard.

Applause

photo: Joan Marcus

Applause, which re-sets the All About Eve Broadway backstage story in the polyester early '70's, was never a good musical. But with a campy sense of humor and a larger than life star as Margo Channing it can be a fun and tacky-fabulous gassss, baby! This Encores! edition was about as groovy as a funeral, weighted down by joyless earnestness (thanks to Kathleen Marshall's humor-free direction) and the barely-committed, far less than fun star performance by a pitilessly miscast still on-book even for the songs Christine Ebersole. With all the cheap fun drained away to expose the mediocrity of the score and the book (strike that - the score is sometimes less than even medicore, with bummers like "Fasten Your Seat Belts" worthy of serious consideration as the worst musical number of modern times) the show is a disaster - straightfaced rather than camp - and you start to resent that talented people like Kate Burton and Chip Zien have been rounded up to lend support to such a woefully misguided enterprise. (Mario Cantone, subdued and acid-funny as Duane The Hairdresser, is the only performer who makes a favorable impression) Would Patti Lupone and Leslie Kritzer have been too much to ask the theatre gods for?