Saved

**** (...out of five stars)

Playwrights Horizons

I agree with Patrick that this new musical is perhaps a little too precious for its own good. A sharper satirical edge would give our colorful teenage characters another layer to play within and also would not make New Yorkers think that they're attending church. Still though, I was charmed by this perky, needy little musical that follows the exploits of a crowd of haywire teens at a Christian high school. The songs were bright, the sensibility was modern (everyone texts and facebooks) and the show zipped along at a chipper clip. The cast is pretty perfect with Celia Keenan-Bolger leading the pack as the worrisome devout Christian determined to fix her boyfriend. I kinda wanna see the movie now.

The Actor's Nightmare/The Real Inspector Hound

Christopher Durang's The Actor's Nightmare and Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound are two fantastic (and fantastically different) riffs on the theater. Durang, ever the manic comedian, goes for broad strokes as he thrusts a hapless accountant, George (Michael Black), into an olio of dramas (Coward, Beckett, Shakespeare), skewering the whole lot with his memories of nuns. Stoppard, always one step ahead, ridicules the murder mystery (Christie's long-running The Mousetrap) by having two critics, Moon and Birdboot, remark on (and indulge in) the proceedings (Julian Elfer and Rick Forstmann, playing Michael Caine and Lawrence Olivier-like roles). It's a funny evening, but it's soured by thoughts of how sweet the production could have been, had Peter Jensen pushed the physical comedy further, and really sharpened the timing of both pieces. Some bits come very close, as when Spelvin haplessly grips a potted plant, or when Moon finds his own acting under the lens of the critics, but my funny bone ached for more.

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The Four Of Us

I've got no problem being the lone dissenter on this two-hander from Itamar Moses. I found the play-within-a-play conceit to ultimately work against the show: the only thing objectively real is the second-to-last scene, and the final scene is a cute little throwaway for those who have been paying attention to all the foreshadowing in the play. It's not even all that clever in a literary sense: Tom Stoppard's satirical The Real Inspector Hound did the same for critics that Moses is doing here with writers--except that he's attempt to delve a little into the corruptive power of celebrity and the pressures of sustaining one's integrity. But it's hard to listen to people complain about such empty issues . . . especially twice, with the scenes mostly parallels of one another. You can carefully construct an echo all you want--it's still just an empty sound. But let me not be too harsh: Moses's writing is, at times, very natural and--rightfully so--a reflection of his youth. Let him get the cricks out of his hand now, and his pen may yet write something truly engaging and not facilely fascinating.

Miss Richfield 1981 Flies Over The Coo Coo's Nest

** (...out of five stars)
The Zipper Theater


With this, her second limited engagement in New York, Miss Richfield 1981 tries out her drag schtick that has made her a local celebrity in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Through musical numbers and mock therapy sessions, this colorful, sassy, loud mouthed, middle aged man in a dress attempts to solve the problems of people yanked onstage from the audience. Though intermittently funny, her improvisations are hit and miss partly due to the fact that they're kinda not improvs at all. She doesn't engage the poor bastards who get pulled up onstage more than she just labels them with fictional "problems" ("You're afraid of clowns!"..."You're afraid of germs!") and then proceeds on to her scripted monologues. This grows tedious after a while and without any sort of dramatic structure or arc, this seems like something that belongs in a bar rather than a theater. Still she does an impressive headstand and she looks very funny in her tacky/slutty dresses and 3 pound cha cha heels. I'd happily toast her at Stonewall.

August: Osage County

***** (...out of five stars)

Broadway

I got to ride the August Osage coaster again! This time I let go of the bar and kept my eyes open. It's even better the second time around. I put a penny on my knee and towards the end of Act 2, it started to float! I wanna go back!

Inner Voices: Solo Musicals

Reviewed for Theatermania.