Fela!

photo: Monique Carboni

More narrated Afro-beat concert than traditional musical, this celebration of Nigerian musical genius and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti features vibrant, spirit-lifting dance, sensationally performed world music, and a charismatic lead performance by Sahr Ngaujah. (It also features an extended ensemble dance sequence in the first act that is among the most electrifying I've ever seen in a theatre; it's the kind of dancing that makes bodies look as if they've been freed from the limits of their spines.) Unfortunately, the show's high level of artistry doesn't extend to the underdeveloped book; the show's primitive overuse of narration and over-reliance on visually projected information is as deadly as the music and dancing are thrilling. The show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, is organized around the conceit that we're in Fela's "shrine" in 1977 watching him perform. Too often, we feel instead we're in history class.

Night Maneuver

Photo/Jordan Fleet

You just never know what you're going to take from a play--turns out that while I didn't care much for the acting, another critic found the acting to be just about the only good thing in the show. That leads me to think that, on the whole, things are probably even darker for this show than I painted it for Time Out.

[Reviewed for Time Out New York]

A Perfect Ganesh

Workshop Theater's production of A Perfect Ganesh comes across as a thrift-store version of Terrance McNally's tale of self-discovery in India: experiences are often reduced to tacky, comic statements and all the vibrant exotic color is often reduced to a bland commercial hue. However, Peter Sylvester's direction, while slow, is actually suited to some of the self-satirical cultural tones, and the two leads, Charlotte Hampden and Ellen Barry, are bright enough spots that, every now and then, we can live vicariously through them.

[Read on]

From The Inside, Out

The narrative spine of this play by Maggie Keenan-Bolger, in which she portrays herself and dramatizes her highly personal struggle with self-injury, is essentially a conversation with her father that leads up to her confession that she cuts herself; the scene keeps freezing so that Maggie can leave it and gather her courage, usually by re-visiting moments from her past. The theatrical conceit goes a long way toward enlivening the show, helping to keep the play from becoming overly dry while it informs, and the play certainly enlightens as it intends about the motivations of self-injurers. (Often, the motivation is to make emotional pain visible; it can't be talked about, so the pain needs to be seen.) The play is constructed to build to the breakthrough when Maggie tells us what her deepest, unspeakable pain is, but that bare honest moment comes in a projected video segment. There's thematic validity to presenting it in that way, but the price is that it unfortunately makes the final moments in the play remote.

Victory at the Dirt Palace

Photo/Abigail Feldman

An excellently acted production that somehow managed to go right over my head. Inspired in parts by King Lear and today's oversaturated say-nothing do-everything media, Adriano Shaplin's Victory at the Dirt Palace focuses on the fractious relationship between bombastic James Mann (Paul Schnabel) and his ice-cold daughter, K (Stephanie Viola). What does it say that a terrorist attack triggers a war that lasts all of four minutes, and whose panic is underwhelmed by the twice-removed resolve of rivaling news anchors? How should we read into K's father issues when it turns out that despite being a successful woman, she requires being dominated by her sycophantic assisstant, Spence (Shaplin)? Truth be told, these are questions I'm too tired to try and answer: the play goes by so quickly, with such striking performances and reversals--James's jealous, bastard of an assistant, Andrew (Drew Friedman), takes control, that it's hard to put a button on it, but I'd certainly like to revisit the Riot Group.

The Amish Project

The real-life 2006 shootings in Pennsylvania's Amish country, which resulted when a local milk man held a schoolhouse hostage with the intention of molesting the girls, are the inspiration for this extraordinary solo show, both written and performed by Jessica Dickey and clearly a highlight of this year's Fringe Festival. The play, which gives voice to fictionalized characters each touched in one way or another by the tragedy, is an accomplished piece of work that avoids sensationalism: its aim is higher and speaks in part to the power of grace and of forgiveness. Dickey's performance is stunning - while always costumed in simple Amish attire she transforms in an instant from a young schoolgirl who witnessed the murders to the gunman's widow to a police liasion and so on - and although the play as written could conceivably be performed by an ensemble of actors, some of its main themes gain a deeper resonance as performed by only one. This play should have a long life beyond the Festival.