The Invitation

The Invitation is so well-cooked that the roars of laughter threaten to drown out the subtler points Brian Parks is making with his hyperactive style. As a social satire of the rich, Parks strips his characters down to five very similar blanks and stuffs them full of the fattiest (in a foie gras way) text, then watches as John Clancy amps up the violence and the speed, a gore- and gorge-fest on one very sharp skewer. The very able cast, led by the indefatigable David Calvitto, make this an evening you'll want to RSVP to.

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King of Shadows

Photo/Carel DiGrappa

King of Shadows leaves us grasping at thin air when, after a promising opening, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa starts to lose himself in an overcooked and fantastical plot. The play has some fine moments (particularly from Sarah Lords, who plays an unhappy teen) all the way through, but by keeping the evil offstage, his magical realism lacks any bite. Despite the aesthetic direction being nailed by Connie Grappo, this particular story seems better suited for the world of comic books, where such presentational and sharply polished dialogue and narrative asides wouldn't seem so out of place beside all those colorful panels.

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Beast

Michael Weller knows that war can't be understood from afar, but he doesn't even try: he just distills a secondhand vision into comedic form. He ends up beating a corpse to death, in this case, the otherwise fresh concept that has a GI (Corey Stoll) rise from the dead to travel America with his buddy Jimmy (Logan Marshall-Green), exposing corruption, decay, religion, and capitalism in America. The aesthetics are always top-notch at New York Theater Workshop, but the cold use of video clips and flag-painted boxes to show a once-removed America ends up as just a glib surface. Despite great performances from Stoll and Marshall-Green, not to mention double-cast ensemble members like Lisa Joyce and Dan Butler, the play is too elastic to ever snap back at us.

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Lady

I saw Rattlestick's production of Craig Wright's new one-act Lady last night and have three questions. 1) Is Paul Sparks the most exciting New York Stage actor of his generation? Not to take a thing away from Michael Shannon (excellent, as a depressed pothead) or David Wilson Barnes (pitch-perfect as a politician whose values have moved to the right over the years) but Paul Sparks has been so consistently dead-on in role after role, with markedly different characterization in each, that he's become compelling reason enough to see anything he's in. 2) Is Lady the best new play I've seen so far this year? I certainly know it's one of the most stimulating and absorbing I've seen yet to draw on our feelings about 'the war'; the playwright's respect for all three characters makes it clear he is after something more resonant than landing easy shots from the left. 3) What can I do to get you to see it? There's a discount code out somewhere and I am going to post it in the sidebar at my blog as soon as I track it down.

Kidstuff

Photo/Ryan Jensen

This crude, shallowly imagined, frantically leaping, childishly portrayed new play of Edith Freni's is, without a doubt, Kidstuff. There's the rare sense of depth, buried deep down in Sarah Nina Hayon's quick retorts and self-denigrating attitude, but for the most part the play is too flat to even pretend that it's good. Partial Comfort Productions often tend to be exaggerated, but they're usually tethered to a sympathetic character who is suffering through an unjust world: here, it's hard to feel bad for a whiny girl who can't get past her first love's betrayal, especially when she surrounds herself with such idiots, all of whom are so cartoonishly portrayed that they end up making her seem far more stable than we're meant to believe.

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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.