All My Sons

Reviewed for Theater News Online.

The Pumpkin Pie Show

The Pumpkin Pie Show is storytelling at its most basic and finest: no set, no costumes, just high energy bedroom stories for the adult crowd. Clay McLeod Chapman's stories may twist and turn, but they are ultimately about the deeply wounded, and even more deeply human, characters at the heart of them, and this voice--unabashedly released by Chapman and Hanna Cheek--is not just what stories need to be about, but what theater should be, too.

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Irena's Vow

photo: Carol Rosegg

At one point in this 90-minute one-act, the always captivating Tovah Feldshuh breaks the fourth wall (while in character as heroic Irena Gut Opdike) to remind us that we will soon have no chance for face to face contact with Holocaust survivors and to drive home the importance of carrying their stories with us. While that's inarguably true, I dare ask: must this story be presented with such a heavy hand and written so that nearly every single dramatic moment is over explained? Just because this is theatre that is good for humanity doesn't mean it's good theatre by default: despite Feldshuh's superb performance as a Polish Catholic housekeeper who courageously sheltered a dozen Jews right under the nose of the Nazi Kommandant who employed her, the play is maddeningly simplistic and keeps faltering with narration that tells us what we already know. That said, I haven't heard so much weeping during the final scenes of a sold-out play since the Brian Dennehy Death of a Salesman.

Rock Of Ages

Reviewed for Theatermania.

A.N.T. Fest

Why toy with a catchphrase that works? According to their press release, their first annual A.N.T. (Ars Nova Theater) Fest is a chance to catch "genre-defying emerging artists from beginning to trend." While there was nothing groundbreaking in the short previews of this premiere--unless you've never seen good step dancing before (10/16's Step) nor heard a nebbish white guy talk about his failed love life (11/13's Girls I've Like Liked)--there were plenty of emerging artists, as evinced by the self-deprecating deadpan of Sara Schaefer (of 10/17's Liquid Gold) and the slightly off-kilter humor of Becky Yamamoto (10/23's The Story of America). The rock band Goodbye Picasso may not be next year's Jollyship (11/1's The Book of Aylene), and Eric March and Jared Weiss aren't as endearing as [title of show] (11/17's Songs About Real Life), but they're in the progress of getting their act together, thanks to A.N.T. Fest's act. Why should we need to make sense of the white-guy dancing, intentionally awful jokes, and political commentary of 10/20's Just Jump!? As is pretty clear from shows with titles like Pirates and Ninjas, Dial 'P' For Pasties, and Outre Island, now's as good as any a time to jump. Ars Nova isn't reinventing the wheel (The Brick has been doing eclectic festivals for years now), but with their beautiful space, excellent liquor selection, and comfortable seats, they're driving in the right direction.

To Be Or Not To Be

Photo/Joan Marcus

As MTC has stupidly begged the question, the answer, definitively, is "not to be." Nick Whitby's adaptation of the 1942 film To Be Or Not To Be is slow, under-rehearsed, badly staged (Faith Healer meets Gypsy), and unable to establish a tone--as Colonel "Concentration Camp" Erhard (Michael McCarty, one of the few good things about this show) points out at a gestapo soiree, "I've misjudged the tone of the room." Boeing Boeing, for all its flaws, knows that it is a sex farce, and the energy crackles through the play, building and building until take-off; not so for To Be Or Not To Be, which sputters through video clips and recordings that defuse the action. It's also horribly dated: even though "Heil myself!" stems from Lubitsch's original, it now seems like secondhand Brooks. Casey Nicholaw's direction is astoundingly aimless, as if he set out to direct The 39 Steps but wanted all the glitz of The Drowsy Chaperone, too. The space is badly used, and Anna Louizos's set could've taken some cues from Roundabout's revival of Twentieth Century. Erhard comments that Josef Tura, a hammy actor (hammily played by David Rasche, which is a most unkosher choice) did to Shakespeare what Germany has done to Poland; one could go a step further and compare what Germany did to Poland to what MTC has done to this film (and to a wasted Jan Maxwell).