The Truth About Santa

***1/2 (out of five stars)

Kraine

Christmas annoy the fuck out of you? Yeah, me too. Which is why I so wholly connected with this slappy, mean-spirited, Santa-bashing stocking-stuffer of a musical downtown at the Kraine. This Greg Kotis joint features him and his real wife and two lovely real children (the von Kotis family singers!.........the family von Kotis!...). The story is simple and dumb and fun. The wife and kids run off to the North Pole with Santa who is basically a big, old, fat slut. Ms. Claus wants to destroy the world and the elves well.... they're not right. Revenge. Booze. Sex. It's what Christmas ought to be (and often is). Production-wise this is a pretty tight package. The pace is speedy, the sets/costumes are thrown together and fabulously crappy and the cast is hilarious. Note to Luisa Struss (aka Ms. Claus): With your gravely voice you sound exactly like Eileen Heckart. You should play her sometime.

ReWrite

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Prayer For My Enemy

photo: Joan Marcus

The acting in this production of the new Craig Lucas play is of consistent high quality, but Victoria Clark, whose contribution to the first half of the one-act essentially consists of delivering monologues, is especially outstanding. When the character she's playing eventually interacts meaningfully with the other characters - an extended family whose eldest son (Jonathan Groff) is about to return to duty in Iraq - it's clear that the play is at its core about grace and forgiveness. Unfortunately, the playwright has put a lot of other distracting business in our way and dulled the power of his message.

Improbable Frequency

This much-acclaimed musical, from Dublin's Rough Magic Theater Company, is the kind of unique and wacky that inspires cults, but I'm still scratching my head as to why it didn't do much for me. On paper, I ought to love it - it's like nothing else out there, it marches with integrity to its own drum, and it certainly isn't stupid. (In fact the script is on fire with clever wordplay; it's what held my interest through the first act.) The patter-rich music is entertaining and flavorful (one group anthem, "We Are All Of Us In The Gutter", is still with me) and there's nothing to complain loudly about as far as the ensemble goes. (In fact I found two of the performances - Peter Hanly as a crossword puzzle fanatic who is pressed into service as a code-cracking spy, and Sarah-Jane Drummey as a mysterios lass who may or may not be on his side - to be entirely delightful.) And yet after about an hour I had had quite enough: the setting of the story - namely, politically neutral Ireland during WW2 - seems irrelevant by the second act, and the zany silliness that ensues exhausted rather than charmed me.

Home

Reviewed for Theatermania.

3 Sisters 6 Actors 12 Dollars

To clarify, while Jesse Edward Rosbrow has "adapted" Chekhov's Three Sisters for Theatre of the Expendable, this review will refer to it by its gimmicky slogan--3 Sisters 6 Actors 12 Dollars. With the naturalism destroyed, the subtext discarded, and (at best) two passable actors cobbled out of the mass, it would be criminal to link this to Chekhov. One problem is most obvious in the crowded first act, in which actor Clinton Lowe mentions "There are thirteen of us at the table!" and the casual observer has no way of telling if Lowe is speaking as Kulygin, Masha's husband, or Solyony, rival to Irina's loveless dalliance with Tusenbach. (I won't bore you with the plot any more than the show does, which is to say, you'd better be familiar with these characters before seeing the show.) To cut things short: this is more of an abomination than an adaptation, and whatever credit Rosbrow earned with Mare Cognitum has just been bankrupted.

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