Hair

photo: Joan Marcus

It's been more than four decades since the self-described "American tribal love rock musical" Hair became an instant cultural sensation, so it's astounding that this new production (transferred from its run last Summer in Central Park and staged more like a happening than a traditional musical) feels so urgent and newly powerful. Director Diane Paulus doesn't condescend to the material and treat it as cute mostalgia; instead, the production seems guided by a deep respect for briefly-mainstreamed hippie sensibilities and tinged with an underlying sadness that the intervening years have so drastically changed our cultural values. The members of the talented cast (now including Gavin Creel, whose goofy-sweet charm and vulnerability make him an ideal Claude) effectively create a microcosm of a community rather than compete with one another for attention. This isn't a production where you are left to note how well this one sings "Easy To Be Hard" or "Aquarius", it's one where the larger purpose of the whole piece informs each song and vignette, and in which the final cumulative effect is as exhilarating as it is emotionally devastating. Vital, thrilling, unmissable.

Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them

Photo/Joan Marcus

The panties of one of Christopher Durang's characters best describe his new play, Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them: all that stretched-out elastic causes her underwear to keep dropping. When she’s called on it (“They’re down about your ankles like some insane shoe accessory”), she replies, “I’m not doing it on purpose. Just ignore it. You should be looking at my face anyway.” Well, Durang’s not going off on all these riffs on purpose either—it’s just the manic way he writes. And this is the problem: his lack of focus undercuts his attempts to use political absurdity. We don't care enough for Felicity (Laura Benanti) or Zamir (Amir Arison) to care about them (flat actors in addition to flat characters), and though we'll always laugh in the hands of experts like Kristine Nielsen, who plays Felicity’s ditzy, theater-obsessed mother, there's not enough bite out of her counterpart, Richard Poe, the Felicity's opinion-crazed conservative father, to help project out of the one-dimensional box everyone's locked in. The result comes across like David Mamet's November (which will be good news to some), but at least David Korins's spinning set gives it a pretty face!

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Tartuffe

Photo: Gregory Costanzo

What a pleasure it is to go to the Pearl Theatre and see a solid production of a classic, well-acted by a regular company, in a small theatre at a reasonable price. The current production, Moliere's Tartuffe, is a case in point. It features none of the sort of bogus reinterpretation seen in, for example, Simon McBurney's All My Sons. Director Gus Kaikkonen and the reliable Pearl company (in particular, Rachel Botchan, Sean McNall, and Robin Leslie Brown) give us, well, Tartuffe. It's not an insanely brilliant production, and that's okay. With very few missteps (one of them, unfortunately, being a Tartuffe who is so transparently a con artist that no one could fall for his tricks), it honors the play and trusts the playwright.

Mrs. Warren's Profession

Director Kathleen O'Neill, founder and director of BOO-Arts, creates a pleasing, almost earthy sense of intimacy in her new production of this classic by placing the audience on two sides of the action. Shaw's dialogue is supremely fluent and expertly whittled, but also somewhat heightened; staging the play so that we're practically embracing the cast pulls a modern American audience into the action and helps make everything seem quite natural. Ms. O'Neill has grasped both the essential characteristics and the depths of Shaw's characters: not only the pivots of the story -- the middle-aged madam of the title and her independent-minded daughter Vivie -- but the four class-conscious men orbiting the women. Caralyn Kozlowski is a wonder as Vivie, completely disappearing into her complex character, biting down on emotions, then opening up just enough for us to read her precisely, controlling herself and controlling the men with the only real power she has: her determination. She makes us laugh even as she faces the serious conundrum of woman's lot. Including intermission, the play runs two and a half hours, but it zips by. It's actually one of Shaw's shorter plays, and as such it's done more often than some; still, this is a fairly unusual opportunity to see a top-notch staging with an excellent cast in an intimate setting.

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Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage

Photo/Jessica Palopoli

Though Grendel appears in Banana Bag & Bodice/Shotgun Player's Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, Dave Malloy and Jason Craig’s songplay is a beast of a different sort, focusing not on the point of view of the heroes (or villains) but rather on the subjective interpretations of three damnable academics. The result is a clash between the physical reality of Beowulf (Craig) and the gleeful spin of the academics, who justly double as the villains of the epic poem: Grendel (Christopher Kuckenbaker), Grendel’s Mother (Jessica Jelliffe), and the Dragon (Beth Wilmurt). Oh, and the whole thing’s set to Malloy’s nicely hodge-podged music, be it feedback (“Overture”), jungle-like techno (“Beowulf Arrives”), punk (“Body”), a dirge (“Grendel’s Death”), or even Broadway (“Ripped Him Up Good”). Rod Hipskind's fluid directing nails the emotional, even as the company's set design lights upon--at times absurdly so--the physical, and while the energy sometimes lags, the creativity never falters, and see if you don't cower when Grendel's mother keens, in Craig's childishly direct language, “I don’t fucking care how fucking men my fucking son murdered/they all fucking deserved what fucking ass pushers in fancy dress.”

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Next to Normal

Photo: Joan Marcus

A the beginning of Next to Normal, Diana, a cheery, energetic woman, banters with her son, chats with her daughter, and seduces her husband. Later, making their lunch, she starts laying bread on the table. And the chair. And the floor. More and more frantically, she throws together haphazard sandwiches and thrusts them at her family. And they know what they are seeing: her mania is back. Brian Yorkey's and Tom Kitt's beautiful, often propulsive score, clever and moving lyrics, and strong, intense storyline take the audience along on the always rocky, frequently painful, sometimes funny journey as Diana tries to find a treatment that will relieve her pain without taking away her personality. The changes that have been made since the Off-Broadway production are smart and successful, tightening the show's focus and digging deeper into its story. The cast, led by Alice Ripley giving the performance of a lifetime in the role of a lifetime, is uniformly excellent (though I miss Brian D'Arcy James from the Off-Broadway production). The show might benefit from being trimmed a bit, particularly toward the end of the first act, but overall I think this is a superb new musical, and I hope that many Tony Awards and a long run are in its future. (Spoilers in the next paragraphs.)

In the course of Next to Normal's various incantations, there has been some discussion about it having an "unrealistic happy ending." I found the ending neither unrealistic nor happy. Many people with bipolar disorder choose to go off their meds, since the side effects can be awful and the disorder can mess with the ability to make good decisions. It is likely that Diana has suicide attempts, electroconvulsive therapy, and institutionalization in her future--hardly a happy ending. In addition, at the close of the show, the daughter Natalie and her boyfriend Henry are busy re-creating all that is unhealthy in Diana and Dan's marriage.

What gives the show that sense of a happy ending is the final song, "We Need Some Light," a positive-sounding anthem that allows the entire cast to harmonize beautifully together . It reminded me of "The Song of Purple Summer" from Spring Awakening. In both cases, faux cheery music is used to (1) allow a big finish and (2) keep the audience from going home and slitting their wrists. These seem to me to be legitimate reasons to use these songs.