Twisted

Photo: David Anthony

Twisted is an evening of five short and often funny one-acts. In Matt Hanf's Teddy Knows Too Much, the most substantial and ambitious of the plays, the hefty Peter Aguero hilariously deadpans the role of three-year-old Billy, whose toys—a plush bear, a Dick Cheney mask, a rubber duckie—are his only confidantes. The only way he can fight back against his comically insensitive parents is through ever-intensifying mischief. A garden shears, lots of pastries, and a tragicomically misunderstood Salome (the droll Lindsay Beecher) highlight the skit-like pieces that follow. Unfortunately the evening closes with its weakest entry, but overall it's a diverting anthology. Read the full review.

Thérèse Raquin

Photo: Stan Barouh

A woman sits and stares. She is trying to see the river, she explains. We quickly realize that what she is trying to see is something, anything, other than the unexciting life in which she feels trapped. Her cousin, then husband, Camille is sweet but ineffectual. Her aunt is kind but boring. Thérèse feels buried alive. And then she meets Laurent--dashing and sexy Laurent. Based on Emile Zola's novel, Thérèse Raquin combines the sexuality of a potboiler, the eeriness of an Edgar Allan Poe story, and the morality of an old movie, sometimes movingly and sometimes awkwardly. In the small Atlantic 2 theatre, the audience is intimately involved with the dreams, nightmares, and fervid couplings of Thérèse and Laurent. Sometimes Jim Petosa's staging seems hokey, but often it is vividly evocative and emotional. In the second act in particular, the inventive, almost-over-the-top direction uses simple yet intense theatricality to pull the audience into the story. Lily Balsen as Thérèse is always fascinating if occasionally overwrought, and her amazing looks (Frieda Kahlo meets Lena Olin) bring much to her portrayal. Scott Janes is attractive and smoothly charming. Willie Orbison comes across as being as much in love with Laurent as he is with Therese. This is an interesting approach, but it could have and should have been more subtly handled. Overall, it is wonderful that this production of Thérèse Raquin exists. How lucky we theatre-goers are that incredibly talented people are willing to work their butts off for little or no money and little or no acclaim, giving us intense, exhausting, often exhilarating performances for the sheer love of doing theatre.

Perfect Wedding

Photo: Sun Productions, Inc.

No one does bedroom farce like the British, and a fine example just blustered onto the New York stage with the Vital Theatre Company's sharp new production of Robin Hawdon's Perfect Wedding. Bill (the excellent, elastic-faced Matt Johnson) wakes up on his wedding morning in the hotel's bridal suite with a naked woman he doesn't know. Hilarity ensues, and a touching love story too. The effervescent Dayna Graber threatens to steal the show as the wisecracking, mint-popping hotel housekeeper who gets caught up in the proceedings. But Tom (Fabio Pires in a very promising Off-Broadway debut) distracts us with his finely tuned fury upon discovering that Bill's best man is by no means the only role he's destined to play in this careening plot. Teresa K. Pond's sure-handed direction shapes Hawdon's snappy dialogue, slapstick humor, and blurry maze of plot twists into a cheery evening of laughs and good feeling.

The Europeans

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Thérèse Raquin

Photo/Stan Barouh

Neal Bell's brilliant adaptation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin puts a stake through the heart of dry naturalism. With a sense of Ibsen's modernism, he focuses on the stark apathy Raquin feels toward marrying her cousin, Camille ("I can't be frightened to death; I'm already dead and this is hell"), which is all the better for showing her sexual awakening at the hands of the roguish Laurent. Adding to this is Jim Petosa's romantic direction, which finds clever ways to mix such morbidity with dashes of sweetness: ravenous passion, indeed. Much credit to the cast, too: as Raquin, Lily Balsen (like a younger, more innocent Helena Bonham Carter) is haunted by an actual ghost, but what moves us is the way she is haunted by genuine regret. It's a shame that Scott Janes isn't allowed such range, but his Laurent is nonetheless solid, as are the terrific turns of Willie Orbison (Camille) and Helen-Jean Arthur (Camille's mother), both of whom are sharpened by a different sort of passion: rage. It's easy to be poetic, but hard to justify such language, as Thérèse Raquin has done. That's easy to say, but not at all hard to believe for those who have seen it.

[Read on]

Euan Morton at Castle On The Hudson

photo: Juan Jose Ibarra

I’ve been nursing a mad man crush on Euan Morton’s voice ever since he starred as Boy George in Taboo, so I was especially pleased that he opened his delightful set at Castle On The Hudson with that show’s “Pretty Lies”. (Bonus for Taboo fans: Liz McCartney in the audience. See picture.) Accompanied by a single piano, Morton sailed through an eclectic set of songs – the Nat King Cole standard “Smile”, “Danny Boy”, Roy Orbinson’s “You Got It”, the Eurythmics’ “Why”, a song from the musical Caligula - with assured seamlessness, partly thanks to the easy, unpretentious charm of his banter but also thanks to the depth of feeling in each interpretation. I laughed, I cried, I got wood. His voice may be smooth and pretty and his tone sweet but what is especially outstanding about his singing is how much emotion he puts into his interpretations while judiciously maintaining a vocal restraint and a gorgeous tone; it’s not for nothing that he counts Karen Carpenter among his vocal influences. I’m not often a cabaret person, but this was bliss.