The Miracle Worker

There's much to admire in this first Broadway revival of the Anne Sullivan-Helen Keller story - above all else a riveting performance by Abigail Breslin - but, as you've likely already heard, the staging is a serious problem. (It pains me to say it, as I thought director Kate Whoriskey's staging of Ruined last year was flawless.) Presenting this story in the round has to rank as one of the worst ideas in recent Broadway seasons - you can't very well have your deaf and blind central character crossing the room mid-scene so that the other half of the audience can see her, especially when so much of her stage business is sitting and writing letters into the palm of her teacher's hand. With so much non-verbal business, it's especially imperative that the audience be visually connected to the players. My view was so frustrating for the first act that I debated skipping the second, and I could spy seats that were far more problematic than mine. (I'm glad I stayed - no major obstructions to my view after intermission, and the play's final scene is as touching and effective as one could possibly hope.) The ideal seats would appear to be numbered in the 100s and in the low to middle 200s on the even side of the theatre. Sit there.

As You Like It

photo: Sara Krulwich

Last year, when everyone was raving about Sam Mendes' production of The Winter's Tale, I was imploring everyone and their mother to go see his staging of The Cherry Orchard. It was simply the best production of a Chekhov play that I'd seen in New York in over a decade. Once again, I find myself to be the contrarian voice: people are going crazy over his production of The Tempest, which I found interminable, while I am still in awe of his fresh, beautiful take on one of Shakespeare's most oft-performed comedies, As You Like It. Mendes manages to tap into the resources of subtext behind the playwright's comedic scenarios without sacrificing any of the wonderful, ebullient moments of hilarity. The cast is an embarrassment of riches: Juliet Rylance's perfect Rosalind, Christian Camargo's invigorating Orlando, Stephen Dillane's surly Jaques; even the tiniest roles are played with aplomb. Only one performance remains, this Saturday at 2. Don't miss it.

Glee Club

Some initial impulsive energy screeches to a halt once the implausible plot gets under way. The play devolves into a couple of modestly funny jokes stretched over much too long a time. There's lots of yelling and cursing, without the development of character that makes such moments anything but annoying. The only really appealing character is Paul (Steven Burns), an apparent serial killer whose chilling non sequiturs always draw a laugh. The actors do their best with the weak material, but little good results besides some isolated funny lines. The high point: the song, which after much hemming and hawing the all-male glee club of the title finally manages to sing at the end. It perfectly captures the spirited zaniness the rest of the production only hints at. Read the full review.

The Scottsboro Boys

photo: Carol Rosegg

Even by the vaunted standards of other Kander and Ebb musicals, The Scottsboro Boys is an especially potent mix of bitter social comment and rousing showbiz razzle-dazzle. The real-life story from the Deep South in the 30's - of the infamously unjust arrest and prolonged imprisonment of 9 innocent black men for raping 2 white women - is told as if in vignettes in a minstrel show, a bold and excitingly dangerous theatrical conceit that adds exponential layers of subtext. Unlike the duo's Chicago, also about a miscarriage of American justice and prsented as a vaudeville entertainment, The Scottsboro Boys is palpably discomforting by design - it often aims to make you squirm in your seat as it implicates not only societal racism but the racism of the minstrelry it presents. Except for a rarely intrusive framing story that leads to an unneeded, softening coda (that critics have been kindly asked not to reveal), the musical sustains both a remarkable level of stinging anger and a consistent visceral musical-theatre excitement. There's plenty of praise-worthy craft - director/choreographer Susan Stroman has brought her best game to the staging, the book is purposeful and dynamic, the score is accomplished and often sublime, and the performers (particularly John Cullum, Brandon Victor Dixon, Colman Domingo, and Forrest McClendon) are sensational. But you stagger out of the theatre as you should, somehow altered and thinking not about the parts but about the in-your-face sum. Jolting, serious, thrilling, and absolutely unmissable.

Last Life

Rod Kinter's athletic fight choreography for Last Life, one of the hits of The Brick's recent Fight Festival now enjoying a short encore run at The Ohio, is viscerally exciting and technically impressive (and it's far more convincingly executed than what I'm used to seeing on stage). There's also plenty of it - the show hasn't dubbed itself a "fightsical" for nothing. The rough, decidedly R-rated violent smackdowns are underscored with percussive bursts of music, the way they would be in a film: the sometimes edge-of-your-seat stage combat is the main reason for the play and sure to satisfy action-seekers. Tim Haskell's direction adds great additional vitality thanks to a striking meta-theatrical presentation: for much of the play, the actors are seated facing the audience while delivering their lines to each other. Even cooler is a conceit that regularly has the actors freeze mid-fight while an effects guy applies stage blood. Eric Sanders' script is not always entirely clear in laying out the backstory of the characters and the post-apocalyptic setting, but it does what it needs to do in setting up the combat scenes and it wisely does so with some mitigating humor. Special shout-out to lead actor Taimak Guarriello who, whether delivering deadly roundhouse kicks or spoofing an infomercial with tongue in cheek, capably handles his role's varied demands.

The Temperamentals

I had hoped to like The Temperamentals, now transferred to one of the New World Stages, a lot more than I did in its earlier, off-off Broadway incarnation, but by the middle of its first act I was once again slumped in my seat with a case of the Gay History Lesson Blues. The playwright, Jon Morans, should get due socio-cultural credit for dramatizing the mostly overlooked gay rights pioneers who formed the Mattachine Society decades before Stonewall, but did he have to go about it with so heavy a hand? Although the show is not the joyless slog that most "good-for-you" theatre is - there's lively entertainment value in watching the unlikely love relationship unfold between social activist Harry Hay and young fashion designer Rudi Gernreich - it's still essentially the kind of theatre that makes you worry you'll be told to stay after to clap erasers. The playwright makes sure we know that the characters are fighting for something, but that's not as involving as giving them something playable to fight against: the play lacks actable conflict until a new character shows up out of nowhere very late in the first act. The lead performances, by Michael Uhrie and Thomas Jay Ryan, are at all times nuanced and credible, the main reasons to see the show, in fact. Arnie Burton is a clear standout among the otherwise far-from-subtle supporting cast.