Michael Walek’s The Bookstore is a cozy, unprepossessing play about the power of literature to change one’s life and the importance of both writing and reading. It is also about the people who do one or the other, and those who try to do both, and it’s peppered with nuggets about writers, readers, and the spectrum of human experience.
The Disappear feels like an incomplete puzzle: Its pieces don’t fit together. This new play, written and directed by Erica Schmidt, is overloaded with undercooked melodramatics and ideas.
A work that has been collaboratively devised by members of the Happenstance Theater troupe, Juxtapose | A Theatrical Shadow Box cites as its influences the artworks of Joseph Cornell and the French films Amélie (2001) and Mon Oncle (1958). The play, directed by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Selma Mandell, explores randomness and dissimilarity and focuses on the lives of tenants in a French apartment house through a series of scenes that can be identified from their artistic influences or simply enjoyed as charming vignettes arranged in visually striking tableaux. Either way, the result is a multilayered and curious work that is both thought-provoking and delightful.
Bob Marley: How Reggae Changed the World is a soulful solo journey that traces reggae’s roots and its global reverberations through the life and legacy of its most iconic figure. Written, performed, and directed by Duane Forrest, the show blends acoustic music, personal storytelling, and audience connection, allowing one to glimpse how Bob Marley’s message reshaped not only a genre, but lives.
The Holocaust is never light fare for anyone, and it may be presumptuous to say, but its darkness is no more acutely felt than by those who survived it. The Congress for Jewish Culture’s production of Night Stories: Four Tales of Reanimation dramatizes the Yiddish poems of Avrom Sutzkever, widely acknowledged as the most eloquent Holocaust poet. Sutzkever’s poems, which depict the ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, under Nazi occupation, reflect the emotional roller coaster of its residents’ existence, pivoting among horror, humor, and an ambivalent desire for both death and redemption.
Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
