Marc Miller

,

The Hummingbirds

,
The Hummingbirds

The fun thing about writing a fantasy set in the future or in some alternate universe is, of course, you get to make up your own rules. Garret Jon Groenveld’s The Hummingbirds, a dystopian fantasy set in a future of indeterminate distance, has been kicking around for a decade or so, but it is currently making its New York debut at the Chain Theatre. Groenveld depicts a highly regulated society, yet a violent and anarchic one, and it’s debatable whether we’ve moved closer to such an environment since he wrote it. But no question, the man has imagination, and his vision is efficiently presented in a well-staged, well-acted little production.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Five: The Parody Musical

,
Five: The Parody Musical

A sign in the lobby of Theater 555 says: “Warning: This performance features theatrical haze, flashing lights, and closeted Republicans.” And the set by David Goldstein that greets the audience is a gleefully tacky, Vegas-esque sea of silver tinsel streamers, with a “Make America SLAY Again” banner above. It all primes one for a good time. And then Five: the Parody Musical half-delivers.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

The Christine Jorgensen Show

, ,
The Christine Jorgensen Show

Much of the audience at The Christine Jorgensen Show seemed to be, as the phrase goes, of a certain age, and maybe that’s understandable. Who under 60 knows who Christine Jorgensen was? Yet for a time in the 1950s she was, as a character says in Donald Steven Olson’s play with music, “one of the most famous human beings in the world.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

War Words

,
War Words

War Words, assembled by Michelle Kholos Brooks from the words of some dozen veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, is simplicity itself, and all the stronger for it. The show thrusts the audience into combat and its devastating aftereffects. You may quibble here and there with the presentation and the choices of what’s included and what isn’t, but it’s unlikely that you’ll leave A.R.T./New York unmoved.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Ode to the Wasp Woman

,
Ode to the Wasp Woman

It’s a noir. It’s a drama. It’s a comedy, maybe. It’s Ode to the Wasp Woman, Rider McDowell’s history of B-level stardom in long-ago Hollywood. Graced by Sean Young (Blade Runner, Wall Street), a Hollywood leading lady whose own career history is pretty colorful, Wasp Woman has its attractions, but coherence and insight aren’t among them.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Making of a Great Moment

,
The Making of a Great Moment

The Making of a Great Moment is, at least the press release implies, supposed to be about a cross-country bike trip. But it turns out that Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s play at Urban Stages is mostly about other things. Maybe even calling it a “play” isn’t quite right; it’s closer to performance art, or an actors’ exercise, a chance for Bill Bowers and Esther Williamson to try on a closetful of identities, all the while philosophizing about the meaning of art, the meaning of life, the value of performing. Which they attack with great enthusiasm, at times making you forget the banality of much of the material. Is The Making of a Great Moment interesting? Sometimes. But it lacks discipline.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Swing State

,
Swing State

So why is Rebecca Gilman’s new drama called Swing State? Granted, it takes place in rural Wisconsin, in the recent past, when COVID shots were novelties and the Delta variant was lurking. But there’s not a lot political going on among her four principals, beyond a general head-butting between Peg (Mary Beth Fisher), the liberal, nature-loving recent widow occupying Todd Rosenthal’s hyperrealistic prairie home set, and the more traditionalist, presumably Trump-loving denizens around her. (Gratefully, the man himself rates only one mention.) In fact, when you get down to it, there’s really not a lot of anything going on.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Chanteuse

, ,
Chanteuse

If you just can’t wait for the transatlantic transfer of the hit West End Cabaret that was recently announced, cheer up, there’s another Nazi musical in town. That would be Chanteuse, the bleak and arresting solo tale of the remarkable fate of one gay man in Weimar and post-Weimar Germany. The performer, Alan Palmer, also wrote the book and lyrics, while the curiously soothing music is by David Legg. Chanteuse has a frightening and touching story to tell, but you might not be entirely on board with the way it gets told.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Gospel According to Heather

,
The Gospel According to Heather

The first thing to know about The Gospel According to Heather: It’s way out of author Paul Gordon’s wheelhouse. Gordon, the rare writer who creates book, music, and lyrics, specializes in adaptations of lofty classics, most prominently Jane Eyre. His  2009 version of Daddy Long Legs gets produced a lot (while convincing some of us that epistolary musicals aren’t a great idea). For The Gospel According to Heather he turns thoroughly contemporary, with an original story so current that there are jokes about drag storybook hour, Dylan Mulvaney’s Budweiser ad, and the congressional tussle over gas ovens. Heather, like its title character, isn’t perfect, but it has more on its mind than the average musical comedy, and it dispenses its outrage with verve and good humor.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain

,
Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain

“The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” The words are those of Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens, and the philosophy gets a healthy workout in Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain, Joe Baer’s one-man retrospective of the life and works—but mostly the life—of America’s great author. Baer loves his subject, and he works up a worthy retelling of Clemens’s life and times. He might have labored harder to carry them into a modern perspective, but it’s still a pleasant, leisurely ride.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Crumbs from the Table of Joy

,
Crumbs from the Table of Joy

Lynn Nottage. Author of a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece (Sweat), another Pulitzer winner (Ruined), a wild phantasmagorical comedy with revealing things to say about the underclass (Clyde’s), a heartrending miniature she also skillfully adapted into an opera (Intimate Apparel), and several others. Who wouldn’t want to see a little-known early work of hers? Not for nothing is Keen Company promoting Crumbs from the Table of Joy as “the Lynn Nottage play you don’t know (yet).”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Rewards of Being Frank

,
The Rewards of Being Frank

A sequel to The Importance of Being Earnest? It’s a tall order, given how frequently Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece returns, and how beloved it is. Alice Scovell’s attempt, The Rewards of Being Frank, gets a few things right and several things wrong, and it’s not the strongest production that New York Classical Theatre has ever done. But if you’re curious about what happened to Ernest and Algernon and Gwendolen and Cecily, and are willing to suspend a fair amount of disbelief, you’ll have a decent time.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Becomes a Woman

,
Becomes a Woman

Becomes a Woman, Betty Smith’s sort-of warmup to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn now premiering at the Mint Theater Company, begins wonderfully. In the sheet music department of a dime store in Brooklyn, circa 1927, 19-year-old Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price)—she shares the name of the heroine of Smith’s beloved novel, though she’s quite different from the Francie in the book—is working as a song plugger, demonstrating the little-known Jerome Kern–Anne Caldwell “Left All Alone Again Blues,” to the accompaniment of piano-playing pal Florry (Pearl Rhein), while friend/co-worker/roommate Tessie (Gina Daniels) looks on. A lively setting, a swell Kern tune, a trio of sassy girlfriends gabbing about men. A first of three acts that promises a friendly nostalgia trip, in the vein of Smith’s much more famous book. Where are we headed?

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Indictment Excitement

,
Indictment Excitement

Whether there will actually be any indictment remains highly speculative. But you might glean a modicum of excitement, and a laugh or three, from Indictment Excitement, the political standup fest now being presented at Theater 555, with a rotating roster of comics.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

The Near Disaster of Jasper & Casper

, ,
The Near Disaster of Jasper & Casper

It can’t be easy to invent a brand-new fairy tale; even James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim had to rely on the old favorites. But here comes Jason Woods, not only cobbling together an entirely original fantasy with The Near Disaster of Jasper & Casper, but performing all the parts, with distinctive voices and personalities for all the characters. Woods may seize on some familiar plot points, and he’s not always tidy: “Jasper and Casper” don’t rhyme perfectly with “Disaster,” as he seems to have been aiming for. But he knocks himself out to engage the audience.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Butcher Boy

,
The Butcher Boy

Whoa! At the ends of both acts of The Butcher Boy, the Irish Rep’s new musical adapted from Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel, such unsettling things happen that you’re forced to revisit everything that preceded them, assessing how much was fact, how much was fantasy, and whether or not we should trust our narrating protagonist, Francie Brady (Nicholas Barasch, and we shouldn’t). The Butcher Boy isn’t comforting or reassuring or lovable, and it won’t send you out whistling a happy tune. But, and this puts it ahead of much of the current pack, it isn’t stupid.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Panic of ’29

,
The Panic of ’29

The Panic of ’29 isn’t deep. It hasn’t much on its mind, except camp silliness and an encyclopedic knowledge of old-movie tropes, mixed up and scrambled and spilled out on the modest 59e59 stage. Graham Techler’s loose comedy is a Less Than Rent production, which claims in the program that its mission is “examining the relationship we have to capital and the web of injustices that stem from an allegiance to profits over people.” We don’t get a whole lot of that, except in the broadest terms, but we do get some zingy one-liners and a lively troupe of players. The first half-hour or so of The Panic of ’29 is rather delightful. And then it just goes no-damn-where.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Mr. Parker

,
Mr. Parker

In the 1950s Paddy Chayefsky wrote a successful drama, Middle of the Night, in which nobody could understand what a young Gena Rowlands could see in an old Edward G. Robinson. Or, in the movie version, what Kim Novak could see in Fredric March. That quandary is back, after a fashion, with Mr. Parker, Michael McKeever’s sort-of-new drama (it premiered in Florida in 2018). Only this time it’s hard to see what Davi Santos sees in Derek Smith.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Garbageman

,
Garbageman

Keith Huff likes to write about blue-collar thirtysomething white dudes from Chicago. His magnum opus, A Steady Rain, made a high-profile Broadway debut back in 2009—high-profile because it starred Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as a pair of Windy City cops (both were good). With his latest, Garbageman, Huff is maintaining a considerably lower profile, at the 60-or-so-seat Chain Theatre space on West 36th Street, and instead of Jackman and Craig we get Deven Anderson and Kirk Gostkowski. But once again he’s given us a two-hander about hapless blue-collar dudes, trying to make sense of a series of bad fates, and in so doing, revealing both their humanity and their lack thereof.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Black No More

,
Black No More

At the Act One climax of Finian’s Rainbow, which premiered 75 years ago, Billboard Rawkins, a bigoted white Southern senator, turns into a black man by the power of a wish. There’s a blackout, and the actor playing Rawkins hurriedly smears blackface on. Obviously you can’t get away with that anymore, and these days, if anyone dares to do Finian’s (they should), there’s a blackout, and a black Rawkins rushes on to replace the white one. However, in the Act One climax of Black No More, a new musical adapted from George S. Schuyler’s 1931 satirical novel, an opposite racial transition happens.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post