One in a Million

Who doesn’t move to New York to strike it rich? Whether you’re hunting for money, a job, or romance, making it in the city has always been all about luck and pluck, even in 1922. And when Millie Dillmount strides into town, she’s already got the pluck—she’s just ravenous for the luck. In 1967, the daffy film Thoroughly Modern Millie starred the chipper chirper Julie Andrews in the title role; the Tony-winning Broadway adaptation featured megawatt rising actress Sutton Foster, who, in a dazzling shot of luck, went from understudy to star during the show’s out-of-town tryout, stoking the hopes of struggling actresses toiling in temp jobs everywhere.

And now, in the footsteps of Andrews and Foster, comes Alison Luff, an eminently watchable young actress who more than fills Millie’s high heels—she makes them her own. A warm and welcome tonic for these cold winter months, the Gallery Players’ winning production of Thoroughly Modern Millie is a must-see mostly for her exuberant performance.

On Broadway, Millie more than filled out the massive Marquis Theatre with its zippy dance numbers and shiny scenery, so I was initially skeptical about how the show would work in a more intimate, Off-Off-Broadway-sized space. But tucked into this smaller venue, the show’s charms are only more obvious—there’s still plenty of dancing and gleaming grins galore, but the characters and the comedy are all the more vivid when viewed from a cozier seat.

A hybrid of classic Broadway storytelling and delectable new music—Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan wrote several terrific tunes to round out the film’s score—Millie was initially criticized for its relentless can-do attitude and traditional structure. The story is certainly a familiar one: Fresh from her “one-light” hometown in Kansas, Millie quickly reinvents herself with bobbed hair and a shorter hemline, and nothing can stand in her way—that is, of course, until she is mugged and loses her purse (and one of her shoes).

It’s this screwball sequence of highs and lows that makes us root for Millie, and the show also has an intriguing time-capsule quality to it. The self-proclaimed “modern” Millie is determined to make it on her own in the big city … by marrying her boss? As old-school as this may seem, the love vs. money decision at the center of Millie’s story often feels all too 21st-century modern (see “The Bachelor”). Millie’s choice hinges on two men: her playful, penniless pal Jimmy Smith, who keeps her laughing (and on her toes); or her elusive, inscrutable boss Trevor Graydon, who calls her “John” (and makes her swoon).

Like Millie, her comrades at the Hotel Priscilla are also making their perilous way as stenographers and actresses—that is, until they start mysteriously disappearing. It turns out that the manager, Mrs. Meers, sells orphaned girls into white slavery in southeast Asia. (“So sad to be all alone in the world,” she maniacally sympathizes.)

The white-slavery subplot veers between awkward and uncomfortable: Mrs. Meers is a failed actress (badly) playing the part of an Asian woman, and she keeps strict command over her two employees, Ching Ho and Bun Foo, who hope that she’ll rescue their mother from China. That Mrs. Meers “performs” the stereotype keeps it at a safe remove from reality, but Justine Campbell-Elliott’s rather lukewarm performance never gets quite big enough to show how Mrs. Meers is really, in fact, exploiting herself.

At the center of it all, Luff makes a thoroughly marvelous Millie—she shows us both Millie’s confidence and insecurity (sometimes simultaneously), and she nails the triple-threat demands of the role. She is both a confident dancer and an impeccable singer, but what makes Luff’s performance most distinctive is her natural, nervy sense of humor—particularly in her exchanges with office manager Miss Flannery (the scene-stealing Katie Kester), who joins her in the infectious tap-dancing tirade “Forget About the Boy.”

As a foil to Millie, the wealthy Miss Dorothy is looking for lower-class diversions—including “winter in Hell’s Kitchenette.” Played with panache by Amy Grass, Miss Dorothy is a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque coquette with a glossy head of curls, and Trevor Graydon (the excellent Andy Planck) immediately falls in love with her in (what else?) a witty send-up of operetta at its most overbearing. In his swoony, oafish romantic gestures, Planck uses his lush voice and expert comic timing to fantastic effect.

Jay Paranada and Roy Flores are immensely charming as the beholden brothers, and Debra Thais Evans turns in lovely vocals as jazz singer Muzzy Van Hossmere. Despite some vocal struggles, David Rossetti makes a sweet, affable Jimmy—and finds palpable chemistry with Luff.

The ensemble does excellent work with Katharine Pettit’s jazzy choreography, and director Neal Freeman has made some clever, cheeky choices that wink at the theater’s limitations: instead of fancy subtitles, the Hotel Priscilla’s bellhop (stage manager DaVonne Onassis Bacchus) appears with “Hotel Translation Service” placards. Bacchus also makes humorous cameos in several set changes, which earned some of the biggest laughs during the performance I attended.

Led by the plucky Luff, this Thoroughly Modern Millie is a scrappy fighter with personality. Merely surviving in New York sometimes takes everything you’ve got, but here it looks like fun—provided you’ve got the sense of humor (and a little bit of luck) to go with it.

The Secret Lives of Asteroids

What’s smaller than a planet, larger than a meteoroid, and a favorite subject of science-fiction writers? The easy answer is an asteroid, of course, but its particularities are harder to define, especially for the average human (or theatergoer). But leave it to experimental risk-taker Mac Wellman (an oft-feted Obie Award-winning playwright and professor at Brooklyn College) to attempt to humanize this outer-space phenomenon and thrust it center stage. In 1965UU-- his adaptation of a constellation of his own short stories, A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds--he charts the imaginary histories of actual asteroids, creating a playful, surreal world that is as foreign to most of us as the surface of the moon.

Your enjoyment of this brief fantasy will depend on your ability to suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself in what you don’t – and most likely never will – understand. It’s a discombobulating experience, in both content and execution, and the shapeless plot might leave you feeling as if you, too, are floating through space. In the end, 1965UU proves to be more satisfying as a cerebral exercise than as a theatrical one.

Within the rectangular confines of the Chocolate Factory Theatre, a long runway stretches wide before the audience. There’s a low, ominous rumbling in the background, from which Dr. Ravanello (“Nello, for short”) materializes, slumped in a chair. Clad in a dark robe, thick goggles, and white athletic socks, he introduces himself as part of “Planetoid 1965UU” and becomes our guide to this stark world, a place where he has only three companions: Alphonse Bedo, the hefty, sardonic barometer of an object’s reflectivity; Umberto the Polisher, the gruff, bearded leader, who shines everything to gleaming perfection; and Rosalind, whom they all desperately adore, and who whizzes by at lightning speed in her own orbit.

Asteroids, as it turns out, are studied within surprisingly human terms – assigned to families, given intricate names, and tracked by origin. Behaviorally, however, they can be both predictable and unpredictable (hence their forbidding presence in sci-fi scripts), and Wellman observes them here in an intriguing, yet often alienating, parallel to the human condition. How much do we (or can we) determine our fate? What forces must be in place for us to collide?

Wellman creates an unfamiliar landscape and then fills it with recognizable emotions, including infatuation, unrequited love, jealousy, loneliness, and ennui. Particularly fascinating are the “No-Lookies,” which Nello calls “our interior theater” – scripts that literally float through the universe, just waiting to be enacted. Do we drift through the universe only to imbibe and perform various scripts that have been penned for us?

But as fascinating (and worthy) as many of these questions are, they are delivered through a confusing clot of theatrical devices and bizarre scenarios. An actress (Heather Christian) sits at one end of the stage, lit with “bluish-green dust,” and reads the lines that are occasionally projected on the back wall of the stage in a robotic, spacey voice. At the beginning this includes the stage directions; later, she repeats a fortune-cookie mantra: “What is must stand alone; stand still.”

And she doesn’t just speak – she simulates the acrobatic flatulence of one character via her microphone, providing just one of the jarring pockets of humor that percolate randomly throughout the production.

With his taut, reptilian gaze, Paul Lazar makes a game, if unremarkable, interpreter of the planetoid, and his planetary cohorts make only brief, often bizarre, cameo appearances.

For all its off-putting weirdness, 1965UU benefits most from Wellman’s poetic language: one moment finds us within “the deep umbrella of the darkest velvety night shadow,” and in the final scene, Nello tells a compelling story about a “vividly vermillion” radish. The tale culminates when, in a moment full of suspense and anticipation, Nello reaches into his pocket and asks us to look at an object. As he unfurls his fingers to reveal his palm, he presents his treasure to the audience. In a way, it’s a final test to qualify us for understanding this world. His hand, as it turns out, is empty – unless you happen to see something there, of course.

Joe Litigator

The music that blasts through the theater before the beginning of Johnny Law: Courtroom Crusader is funky, soulful, and . . . distinctly unlawyerly. In this spirited solo show, actor Tim Ryan Meinelschmidt grabs this musical energy and runs with it, riffing amiably through an entertaining and fascinating look at the life of one lawyer—yes, his name is Johnny Law—as he attempts to put some personality on a persnickety profession. But this loquacious lawyer doesn’t stop at unearthing the cool from the courtroom. Meinelschmidt and his cowriter, attorney Thomas L. Fox, use the fictional Law to explore the ethical dilemmas and crises that confront any lawyer, from defending belligerent (and clearly guilty) prisoners to darting through pesky objections and insufferable judges to get a point across to a jury. (He even offers practical-sounding advice on how to respond if you’re ever pulled over on the road for a field sobriety test—who knows if it really works, but how often do you come away from theater with free legal advice?)

Briskly directed by Christopher Fessenden, Johnny Law snaps to life through the tireless tenacity of Meinelschmidt, who brings a refreshingly direct (eye contact!) and gregarious (funny jokes!) approach to the material. Stuck in a hotel room the night before a big trial—defending a student accused of drug possession—Law fields calls from the district attorney and the boy’s mother while reminiscing about his colorful career, which includes stints in the U.S. Attorney’s office, public defender’s office, and private practice.

Although a few of these anecdotes ramble on a bit (the shedding of 10 minutes or so would help), they provide the best bits of material. Meinelschmidt is an impressive vocal chameleon and plies his booming baritone into various cadences and octaves—he morphs seamlessly into the thunderous, James Earl Jones-like tones of a regal judge, doing a quick reverse to send up an adenoidal, embittered law professor.

Lawyers are (in)famously dramatic, and while Johnny Law harnesses the best of this theatricality, it stops short at becoming flip. By sprinkling in a liberal dose of sobering stories (the frightening effect of drugs and alcohol on crime) and devastating descriptions (the realities of life behind bars), it ultimately makes a convincing case for the need for committed, courageous lawyers. And as the music portends, those litigators might just have some soul after all.

Johnny Law: Courtroom Crusader is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Theater on the Edge

How did theater fail America? In his incisive, entertaining, and often poignant monologue, acclaimed writer and performer Mike Daisey’s answer might surprise you. A pungent mix of raw personal experience and savvy cultural critique, How Theater Failed America is both a sensitive self-reflection and an emphatic call to arms. And, however you think you might answer the central question right now, Daisey will challenge your ideas about what theater is, what it has become, and what it could be. Seated behind a table on a bare stage, with only a stack of notes and a glass of water for company, Daisey admits right away that the title of his show is all wrong. “You should not have come here,” he declares, since most likely we already know (or think we know) what the show will be about: Disney’s homogenization of theater into a gooey tourist commodity; the distractions of iPods and other technology; the ever-dwindling state of arts funding; and the debilitating taste pronouncements of all-powerful theater critics at the New York Times.

But, instead of pointing a finger at those shadowy outside forces, Daisey implicates himself and us, the audience stuck in the “stifling dark”: “You did it, I did it, we did it.” The problem is not so much how theater failed America, he says, but how theater became America (the alternate title an artistic director friend proffered for the show).

This all probably sounds very Michael Moore, and in some ways the similarities are there—like the controversial documentary auteur, Daisey is also a larger-than-life force working to upend and revolutionize his art form. However, Daisey’s approach, although it can be in-your-face and demanding, is gentler. Although he is sharply critical of how theater is breaking down, he holds up and reveres those moments when it has worked and when it has made a difference; in short, why we will always so desperately need it in our culture. He’s from the theater and for the theater, and his project draws on personal anecdotes to create a reverent, yet cautionary, love letter.

Flashing back to his youth in a sparsely populated region of western Maine, Daisey offers vibrant anecdotes about the people and places that enchanted him with the theater: his “madman” college theater director Dick Sewell, who bounded over theater seats to give his cast inspired notes; the summer Daisey and five friends ran their own small theater company at a small resort, playing all of the roles, doing all of the technical work, and subsisting on Ramen; and directing a scrappy group of high-school students in a one-act play competition.

As a teenager, watching plays rotating in repertory one summer, Daisey became obsessed with “the space between the plays,” cherishing the opportunity to see actors change roles and change missions, all within “a small world, constantly transforming.” With his wide eyes, wild gestures, and dramatic intonation, Daisey’s enthusiasm is infectious, but so is his despair; he brackets joyful memories with the deep chasms he has discovered dotting the larger theater scene.

Instead of a vibrant community, Daisey finds a regional landscape peppered with “glorified roadhouses,” where actors are flown in for compact, three-and-a-half-week rehearsal periods. Theater, he discovers, has become something of a machine, more of a corporation than a group of plucky, hard-working people.

I won’t give away much more, even though it’s tempting—indeed, I found myself taking more notes here than at almost any other production I’ve attended. But Daisey’s devotion to theater is never more apparent than when he reveals how theater brought him out of a depressive, suicidal year of his life. And his epiphany while performing at a small theater in Seattle—as an unlikely character doing an unspeakable deed—makes for both sidesplitting comedy and searing commentary.

Daisey made big theater news in April 2007 when, during a performance of his monologue Invincible Summer at the American Repertory Theater, 78 audience members walked out in protest, one of them unceremoniously upturning Daisey's ever-present water glass, soaking his notes. Ostensibly, the conservative school group was offended by the show’s profanity, and while Daisey does throw in the occasional F-bomb, he artfully balances shock value with sincere testimonial.

In How Theater Failed America, Daisey shapes personal experience into a stirring action plan. Theater is about creation, and as he outlines his perspective on the state of the art, Daisey leaves it to us to take the next step. A single ghost light on the stage fades as Daisey begins his monologue, as if his bright, energized voice were poised to beam out for all of us. It glows again as Daisey concludes—a reminder to keep the stage illuminated whenever, wherever, and however we can.

Check out www.mikedaisey.com for information on post-show roundtables with theater professionals that will take place throughout the month of June.

Born Again

With both tragic and triumphant results, teen pregnancy has pushed its way beyond depressing news statistics and into popular culture: in Broadway’s Spring Awakening, Wendla’s unplanned pregnancy puts her on a catastrophic path, while in the sunnier movie Juno, the title character gamely faces her pregnancy armed with sharp wit and a hipster soundtrack. And it seems that nobody is immune from problematic conception. The 2004 film Saved! threw a pregnant teenager into the least welcoming environment imaginable: a fundamentalist Christian high school. A good-natured spoof on the idiosyncrasies of organized religion, Saved has now been resurrected as an honest-to-goodness, singing, dancing musical. With its flashy design, spirited cast, and kicky choreography, it’s a wonder the title lost its exclamation point somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, it also lost much of the gleeful, goofy spoofiness that made it such a cult favorite.

Many of the characters in Saved have extremely good intentions. When, at the beginning of their senior year, Mary’s longtime boyfriend Dean confides in her that he thinks he’s gay, she decides to consummate their relationship in order to “save” him, taking sage advice from Jesus—of course!—who appears to her in a vision. The shared intimacy doesn’t do the trick, however, as Mary’s pious BFF Hillary Faye catches wind of the secret and alerts the school. Dean is shipped away to a detention center called Mercy House to be cured of his “faggotry"; Mary winds up pregnant, alienated from her straight-and-narrow popular friends and smothered in baggy K-mart clothing.

As far as committed Christians go, and as played by the wistful, plaintive Celia Keenan-Bolger, Mary is as devout as they come—she’s part of a praise-happy vocal trio called the “Christian Jewels” and a regular member of “P-Group” (translation: prayer group). But when she steps outside of her comfort zone, Mary finds acceptance with the school’s outsiders: Cassandra, a rebel Jewish transfer student, and Roland, Hillary Faye’s younger, wheelchair-bound, and avowedly atheist brother. In addition to these and other assorted teenage dramas, the plot folds in a blossoming yet forbidden romance between Mary’s widowed mother, Lillian, and the school’s unhappily married principal, Pastor Skip.

At two and a half hours, Saved attempts to cover a lot of ground, but ultimately loses its focus. Slipping back and forth across the line between spoof and sincerity, it’s sometimes hard to know whether you’re being preached at or performed to.

Still, the comedy, often derived from the exaggerated behavior of the overtly religious, frequently hits its mark. Lines like “We’re psyched for His arrival!” and “Can’t you get with the Lord?” craftily wed Christian rhetoric with trendy teen-speak. And the devious Hillary Faye, played to pert perfection by the charismatic Mary Faber, is a walking fountain of hypocrisy and righteousness—she immediately dubs newcomer Cassandra “a good get for God,” and her blithe, deluded fantasy of “Heaven” is one of the show's strongest musical moments.

But these tart scenarios lose their zing when mired in the rest of the middling material. The music is particularly disappointing. Written by the prodigious Michael Friedman (who pens magnificent, witty material for the renegade theater troupe The Civilians), this score rarely coheres into anything catchy or memorable. Perhaps aiming to fit the material, it settles into the realm of the pseudo, and the resulting songs lack a distinctive personality: we’re stuck with pseudo rock, pseudo rap, and pseudo musical theater. Even the lyrics lack energy: one particular phrase rhymes “screwy” with “life buoy.” Silly? Yes. Spoofy? Maybe. But within this confused show, it’s hard to separate intentional, ironic “bad” writing from just plain bad writing.

Perhaps if it were focused and trimmed to 90 minutes, the show could find a more resonant core. The talent is certainly there: designers Scott Pask (set) and Donald Holder (lights) have created a dazzling back wall covered in a panel of lights, cross-cut into squares to evoke stained-glass windows; Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys) has given the girl trio some snappy moves; and the young cast is armed with fistfuls of energy. Veteran performers John Dossett and Julia Murney are wasted in the grown-up roles, but they valiantly struggle to hold up their wispy storyline.

As Mary’s mother, Murney delivers one of the more poignant, “real” messages about religion—in short, that it’s more important to have faith than to follow a strict list of rules. Although Saved often eerily echoes the damaging repression constricting the nineteenth-century teenagers in Spring Awakening, Lillian’s redemptive words would never be offered by Wendla’s unforgiving mother. Repression may always be part of our culture, but here, at least, we are presented with more than one way to be Saved.

As They Like It

The convoluted stories and colorful casts of Shakespeare’s plays are just begging to be thrown into clever environments — for every “traditional” production, you’ll find one that twists the story into a surprising new incarnation. Twice within the past few years, the pastoral comedy As You Like It, with its feuding families and domestic strife, has resurfaced in an unlikely setting: nineteenth-century Japan. Kenneth Branagh helmed a made-for-TV BBC film version in 2006, which won both accolades and awards. Now, on a slightly smaller stage, the ambitious Prospect Theater Company also vaults to feudal Japan in the new musical Honor, which borrows loosely from the play’s confused couplings and mistaken identities.

The source material is problematic, not because of the writing, but because of Shakespeare’s superhuman ability to thread together disparate themes and moods. With a nod to the elite and a wink at the groundlings, he weds lovely, elevated language and sophisticated ideas with spurts of crass humor and crude behavior.

Unfortunately, this deft mesh of styles forms the central problem with Honor, which struggles to find a cohesive voice. The issue isn’t Shakespeare — it’s the challenge of adapting such resonant material.

It's not that writers Peter Mills (book, music, and lyrics) and Cara Reichel (book and music) haven’t constructed an interesting mix of characters and situations. When the power-hungry Katsunori violently dethrones his older brother, Takehiro, their kingdom is ripped apart. Takehiro and several of his men flee to the nearby forest; his daughter, Hana, fearing for her life under her uncle’s rule, disguises herself as a man and sneaks away with her cousin Kiku in tow. Eventually, Hana and Kiku cross paths (and fall in love, of course) with yet another set of brothers. Yoshiro is desperate to avenge their father’s death at the hands of one of Katsunori’s men, while his older brother, Ichiro, pledges allegiance to the new kingdom.

These characters form the dramatic part of the story, with music to match: eruptive, emotional ballads that echo the big-hearted sentimentality of Les Miserables — with a delicate, guitar-plucked, Asian influence. Animating such one-dimensional characters is also a challenge, and the performers mostly acquit themselves well. Diane Veronica Phelan shows some winning tomboy moxie as the resolute Hana, but she and Vincent Rodriguez III, as the spirited Yoshiro, don’t bring much dimension to these flat characters.

However, this being Shakespeare, there are also less moody plots afoot. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most enjoyable aspects of this comedy are, well, its comic characters. As the court fool, Nobuyuki, David Shih’s unrestrained performance initially sticks out as too over-the-top. But, as he prances and puns his way through the woods — as appointed and begrudging bodyguard to the two young girls—his knowing delivery and impish physicality provide some well-anchored (and much-needed) comic relief. Unfortunately, he suffers a bit from an overlong and overly metaphoric ballad about a “Little Gray Stone” game that circles into oblivion (but does contain the wonderfully cheeky line, “I’m determined to be indeterminate”).

A subplot involving an endearing forest family brings out the production’s best music — Romney Piamonte brings a lovely lyrical voice and superb comic timing to Kuro, a lazy son who has fallen head-over-feet in love with Mitsuko, a neighbor girl played with wide-eyed, dim-witted charm by Jaygee Macapugay. Mitsuko, of course, is smitten with the cross-dressing Hana. Reichel and Mills have penned a fantastic trio for Mitsuko, Kuro, and the elfish Nobuyuki, in which smart lyrics laced with irony convey the humor of their misplaced affections.

Erica Beck Hemminger’s sleek set mixes simple screens with Evan Purcell’s vibrant lighting to create a sumptuous landscape for the performers. Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum has arranged some gripping fight scenes, and choreographer Dax Valdes uses actors holding tree branches and poles of bamboo to inventively depict the forest scenes. Sidney Shannon’s stunning costumes — featuring glossy kimonos in a bouquet of colors — also add to the production’s visual beauty.

However, the design’s cohesiveness only underlines the unevenness of the songs and stories. A confusing structure randomly places an enthusiastic full-cast anthem midway through the first act; not only do the performers emote and belt as if this were the finale, but Reichel also sets up a tableau of characters and relationships that seem unfamiliar and strange this early in the story.

“What does honor mean?” Hana asks as the production begins; as it closes, we don’t have a definitive answer. Still, it’s always a treat to see what the Prospect Theater Company dreams up — recent daring productions have included The Rockae, a hard-rock version of The Bacchae, and West Moon Street, an elegant Oscar Wilde-an comedy of manners. Honor may seem like a work in progress, but it’s definitely a project worth pursuing.

Love on the Run

Like Brooklyn’s Gallery Players, the Astoria Performing Arts Center has found a niche in reviving recent Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Previous ventures have included solid productions of A New Brain and Proof, but their latest offering, an energetic revival of the short-lived 1997 musical Triumph of Love, proves that some shows that die in Manhattan are better off left buried on the island. A blithe and breezy adaptation of Marivaux’s 1732 comic adventure, Triumph of Love chronicles the efforts of the brazen Princess Leonide to woo the man she worships from afar. Disguised as a dapper gentleman, with her friend and accomplice Corine in tow, she conspires to penetrate the philosopher Hermocrates’ stately Greco-French garden, which is both sanctuary and prison to her beloved. But when the object of her affection turns out to be Agis, the rightful Prince of Sparta (and inconveniently plotting her own murder), Leonide must figure out how to reveal her affection without losing her heart or her head.

Sound confusing? James Magruder’s scatter-brained plot ties itself in knots that are infuriating rather than intriguing, and the uneven writing—which pairs the elevated rhythms of Shakespeare with the crass comedy of a bawdy commedia dell’arte revue—fails to create a beguiling (or even believable) world. Instead, like the characters, the audience is left running in virtual circles, chasing down any semblance of connection.

But, in defense of APAC, the central problem isn’t the direction (mostly efficient and well-paced) or the acting (which ranges from excellent to strained). Under the confident baton of Jeffrey Campos, the orchestra makes lovely music, Adam Coffia's period costumes are perfectly draped and dazzling, and Michael P. Kramer’s multi-level set is a sumptuous land of fountains and ivy-covered walls. No, the problem here is the show itself, which presents a spectacular hurdle—making palatable entertainment from mostly forgettable songs and an inconsequential story.

In fact, New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the original Broadway production a “flat-footed parade of raunchy double-entendres and double takes that give new meaning to the phrase ‘low comedy.’”

So why revive a show that was so derisively dismissed? It’s pure wishful thinking, and you have to give director Brian Swasey credit for rising to the task. His mad-cap direction is filled with spirit and sass, and he has assembled a cast who give the show their all and then some.

The winning Abby Baum fairly bursts with enthusiasm as the cagey Princess Leonide; her ebullience doesn’t create much dimension, but she sings prettily and gestures determinedly. As the object of her affection, Tripp Pettigrew doesn’t do much besides pace and sputter, but he valiantly strives to match Baum’s vivaciousness.

After arriving in the garden, Corine (Ashley Speigel) joins forces with a jester, Harlequin (Philip Deyesso), and the gardener, Dimas (Justin Birdsong), to try to help Leonide accomplish her goal. Charged with unearthing comedy from the most vulgar and banal of sources, the trio find some humor in the playful vaudevillian romp “Henchmen Are Forgotten.” But Speigel and Deyesso all too often fall into fits of mugging that distract from the other action on stage, falling into the comedy trap of trying much too hard. The always excellent Birdsong is reduced to resurrecting laughs (which he does) from such sexual innuendo-prone words as “tuber.”

The more serious characters fare better. Rational siblings Hermocrates (Richard Rice Alan) and Hesione (Erika Amato) are both seduced by Leonide’s charms—Hermocrates knows Leonide is a woman; Hesione is convinced she is a man. Alan finds some refreshing levity in his sensual awakening, but Amato is hands-down the star of this production. It helps that she has the best song, the heartbreaking ballad “Serenity,” but she articulates every inch of her tightly laced character so persuasively that hers is the fate you lament at the end of the production. Bewitched and bullied by the scheming Leonide, Hesione serves as the emotional anchor in this overwhelmingly silly story. In fact, Amato’s elegant presence and velvety voice are the best reasons to revisit this show.

Ironically, Betty Buckley’s performance as the tortured Hesione was one of the very few praised elements (and the only Tony Award-nomination) in the original Triumph of Love. Jeffrey Stock (music) and Susan Birkenhead (lyrics) not only gave her the sweet “Serenity,” but also the opening (sung) lines of the show. An announcement that beautiful and commanding will certainly grab an audience’s attention long enough to entice them into taking the journey—it seems that it pays to be the sole voice of reason in a land of nonsense.

Curtain Up, Pants Down

Making theater in New York is a tricky process, especially for small theater companies on shoestring budgets. But necessity is the mother of invention, and these artists often find extraordinary ways both to cut costs and to lure new audiences. The Play About the Naked Guy boldly announces one fictional company’s latest attempt to make ends meet: to fill seats, they take a break from their traditional focus on the classics (their mouthful of a mission statement preaches their devotion to obscure, noncommercial projects) to bring in a more splashy production that will show more guts—and much more skin.

Writer David Bell channels both the backstage wit of Noises Off and the over-the-top hilarity of Waiting for Guffman. But despite the nimble, inventive direction of Tom Wojtunik and a handful of memorable acting performances, The Play About the Naked Guy quickly stretches its jokes too thin. Its insider-y, cheeky humor, stylized physical comedy, and outsize personalities could be lifted directly out of a sitcom, which isn't entirely a bad thing. Within a 30-minute time slot, the story would be a predictable yet endearing diversion; but at an intermissionless (and often arduous) two hours, the humor eventually dries up and withers away.

Still, once you steel yourself for the repetitious ride, there’s plenty to enjoy in this good-spirited production. Married couple Dan (Jason Schuchman) and Amanda (Stacy Mayer) run the idealistic, struggling Integrity Players, and their sole company member, Harold J. Lichtenberg (Wayne Henry), hits a gay club one night and returns with a flamboyant director in tow. Eddie Russini (Christopher Borg) prances on the scene with his two sidekick pixies (Christopher Sloan and Chad Austin), as well as a daring proposition: he suggests that the company let him direct the next production, which will star Kit (Dan Amboyer), an infamous porn star.

The usual calamities and misadventures ensue, led by the preening presence of Amanda’s mother Mrs. Anderson (Ellen Reilly), a vicious personality determined to foil the production and drag her daughter back to her idea of civilization: Westchester. Another major snag surfaces in the disapproval of Dan, who doesn’t want to see his theater company—or his wife—compromised by such blatant, lewd commercialism.

Ultimately, Bell's writing tries to focus on too many scenarios. Will Amanda and Dan save their theater company (and their marriage)? Will Kit become a more “serious” actor and be redeemed by the wisdom of acting legend Uta Hagen? Will Harold—who comes out of the closet early in the production—become more confident in his sexuality? And—most importantly—will the show go on? Adeptly intertwined, these stories might create a cohesive (and coherent) whole, but here, the scenes are strung together too tangentially to be fully tantalizing.

The acting is similarly uneven: Mayer is all winsome sincerity as the amiable Amanda, but as her cloying husband, Schuchman’s over-earnestness quickly becomes wearing. Clad in animal prints and towering heels, Reilly makes an old stereotype fresh and ferocious as the fearsome Mrs. Anderson. Borg and his sassy duo make a delightfully catty trio, even with such campy, "Will and Grace"-esque exclamations as “Heavens to Oprah!” and “Sweet Hillary for President!,” and Henry consistently connects as the nervous Harold, especially in his uncertain yet determined “strip-off” with Kit, who threatens to unseat him from his usual leading role. Amboyer’s Kit is appropriately easy on the eyes, but his soft voice and distracted presence get a bit lost amid the scaffolding-heavy set.

The glitzy final performance provides a bit of a pay-off, but the road to the finale is paved with tedious material. Filled with theater references (Charles Isherwood, Actor’s Equity, the Tony Awards, and Patti LuPone all get shout-outs), The Play About the Naked Guy speaks to the struggling (naked?) theater artist in all of us, especially as it asks that most unsettling of questions: What are the consequences of “selling out”?

Don’t expect any serious answers here, but perhaps an overextended sitcom about the tribulations of theater people is just the diversion and release needed to stimulate and inspire artists to move beyond the usual, tired fare—and The Play About the Naked Guy.

Grace Notes

Are you tired of the endless hours of presidential candidate debates, in which important issues seem to vanish into personalities, egos, and pundit prattle? Free yourself from the vicious election cycle and dive into the fresh approach of Grace, a captivating new play that doesn’t merely give a nod to timely issues; instead, this expert cast—led by the mesmerizing Lynn Redgrave, in a fiercely powerful and devastatingly potent performance—attacks, engages, flips, and wrestles with the timely topic (and inherent problems) of contemporary religion. An acclaimed import from London (you even get to leave the country!), Grace sets up a provocative dialogue, but not between nations or candidates. Instead, writers Mick Gordon and AC Grayling construct a rift between two warring forces within a timeless construct: a family. On one side, Grace Friedman (Redgrave) is a rigid rationalist and a determined atheist; an outspoken professor and lecturer on the “absurdity” of religion, she finds solace in reason and the indisputable evidence of scientific facts. So when her beloved son, Tom (Oscar Isaac), announces his disillusionment with practicing law and his intention to become an Episcopalian priest, he doesn’t just shake up Grace’s world, he throttles it.

Before Tom’s momentous announcement, we get a sense of the Friedman family life: stark candidness is encouraged (“Mom! Too much information!” Tom protests when Grace shares one of her torrid youthful sexual encounters), everything is up for debate, and there are no rules against chemical experimentation (Tom gleefully remembers the time when he spiked his father’s dinner with a crushed Ecstasy tablet). Most significantly, this is a family alive with intellectual energy and affection: when Tom arrives with his fiancée Ruth (K.K. Moggie), the foursome immediately swings into the easy rhythms of familiar conversation.

But Tom’s disclosure throws the group into their own corners—Tom’s father, Tony (Philip Goodwin), who is Jewish, attempts to play peacemaker between his wife and son, who launch into fiery, emphatic, and exhilarating debates. “It’s faith or reason,” Grace argues, but Tony protests that there is not simply religion and non-religion; instead, he aspires to turn “bad religion” into “good religion”—a faith that will appeal to thinking, moderate, self-critical people.

Gordon and Grayling move the arguments beyond oversimplification: when Grace accuses Tom of being nothing more than a “salesman,” he retorts that he was more of a salesman when he was practicing law, and then accuses her of being the fundamentalist for her rigid devotion to the laws of science.

The scenes vault back and forth across time, overlapping and often seeming to tear away at each other. As director Joseph Hardy has brilliantly conceived it, this potent topic may be cerebral, but its animation is both hauntingly acute and brutally visceral.

And his fantastic cast is well up to the task, attacking the material with extraordinary articulation and sophisticated depth. Redgrave and Isaac’s verbal duels are thrilling duets of vigorous elocution, and as the doting father figure, Goodwin offers an unforgettable, generous performance steeped in dry wit. On the periphery of the family, Moggie is commanding as the no-nonsense Ruth, a pragmatic lawyer who doesn’t believe in God. As Ruth navigates the minefield of issues in the Friedman family and struggles to understand Tom’s decision, Moggie carefully peels away Ruth’s layers to reveal a core of surprising complexity.

Tobin Ost’s sleek, spare, and modern set provides an elegant canvas for these vibrant debates, and Fabian Obispo’s punctuated sound design crisply launches the characters into each scene.

When a tragic event intercedes and further unravels the characters’ lives, ideological dilemmas shift into personal crises. This careful attention to an issue’s power to inform both your heart and your head makes Grace an emotional and cerebral firecracker of a show—unlike most political debates, this drama will leave you satiated yet itching for more.

Party People

Creativity struck twice during the 2000 theater season, when two dramatic adaptations of the Jazz-Age poem “The Wild Party” surfaced in New York. On Broadway, composer Michael John LaChiusa’s version nabbed a handful of Tony nominations but closed after only 68 performances; Off Broadway, Andrew Lippa’s incarnation met with a similar fate, snagging several awards but playing only 54 performances. Were audiences resistant to this edgy source material, or were they simply confused by having two parties to choose between? Whatever the reason, the lights went out on both shows in 2000, but now, eight years on, Brookyn’s ever-reliable and always ambitious Gallery Players have revived Andrew Lippa’s slick and seductive send-up of The Wild Party; with no competing garish galas in the area (aside from the occasional Park Slope street festival), perhaps audiences won’t shy away from the deliciously decadent production this time around.

The titular party is born, as so many problematic ideas are, out of nagging boredom. Queenie, the blonde and leggy half of a vaudeville couple living in 1920s Manhattan, persuades her boyfriend Burrs—a stage clown with a volatile, violent temper—to throw a spontaneous and gargantuan bash. Their relationship has soured, and she’s hungry for an influx of new and familiar faces to stir up some drama.

When her old pal Kate arrives with her latest catch, Mr. Black, in tow, Queenie immediately goes on the hunt. Shrugging Burrs off on Kate, she falls into a fierce flirtation with Black, who is an all too willing partner in this toxic mix of jealousy, love, and desperation.

Lippa’s almost completely sung-through score carefully traces the paths of the central characters, who perform the bulk of the material. A writhing mass of decadence, the party is laced with acts of debauchery (alcohol and drug use, sexual couplings), but it is also peopled with an extraordinary collage of juicy supporting characters. And in this production, the featured players nearly pull the rug out from beneath the principals.

Not that the leading characters don’t have some exceptional talent. As the calculating Queenie, Nicole Sterling has a distinctive voice and puts forth an instantly provocative presence and an imposing silhouette, but her tough-as-nails demeanor never registers the vulnerability that makes Queenie such a tragically trapped figure. In contrast, Jonathan Hack’s performance only skims the madness that would transform Burrs into a truly menacing, maniacal, and just plain terrifying persona. He has an explosive voice that handles this demanding material well, but it’s hard to believe that his Burrs wouldn’t be crushed by Queenie in two seconds flat.

The other leads fare better. Michael Jones turns in a smooth and enigmatic performance as the elusive Mr. Black, and Julia Cardia brings a delightfully zany energy to her thrilling performance as the devious Kate. In fact, her appearance midway through Act One was enough to kick the entire production into a higher gear—she explodes onto the stage like an uncorked bottle of champagne.

The most frustrating part of this Wild Party, however, is the tantalizing tease of being introduced to entrancing supporting characters who, after saying hello, don’t say much ever again. As the sexually ravenous Madelaine True, Tauren Hagans stops the show with an avalanche of perfectly fired one-liners during her saucy solo “An Old-Fashioned Love Story” (just guess which kind). As the dim boxer Eddie and his pint-sized girlfriend Mae, Theis Wekessser and K.C. Leiber turn in a sweetly comic—and adorably choreographed—duet on “Two of a Kind,” while composer brothers Phil and Oscar D’Armano (portrayed by cunning comedians Justin Birdsong and Zak Edwards) generate peppy panache as they guide the partygoers through a performance of their latest project.

Although these characters get a bit lost in the shuffle, this is still a hypnotic and intoxicating party in which to lose yourself. Director Neal J. Freeman keeps his ensemble on their toes—they are both interested and interesting—throughout the production, and Brian Swasey has created some exceptional, infectious choreography that uses the claustrophobic confines of the on-stage apartment to great advantage. And although the brassy band frequently threatens to overpower the actors (and, more perniciously, to obscure the show’s lyrics), they keep the show jumping under the solid direction of Jeffrey Campos.

The production also provides sumptuous visuals through the evocative and provocative designs of Summer Lee Jack (costumes), Hannah Shafran (set), and John Eckert (lighting).

Although the original Wild Party is now a distant echo, the best parties never lose their steam. Composer Andrew Lippa sat across the aisle from me during the production I attended, and judging from his reactions to the show, both he—and the responsive audience—are happy to have this Wild Party back in the city.

Over the Moon

The magnificent Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel was never intended to be a theater. With its deep brown paneled walls, almost claustrophobically cozy space, muted lighting, and lush atmosphere, it seems better suited to the intimacy of cabaret (for which it is a historic stomping ground) or to the stealthy maneuvers of a clandestine love affair. But Tajlei Levis and John Mercurio were determined to stretch the stoic walls of this hallowed space to embrace a different sort of creature entirely: a musical comedy. Exploding with charm and infectious songs, their new musical Glimpses of the Moon makes an endearingly predictable—and predictably endearing—evening of classy, frothy entertainment.

Adapted from Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name, Glimpses of the Moon marks another period piece for Levis (book and lyrics) and Mercurio (music), who have become something of literary specialists over the past few years. Their jazzy adaptation of Dawn Powell’s 1940s novel A Time to Be Born played to sold out audiences at the 2006 International Fringe Festival; Glimpses of the Moon also skips happily back into the glamorous days of old New York and was written specifically to be performed in this historic space.

At the performance I attended, the room was at least partially filled by a cluster of the well-heeled Manhattan elite. If, like me, you’re unaccustomed to such luxury, you’ll find that you immediately identify with the central couple, Nick (Stephen Plunkett) and Susy (Patti Murin), two bright and clever individuals who rub shoulders with the upper set—but haven’t a cent of their own. Treasured and admired for their talents (he writes, she dances), Nick and Susy rely on their friends to sponsor their high-brow lives. But when their paths cross, Susy hatches a scheme to get them off the hook forever: she proposes that they get married, trade in the gifts for cash, and stay married for only one year, or until one of them snares a richer spouse.

In the midst of their mischief, however, Nick and Susy unexpectedly fall in love—with each other. They’re unwilling to settle for a life of poverty, however, so they remain determined to find wealthier matches, wounding themselves and each other in the process. Within this deceptively simple story, Wharton asks uncomfortable questions: Can you be happy without money? How much will we compromise ourselves for what we (think we) want?

Mercurio’s bouncy, appealing score enlivens every scene, and the production pops swiftly from one song to the next. Mercurio sits at the grand piano, which serves as the central set piece, and his fiery accompaniment is given depth and texture by Geoff Burke, who contributes captivating counterpoint on flute, clarinet, and saxophone.

Briskly directed by Marc Bruni and quick-stepping to the elegant, compact choreography of Denis Jones, the excellent six-member cast turns in remarkably rich performances in their thinly sketched roles. Beth Glover is perfectly pretentious as Susy’s uppercrust friend Ellie, who uses Susy to conduct her own extramarital escapade, while Daren Kelly turns in a warm and blustery performance as her long-suffering husband. With her snappy, spot-on timing, Laura Jordan very nearly steals the show with her sharp comic performances in two quirky roles. And as the fantastically fussy Streffy, Glenn Peters dexterously delivers an endless stream of witty asides.

As the crafty couple, Plunkett and Murin generate a sweet chemistry during the sweeping title song. Levin hasn’t given much dimension to their characters, however, and the performances suffer a bit from their overwhelming normalness. With her zippy trove of songs and dazzling smile, Murin fares better at making Susy a very nearly quirky heroine—an imperfect ingénue we can root for. And along with the rest of the cast, Murin is draped in a set of gorgeous costumes designed by Lisa Zinni.

A major draw of this production is the opportunity to see a different notable cabaret singer at each performance. Levis and Mercurio have cleverly set one of the scenes in a luxurious hotel—guess which one?—in the elegant Oak Room, where a quarreling Nick and Susy watch a performance of “Right Here, Right Now,” a torchy, “seize the day” ballad that is both poignant and pointed. Cabaret legend KT Sullivan took the stage the night I attended; Susan Lucci and Alison Fraser are among the artists yet to come.

Regrettably, the song that Mercurio and Levis have given their diva is one of the production’s least melodically remarkable, but its lyrics elicit a lovely transformation from Nick and Susy. It’s rare that you get to watch characters watching a performance, and it was fascinating to see how they reacted to the music. Although it skips over darker (and often more interesting) plot possibilities, this production makes an excellent case for the power of song. Set in a cabaret space, where the genuine exchange of music and emotion is de rigueur, Glimpses of the Moon offers a glimmer of honesty that takes musical theater back where it belongs—whether or not it was intended for theater, the Oak Room is currently bringing it up close and personal.

Peach Appeal

Flirting with (and stripping to) the taboos of the Prohibition era, the burlesque troupe The Peach Tartes—a luscious quintet of game, glamorous women—have unleashed their saucy new show in the intimate boudoir space of the Cutting Room. Cheekily dubbed Peel for Repeal, their latest romp is a winsome, lively, and irresistible evening of entertainment that loosely embraces the music, style, and aesthetic of the 1920s. The eclectic performances are tethered together by an enigmatic hostess, Miss Astrid, a brilliant comedienne who presides over the evening with a thick German accent and an endless stream of ripe verbal zingers. Declaring her plan to open a speakeasy named, aptly, “Shhhhh,” she introduces each scene as a possible act for her new club. Through her interaction with the audience (many of whom were more than eager to participate), Miss Astrid creates a speakeasy in the venue itself, ordering patrons to “drink the boooooze,” make noise, and, most of all, imbibe the intoxicating show.

And whether or not you want to take her advice, it’s all too easy to lose yourself in the decadent atmosphere. Sitting elbow to elbow at long tables alongside dedicated regulars who swilled cocktails and stared hard at the stage, gazing up at the dimmed chandeliers that provided a smoky, sultry ambience, I had to blink to remember that it was 2008, not 1928.

Burlesque, after all, is escapism at its finest; when we arrive at a place, Miss Astrid reminds us, we "are either running from or to something.” The talented Tartes—who are, variously, fine actors, dancers, and acrobats—maintain their part of the charade, appearing only as their alter egos (Scarlet O’Gasm, Veruca Honeyscotch, Rita MenWeep, Penny Dreadfulz, and Madam Rosebud) with no mention of their “real” names in the program.

Accompanied by bouncy, soulful, and brazen music, the women spool and twist their bodies to create meaning and tell stories. And the majority of these stories, of course, whether a soliloquy featuring a lonely Oklahoma girl or a flirtation between two silent-movie stars, arrive at the same skin-baring conclusion.

But showing skin will only get you so far, and the trick of this brand of storytelling, as the Peach Tartes have embraced with moxie and wit, lies in the creative steps you take to reveal yourself. Layered in stockings, camisoles, fringe, and tassels, each performer makes brilliant and often seductive use of creative props. (Take a moment to imagine the possibilities inherent in the broad curves of a liquor bottle or the sharp edges of a shovel.)

Given the group’s penchant for theatricality, it seems no accident that the most polished and entertaining numbers showcase the least amount of skin. At the top of the list is Veruca Honeyscotch’s high-flying routine. Devastated after the abrupt departure of her boyfriend, she removes only her gloves before climbing up two long scarlet curtains that hang from the ceiling. To the brassy, jazzy sounds of Ella Fitzgerald crooning “When I Get Low, I Get High,” Honeyscotch scales the drapes, winding and binding herself before unfurling and bending her body into various breathtaking contortions. She’s coy, commanding, and, remarkably, clothed.

Burlesque is certainly not for everyone, and as a feminist I was on high alert to sniff out any wisp of objectification. Instead, I found myself charmed by the good-natured, almost wholesome, attitude of this dynamic ensemble, who popped with personality and sweetly shrugged off the occasional musical miscue.

The show hurtles to an end all too quickly with a quick reference to the 1929 stock market crash. With its flimsy, uneven structure, the show itself is also something of a tease—a cluster of variety acts dominated by a mid-show raffle and obscured by the clinking of glasses. Still, Peel for Repeal accomplishes a tricky theatrical feat, one just as coveted in 2008 as it was in 1928: it leaves its audience wanting more.

A Spot of Christmas

Like a sweet and spicy shot of eggnog, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s intimate production of A Child’s Christmas in Wales and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas goes down easy, warms your insides, and leaves you wanting more. This mild and merry show is the perfect festive tonic for this often over-commercialized holiday season. Set in a cozy living room—complete with hearth, stockings, and twinkling trees—the show features five energetic performers who bring spirited life to these classic texts. Director and adapter Charlotte Moore has also cleverly interspersed both new and traditional Christmas music within the stories, showcasing the ensemble’s excellent voices and charming personalities.

Seated on five well-worn easy chairs, the performers share storytelling and singing duties. Justin Packard leads off with an animated retelling of Clement Clark Moore’s ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, which is followed by Dylan Thomas’ ruminative memoir A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Thomas, a prolific writer best known for his moody poetry, was born in Wales in 1914 and died suddenly, just days after his thirty-ninth birthday. In this personal work, he chronicles the family’s holiday activities and an eccentric cast of characters and traditions: the tipsy and bawdy aunts, mountains of luscious candy, bratty cousins, the bullies up the road, devious pranks, endless meals, and his uncles' voluminous bellies.

Above all, this text taps into Thomas’ vivid imagination and his overwhelming affection for his childhood. Many of his memories are tinged with a foreboding darkness—an ominous touch from the writer whose own life would come to a tragic and untimely end, making the glimmers of brightness even more poignant.

Together, these nostalgic tales form a lovely collage of a young boy’s sense of Christmas—stories of mischief, mirth, and mayhem. There’s not much narrative arc or suspense, but it’s delightful to hear Thomas’ words set into motion. At times, the carols that interrupt the text are a bit jarring, but they also underscore the joy, hope, and spirit of the season.

Musical director John Bell sits at the piano and has stitched together glorious harmonies for the ensemble, the majority of whom appeared in the Irish Repertory’s revival of Meet Me in St. Louis last December.

Bonnie Fraser played Esther, the Judy Garland role, in that production, and it’s a gift to hear her reprise “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in another radiant, glowing incarnation. Fraser discovers fresh depth and meaning in the well-traveled ballad, and she brings genuine warmth to the production. In one of the show’s highlights, she joins Kerry Conte, another crystal-voiced singer, to duet on a re-tooled version of “Sleigh Ride,” which features clever percussive touches and integrates a few splashy melodies from Stephen Sondheim’s perky pastiche “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” (from the musical Company).

Ashley Robinson infuses his readings with a little boy’s wide-eyed incredulity, and he offers a sleek and stunning performance of “Oh, Holy Night.” The charismatic Joshua Park adds excellent comic flourishes throughout and is especially winning in “I Don’t Want a Lot for Christmas,” a quirky patter song that describes an impossibly lengthy Christmas list. Packard anchors the production and provides solid support throughout.

At a brief 70 minutes, this show is an irresistible aperitif for the holiday season. The program is filled with lyrics from a handful of songs which will likely stick in your head long after you’ve left the theater. The show is a rare opportunity to experience an oral storytelling tradition that transcends our modern-day electronic isolation. It concludes with poignant lyrics that invite the audience into the convivial atmosphere: “Take my hand, tomorrow’s Christmas / All over the land and cross the sea / Take my hand, we’ll all be together / All of our friends, and you and me.”

Doing the Math

Math has never been the sexiest subject, but in David Auburn’s superb play Proof, the study of numbers anchors a fascinating, almost voyeuristic, look at a splintering family. The play nabbed both the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and the Astoria Performing Arts Center has produced an earnest, if not thrilling, revival of this razor-sharp drama. Each potent scene takes place on the back porch of a typical family home in Chicago, and we meet Catherine after midnight on her twenty-fifth birthday, sulky and slugging champagne straight from the bottle as she talks with her father, Robert, a famous and unrivaled mathematician and professor. But what appears to be a typical domestic scene quickly twists when Robert reminds her that his funeral is the following day. The play, like Catherine, hovers alluringly on the cusp of this madness. Is Catherine simply drunk and hallucinating? Or does she resemble her father—who eventually deteriorated into dementia—in more ways than in her prodigious mathematic ability?

Besides her father, who appears both as a ghost and in flashbacks, Catherine is joined by her tightly wound older sister Claire, who flies in from New York for the funeral, and Hal, one of her father’s graduate students. Claire is eager to put things in order, sell the house, and drag Catherine back to New York, while Hal is itching to get his hands on the stacks of notebooks in Robert’s office. Catherine assures him there’s nothing there, but he’s looking for a diamond in the rough—one last stroke of genius from Robert’s faltering faculties. When Hal plucks a potentially groundbreaking proof from the pile, the question of exactly what it is—and who wrote it—throws the trio into further distress.

Auburn deftly positions his characters as if they were numbers in a complex equation, aligning and shifting and repelling them to create explosive conflict. “She’s not my friend, she’s my sister,” says Catherine of the fussy Claire, and the sisters’ tumultuous relationship is particularly riveting. It’s the electrifying push and pull of two diametrically opposed (yet related) personalities: Catherine, who gave up going to college to care for their father, is bitter about her sacrifices and yet shattered by his death, while Claire, jealous of the intellectual aptitude shared by her sister and father, overcompensates by trying to take care of her intractable sister.

In this solemn production, intense musical passages underscore and drive the transitions between the scenes. These original compositions, by Jeffrey Campos, place the rumbling chords of a piano and the moaning of a cello into furious counterpoint—the instruments rub up against each other in both harmonious and dissonant patterns, much like the relationships that percolate in each scene.

Michael P. Kramer contributes yet another fantastic set to APAC (his designs for Picasso at the Lapin Agile and A New Brain were similarly sumptuous), this time creating a cozy yet damaged domestic zone, complete with picture windows and peeling paint. Lighting designer Erik J. Michael adds even more depth to the set, from the warm golden lamplight within the house to the eerie shadows from the trees. Like the bars of a prison cell, these dark slim slivers seem to trap Catherine in her anguished world.

Director Tom Wojtunik also seems to get ensnared—in the rapid-fire delivery of Auburn’s dialogue. He has elicited composed performances from his actors, but in many scenes—particularly the opening father-daughter conversation—the actors trade lines with a breathlessness that effectively locks down emotion and steamrolls over much of the humor. There’s snap and vigor in these pithy exchanges, but they often blot out the dimensionality that makes these characters so interesting.

For example, Catherine’s tough-as-nails exterior is shaded by a very real vulnerability—namely, her fear that she will end up like her father. She resists her sister’s help, but she’s eventually seduced by the goofy Hal, who manages to cut through her spiky shell. As played by Catherine Yeager, however, this Catherine is all blunt edges. Infusing her performance with noxious sarcasm, Yeager turns Catherine into something of a cartoon, rolling her eyes out at the audience after nearly every line. Her most poignant moments come in a flashback in which she tenderly cares for her father—here, she finds the varied layers that would give Catherine much-needed complexity in the other scenes.

Catia Ojeda turns in a poised and refreshingly witty performance as Claire, and Richard Vernon makes a believable, if slightly too easygoing, Robert. (One gets the feeling that the nutty professor would be a bit more idiosyncratic.) Richard D. Busser fares best as the industrious Hal; he brings a winning, loose-limbed charm to the nerdy student who is determined to be cool, at least cool enough to impress his advisor’s brilliant daughter.

At its best, Proof peers in on family strife with the irresistible intimacy and immediacy of eavesdropping; when these actors stop “performing” and allow Auburn’s writing to take fire, their charged conversations transform their lives, and the math, into compelling—even sexy—equations.

Glamour in a Gumshoe

From the wholesome adventures of Nancy Drew to the neo-noir high-school high jinks of TV’s Veronica Mars, the girl gumshoe has carved out a solid niche in popular culture. In Kelly Link’s fantastical short story The Girl Detective, the title sleuth doesn’t have a perky name—adept at solving tricky cases and nabbing criminals, the Girl Detective is on the hunt for her missing mother, whose name (she suspects) may very well be the same as her own. And to say it out loud might just be bad luck. Under the inspired vision of director and adapter Bridgette Dunlap, the Ateh Theater Group has revived its acclaimed production of The Girl Detective for the Crown Point Festival. As in its 2005 adaptation of Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (another collection of surrealist short stories), The Girl Detective presents an enchanted dreamscape filled with charged ideas, vivid colors, intriguing premises, and precious little solid ground. Dunlap has an acute eye and an undeniable talent for riffing on the bold, eclectic, and downright bizarre; even when this production loses a bit of its steam, it still keeps us looking for what might be just around the next corner.

The production blares to life in a colorful montage of bodies writhing to a jazzy, frenetic beat. The Girl Detective (the haunting Kathryn Ekblad, in a pretty blue dress and headband that evoke Alice in Wonderland) gracefully breaks up fights, returns purses to their rightful owners, and generally makes the world right.

But all is not right in her own world. Ignoring her father’s pleas, the Girl Detective has stopped eating. Instead, she visits—and devours—people’s dreams. Slipping through the subconscious world, she’s on the lookout for her mother, who vanished when she was young. Is her mother dead? Or on vacation? And why won’t anyone speak of her? When she gets wind of a story about tap-dancing bank robbers, the Girl Detective suddenly feels like she might be on the right track.

As they create designer Emily French’s appropriately minimalist sets, the energetic ensemble scurries on and off the stage, and it is through their direct address that we learn the most about the Girl Detective, in both what she is and what she is not. “The Girl Detective doesn’t care for fiction,” one character remarks. But, “she feeds her goldfish,” adds another.

Still, despite this accumulation of random facts—and the insights of the Guy Detective, who sits in a tree to “detect” the Girl Detective—the wispy central character remains mysterious and hazy, as does the plot. The story extends from “real” life into the underworld, but there’s not much to distinguish these settings (which may be the point). Ultimately, the Girl Detective’s quest gets a bit lost in the weird and wonderful tapestry that surrounds her.

Dunlap provides an often captivating animation of Link’s story, and she crams a vibrant assortment of styles—including tap and swing dancing—into the narrative. These sequences are polished and pulsating, but they often linger too long, and the overall pacing of the show drags at times. Ill-placed, shadowy lighting further obscures the production.

Clearly, the ever-elusive Girl Detective, that master of disguise, is meant to be a metaphor for our search for what we’ve lost. But the story—and this production—doesn’t have enough punch or snap to jolt us out of our apathy. It does, however, form a lovely, if somewhat spacey, meditation on loss, which is becoming a familiar theme on New York stages, from The Civilians’ pithy musical Gone Missing to the lyrical grace of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. These productions, along with The Girl Detective, explore loss from stylized, wacky angles—here’s hoping they ultimately find their way to more solid ground.

Poise and Prejudice

When staged on stage and screen, the stiff, formal dances that anchor many of Jane Austen's novels pull the characters through elliptical shapes that turn and revolve, threading them through various configurations and couplings. Hands (barely) touch and gazes (intensely) lock, but eventually—in a coy foreshadowing of the ebullient conclusion—everyone ends up with the person to whom he or she is best suited. For the most part, Emma sticks to the standard Austen formula: the heroine circles around her somewhat inscrutable true love, the requisite pratfalls ensue, yet all is resolved in the end. Joel Alden's musical reinvention of Emma (a selection of this year's New York Musical Theater Festival) is, for the most part, an enormously satisfying success. Briskly directed by Terry Berliner, the first act zips along with a graceful economy that would have made Austen proud, but in the second act, when the knotted conflicts begin to unwind, the action becomes a bit bloated. Still, an exquisite cast—led by the enthralling Leah Horowitz in the title role—makes this latest bit of Austen entertainment a delectable treat, especially for die-hard Austen lovers.

Like many of Austen's best-loved heroines, Emma is a woman ahead of her time: intelligent, witty, and fully capable of "forming her own opinions." What distinguishes the formidable Miss Woodhouse from the rest of the lot is her self-anointed gift for matchmaking. After successfully pairing off her governess, Emma takes the orphaned, lower-class Harriet under her wing. Through lessons in "posture, poise, and patience," she is determined to transform Harriet from country bumpkin into a fitting candidate for "a gentleman's wife." But Emma, so confident in reading the romantic patterns of others, is unable to see how she herself fits into the mix. She advises Harriet to pursue the solicitous clergyman Mr. Elton, while she sets her sights on the rakish Frank Churchill. Of course, things don't turn out as planned, and her old family friend Mr. Knightley hovers in the wings, patiently waiting out Emma's games so that he might make a proposition of his own.

Alden's score is well suited to his Austen endeavor—the songs are charming, if melodically repetitive, and they spool out harmlessly like the revolving wheel on a player-piano. He's written some nice harmonies for the strong-voiced cast, and he gives Horowitz ample opportunity to show off her floaty, silvery high notes in Emma's many solos.

But, without a doubt, the strongest music comes in the more animated characters' songs. As Emma's endearingly dim friend Miss Bates, Terry Palasz turns in a masterful comic performance in the peppy patter song "Jane Fairfax Wrote a Letter" (punctuated by the rhythmic snoring of her elderly mother, Mrs. Bates).

Likewise, the defiant "A Lady Stands Before You" is a spectacular showcase for the fantastic Kara Boyer. She brings such warmth and personality to the ever-agreeable Harriet that you never stop rooting for her from the moment she enters the stage. As the dependable Mr. Knightley, John Patrick Moore gives a refreshingly understated performance. Only Jesse Lawder and Ben Roseberry, as the sought-after Churchill and Elton, push the comedy schtick a bit too far.

It's quite a feat that Horowitz manages to hold her own among the superlative supporting players, and she makes the perfect Emma. A strong, fearless actress, she enacts Emma's cunning schemes with a subtle smirk and an artfully cocked eyebrow.

The spare production features clever props and costumes, including miniature houses that double as trunks. Berliner's direction is appropriately cheeky at times, with winks toward more modern conventions. I did find the anachronism of the men's costumes—jeans with period jackets and boots—a bit distracting.

As the calamities are slowly ironed out, the production loses the crispness of Austen's prose, and certain fuzzy plot points could be more clearly explicated in the last half-hour. Specifically, the secrets behind Churchill's bad reputation and the consequences of Emma's bad behavior toward Miss Bates are never clearly articulated.

Although I've read Austen's novels (and seen many of the films), this was my first time watching a stage adaptation, and there's much to be said for the experience. The live animation allows us to witness the full sting of Emma's grossly entitled behavior—her self-serving social conscience, her rather pompous demeanor, and her attempts to control Harriet ("She's almost the lady she has always wanted to be"). As a musical, Emma makes us privy to the visceral drama of class distinctions that, even through the alchemy of romance, stand firm. In Austen, personalities may clash and still make fine matches, but social spheres and pounds per year too often determine whom you can dance with.

A Touch of Frost

The creators of the zany musical The Yellow Wood have nabbed Robert Frost's classic poem "The Road Not Taken," splashed it with vivid surrealism and a quirky score, and spliced it into the life of an insecure Korean-American teenager. Sound a bit confusing? In their admirable attempt to give musical life to Frost's hallowed abstractions, Michelle Elliott and Danny Larsen have constructed a frothy surrealist show that eventually meanders into meaninglessness. Even before he heads off to school, Adam is smothered by choices. Will he take the time to memorize that poem for his English class? Will he sit with his little sister at lunch? Will he take his Ritalin? The answer to the last question, in particular, makes "all the difference" to Adam's day, and from the moment he hits school, reality dovetails with the bizarre. Are these dream-like sequences, which connect loosely to stanzas from Frost's poem, induced by Ritalin withdrawal? Or are we merely witnessing the fragmented thoughts of an ordinary, overly imaginative boy?

Frequently overwrought and definitely overlong, The Yellow Wood, part of this year's New York Musical Theater Festival, doesn't provide satisfying answers to these questions; nor are the questions posed very clearly. Instead, the scenes and songs unfold like a hazy (and lazy) mirage, grounded only by a handful of pitch-perfect performances from a terrific ensemble cast.

As the fidgety, troubled Adam, Jason Tam is a bundle of charm and energy. When the lights go up, he immediately explodes into a fiery monologue, which evokes the athleticism of the skateboard he clutches. His testy relationship with his overachieving but lonely sister, Gwen (the outstanding Yura Takara), is the production's highlight—their antagonistic relationship is lined (just barely) with love, providing a much-needed web of realism in this overly abstract plot. And as Adam's buddy, the irreverent Casserole, Randy Blair brings down the house (and the school cafeteria) with the powerhouse song "Tater Tot Casserole."

The Yellow Wood finally drowns in the many questions it poses. Why does Adam deny his Korean heritage? Will he become class president and lead the "nerds" to control the school? And as for the production itself, is it an anti-Ritalin tract, a celebration of overactive imaginations, or a theatrical experiment? By the time the piece ends, in a spate of warm and fuzzy self-empowerment, the oversimplified, reductive message only makes the rest of the show more confusing.

In the program notes, director and producer B.D. Wong writes that he saw the show as "a particularly psychedelic outlet to my rampant creative impulses." In his New York directing debut, Wong, an accomplished performer on stage and screen, clearly revels in this wacky material. He makes inspired use of yellow umbrellas and less successful use of an overhead projector in the spare production, but even clever technical twists are not enough to rescue this murky project. In this case, some roads are better left untraveled.

Heartland Song

Bizarre antics saturate the New York International Fringe Festival, but one particularly brazen act will likely perplex and intrigue New Yorkers more than any nudity or profanity. Feast your eyes, dear cosmopolitan readers, on the simple joys of hay baling. Direct from the heartland, Farmer Song: The Musical is a charming, down-home venture set in Iowa and delivered by an authentic Iowan cast, some of whom, according to the program, are or have been farmers. Although it suffers from sluggish direction and the acting restraints of many of its cast members, Farm Song offers an important message cushioned by an endearing love story.

As explained in the program, the "farm crisis" swept the Midwest in the 1980s. Interest rates soared, land values dropped, and the resulting debt left many farmers struggling to get by. The show opens with the auction of Frank and Ruth Whitby's farm property. Despite the meager odds, their daughter Becky and her husband Carl decide to make their future in farming, and the musical chronicles their attempts to make a living.

Supported by a thumping three-piece band (fiddle, bass, and guitar), Joe Hynek's pleasant score—a blend of bluegrass, country, and folk—conjures up dusty roads and rusty sunsets. His lyrics are sometimes awkwardly phrased ("I wish that the wealth in our country was more spread across"), but certain songs, like the yearning ballad "Wild Rose," leave you wanting more.

The production plods along steadily in want of more focused direction. Conversations often meander and trail off inexplicably, and sharp attention to the show's central conflicts would certainly pep up its book. Stronger direction would also benefit the cast members, who—while earnest and plucky—turn in extremely uneven performances. The dissonant acting styles veer from naturalistic to presentational to completely bombastic. Still, Hynek and Amy Burgmaier (as Becky) generate sweet chemistry as the young couple. And Joel Perkins, the banker, gives a thrilling performance of the bluesy "Honest, Stubborn, and Simple," a melancholy ode to hardworking farmers. Perkins has such a genuine presence and lovely, easy voice that I found myself wishing for more verses.

If its melodramatic tangles are often laughable, the crucial subject matter that Farmer Song addresses is certainly not. Kudos to this hard-working troupe for trucking in to give New Yorkers a taste of something more wholesome and no less incisive than the usual artsy offerings. The Fringe is all about eclecticism and daring, and Pumptown Productions is working to redefine its borders on a new frontier.

Bumming in the 'Burg

The saucy hipsters of Brooklyn take the stage in Williamsburg! The Musical, a raucous spoof of the thrumming young neighborhood. Writers Nicola Barber, Will Brumley, Brooke Fox, and Kurt Gellersted have slathered a formulaic story with the irony and zest of this fashion-forward, overly intellectual crowd, replete with sarcasm and skinny jeans. The story centers around Piper Paris, a newcomer on the block. She moves into a crumbling apartment building and discovers that her Polish landlady is being threatened by carnivorous real estate scavenger Amina Snatch, a Cruella DeVil with a perky black bob. Despondent on her 30th birthday, Piper decides to end her life by leaping off the Williamsburg Bridge. Shlomo, a cheerful dry cleaner (and Hassidic Jew), talks her down, and the two begin an unlikely, clunky, yet endearing courtship. As Shlomo and Piper fall in love, Snatch continues to circle the neighborhood, turning unsuspecting hipsters into zombies to peddle the accoutrements of her slick company.

Any New Yorker who's in the know will appreciate jokes about the L train's inefficiency, the changing demographics and gentrification of the city's neighborhoods, and the exhausting quest for cool. Although a few of the winks are conveyed a bit too broadly, Gellersted and Fox have created an infectious, catchy score that frequently hits its emotional mark. One example is "Craigslist Hook-Up/Missed Connections," which pokes fun at the desperate language of personal ads while also capturing the loneliness of living in a city where casual encounters are plenty but intimate relationships are few.

Director and choreographer Deborah Wolfson keeps the action charging across the stage, but the tone often diverges wildly between earnestness and irony. It's often unclear whether this is a celebration, critique, or loving spoof (which I suspect it is) of this neighborhood. Thankfully, Alison Guinn (as the petulant Piper) and Evan Shyer (as the charming Shlomo) make their roles and relationship crystal clear. Without poking fun at themselves, they embody their characters with pluck and sincerity. Their supercharged power duet, "We Can't Look (And We Can't Touch)," is one of the production's most electric moments.

It's a messy life in Williamsburg, and the opening number begins with the silhouette of a frenetically dancing hipster—soon, another joins in, until there is a thrashing mob of hipsters, moving in rhythm. This assimilative movement betrays a culture in which its members don't (but clearly do!) care what other people think, and this cutthroat race to be the hippest of them all creates a visibly homogeneous human landscape. An entertaining trip to a nifty neighborhood (no subway ride required), Williamsburg! is a production struggling to figure out what it wants to say.

Note: This production is part of the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival.

Showstoppers

An explosion of silver sequins and jazz hands, the first act of Show Choir! The Musical is an effervescent, high-kicking delight. The story of the rise and fall (and rise?) of a nationally renowned show choir, the Symphonic Sensations, this joyous production is an affectionate send-up of that staple of so many American high schools: a hormonal ensemble of singing, dancing, and over-emoting teenagers. With snappy and jubilant choreography from director Gary Slavin, the material is also an ingenious premise for a theatergoing crowd, in which so many viewers are automatically in on the joke. Many future thespians willingly participate in or are subjected to "the art of show choir." (Full disclosure: my Nebraska group was called the Choraleers. And yes, I loved the show.)

Creators Mark McDaniels and Donald Garverick penned the book, music, and lyrics, and they have cleverly parroted the high-octane melodies and rhythms of show choirs into winning production numbers and engaging solos. They skillfully capture the simplistic sheen of lightweight four-part harmonies, as well as the American Idol-inspired trend toward pseudo power ballads.

They also deftly dramatize the dynamics of quirky teenage personalities. In a sense, Show Choir! works like A Chorus Line in reverse. When Jake wakes up from a silver-spangled dream, he is determined to make this line of dancing bodies a reality. And one by one, an initial group of shimmering performers separates into distinct personalities. The excellent cast turns in pitch-perfect performances—each ensemble member creates a memorable character, and they are well supported by Brian Michael Flanagan, as the enterprising Jake, and Dena Cubbin, as the sweetly ambitious composer, Monica. Michelle Millerick and Marcos Sanchez also provide exceptional comic work in a grab bag of character roles.

Jammed with too much emotional weight, the second act fumbles a bit, and the action kinks when it becomes overly (and overtly) earnest. Watching the downward spiral isn't as satisfying as the upward climb, and one wishes the writers would also extend their pithy energy into the more sobering material.

Framed by a Behind the Music-esque documentary that takes place in 2012, the group staggers to fame in chronological scenes, interspersed with quirky interviews and reflections. That a show choir could ever capture the cultural imagination of the American public seems preposterous, at best, but I wouldn't call this show a "spoof"—given the amazingly enthusiastic audience response, this is clearly (cue jazz hands) a celebration of the lovable geek in all of us.

Note: This production is part of the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival.