There have been plays affirming LGBTQ people’s fitness as parents. There have been plays where child characters are played by puppets, and stories in which a child who feels different identifies as some type of animal. Boxing has been used as a metaphor, and there have been productions with lots of props and scenery that are upended by the final scene—one that comes to mind, Blasted, was staged at Soho Rep, whose new show, Wolf Play, includes all these things.
After all those months with no live performance, it’s heartening not only to have theaters back up and running but also to see companies picking up right where they left off. Like the Civilians, who are finally getting to mount the New York premiere of Whisper House. The show had been set to begin performances of the Duncan Sheik/Kyle Jarrow musical on the very day in March 2020 when all theater was shut down.
Take a slew of New Jersey jokes, opening notes played on a ukulele, onstage ice skating, songs about scurvy and parasitic infection, and a tuba and a mailbox being lugged across the stage, and you’ve got some idea of what the delightful new musical Kimberly Akimbo has to offer. For good measure, there’s a lead performance by redoubtable Tony winner Victoria Clark.
As if the pandemic shutdown weren’t enough, the York Theatre Company was forced out of its longtime home last January by a water main break that flooded buildings on its Midtown block. The company has relocated, at least for the foreseeable future, to the Theatre at St. Jean Baptiste on the Upper East Side.
You may remember Soho Playhouse before the pandemic. Located in an antebellum row house just off Sixth Avenue, it often featured solo and Fringe Festival plays in its careworn mainstage theater or cabaret downstairs, its stairwell adorned with framed posters of shows that had played there.
Many an autobiographical solo show has been born from hardship— growing up closeted, say, or having an intolerable job, or living through a war. Lori Brown Mirabal’s jumping-off point is the complete opposite. It’s right there in her show’s title, Charmed Life: From Soul Singing to Opera Star.
When writer Rex Pickett was trying to get his novel Sideways published, he submitted it to film studios as well as book publishers. He has now adapted the novel as a play, but the story’s cinematic nature works against it on stage. Because there are so many scene changes, scenery is simplified to tables and chairs (and the occasional counter or bed) that can be hastily reconfigured to represent various homes, bars, restaurants and outdoor locales. But Sideways has such a strong sense of place—the Oscar-winning 2004 movie fueled a tourism boom for California’s Santa Ynez Valley, and a map of film locations is still available on the Santa Barbara visitors bureau website—that it’s shortchanged by many scenes looking similar and the same backdrop, a lone tree, remaining for the entire play. What scenic designer David L. Arsenault has created is okay (the multiple levels and a faux hot tub work well); it’s just not enough to evoke the landscapes and idea of traveling.
The solo play A Sign of the Times stars Javier Muñoz as a former physics professor who now works as a traffic controller near a construction site. Sounds of vehicles zooming past, slowing down or screeching to a halt are heard frequently, and Muñoz occasionally speaks with their unseen drivers.
Rules of Desire is the first new play by William Mastrosimone (Extremities) to premiere in New York in some time. And this 90-minute, three-character piece, directed by William Roudebush, is a head-scratcher: Whatever points it makes get muddled by ambiguous character development, a far-fetched setup and one long scene that gives new meaning to “toxic masculinity.”
Arriving during this primary season like a theatrical rejoinder to all the Democratic hand-wringing over the working class, Paris is an honest portrayal of people who need every dollar they earn. Or it’s a sly commentary on how race figures into a seemingly nonracist environment (i.e., one full of “nice” white people). Or it’s just a well-performed and engaging workplace dramedy. However it’s viewed, this sharply written, superbly acted new play provides theatergoers with a jolt from winter doldrums.
Is there any way to review a show called Emojiland besides 🆕🎶📢🎨⚡? That is to say, this new musical is loud and colorful and has lots of energy, but some parts work better than others. (Hmm, there doesn’t seem to be an emoji for that last thought.)
Toward the end of Harry Townsend’s Last Stand, a play that’s set in a New England lake house and revolves around the strained relationship between an aging father and his adult child, a door is opened and the call of a loon is heard. It immediately brings to mind On Golden Pond (“The loons, Norman!”), a play that’s set in a New England lake house and revolves around the strained relationship between an aging father and his adult child. This association doesn’t do Harry Townsend any favors, though, since its parent-child relationship is not as well developed as the one in On Golden Pond and, consequently, the conflict and emotions feel forced.
We are all connected. Nothing is random; things happen for a reason. Be nice to your siblings. These are some ideas one might discern from Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee, but to say the play is a reflection on these—or any other—themes would be far too generous to this massive misfire that tells three different stories, with barely a sentence of realistic-sounding dialogue among them.
Not so much a “he said/she said” as a “he pontificates,” MsTrial marks the playwriting debut of Dep Kirkland, a former prosecutor who obviously has insights to share about the legal system. It’s ironic, then, that a scene set during a legal proceeding is where the play goes awry.
You wouldn’t think people could forget the name Reality Winner, but with the constant stream of news related to Russian election interference over the past 2½ years, the early chapter involving Winner has been largely forgotten. People could watch Is This a Room thinking it is a fictional, or at least fictionalized, encounter between a young woman and the FBI agents who have come to interrogate her. And that’s the beauty of this show, whose script comes verbatim from an FBI transcript of June 3, 2017, the day Winner—a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who’d been working for a national-security contractor in Georgia—was arrested for leaking classified information to the media.
