Comedy

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The Confession of Lily Dare

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The Confession of Lily Dare

It’s been quite a while since Charles Busch, the playwright and performer who specializes in sending up old movie tropes in works like The Divine Sister and Red Scare on Sunset, has had a show that he deemed ready for review, so The Confession of Lily Dare counts as a successful return to form. It’s a loopy satire of film melodramas about fallen women, although its most prominent forbear is Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first performed in 1902). Few performers can discern Hollywood camp as well as Busch: he has even provided commentary on DVD releases of The Bad Seed and Dead Ringer.

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Tumacho

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Tumacho

Tumacho, the Clubbed Thumb production now playing a return engagement at the Connelly Theater, begins with a chorus of performers onstage. Their faces are lit hauntingly in red as they sing a solemn tale, introducing how “hope has left/from a town bereft” and the need for “lasting peace.” The scene should be a downtrodden one—except it isn’t these human performers that are supposed to be doing the singing. Instead, it’s the saguaro cactus puppets (complete with Muppet-like faces) each singer wields that are narrating this haggard tale. This grizzled silliness comes to define Tumacho, a portrait of the Wild West where characters combat ennui, hopelessness, and impending doom—without ever taking themselves too seriously.

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Dracula

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Dracula

In Kate Hamill’s adaption of Bram Stoker’s Dracula at Classic Stage Company, fighting against vampires becomes synonymous with fighting the patriarchy. With Sarna Lapine directing (she also directed Hamill’s Little Women) and a stellar cast, Hamill’s Dracula manages to be hilarious without descending into farce, perhaps because so much of the humor is in the service of a feminist reshaping of Stoker’s novel, which turns the struggle against vampires into a struggle for self-individuation and self-determination.

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Happy Birthday Doug

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Happy Birthday Doug

Drew Droege made a big splash with his 2017 hit Bright Colors and Bold Patterns, in which his main character, Gerry, attended a gay wedding whose intendeds had asked on their invitation that nobody wear bright colors or bold patterns. Droege’s solo performance as Gerry let one know the other characters through his reactions to them. Now he is back with another solo show keyed to an important event: Happy Birthday Doug. And once again, he is making mincemeat of stereotypes in the gay world.

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The Sabbath Girl

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The Sabbath Girl

Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl, produced by the Penguin Rep and currently at 59e59, is an attempt at a throwback romantic comedy, a story of two lonely souls from different cultural worlds who find each other in the big city and forge ahead in the name of love despite all the obstacles.

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Romeo and Bernadette

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Romeo and Bernadette

It’s rare that a musical synthesizes genres and influences from popular and high culture and succeeds at integrating them all, but Romeo and Bernadette does. With book and lyrics by Mark Saltzman, and music adapted from traditional Italian melodies, this show incorporates elements of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, with a bit of The Sopranos to boot. Northern vs. southern Italian (Sicilian) class prejudices and contemporary renditions of classical Italian operas are thrown into the mix for good measure.

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Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation

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Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation

It has been five years since the last edition of Forbidden Broadway, titled Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging. (It always did.) The long hiatus, however, hasn’t dulled the ruthlessness of Gerard Alessandrini, the Drama Desk–winning lyricist and director who satirizes a range of theater shows and foibles, often using classic show music with his own deft lyrics. And he has probably never been more ruthless than in Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation. Smart, vicious and superbly cast, it’s sublime.

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Little Shop of Horrors

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Little Shop of Horrors

Walter Kerr’s New York Times review of the original production of Little Shop of Horrors in 1982 started with a bloviating discourse on special effects’ ruination of good theater and its threat to the jobs of live actors. Then he added: “[T]he lyrics aren’t really witty enough to keep us eagerly attentive while the Equity membership is disappearing.” In our post–King Kong world, though, time has had its revenge. His clueless review is now an embarrassing read, while Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s creation has an unassailable stature.

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Playwrights Horizons is currently housing an unexpected thing in New York City: conservatives openly discussing their beliefs. And liberal New Yorkers are, and should be, flocking to it. Providing a respite from the shock-jock conservatism of Donald Trump and Fox News, Will Arbery’s new play Heroes of the Fourth Turning puts Catholic conservatism onstage in all of its messiness and nuance, daring its audience to listen to what the other side has to say—and maybe even making them care about the characters doing the talking.

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Round Table

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Round Table

Liba Vaynberg’s Round Table is a small play with huge aspirations. Focusing on a pair of nerdy lovers who meet through an online dating app, Vaynberg’s work is at heart a sentimental and sweet romantic comedy. Interspersed throughout, however, are scenes inspired by the legend of King Arthur as well as monologues that break the fourth wall to address heady quandaries about unrequited love, self-idealization, and mortality. To the credit of the winning cast and fleet direction, the intimate production at 59E59 Theaters does not collapse under its own ungainliness.

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Caesar and Cleopatra

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Caesar and Cleopatra

David Staller, the artistic director of the Gingold Group, has made his mission to celebrate the plays of George Bernard Shaw. To that end, the group offers readings of Shaw plays monthly and hosts discussions about him. One play each year receives a fully staged production. The current offering, Caesar and Cleopatra, is a rarity. Although it’s interesting, it’s less satisfying than, for instance, its low-budget Heartbreak House was last season.

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Wives

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Wives

Jaclyn Backhaus’s Wives, at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Margot Bordelon, is a raucous, funny, well-acted, and well-intentioned production that suffers from intermittent heavy-handedness and whose four distinct parts don’t fully cohere. The final of the four vignettes that comprise the 80-minute play tries to wrangle the previous three stories, which originated as ideas for three separate plays, into a harmonious symmetry, but it only muddies the waters so that Wives ends up feeling like partially thought-out ideas awaiting fuller exploration.

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Eureka Day

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Eureka Day

Jonathan Spector’s new play Eureka Day is the unusual satire that takes aim at left-wing politics. It is perhaps the most notable rare bird of its kind since Jonathan Reynolds’s wonderful Stonewall Jackson’s House, which appeared more than 20 years ago. Spector sets his play in Berkeley, Calif., a town whose radical politics have put it at the forefront of social change yet also earned it the nickname Berserkeley.  

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Tech Support

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Tech Support

Time travel. It’s such a promising stage subject, why haven’t playwrights tackled it more? A chance to compare and contrast eras and attitudes, to explore the progress we’ve made and what we’ve lost. Debra Whitfield’s little comedy Tech Support attempts all of the above, throwing in some #MeToo concerns and pointed observations about our inability to keep up with the galloping pace of technological change. It’s a friendly, well-meaning effort. And it’s frustratingly low-impact.

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Forbidden Broadway to return

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The award-winning Forbidden Broadway will return to New York after a five-year absence. Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation will appear for a 10-week run at the Triad Theater (158 West 72nd St.) beginning Sept. 18 and run through Nov. 30. Opening night is Oct. 16. Gerard Alessandrini’s continuing series of Forbidden Broadway entries has been spoofing theater seasons since 1982; it has won seven Drama Desk awards and a special Tony Award since its inception. The new edition will castigate Hadestown, Moulin Rouge, the recent Oklahoma! revival, The Ferryman, Tootsie, Beetlejuice, Frozen, the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, Dear Evan Hansen, and What the Constitution Means to Me, along with stars such as Ben Platt, Billy Porter, Santino Fontana, Karen Olivo, and Alex Brightman. For more information, visit www.forbiddenbroadway.com.

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Make Believe

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Make Believe

Bess Wohl’s new comedy Make Believe portrays a quartet of Gen-X siblings at two points of life-changing family crisis. The first is in 1980, when the Conlees, two sisters and two brothers, are small children. The second is 32 years later. In both instances, the kids are gathered—it’s tempting to say “barricaded”—in a gargantuan nursery at the top of their parents’ luxe suburban home.

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Midsummer: A Banquet

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Midsummer: A Banquet

Food might not be the primary theme one would look for in Shakespeare, but Food of Love and Third Rail Projects have hit upon it, with pleasantly surprising results, in Midsummer: A Banquet at Café Fae, an unusual performance venue just south of Union Square. From the title it’s easy to guess that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the production; it’s not easy to predict the rest.

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The Wizard of Oz

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The Wizard of Oz

Harlem Repertory’s The Wizard of Oz is a theatrical romp accompanied by a lively jazz trio. Directed and choreographed by Keith Lee Grant, themes of self-discovery, connection to family and facing one’s fears are well tackled and performed by a wonderful multicultural cast. They bring to life the events that propel the Kansas schoolgirl, Dorothy, on a magical mystery tour as she follows the yellow brick road.

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Two’s a Crowd

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Two’s a Crowd

Rita Rudner is not quite a household name, but when she shows up in Two’s a Crowd, the new little musical for which she cowrote the book with her husband, Martin Bergman, and in which she stars, she commands entrance applause. If you don’t know who she is, here’s the scoop: The comedienne first showed up on 1980s late-night talk shows, usually Letterman or Johnny Carson, selling the persona of the modern, put-upon woman—frustrated with technology, female powerlessness, and men. She had a good run with it, wrote some books, and moved from network TV mostly to Las Vegas, where she has been steadily performing for almost two decades.

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Reborning

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Reborning

Reality Curve Theatre of Vancouver is making its first visit to New York City with Zayd Dohrn’s early play Reborning. Ten years ago, when Dohrn was unknown, this unsettling, if far-fetched, comedy-drama was part of the Summer Play Festival at the Public Theatre. Since that time, the playwright, who heads the graduate dramatic-writing program at Northwestern University, has penned a number of provocative yet non-preachy scripts that explore social issues through clashes—always fierce, sometimes violent—among recognizable characters.

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