Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
If you think puppet shows are for kids, think again. Bill’s 44th is a comic puppet play for adults with original recorded music that makes one marvel at the sheer inventiveness of the human imagination. Co-created by Andy Manjuck and Dorothy James, this wordless theater piece invites one to reflect on the inescapable reality of ageing and loneliness.
What happens when the adults of a town ignore the wisdom of their children? That’s the haunting question underlying Amina Henry’s new adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Directed by Michole Biancosino, Henry’s play retools the myth, emphasizing the natural virtues possessed by children. Replete with song, dance, and a 10-member ensemble who double as rats, this take on the legend reveals surprising depths.
Whether the 2004 low-budget horror film Saw has left enough of a cultural footprint on the public to warrant a musical parody is for audiences to decide. Saw the Musical, a send-up of the original Saw, with a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and music and lyrics by Patrick Spencer and Anthony De Angelis, certainly doesn’t provide any evidence of it.
This time of year it may seem that every holiday tradition from around the world has been commodified in the United States, but one that hasn’t caught on is the British panto, a comic family entertainment widely produced throughout the U.K. at Christmastime. Happenstance Theater, the Washington, D.C.–based troupe behind Adrift, doesn’t name panto as one of the many influences on its quirky and clever show, but there are similarities: a vaudevillian essence, British accents, physical comedy, musical interludes, commedia dell’arte–type characters, audience participation, elaborate costumes, a touch of the ribald.
Dav Pilkey has endeared himself to children—and adults—through his graphic novels and multiple hit comic-book series. Beginning in 1990, he created the bestselling series Cat Kid Comic Club. Now, playwright and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila (best known for his Drama Desk Award-winning performance in the musical Some Like It Hot) and composer Brad Alexander have adapted the series into Cat Kid Comic Club The Musical.
When the fourth season of the Netflix hit Stranger Things premiered this past summer, it seemed like the show’s popularity had reached its zenith. From pushing a certain decades-old Kate Bush song back onto the Billboard Hot 100 to causing fangirls to rave online about the magnetism of breakout star Jamie Campbell Bower as Stranger’s newest baddie, the show’s powerful reach could rival the telekinetic abilities of one of the series’ other iconic characters, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). So it’s only natural that a musical parody of the show about superpowered teens, demonic beings and alternate dimensions would be the next step—here called Stranger Sings!, of course.
André & Dorine, a masked drama and physical theater show from the Spanish company Kulunka Teatro, presents the life of a family as they confront a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s for the matriarch, Dorine. This heartfelt play captures the frustration and roller-coaster of emotions that families undergo when caring for a family member with the disease.
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.
Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec explores the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the immensely talented 19th-century French painter and printmaker, using the sidewalks, doorways, and windows of Greenwich Village as the setting for a “pandemic-friendly theatrical experience.” Live performance, puppetry, music and a short black-and-white film combine to help the site-specific production tell the story of the artist who captured the seamier side of the Belle Époque.
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.
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.
Cirque du Soleil’s latest extravaganza, Luzia, draws on a Mexican theme for its storyline, but in a way that proves more accessible than some of the earlier productions. It’s subtitled “A Waking Dream of Mexico,” and under that guise it presents the feats of strength, agility and clowning with less obligation to a plot that can feel murky. An announcer sets it all up: he is a pilot of Flight 2016 to Mexico; the audience is in the passenger seats; and as the plane takes off, the fliers are meant to relax and doze into an in-flight fantasia.
The Ensemble for the Romantic Century puts together hybrids of theater, classical music—both vocal and instrumental—and readings of letters or diaries to create its productions. For Hans Christian Andersen, its latest offering, the group has increased the hybrid entertainment by adding puppetry for its story of the life of the great Danish fairy-tale writer: marionettes, hand puppets, and some that are much larger.
Made in China is a decidedly adult musical from Wakka Wakka, a New York–based theater company that prides itself on challenging “the boundaries of the imagination” with “bold, unique, and unpredictable” entertainments. This visually engaging production is performed by a host of black-veiled puppeteers manipulating intricately crafted bunraku-style puppets designed by Kirjan Waage. The script, by Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock (“with help from the Made in China Ensemble”), pushes the boundaries of puppet earthiness with a vengeance—it features puppet nudity, a puppet performing ordinarily private bodily functions, puppet copulation (both human and canine), and a puppet-dragon that has a mind-blowing digestive system.
There are only so many ways to describe the Jessica Scott's avant-garde Ship of Fools, currently at HERE Arts Center. On the one hand, it is a unique combination of original music, puppetry, video, and live action, yet on the other it comes across as disjointed and meaningless—imagine Disney’s “It’s a Small World” born in the 1960s Haight-Ashbury. The audience is seated on a platform that moves left or right, and sometimes rotates completely, giving the performers time to set up the next vignette on the perimeter.
Fans of the hit television sitcom The Golden Girls can now experience Blanche (Cat Greenfield), Rose (Arlee Chadwick), Dorothy (Michael LaMasa) and Sophia (Emmanuelle Zeesman) all over again. But this time these lovely ladies have returned as puppets in Jonathan Rockefeller’s That Golden Girls Show!—A Puppet Parody. Capitalizing on moments from the original television show for loyal fans is where this production shines. Nostalgia quickly sets in upon entering the theater. Scenic and lighting designer David Goldstein marvelously transforms the stage into the women’s popular 1985 Miami living room and kitchen.
It’s rare to see anything remotely like Torry Bend’s The Paper Hat Game: a seamless and brilliant performance collage of live puppets, small-scale set models, a variety of video modalities, intricate soundscape, and more. The delicacy, virtuosity, and utter freshness of this avant-garde theater work at the 3LD Art & Technology Center will delight you long after you’ve left the theater. Unselfconsciously Dada, surrealist, naturalist and psychodrama by turns, it is also none of those things: something utterly new.
The thing most everyone loves about birds is their ability to fly, yet one of the first things we do is catch them and put them in a cage. The same can be said of love. Told without a single spoken word, Butterfly, currently at 59E59 Theaters, unwraps a story of a kite-maker who is courted by a customer but is smitten with a butterfly catcher. The hour-long production is rich with symbolism, European and Asian sensibilities, and movement choreographed to haunting original music.
