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Marc Miller

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The Gospel According to Heather

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The Gospel According to Heather

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

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Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain

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Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain

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

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Crumbs from the Table of Joy

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Crumbs from the Table of Joy

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

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The Rewards of Being Frank

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The Rewards of Being Frank

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

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Becomes a Woman

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Becomes a Woman

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

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Indictment Excitement

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Indictment Excitement

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

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The Near Disaster of Jasper & Casper

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The Near Disaster of Jasper & Casper

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

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The Butcher Boy

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The Butcher Boy

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

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The Panic of ’29

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The Panic of ’29

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

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Mr. Parker

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Mr. Parker

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

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Garbageman

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Garbageman

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

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Black No More

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Black No More

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

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A Sherlock Carol

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A Sherlock Carol

“Moriarty was dead, to begin with.” That’s the first line of A Sherlock Carol, now at New World Stages, and it will be repeated many times, for attempted comic effect. It’s a paraphrase, of course, of Charles Dickens’s first line of A Christmas Carol, and it illustrates the determination of Mark Shanahan, who wrote and directed, to fuse two beloved British authors. Let’s put Scrooge on that stage, he figures, and inject as much Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as we can, and we’ll create a jolly new holiday-season hit. He figures.

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Persuasion

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Persuasion

The theatrical troupe calls itself Bedlam, and that may be putting it strongly, but they sure do gad about onstage. Bedlam’s latest endeavor, Sarah Rose Kearns’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion, is currently fizzing all over the Connelly Theater stage, offering many diversions—few of them, unfortunately, having much to do with Jane Austen.

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Love Quirks

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Love Quirks

The soundtrack as you walk into St. Luke’s ought to provide a hint: it’s American songbook standards, like “In Other Words” and “Fever,” rendered by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, respectively. It primes the audience to expect a retro evening, and Love Quirks, the new musical by Seth Bisen-Hersh (music and lyrics) and Mark Childers (book), while set in the present-day New York of Instagram and Grindr and Twitter, is retro. It wants to be a sweet old-fashioned evening of melody and humor and light romance, and some of the time it succeeds.

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The Unsinkable Molly Brown

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The Unsinkable Molly Brown

When Dick Scanlan files his taxes, under Occupation, does he put “Richard Morris rewriter”? Morris, a middling mid-century scribe, penned the screenplay for Thoroughly Modern Millie, revised successfully for Broadway by Scanlan in 2002. Now Scanlan has “revitalized,” as the marketing for it goes, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, a 1960 Broadway hit, with a book by Morris, that was Meredith Willson’s follow-up to The Music Man. Scanlan’s Millie, to these eyes at least, was a sloppy rehash of an awkward premise that didn’t know exactly what it wanted to be. (You can judge for yourself when Encores! encores it in May.) But on Willson’s Molly, it turns out, Scanlan has done a bang-up job.

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Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

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Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

How exciting and new the film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice must have seemed when it hit pre-multiplex screens in 1969. Along with such contemporary classics as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, and with the added inducement of major movie stars wearing few clothes, Paul Mazursky’s satire proffered trendy sex; inspired materialistic adults to question their values; laughed about pot, one of the first big releases to do so; spoofed middle-class mores; and served up newly permissible bare breasts, though not Natalie Wood’s or Dyan Cannon’s. As a time capsule, the movie holds up. But why, in 2020, do a musical version?

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An Enchanted April

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An Enchanted April

Enchanted April has been around longer than you think. If you know the title, it’s probably as a 1991 prestige picture, with Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, and a small cast soaking up the Tuscan sun. But it’s based on an old, old novel by one Elizabeth von Arnim, turned first into a 1925 stage comedy, then a 1935 RKO vehicle that did Ann Harding no favors, then the 1991 remake, then a second, enjoyable stage adaptation by Matthew Barber in 2003. All along, it’s curious nobody saw a musical in it: The lush setting, several love stories, and singable emotions might have been ripe material for, say, a 1954 Lerner and Loewe opus. Which is essentially what the adapters Elizabeth Hansen (book and lyrics) and C. Michael Perry (music and lyrics) have attempted—a radically old-fashioned romantic musical.

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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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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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