, , , ,

Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec

, , , ,

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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Siblings Play

,
The Siblings Play

In mid-March, as the novel human coronavirus steamrolled New York City, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater had to pull the plug on Ren Dara Santiago’s The Siblings Play. The production, directed by Jenna Worsham, was nearing the end of previews, with four days to go before opening night.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

About Love

,
About Love

Jazz artist Nancy Harrow is one of the New York music world’s greatest, though woefully underappreciated, treasures. During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, she was a regular on New York City’s cabaret circuit, singing with figures such as Kenny Barron, Bob Brookmeyer, and Jim Hall. Back then, Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff wrote: “Nancy Harrow is not jazz-influenced or jazz-tinged or jazz-pollinated. She is without qualification a jazz singer all the way.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Love Quirks

,
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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Mr. Toole

,
Mr. Toole

The title character in Vivian Neuwirth’s Mr. Toole is John Kennedy Toole, author of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Known as “Ken” to family and friends, Toole died in 1969, more than a decade before his book was published. Neuwirth knew Toole when she was a student at St. Mary’s Dominican High School in New Orleans, where he taught English. “He was,” she says, “an amazing teacher” with a “theatrical flair.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, , , , ,

Seven Sins

, , , , ,
Seven Sins

The work of Austin McCormick, the polymath artistic director and choreographer of Company XIV, may be handily classified as burlesque—costumer Zane Pihlstrom provides more than enough feathers, fringes, and pasties to justify it—but that label doesn’t really fit a production that incorporates dance, opera, pop music, and acrobatics as well. All are on display in his newest effort, Seven Sins.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Incantata

,
Incantata

Incantata, by Pulitzer Prize–winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, is an elegy crafted into a theatrical narrative that loosely weaves together erudite poetic imagery and concrete memories with literary and artistic references. The experience is a journey through bumpy waters, a sensory and linguistic adventure with Stanley Townsend, a tremendously talented and physical actor, at the helm of the solo show.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, , ,

Sideways

, , ,
Sideways

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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Suicide Forest

,
Suicide Forest

The challenges are as great as the rewards in Haruna Lee’s Suicide Forest, a tortured, weird, and very personal fantasy that includes passages spoken in Japanese, bouts of simulated schoolgirl molestation, and a lengthy scene in near darkness with characters dressed as goats and wearing headlamps. But those willing to go along on this guilt trip, skillfully guided by director Aya Ogawa, will be find unexpectedly beautiful moments of theatricality and an ending that pivots from madness to reality with the force of an emergency brake being thrown on a speeding train.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Unsinkable Molly Brown

,
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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

A Sign of the Times

, ,
A Sign of the Times

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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Confession of Lily Dare

,
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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Blues for an Alabama Sky

,
Blues for an Alabama Sky

Blues for an Alabama Sky, by Pearl Michelle Cleage, has been around for 25 years, but only now has the Keen Company given it a New York debut. Still, Cleage’s work, about black artists struggling in 1930, during the Harlem Renaissance, is as relevant today as it was a quarter-century ago. Poverty, discrimination, abortion rights, violence, and the everyday hustle to make it are still real issues in 2020.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Tumacho

,
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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Rules of Desire

,
Rules of Desire

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.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)

, ,
Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)

Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) is a lively new play by Andrea Thome that presents stories of immigration and fear from Latino immigrants in New York City. Filled with music and dance, Fandango lightens the darkness of its topic without soft-pedaling it.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Frankenstein

,
Frankenstein

Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Timothy Douglas and playing in repertory with Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Dracula at Classic Stage Company, is a strange hybrid of the ploddingly literal and the vaguely conceptual. Its pleasures lie in listening to Stephanie Berry, who plays both Victor Frankenstein and “the Creature,” recite long passages of beautiful prose. But as a piece of theater, it is a flat, almost somnolent experience, and one that doesn’t seem to say anything new or urgent about the story.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Miss America’s Ugly Daughter

, ,
Miss America’s Ugly Daughter

The life of Bess Myerson, the only Jewish woman to have won the Miss America title, in 1945, was two sides of a coin: the face was that of a very beautiful, proud, and successful woman, but her private life involved difficult relationships, most notably with her daughter, Barbara (Barra) Grant. Their mother-daughter interaction, and Bess’s attempts to create her daughter in her own image, are the center of Grant’s solo play/memoir Miss America’s Ugly Daughter. The audience never sees the subject, but she is sometimes heard offstage, her voice (by Anna Holbrook) always booming and intruding in her child’s life.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Dracula

, ,
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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Happy Birthday Doug

, ,
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.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post