Matthew Lombardo wrangles comedy out of a story that is often not comical—wisecracks can be hard to resist coming from a wisecracking pro like Caroline Aaron—but both the humor and pathos in his new play Conversations with Mother are calculated and shallow.
One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”
The actor Dakin Matthews won a special Drama Desk award in 2003 when he adapted both parts of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV into a single, albeit lengthy, version produced at Lincoln Center. His edit allowed regional theaters to present the histories of Henry IV; his son Prince Hal; and the roguish Falstaff in one production, lessening the expense of mounting two separate ones. The adaptation removes lesser characters, such as Mouldy and Rumour in part 2, and trims extended metaphors and a lot of obscure Elizabethan humor. But the famous scenes and lines remain—“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit in other men,” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”
Of all the productions opening Off-Broadway this season, B*tchcraft may well be the most bewitching. With music and lyrics written by Bitch, and book by her and Margie Zohn, who also directs, it’s a wild journey into how Bitch, a quiet girl from suburban Michigan, shed her chrysalis to become the queer icon that she is today.
Matthew Lombardo wrangles comedy out of a story that is often not comical—wisecracks can be hard to resist coming from a wisecracking pro like Caroline Aaron—but both the humor and pathos in his new play Conversations with Mother are calculated and shallow.
The Mint Theater Company is doing what it does best: acquainting audiences with a long-ago play, and author, most people have probably never heard of. Here the author is Harold Brighouse, and the play, Garside’s Career. Billed by the Mint as “bright, witty political satire,” it traverses more genres than that, also taking in domestic drama and commentary on relations between the sexes, and serves as parable about misplaced ambition. The production is mostly excellent. The bright and the witty are relative.
One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”
The actor Dakin Matthews won a special Drama Desk award in 2003 when he adapted both parts of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV into a single, albeit lengthy, version produced at Lincoln Center. His edit allowed regional theaters to present the histories of Henry IV; his son Prince Hal; and the roguish Falstaff in one production, lessening the expense of mounting two separate ones. The adaptation removes lesser characters, such as Mouldy and Rumour in part 2, and trims extended metaphors and a lot of obscure Elizabethan humor. But the famous scenes and lines remain—“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit in other men,” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”
In the same vein as Love, Loss, and What I Wore—but with a different theme—My First Ex-Husband features a rotating cast of female celebrities performing monologues based on real-life stories. The initial four-person cast includes The View’s Joy Behar, who created My First Ex-Husband. At the top of the show, Behar explains that out of curiosity she started asking divorcées she knows about the reasons behind their breakups.
Ken Ludwig, who’s generally out to make his audiences laugh a lot and not think too hard (Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo, Crazy for You), strikes a more mellow and reflective tone than usual with his latest, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, at 59E59. An epistolary lark, it shares some traits with Pen Pals, still puttering away at St. Clement’s: two characters, a deepening relationship between them, lots of letters, punctuated by dialogue. Again, though, the audience doesn’t have to think too hard: Dear Jack, Dear Louise is friendly and diverting, but it sure is light.
The cover photo of Stagelight, the playbill for Mindplay, shows Vinny DePonto, its star (and co-writer, with Josh Koenigsberg) with a swarthy, tight-lipped, foreboding visage. He might easily have just emerged from a coffin in Transylvania, but, thankfully, on stage DePonto is engaging, earnest and unthreatening. In explaining the raison d’être of his show, he mentions his own anxieties, including being subject to panic attacks. “Your mind takes over your body if you’re one of those people,” he says. “I’m one of those people.”
A superb company of actors, the Arlekin Players Theatre, is in residence at Classic Stage Company (CSC) with The Merchant of Venice. The energetic production on CSC’s Lynn F. Angelson stage, however, may come as a jolt to playgoers fond of Shakespeare’s play.
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.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
It may be an overgeneralization, but let’s put it out there: In stage comedies, the more the cast laughs at its own purportedly hilarious exploits, the less the audience does. The onstage hollers and whoops are frequent and loud in The Z Team, Jeff and Jacob Foy’s workplace yuk-fest at Theatre Row, and while some of the audience seemed to enjoy it, those seated in E1 and E2 barely cracked a smile.
It’s a fallacy that addiction can be cured by a stint in rehab. Anyone celebrating sobriety can affirm that the process of recovery takes decades—and is often lifelong. Nevertheless, a rehab experience can trigger a life-changing awakening. This unpredictable process is at the center of Spike Manton and Harry Teinowtiz’s Another Shot, a poignant exploration of Teinowitz’s alcoholism and treatment. Director Jackson Gay keeps the play teetering between denial and acceptance, and between comedy and tragedy.
Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
At first glance, Hannah Gadsby’s Woof! feels like a show strung together with seemingly disparate threads, starting with the performer’s entrance on to the stage at the Abrons Arts Center’s Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, where Gadsby, who uses they as a pronoun of choice, opens the show with a statement about whales, of all things. The topics Gadsby covers range from popular culture to sociopolitical commentary to gender-identity politics. A newcomer to the comedian’s work might wonder how Gadsby would eventually tie these thoughts together, but their stand-ups often veer more toward TED Talk territory than a traditional stand-up structure. Still, as Gadsby promises the audience of Woof! at one point, there is a theme to all this.
Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola’s lively satiric musical Ghost of John McCain has a throw-anything-at-the-wall feel to it, but it’s apt: the action takes place inside the mind of President Donald Trump between Aug. 25, 2018 (the date of John McCain’s death) and Jan. 6, 2021. Given the attention span of the ex-President, it’s no wonder that events in his mind carom around like billiard balls.
Broadway productions may be acclaimed or panned, long-running or doomed to early closure, launch a career or cancel it. Inevitably, though, they are easy targets for satirists. Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, created, written and directed by Gerard Alessandrini, spares no barbs when humorously and semi-lovingly critiquing new Broadway hits, revivals, and their audience.
Why should one have to go to the movies to see uncommonly attractive people flirt, fall in love, botch their relationship, have their heart broken but maybe live happily ever after anyway? Playwright Douglas Lyons has brought that beloved cinematic staple, the romantic comedy, to the stage with Table 17.
Technology is being used more, and more inventively, in scenic and production design for the theater. Social media has become a vital part of marketing—and occasionally casting—shows. But tech has yet to make a big impression in theater as a subject. Three decades into the 21st century, plays about life in the digital age are still scarce. (Maybe that’s why Job, which recently transferred to Broadway, hit a nerve.)
