The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
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.”
Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
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.
Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.
Charles Busch has frequently used old films as fodder for his comedies: Red Scare on Sunset, Shanghai Moon, and The Lady in Question all draw on silver-screen melodrama for a knowing send-up of Hollywood tropes. But his latest play, Ibsen’s Ghost, is a marked change. Busch has steeped himself in the life of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and fashioned both facts and fiction into a charming and funny Improbable Biographical Fantasy, as he calls it.
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.
