Comedy

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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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Jane Anger

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Jane Anger

Poking fun at Shakespeare has been a fruitful pastime for more than a century. George Bernard Shaw enjoyed taking the Bard down a peg in his reviews of Victorian productions. In the 1950s Richard Armour wrote cheeky synopses of the plays in Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, and in 2015 the Broadway musical Something Rotten made fun of Shakespeare himself. Now actress and playwright Talene Monahon has done her bit to twist the dagger a few more times into the playwright with an often funny and splendidly acted Jane Anger.

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This Space Between Us

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This Space Between Us

This Space Between Us contains the opposite of an 11 o’clock number. The nonmusical scene late in the play is a showstopper all right, though not in the rousing good sense. Rather, all action and dialogue literally stop while two characters stand over an air mattress as it inflates. It lasts ... well, however long it takes an air mattress to inflate, which may only be about a minute but seems a lot longer, since the audience has to sit there and wait out this unnecessary moment in a show that has already worn out its welcome.

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Sandblasted

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Sandblasted

Before the play Sandblasted even begins, it grabs the audience’s attention: They enter the theater to see a stage covered with sand—lots and lots of sand. Curiously, this sandy location appears to be indoors, as the set also includes a window on one side of the stage and doors on the other two. The play itself, however, may not stir the audience’s attention or curiosity—at least not for the full hour and 40 minutes (without intermission) of its running time. While Sandblasted features impassioned performances and some lovely two-person scenes, it tends toward the talky and abstruse.

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Space Dogs

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Space Dogs

It seems a near-impossible task to take on an historical, highly politicized, and contentious international topic, and successfully morph it into a high-tech, semi-satirical pop-rock musical. Nevertheless, with Space Dogs, playwrights-composers-lyricists Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire have done exactly that. They have etched out the broader landscape of what was perhaps the most frightening, longest-running, and potentially deadliest conflict of the late 20th century—the Cold War.

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The Merchant of Venice

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The Merchant of Venice

When most people think of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it's Shylock who springs to mind, not the titular merchant. As a Jew in a Christian city-state, Shylock is an outsider; as a moneylender in an economy that reviles usury, he’s a pariah. Director Arin Arbus has chosen John Douglas Thompson, one of the most accomplished classical actors of his generation, as Shylock in her modern-dress production at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA). Thompson, reportedly the first Black actor to play Shylock professionally in New York, finds music even in the most acidic passages of the Bard’s rhetoric; his nuanced performance explodes at crucial points, with moral indignation outstripping self-pity.

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Just for Us

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Just for Us

Despite Alex Edelman’s opening caveat that “my comedy barely works if you’re not a Jew from the Upper East Side,” he is one of the rare, masterful stand-up comics who can “cast out” and then successfully “reel back in” a diverse audience. He can take his monologue way off-topic, on a tangent that itself could be a stand-alone show. Although the thrust of Just for Us is his attendance at a white-supremacist gathering, along the way he signs and mimics the distress of a gorilla at Robin Williams’s death (the gorilla really grieved), then quips that Brexit should be called “The Great British Break-Off,” and lovingly, yet mercilessly, spears his family, their Hebrew names, his brother’s Winter Olympics prowess as part of the Israeli skeleton team, and his Orthodox Jewish parents’ finessing of Christmas (including a decorated tree in the garage) to comfort a bereaved Christian friend.

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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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The Alchemist

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The Alchemist

The Red Bull Theater Company was founded in 2003 to present the talented playwrights of Shakespeare’s time who have been overshadowed by the Bard and bring their plays to new audiences. Among its productions have been The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley), Women Beware Women (Middleton alone) and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford), as well as the occasional Shakespeare. In the years since, the mission has evolved into “classics” outside the 17th century as well—the company’s The Government Inspector, a Nikolai Gogol play of 1836, was one of its most exhilarating triumphs. Now Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted the Gogol, has given an assist to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.

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Morning’s at Seven

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Morning’s at Seven

Paul Osborn’s play Morning’s At Seven is one of theater’s great rescues. A flop on Broadway in 1939, it was resurrected in 1980 by director Vivian Matalon, whose peerless production established it as a classic piece of Americana. It’s a gentle satire on small-town life, with busybodies and petty jealousies and snobbery, and although it’s as sturdily constructed as a Chekhov play, it’s not as dark. There may be conflicts, but the characters have more fun—and are fun to be around.

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Nollywood Dreams

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Nollywood Dreams

Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play was a huge hit for MCC Theater when it premiered in 2017. Set in an all-girls Ghanaian boarding school, the play offered a trenchant examination of teen bullying, fat-shaming, and colorism, and it showed that the United States does not corner the market on adolescent cruelty. Nollywood Dreams, Bioh’s play currently running at MCC, focuses on the Nigerian film industry, but it similarly demonstrates that shady business practices, cutthroat competition, and rabid celebrity worship are not exclusive to Hollywood.

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A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet

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A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet

What do you get when you throw two struggling souls in search of success together in a high-stakes campaign to rebrand an assertive, middle-aged, ex-pop icon named Regina Comet? You get two talented but anxiety-ridden young men, reaching for the stars and stumbling all over each other in semi-slapstick style. They also search for their own awakened, perfected selves as they strive to create the ideal jingle to launch Regina—and her fragrance line—back into the mainstream.

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Autumn Royal

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Autumn Royal

There’s a moment early in Kevin Barry’s darkly comic Autumn Royal, currently running at the Irish Rep under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, when siblings May (Maeve Higgins) and Timmy (John Keating), both in their 30s in Cork city, Ireland, realize that the current predicament of caring for their psychotic, decrepit, slowly dying father might have no end in sight.

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Mrs. Warren’s Profession

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Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Kitty Warren, title character of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, is a madam with heart, though not the proverbial heart of gold. As a single parent, she’s prepared to spend any amount of money to shield her daughter from society’s censure; but she doesn’t intend to abandon her own lucrative career as a sex worker.

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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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Merry Wives

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Merry Wives

Farce, with its antic misunderstandings and confused identities, can polarize audiences. Spectators may either be exhilarated by the pandemonium or left cold. With Merry Wives: A Celebration of Black Joy and Vitality, the sole production of this summer’s Free Shakespeare in Central Park, playwright Jocelyn Bioh gambles that, after a year of societal strife, she can unify audiences by updating William Shakespeare’s rambunctious farce The Merry Wives of Windsor.

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Friends: The Musical Parody

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Friends: The Musical Parody

If you’ve never watched Friends, the TV megahit that aired from 1994–2004, that wouldn’t preclude you from enjoying Friends: The Musical Parody. It’s hysterically funny, and concisely captures the idiosyncrasies of every one of the six characters who provokes, pairs off with, or parts ways with another.

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Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)

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In Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings), the multitalented Jackie Hoffman portrays Ariana Russo, a barely talented amateur actor who is literally and figuratively at the end of her rope. Stuck in the minor role of the ghostly and ghastly Fruma-Sarah, in a community theater staging of Fiddler on the Roof in Roselle Park, N.J., she must spend the first “hour and seven minutes” of the show offstage, strapped in her flying harness and waiting for her cue to soar.

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Sideways

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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.

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The Confession of Lily Dare

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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.

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