Bite, the new comedy from the Dysfunctional Theatre Company and Horse Trade Theater Group, couples laughs and lechery with dominance and dentistry. The story follows Dr. Oliver
Dental Debauchery
Crazed Competitors
The husky voice of Lauren Bacall greets those entering the Duplex Theatre to see the Emerging Artists Theatre's current offering, the biting backstage spoof TONYLUST: The Broadway Bloodbath of 2006. That in itself offers a clue as to what audiences are about to see. Those connected to the show could have played a more famous, equally relevant number, like "There's No Business Like Show Business" from Annie Get Your Gun or "Putting It Together" from Sunday in the Park With George or one of several songs from The Producers. Instead, they opt for the lesser-known "Welcome to the Theatre," sung by Bacall in Applause, and the message is clear: TONYLUST is a show for New York theater purists. Outsiders can turn around at the door.
Razor-sharp and lightning fast, TONYLUST
Futility, Loneliness, and Death, Oh My!
You have to give Morris Paynch credit. Way back in 1989, well before the Internet was a household word, the Canadian playwright had the foresight to imagine Friendster. Witness this exchange, taken directly from the text of 7 Stories, Paynch's 1989 one-act play currently being staged by Rocketship Productions at 78th Street Theatre Lab: Percy: "I wouldn't have a single friend. As it is now, I have nine hundred and forty."
Man: "Friends?"
Percy: "Yes."
Man: "You have that many friends?"
Percy: "Yes. Isn't it fabulous? People are always saying, 'I can't COUNT the number of friends I have!' When what they actually mean is that they only have a handful. Maybe two, three hundred. But I can, and I've got nine hundred and forty."
Man: "I didn't think it was possible to be intimate with that many people."
Percy: "Who said anything about being intimate? I couldn't care less about most of them."
Sadly, this prescient view of a socially networked future is the deepest insight the play has to offer. The inability to communicate, ennui, alienation
Beyond Dysfunctional
Funerals
Fuggedaboutit, Fraulein
Pavol Liska must be fascinated with the human crotch. As the director of
Day of Reckoning
What have you done with your life so far? If it ended tomorrow, could you honestly say you have made the most of it? Playwright Sutton Vane poses these questions to both the characters and the audience in Urban Stages's remake of his timeless 1924 play Outward Bound. The set is surprisingly elaborate, considering the small size of the stage. Members of the audience audibly gasped when red curtains rose to reveal the glittering, elegant lobby of a luxury steam liner. Toward the back of the lobby there is a bar where a jolly man named Scrubby (Wilbur Edwin Henry) serves drinks to passengers on cushiony chairs and glass tables. Across from the bar are sliding-glass doors that lead to a deck where characters watch the sky change from day to night while listening to the sounds of cawing seagulls and crashing waves. All of these elements skillfully come together to create the illusion of being stranded at sea with nowhere to go but your destination.
But what is the destination? No one onboard seems to know.
The seven main characters include Tom Prior (Paul de Cordova), a spoiled rich boy who drinks to forget the life he screwed up. He is admired by a wealthy socialite named Mrs. Banks (Laura Esterman), who converses only with those in her class. They are both befriended by the Rev. Duke (Clayton Dean Smith), a kindly man who takes pity on those who seem troubled. A friendly elderly woman named Mrs. Midget (Susan Pelligrino) strives to be liked by all, while business tycoon Lingley (Michael Pemberton) isolates himself with his haughty manner. And then there is the young couple, Anne (Kathleen Early) and Henry (Joe Delafield).
Anne and Henry are the play's ghostliest characters. Prior overhears them whispering about a secret that has something to do with leaving the gas on at their house, not wanting to be separated, and missing their dog.
Based on this conversation, Prior realizes, "We're all dead, aren't we?"
This revelation occurs early in the play, halting the developing story in its tracks. After all, if we know the passengers are dead, what is the mystery?
It is here that the play's true nature reveals itself. Outward Bound is a tense, suspenseful character study focusing on seven very different people who must look deep into their souls before a feared Examiner (Drew Eliot) arrives onboard to sort out who goes to Heaven and Hell.
Each character's trial is tense and revealing. The Rev. Duke's tugs heavily at the heart, while Prior's stabs a knife right through it. Prior is very likable, though he insists the halo people see above his head is only there because he means to pawn it. When Mrs. Midget attempts to plead for his soul by suggesting that he never had a chance to do right in life, he cuts her off, saying, "I've had every chance."
Credit must be given to de Cordova (the understudy in this role) for the believable and sympathetic way he portrayed all the dimensions of this complex character. He movingly brought out the inner goodness of a man whose surface appears chillingly shallow.
But Cordova is not the only one who shines in this tale of reckoning. Every member of the cast is so nuanced and believable in his or her role that every word spoken feels authentic.
However, it is the mysterious young couple, Henry and Anne, whose story will haunt your thoughts long after the curtain has dropped. Their souls are never probed by the Examiner, and there is a reason for that. Their secrets are revealed at the play's climax in a very eerie, unforgettable scene. So as not to spoil the surprise, I will only cryptically say that you will think of this ending every time you hear a barking dog.
Vane wrote this play after being discharged from the British Army in 1914 due to severe shell shock. The repressed feelings he had from that time have risen with a vengeance on the pages of this story. Death, doom, and destruction are explored in great depth, yet it is the will to live and live bravely that overcomes all. Ironically, given its title, Outward Bound will make you look inward.
Pure Joyce
If they had been stupid, this would have been easy. Had the people behind Medicine Show's production of Finnegan's Wake simply been inept, a review would have been simple to write.
However, there is an intelligence behind the show, a calculation behind every prop, every gesture, every song and piece of choreography. Someone went through a great deal of time and effort to present Finnegan's Wake exactly as I saw it. This makes my job harder.
Why was such a well-constructed piece of theater so awful?
Let's start with the basics. The show was adapted from the James Joyce novel of the same name
House of Horrors
Haunted houses aren't what they used to be. With the popularity of scary-movie satires and shock TV at its worst, pop culture has lost its taste for traditional horror, or at least horror without a wink. That said, Brad Fraser's Snake in Fridge, which was inspired by Shirley Jackson's 1959 classic thriller The Haunting of Hill House, attempts the impossible
Sailors' Spree
Some came by taxi or subway, others on foot. Some walked by themselves, while others were carried in by groggy-looking parents and grandparents. But whatever their transportation, most of the audience that attended Inside Broadway's Saturday-morning performance of On the Town giggled with delight at a show pared down to match their own unique attention spans, found in the highly active but highly distracted minds of children. This 50-minute production is the perfect Saturday-morning treat for young audiences. With bright colors, high-energy performances, simplified dialogue, and charming characters, the show is an ideal way to introduce youngsters to theatergoing as an interactive experience between performer and audience, compared with the more passive experience of watching TV.
Inside Broadway facilitates this process before the production begins, providing each young patron with a playbill "Study Buddy." This colorful publication features a word find, a crossword puzzle, trivia, and facts about New York and the events surrounding the show, as well as a "Critics Corner" inviting children to write their own reviews.
The show centers on three sailor friends
Singing Swashbucklers
Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers is a veritable soap opera set in the 17th century. Dumas gave French history a face, a personality, romance, and intrigue, and his novel spawned hundreds of incarnations in poetry, fiction, film, and theater. This musical version of his 1844 novel suffers from a lack of focus and identity. It simply doesn't know what it wants to be yet, mixing romantic, dramatic, and melodramatic elements along with slapstick and spoof comedy.
At intermission, a girl two rows behind me lamented, "They assume that you have read the book!" and I agreed. Lacking the time to read over the 800-page tome before viewing the musical, I hoped for a clear and straightforward retelling of the Musketeers' story. (After all, musicals like Little Women and The Secret Garden accomplish this literature-to-musical translation in condensed yet coherent vehicles.) However, this Three Musketeers is so burdened by its plots that the characters' motivations are unclear and even seem to shift within individual songs.
There is hardly room to give the entire ambitious plot, but here is the rough outline. Set in France (and moving back and forth to England), the story begins with D'Artagnan, a strapping young man out for adventure, who meets the notorious Three Musketeers: Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The four quickly join forces to defeat four of Cardinal Richelieu's guards in an action-packed duel. They vow "all for one and one for all" and continue to protect and defend one another throughout the show.
Rivalry emerges between England and France when Queen Anne falls in love with England's Duke of Buckingham, and Cardinal Richelieu plots to expose her infidelity to King Louis XIII. D'Artagnan and the Musketeers save the day, of course, and the rest of the show concerns love won and lost, secret identities, indiscretions, assassinations, retribution, and, finally, hope for young D'Artagnan's future.
In the first act, the production flaunts self-referential comments and shtick reminiscent of Monty Python's new Spamalot musical. D'Artagnan jokingly swings in on a rope of white sheets, phallic sword jokes abound, and two of the Musketeers try to outdo each other by singing a note the longest (a bit like Annie Get Your Gun's "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better"). The first act ends with the production number "What I Shall Do!," which is not unlike the Les Mis
The Price of Freedom
What are we without passion, the kind that burns so deeply and vividly inside us that we are defenseless before its power? This is the emotion that drove Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to have a dream and Charles Darwin to say I disagree, and it assured their immortality. Paul Robeson also knew what passion was, and playwright Miriam Jensen Hendrix and the Actors Stock Company take a close look at his life and passions with considerable success in Robeson. In the mid-1930's, Robeson was a prominent entertainer, garnering raves for his portrayal of Othello in London and his role in Showboat on Broadway, along with countless concert engagements throughout Europe. The play begins as Robeson (Ezra Knight) is returning to the States after many years of living abroad. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by a group of reporters, and he is eager to discuss the freedoms his race enjoys throughout the world, especially in the Soviet Union, which he believes should be a social model for America.
Despite pleas from friends and family to tone down his rhetoric, Robeson presses on, speaking at rallies and openly sharing his viewpoints with the press. As time passes, the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union turns the American people against him, leading to an impassioned showdown.
With a booming baritone, Knight delivers a superb performance. An impeccable stage presence with the appropriate bravado, he is easily believed as a man on a mission. Equally compelling is Bruce Kronenberg as Joe McCarthy, conveying the Communist-hunting senator's unwavering convictions with such ease, he transports us to a different America.
Rounding out the cast as Ben Robeson, Ronald Wyche turns in a sensitive performance as a brother determined to steer his sibling in a less controversial direction. A special commendation should also go to Vince Phillip, Roy Bacon, and John Marino. These actors, each taking on multiple roles, make their transitions with remarkable ease and pitch-perfect clarity.
Director Keith Onacle elicits fully developed characters from most of the cast, who never cross over to caricature. He guides us through the dramatic periods of Robeson's life, from his first political rally to his days of hiding from F.B.I. surveillance, most notably pinpointing the precise moment when Robeson shifted from man to idea. As he stands before the House Un-American Activities Committee, bombarded by accusations, it is clear that the truth is no longer a concern; he is Communism incarnate. These moments are heightened thanks to Gregory Tippit's multileveled set, which is primarily in shades of gray, a nice symbol of the uncertainty of the times.
Hendrix has provided an informative portrait of this trailblazer. However, the piece does falter when it strives to educate rather then enlighten, resulting in a somewhat cold emotional center. In these moments, we find ourselves disconnected from the play, hearing but not truly listening. Another device that detracts rather then adds to the production is the use of a movie screen. Though videographer Shawn Washburn captures some haunting images, they ultimately prove distracting.
Overall, Robeson is a thought-provoking look at a disturbing time in American history. You will leave the theater wondering if any of the accused citizens were truly Communists or instead victims of a paranoid government. But you will probably fail to be moved. The play never quite penetrates any deeper than on an intellectual level, which is unfortunate, given that this man's beacon was his heart.
East Meets West
The Beauty Inside is an appropriate title for Catherine Filloux's new play, now receiving its New York premiere at the Culture Project (45 Below). On the surface, the production suffers from tepid direction and the miscasting of a pivotal role. But digging deeper inside this moving and important piece reveals an exceptionally well-written script and several beautifully nuanced performances. The Beauty Inside is the story of Yalova (Tatiana Gomberg), a 14-year-old Turkish girl, and her relationships with the family that has turned against her and the stranger who will save her. After surviving a series of brutal rapes at the hands of her married neighbor, Yalova must go into hiding to escape her family as they seek to regain their honor by killing her. Her salvation comes in the form of Devrim (Jennifer Gibbs), a Turkish-American lawyer who takes on Yalova's case and challenges the centuries-old tradition of honor killing.
While Yalova represents the tradition and oppression of her Eastern culture, Devrim is the embodiment of the Western heritage that lives within her Eastern upbringing (she smokes and drinks, and prefers bikinis to head scarves). With Yalova and Devrim, Filloux has created an intriguing dichotomy of East versus West and old versus new. As Devrim helps Yalova to find her Western voice, Yalova teaches Devrim the beauty of her Eastern heritage. Their complex and fascinating (and touchingly humorous) relationship is the backbone of The Beauty Inside.
The heart of the play is Gomberg's Yalova. Gomberg constructs a complex, sensitive, moving portrayal of a young girl caught between circumstance, tradition, and longing. With an easy grace, her Yalova evolves from a sheltered child to a tortured victim to an independent young woman. It is a beautiful performance.
Gibbs, however, is a talented actress unfortunately miscast, with her broad acting style better suited to high melodrama than to the quiet honesty of Filloux's script.
If Gomberg is the play's heart, then its soul belongs to Michelle Rios and her portrayal of Peri, Yalova's mother. In a compelling battle of nature versus nurture, Rios's Peri is at odds with herself
The Incredible Journey
O Canada, the new home and native land for all things artistic. First we became dependent on you for our movies (funny how much Toronto looks like New York and L.A.), then our music (Montreal, where were you during the boy band era?), and now you increase our dependency by offering up great theater. Do you happen to have any cheap oil up there as well? Pith!, an adventurous tale about letting go, comes to us from Edmonton, Alberta, which, judging by the stellar cast and script, may very well be the next hotbed for the dramatic arts. Expertly written by Stewart Lemoine, Pith! follows Jack Vail, a traveling sailor who drops anchor in Providence, R.I., just long enough to help a grieving widow come to terms with the fact that her missing husband will never return.
Jack's form of therapy is not recommended for the faint of heart. Travel is a must, and dangerous situations
Tasty Fare
As different as they are delightful, the new plays that are part of EATFest: Spring 2005 make a strong showing. The festival's first selections, those of Series A, range in theme from an estranged middle-aged couple sharing a holiday in a hostile, Third World vacation spot, to a young girl trying to connect with her parents at her greatest moment of fear and separation, to a zany look at the dating destiny of a gay man at 40. Though varying in theme and tone, what the plays share is a vein of sweet and sad acceptance. With humor, irony, and sensitivity, each is touching and unique.
In the first, Foreign Bodies, it is clear from the start that Victoria and Maz are incapable of leaving behind memories of their cold British lives long enough to enjoy the first moments of their holiday abroad. In fact, the extremes to which they go, popping "harmony pills" to forget their dreary home life, numb them to the point of oblivion.
Written by Andrew Biss and directed by Dylan McCullough, Foreign Bodies is a gleefully dire, tongue-in-cheek look at how we lose our perceptiveness the more we try to smooth out the edges of our lives and relationships. Kurt Kingsley as Max and Laura Fois as Victoria are sharp and very funny as their characters, wide-eyed and unconcerned, banter casually and eventually turn a blind eye to imminent dangers.
In Asteroid Belt, Carly, a young college student on her way home from a play rehearsal, realizes in the play's opening minutes that she is about to die in a car accident. In that moment, she attempts to logically reflect on the illogical elements that placed her in such danger. In doing so, she also tries to connect with her parents by following them in spirit through the routine of worrying about the late-night whereabouts of their child.
Writer Lauren Feldman creates impressively touching characters with her simple use of detail. Carly's father, Jay (Sam Sagenkahn), tries to distract his anxious wife, Sue (Valerie David), by poking fun at her dislike of Mary Higgins Clark. And Carly reflects that she is ill equipped to handle her accident because she was "never good at spontaneity," and that if she had been, she would have gone into "firefighting...or improv."
Directed by Caden Hethorn, these characters all come to life with warmth and realism, particularly Carly (Rachel Eve Moses), who gives the most affecting performance of the evening.
The final play, Invisible, written by Marc Castle and directed by Mark Finley, is the most absurd and the most fun. In a gay nightclub, Jerry (Jack Garrity), who has just turned 40, is perplexed when his advances on younger men are worse than ignored
The Audience's the Thing
If you are reading this review, you have probably, at one time or another, sat in the audience of a show. You watched the actors onstage portray all sorts of characters: sociopaths, drunkards, thespians, witches, revolutionaries
Familiar Footprints
Shoe Palace Murray, the new Circle East production currently playing at Baruch College's Bernie West Theatre, pays homage to a more innocent era of musical comedy revue. This sweet story, set in a struggling theater-district shoe store during the 1920's, has plenty of charm and talent, and is a delightful throwback to many old-school screwball comedies from the golden age. But it also borrows from one source in particular a little too closely. A Depression-era business fallen on hard times. A nebbish salesman who pines for someone else's woman. Another female character who suffers from the violent temper of her significant other. Any of these elements sound familiar? They converged to great success as part of the framework of Little Shop of Horrors, that seminal mini-masterpiece. It is difficult to say whether playwrights William M. Hoffman and the late Anthony Holland had that show in mind when working on Shoe (which first opened in 1988), but the result is the same: this show cannot help but feel slight and derivative in inevitable comparison.
Nervous, stammering Benny Vogel (Jim Ireland) is the yin to slick womanizer Murray Howard's (Chip Phillips) yang. Together, this duo works at I. Miller, a 46th Street shoe store catering to stars and molls alike. Murray hatches a half-baked plot to open up his very own shoe palace and strike it rich, and ends up weaving a very tangled web involving a failing Broadway show, an aspiring starlet, and a female accountant. The action itself, which only really gets into gear at the end of the first act, is pretty slight, and certain details never prove wholly relevant. For instance, Shoe takes place on the day in 1926 that Rudolph Valentino was buried, but this detail never asserts its relevance.
Additionally, Hoffman and Holland create a major sea change between acts. Once the audience gets used to the marvelous team of Ireland and Phillips, most of the second act features a markedly different and yet well-performed (and occasionally riotous) set of scenes between Marion (honey-voiced Christa Capone), Murray's girlfriend, and Delphi Harrington (Alla Nazimova), a Russian actress who becomes an empowering mentor for Marion.
This kind of schizoid storytelling does benefit from some top-notch talent. From beginning to end, Phillips is the consummate pro, wonderfully slick as Murray and very generous as the play progresses in handing over the baton as Ireland's role takes center stage. Ireland is an absolute miracle worker, with his nervous tics, grimaces, nail biting, precious stammer, and horrific posture. The sextet of the cast is rounded out by two other fine performances: Sarah Irland as the beaten-up Lucille and Judith Barcroft in a small, early role as nosy doyenne Texas Guinan.
Shoe possesses a few other glitches that deal more with Barbara Bosch's direction than the script, including many instances where the pace needs to be picked up and some predictable bits of physical comedy (usually involving Ireland and Phillips twirling phone cords) that do not really pay off. But if these problems were to be fixed, a larger one would still remain. Hoffman, who two decades ago had major success with the excellent As Is, and Holland took a story that could have been delightful and made it merely palatable at best. With so many recognizable elements in play, this is a case of familiarity breeding a tad too much contempt.
Prisoners of War
"If the war was over then all the dead had been buried and all the prisoners had been released. Why shouldn't he be released too?" wonders the title character of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. While fighting for America in World War I, a shell blows off Johnny's arms, legs, and face, and robs him of his vision, hearing, smell, and taste. The novel takes place in his consciousness, blurring the line between dream and reality, as Johnny struggles to communicate with a world that has virtually forgotten him. Trumbo's tragic figure could be considered a metaphor for the condition known as shell shock, where soldiers returning from battle at that time had immobilizing bouts of panic, hallucinations, or even complete catatonia. This is the strange and mysterious subject matter that the Axis Company explores in the brilliant Not Yet Diagnosed (Nervous) 1918. In it, a group of soldiers attempt to figure out where they are, why they're there, and how to return home or to the front. Despite a vague familiarity with one another and their setting, no one seems to know exactly how he arrived.
The impressively realistic set design immediately transports the audience to a WWI bunker, rife with gas masks, cameras, and primitive communication equipment, and accented with a number of tunnels that lead to nowhere in particular. The sound (by Steve Fontaine) is limited to paranoia-inducing whispers of people and places, leading us to believe that all we need to do to escape is open our eyes.
The Axis Company members all put on strong performances as usual, with a particularly powerful showing by Margo Passalaqua, whose role is a not-quite-there presence. Passalaqua's androgyny not only makes her appear young enough to have fought in WWI but also lends her a haunting and innocent quality as she slips in and out of roles as a soldier and characters from lives once upon a time. No one else really recognizes her presence in the group, but she is almost constantly there, feeding the soldiers their lines (and sometimes completing them), which she does with a wonderful mixture of anger and melancholy.
Indeed, what makes Not Yet Diagnosed stand out from previous Axis productions is its arresting script. While it takes almost the exact same theme as last year's Hospital
Gray Matters
Sketch comedy is a cruel mistress. She demands that you come up with original material. She insists that each show top the previous one. And above all, she commands that you do these things with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. At the premiere of BOOM, celebrated New York sketch group Elephant Larry's eighth new show, EL succeeded in making its mistress, and the audience, very happy indeed. As the audience filed into the Peoples Improv Theater, a screen was onstage, and "factoids" linking to the show, as well as ads for its co-sponsor (satirical weekly magazine The Onion), were being shown, movie theater-style. The lights dimmed, credits rolled, and out came four clean-cut boys, singing about how three of them were "following around" the fourth one. It was a straightforward premise, built on funny lyrical revelations, and kicked off an entertaining hour of live sketches, taped links, and songs.
Elephant Larry's members drew their material from television, history, and popular culture. A recurring joke involved a game show that was named after an overly elaborate description of its premise, rules, and grand prize. The traditional "man visits doctor" scenario was turned on its ear when the doctor turned out to be a chatbot. (For those unfamiliar with instant messaging, this is a computer-generated "persona" that responds to a user's questions with a stock set of answers.)
The most lovably silly sketch centered on Dr. Frankenstein's monster creating his own monster, whose vocabulary was mostly limited to the word "monster." The simple repetition of that word was enough to get everyone laughing, and the sketch continued in surprising ways from there.
One of the classic pitfalls of the form, which has plagued everybody from the lads of Monty Python to SNL's Not Ready for Primetime Players, is how to end a sketch. In the absence of a proper conclusion, writers will comment on the lack of an ending, spin the premise out into boredom, or just abandon the sketch entirely. To their credit, Elephant Larry's performers were able to end on a joke and a blackout, without leaving the audience feeling cheated.
EL has written a strong show, full of sketches that make you smile and several that make you laugh out loud. It's impressive how it has created a show that, without a lot of profanity, politics, or "blue" jokes, manages to play smart and not square. These guys are earnest, clever, and ready to please; it's a refreshing change of pace in an increasingly snarky, too-hip-for-the-room NYC comedy scene.
For those comedians who are willing to try their luck at sketch comedy, the creative struggles tend to outweigh the returns. (How often does a sketch comedian turn his or her stage success into onscreen success that doesn't involve being a background player on a televised sketch show?) Lucky for New York that Elephant Larry doesn't dwell on such things. Its performers' goal is simple: for 60 minutes, they want to make our troubles go BOOM.
Love Taking Wing
Love, commitment, marriage
More Money, More Problems
Outdoing the Jones's