Reviews

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Uncle Vanya

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Uncle Vanya

Director Jack Serio’s intimate staging of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya had a brief run in July at a private loft in the Flatiron District (16 nights, with 40 spectators per night), and has now returned for a few weeks at a different loft in the same neighborhood. The original run cultivated a buzz of exclusivity—“sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it,” as described in the New Yorker. The impression that you have been granted entrée to an event persists in the encore engagement: the program given to the relatively few (but more than 40) audience members includes a countdown of how many performances remain.

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Cat Kid Comic Club

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Cat Kid Comic Club

Dav Pilkey has endeared himself to children—and adults—through his graphic novels and multiple hit comic-book series. Beginning in 1990, he created the bestselling series Cat Kid Comic Club. Now, playwright and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila (best known for his Drama Desk Award-winning performance in the musical Some Like It Hot) and composer Brad Alexander have adapted the series into Cat Kid Comic Club The Musical.

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Toros

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Toros

The Second Stage production of Toros deserves a prominent spot in New York theater annals thanks to Frank Wood’s tenderly compelling portrayal of Tica, a golden retriever on her last legs. Danny Tejera’s sometimes comedic drama is a largely slice-of-life depiction of three privileged, emotionally stunted millennials living in Spain after the election of President Donald J. Trump and just before the onslaught of COVID-19. Tica—loyal, empathetic, and loving—is a foil to the humans rather than the play’s focus. Wood’s impeccable performance is calibrated to avoid upstaging the other actors, yet his Tica is the most memorable aspect of this arresting, if sometimes unsatisfying, play.

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The Half-God of Rainfall

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The Half-God of Rainfall

Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic revenge fantasy about a basketball superstar who was born as a consequence of Zeus’s raping of a mortal woman. This multilayered piece uses poetry, music, and a mix of Greek and Yoruba mythology for a lyrical meditation on power, patriarchy, and the black feminist response to the #MeToo movement. 

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One Woman Show

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One Woman Show

“I guess I’m just relatable,” says Liz Kingsman with a shrug in One Woman Show, her sharp, absurdist parody of the British TV series Fleabag and the wave of women’s solo confessionals that followed it. Kingsman plays a hyped-up version of herself in her play, a jobbing actor who is recording her self-penned solo show, Wildfowl, so that she can market it in the hope of becoming a major TV series.

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Orpheus Descending

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Orpheus Descending

Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending is a play not frequently revived. Although it has many of the themes and elements of the major works, its premiere in 1957, directed by critic Harold Clurman rather than Elia Kazan, was short-lived. The production at Theatre for a New Audience throws into relief some of the problems. As interesting as the play may be for fans of Williams, one comes away with a sense of dissatisfaction. Williams described its theme as “more tolerance and respect for the wild and lyric impulses that the human heart feels and so often is forced to repress, in order to avoid social censure and worse.” Variety, however, judged it “a murky tale of inbred, hard-eyed people in a Mississippi village.”

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Flex

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Flex

Watching Flex, you may be reminded of The Wolves, the pre-pandemic Off-Broadway hit about a girls’ soccer team. Your mind may flash to TV shows about Black female friends, like Living Single or Insecure. One scene might make you think of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the 2020 indie film in which a girl travels with her friend for an abortion. The new play also brings to mind any number of dramas—on stage or screen—with a protagonist who’s determined to escape a dead-end hometown, or all those sports stories where everything’s building up to the Big Game.

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Malvolio

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Malvolio

Betty Shamieh’s Malvolio, a joyous sequel to Twelfth Night, investigates the life of Malvolio after the events in Shakespeare’s wintry dark comedy. In the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s production, 20 years have passed since Olivia’s much-abused steward (Allen Gilmore) threatened revenge on his tormentors. Back then, Malvolio was tricked into believing the Countess Olivia, his mistress, had written a love letter to him and insisting he don yellow, cross-gartered stockings to please her. Swallowing the bait, Malvolio did as the letter requested—and swiftly was incarcerated in Illyria as a lunatic. 

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The Saviour

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The Saviour

Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour is Irish Repertory Theatre’s second presentation within a year of the “world stage premiere” of a script written for online distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and now retailored for in-person performance. The previous such work, Tracy Thorne’s Jack Was Kind, was acted as a solo by the author in the Irish Rep’s tiny basement venue in autumn 2022. The Saviour is on the company’s more capacious main stage, giving it a misleading sense of heft. Directed by Louise Lowe, the production features Marie Mullen, a Tony winner for Martin McDonagh’s memorable The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Like Jack Was Kind, The Saviour is a miniature drama intensely focused on up-to-the-moment societal problems.

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Chanteuse

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Chanteuse

If you just can’t wait for the transatlantic transfer of the hit West End Cabaret that was recently announced, cheer up, there’s another Nazi musical in town. That would be Chanteuse, the bleak and arresting solo tale of the remarkable fate of one gay man in Weimar and post-Weimar Germany. The performer, Alan Palmer, also wrote the book and lyrics, while the curiously soothing music is by David Legg. Chanteuse has a frightening and touching story to tell, but you might not be entirely on board with the way it gets told.

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Richard III

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Richard III

New York Classical Theatre (NYCT) is a small troupe presenting distinguished plays, mostly tried and true, with occasional novelties in public spaces around New York City. Stephen Burdman, the company’s founder, espouses a performance style he calls “panoramic theater,” which involves spectators following actors as they perform scenes in multiple spots.

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Triple Threat

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Triple Threat

“Triple threat” has a double meaning for Broadway veteran James T. Lane. As a performer who can sing, dance and act, he is a triple threat in theater parlance. But, as he acknowledges in his solo autobiographical play of the same name, he has also faced a triple threat of challenges in his life: Black, gay, addict.

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In Corpo

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In Corpo

Ben Beckley and Nate Weida’s In Corpo is a new sci-fi musical about human connection that will make some theatergoers smile and others wince. Directed by Jess Chayes, it draws on Franz Kafka’s unfinished novels The Castle and The Trial, Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and the artists’ own experiences navigating the corporate world. The piece grapples with corporate overreach, invasive technologies, and unresponsive bureaucracies to satirize how working in the corporate world can stymie one’s heart and soul. Its principals’ names, “K” and “Bartleby” (played by Austin Owens Kelly), are borrowed directly from Kafka (K. is the hero of The Castle; Josef K. of The Trial) and Melville’s 1853 short story.

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The Doctor

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The Doctor

Opportunities to see the British actress Juliet Stevenson on this side of the Atlantic are too rare to pass up. Robert Icke’s play The Doctor—Stevenson has the title role in this loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi—is a welcome reminder of this actress’s enormous talent. It’s unmissable for any theater lover.

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Rock & Roll Man

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Rock & Roll Man

The last time that Constantine Maroulis trod the boards of New World Stages was in 2008. Capitalizing on his dynamic American Idol appearances, he was cast as the hard rocking Drew in the ’80s-themed jukebox musical, Rock of Ages, a part that he would parlay into a Broadway run. Now, as the title character in Rock & Roll Man, he has returned to the venue, with shorter hair, to lead another period musical that’s full of classic hits. But this time he leads from behind, supporting a sensational ensemble that steals the show and never gives it back.

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Cassie and the Lights

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Cassie and the Lights

A foster-care placement, no matter where or when, can be a difficult, even traumatic transition for all parties involved. Much can go awry, especially when children expect that their parent or parents will return for them. Alex Howarth, writer and director of Cassie and the Lights, draws the audience almost vicariously into the fantasy-filled and emotion-and-guilt-fraught world of three sisters in foster care in northern England. Their strongest, and possibly only, tool for survival is their bond with one another.

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Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

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Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

Richard Hellesen’s new solo show Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground resurrects the 34th President with much sound and fury. Directed by Peter Ellenstein, and with the superb John Rubinstein playing the eponymous role, this play may well overhaul that musty image of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “do-nothing” president.

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The Gospel According to Heather

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The Gospel According to Heather

The first thing to know about The Gospel According to Heather: It’s way out of author Paul Gordon’s wheelhouse. Gordon, the rare writer who creates book, music, and lyrics, specializes in adaptations of lofty classics, most prominently Jane Eyre. His  2009 version of Daddy Long Legs gets produced a lot (while convincing some of us that epistolary musicals aren’t a great idea). For The Gospel According to Heather he turns thoroughly contemporary, with an original story so current that there are jokes about drag storybook hour, Dylan Mulvaney’s Budweiser ad, and the congressional tussle over gas ovens. Heather, like its title character, isn’t perfect, but it has more on its mind than the average musical comedy, and it dispenses its outrage with verve and good humor.

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The Comeuppance

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The Comeuppance

In his new play, The Comeuppance, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins checks in with his generation of Americans nearing 40. The five principals in this world premiere are gathering for their 20th high school reunion, and Jacobs-Jenkins, 38, draws his structure from notable plays that involve excessive drinking after sundown: Long Day’s Journey into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Boys in the Band. In addition, those who have read Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons may recall that comeuppance figures heavily in that novel. There’s also a smidgen of The Big Chill and a larger scoop of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

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Days of Wine and Roses

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Days of Wine and Roses

In Days of Wine and Roses, the new musical based on JP Miller’s 1958 teleplay and Blake Edwards’s 1962 Warner Bros. film, the central characters introduce themselves in song as “two people stranded at sea.” Even when offered lifelines, as the boozy, destructive duo often are, they respond like drowning victims, clawing and scratching, threatening to bring their rescuers down with them. With a book by Craig Lucas and a score by Adam Guettel, Days of Wine and Roses presents a searing and sobering portrait of the devastating costs of addiction.

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