Reviews

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Cross That River

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Cross That River

Fact marries fiction in the new musical Cross That River, a tale about a runaway named Blue who escapes slavery in the 1860s to become one of America’s first black cowboys. Soulfully directed by Reggie Life, and starring jazz musician Allan Harris, Cross That River has music and lyrics by Harris, and a book written by Harris and his wife, Pat Harris. Although its musical patterns are mostly defined by a spirited jazz and blues vibe, there are also dashes of gospel, country and western, and African rhythms that pulsate in the vibrant songs.

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Job

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Job

Max Wolf Friedlich packs a boomer–Gen Z clash, thoughts about modern technology, gender politics, liberals’ self-flagellation, the belligerent anxiety that’s become our national character, and a whopper of a twist into the 85-minute run time of Job, his first play produced Off Broadway. Also making her Off-Broadway debut with Job is actress Sydney Lemmon, granddaughter of movie legend Jack, recently seen opposite Cate Blanchett in Tár and opposite the venomous Roy clan on Succession—where her Job costar, Peter Friedman, had a recurring role.

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Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

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Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

The stakes are high, and quite pointy, in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. In this jocular take on that jugular-loving creature of the night, blood is sucked, true love is tested and vanity finds a way to survive in the soul of a monster who ironically cannot cast his own reflection in a mirror. Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic tale provides the groundwork, but the spirit of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, and the ghost of Charles Ludlam, lift the evening to its batty heights.

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Infinite Life

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Infinite Life

Annie Baker makes her much-anticipated return to Off-Broadway with the world premiere of Infinite Life, a coproduction with Britain’s National Theatre. The play, once titled On the Uses of Pain for Life, was slated for Fall 2021 at Signature Theatre, but it never materialized; Baker’s most recent play, The Antipodes, was produced at Signature in 2017. It takes only a few moments of Infinite Life’s halting and delightfully awkward opening exchange for Baker to captivate with her uncanny blend of the naturalistic and the absurd, honing in on human frailty with a merciless yet empathetic eye, this time trained on patients at an alternative pain clinic in Northern California.

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Bioadapted

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Bioadapted

Bioadapted, a new theater piece created and directed by Tjaša Ferme, and written by James Yu and Alexis Roblan, is a hybrid play drawn from sources as disparate as a 2020 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that was written by ChatGPT; transcripts of panels of scientists discussing the subject; and scientists interacting with artificial intelligence (AI). Turning transcripts into drama has been around a long while—from Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice and Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde to the recent Is This a Room, which took dialogue verbatim from FBI interviews with Reality Winner.

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Doris Day: My Secret Love

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Doris Day: My Secret Love

Paul Adams, the founder and artistic director of The Emerging Artists Theatre, knows a thing or two about digging up dirt. In his 2016 NY Fringe howler, The Cleaning Guy, he recounted his quarter century of maintaining various Manhattan apartments (including Agnes de Mille’s in her last days) to make a buck. Now, as the writer behind the tell-all, Doris Day: My Secret Love, he peels back the movie star’s squeaky-clean image to reveal a rather bleak biography with bullet points that include being married thrice by age 28, suffering a philandering father, crimes against her body and her bank account, panic attacks and the unexpected deaths of those whom she counted on the most. Is it any wonder she would ultimately focus her energies on pet care and animal adoption? 

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A Will to Live

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A Will to Live

New lives that spring from trauma can often take surprising turns. The people who may seem most likely to be permanently damaged can demonstrate the ability to heal, be empathetic, to love, and even to forgive. The indomitable spirit of Helena Weinrauch, whose world was brutally torn apart in occupied Poland during World War II, is reflected viscerally, visually, and poetically in A Will to Live, Kirk Gostkowki’s adaptation of Weinrauch’s 2008 memoir.

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A Séance with Mom

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A Séance with Mom

Actress-playwright-comedian Nancy Redman has returned to the Chain Studio Theatre for the third run of her one-woman show, A Séance with Mom.  Directed by Austin Pendleton, the piece is performed on a bare stage, with only a chair, small table, and walker at its side. Its six characters are conjured up by Redman with her expressive voice, elastic face, and physical comedy. Redman, who has been described as a cross-fertilization of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, steers clear of politics, preferring to take a deep dive into family relationships and the human condition.

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Pay the Writer

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Pay the Writer

With TV star Marcia Cross and beloved stage actor Bryan Batt in the cast, two Tony winners on the design team, and recognizable names among the producers, Pay the Writer would appear to be a solidly financed production. Yet it has a kind of low-rent look to it and clunky staging.

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A Eulogy for Roman

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A Eulogy for Roman

Going to a solo show that is set up as a memorial service might not sound like a particularly inviting theatrical experience during the dog days of summer. But A Eulogy for Roman, written and performed by the beguiling Brendan George, proves that saying farewell to a childhood friend doesn’t have to be an occasion for tears but can be a time for making new promises.

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Let’s Call Her Patty

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Let’s Call Her Patty

For older females, upper middle-class life, even when coated with a veneer of happiness, creature comforts, and respectability, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Playwright Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty focuses on this milieu via an Upper West Side woman, flanked by her daughter and niece. Margot Bordelon’s direction reflects first the comic, then the tragic aspects of such a life.   

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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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