Reviews

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Munich Medea: Happy Family

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Munich Medea: Happy Family

A program note by Corinne Jaber, the playwright who is making her debut with Munich Medea: Happy Family, says that her work is meant to “shine light into places that are difficult to look at” and not “judge nor accuse, but to reveal.” She accomplishes that, but the story line of her fairly static, albeit well-cast, play feels like one we’ve (unfortunately) seen before. At this point, more than 25 years after How I Learned to Drive won the Pulitzer Prize, sexual abuse is no longer a novel subject for the stage.

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The Apiary

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The Apiary

A dystopian story about environmental catastrophe and death is not necessarily where one would expect to find humor, but Kate Douglas achieves a darkly comic triumph with her new play, The Apiary. The production at Second Stage Theater fires on all cylinders, including Kate Whoriskey’s superb direction and the uniformly stellar cast, who navigate the play’s mixture of absurdity and sincerity with precise and convincing performances.

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Russian Troll Farm

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Russian Troll Farm

Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm at the Vineyard Theatre is a nightmare version of an office sitcom, set during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Quirky worker bees perform evil tasks while navigating interpersonal relationships and an ever-present authoritarian state looming over them, in the form of Vladimir Putin’s portrait on the wall and an armed soldier keeping watch. The professional Internet trolls in St. Petersburg, at the benignly named Internet Research Agency, send out vast numbers of tweets and posts using fake accounts—a “mix of celebrities, eggs, fake individuals, and pundits”—to disseminate misinformation. In almost every case, Gancher uses real Russian troll tweets, a documentary reality that makes the set-up even more nightmarish.

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The Connector

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The Connector

The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.

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White Rose: The Musical

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White Rose: The Musical

Those reflecting on history often use a wide brush and focus on major figures to the exclusion of perhaps less renowned but significant players. Hitler, the Nazi war machine, and concentration camps are front of mind as regards World War II in Europe, but how many people remember dissidents and resistance from within Germany? The White Rose, one such resistance group, presented a credible threat to Nazi lies, propaganda, and blind devotion to the Führer. Brian Belding’s White Rose: The Musical is an homage to some of those “good Germans” who risked their lives and paid the ultimate price for defying Hitler and his henchmen.

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Saw the Musical

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Saw the Musical

Whether the 2004 low-budget horror film Saw has left enough of a cultural footprint on the public to warrant a musical parody is for audiences to decide. Saw the Musical, a send-up of the original Saw, with a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and music and lyrics by Patrick Spencer and Anthony De Angelis, certainly doesn’t provide any evidence of it.

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The Animal Kingdom

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The Animal Kingdom

There are few theatrical experiences more thrilling than witnessing a new play catch fire and mesmerize an audience.  That experience is now to be had at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, where British playwright Ruby Thomas’s airtight 80-minute drama, The Animal Kingdom, is making its U.S. premiere.  Tautly directed by Jack Serio, it’s a show that is emotionally gripping and ultimately redemptive.

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Public Obscenities

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Public Obscenities

Shayok Misha Chowdhury's semi-autobiographical Public Obscenities returns to the stage this season at Theatre for a New Audience as part of The Under the Radar Festival. The production explores themes of returning home and complex relationships as a queer Indian man tries to come to terms with his family’s secrets while breaking away from learned behavior.

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Jonah

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Jonah

The main character in Rachel Bonds’ new drama Jonah is not Jonah but Ana, a young woman portrayed from age 16 into her 30s by Gabby Beans, who’s on stage for the entire play. Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) is in only the first third, except for a brief reappearance near the end. The play peaks during those early scenes, which are charming and funny, then gets increasingly talky and disturbing in the post-Jonah scenes.

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The Greatest Hits Down Route 66

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The Greatest Hits Down Route 66

Histories come in all shapes and sizes and can be chronicled in any number of fashions. Family histories, each unhappy in their own way, may reveal personal pains that turn out to be strikingly universal. A country’s history can be told in terms of its politics, its geographic landmarks, its immigrants. And a people’s history can be reflected in its folk music. Any one of these might make for an engrossing night of theater. But when attempting to combine all three, finding the right balance and weaving a cohesive tale become a tall order. Such is the case with the New Light Theater Project’s production of The Greatest Hits Down Route 66, which finds itself short on songs, long on family dysfunction, and scattered on Americana.

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Aristocrats

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Aristocrats

Brian Friel’s Aristocrats is often described as “Chekhovian,” and, indeed, the parallels to The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are unmistakable: three very different sisters of the O’Donnell family, along with their relations and hangers-on, navigate a collapsing estate, literally and figuratively, and grapple with a questionable family legacy and sense of purpose. Aristocrats is the second installment of the Irish Rep’s Friel Project, following an exquisite production of Translations.

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Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

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Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

The Wooster Group’s 2017 celebrated production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons” was promoted as a “record album interpretation.” Conceived by Eric Berryman, the multimedia performance gave thrilling urgency and pulsing vitality to a recording from 1965 that featured African American work songs, spirituals, and personal anecdotes from prison. Berryman and The Wooster Group’s current piece is an exploration of Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, an LP that was released by Rounder Records in 1976. While the performance has its share of exhilarating moments, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is not as stirring as the previous work. It has, regrettably, several of the hallmarks of what is described in the recording industry as “difficult second album syndrome.”

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Our Class

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Our Class

On July 10, 1941, as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children were rounded up and packed into a barn in Jedwabne, a small town in northwest Poland. The locked barn was set ablaze, and everyone inside perished. The pogrom is notable (and controversial) because, unlike similar atrocities in Nazi-occupied cities and villages, the massacre was not carried out solely by officers of the Third Reich or by Soviet nationals. The perpetrators were friends, associates, and neighbors of the Jews with whom they had lived peaceably and side-by-side before the occupation. Although not explicitly about Jedwabne, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class follows the basic outlines of the historical events, and under Igor Golyak’s resourceful and potent direction, the play shows that our most barbarous enemies may indeed dwell among us.

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Bacon

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Bacon

The journey from boy to manhood is fraught with dangers. A superb new play, Sophie Swithinbank’s Bacon, underscores this reality as she dramatizes the passage of two teens into adulthood. Directed by Matthew Iliffe, Bacon is both a cautionary tale and an unflinching exploration of masculinity, sexuality, and power. A sold-out production at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it is now part of the International Fringe Encore Series at the SoHo Playhouse.

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Less Lonely

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Less Lonely

Toward the beginning of the new solo show Less Lonely, writer and star Jes Tom explains: 

Usually when I do comedy, I come out on stage, I do a bit that goes “Hi. I’m Jes, my pronouns are they/them, I like when people call me ‘they,’ it makes me feel less lonely. Like someone can be like, ‘That’s Jes, they’re gonna go smoke a spliff,’ and it sounds like I had a friend.”

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The Night of the Iguana

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The Night of the Iguana

Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana is often considered his last great play, but the 1961 milestone was created amid stress and anguish. The role of Hannah Jelkes was written for Katharine Hepburn, but Spencer Tracy needed her care; Margaret Leighton played it and won a Tony. Bette Davis, difficult to imagine as the sensual Maxine Faulk, was at her most tyrannical during tryouts; she left the production after three months. Elia Kazan didn’t direct, though he lauded the work of Frank Corsaro, who did. In the end, however, the play survived, but La Femme Theatre Productions’ revival, the first in 28 years, demonstrates that pitfalls abound.

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Buena Vista Social Club

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Buena Vista Social Club

Theatergoers who yearn for a tropical getaway need look no further than the musical Buena Vista Social Club, set in Havana, Cuba, and alternating between 1996 and 1956. With music by the eponymous collective—the subjects of German director Wim Wenders’s 1999 documentary that inspired this production—the show presents young and old versions of the principal characters (played by different actors) as they cut their professional teeth as artists and learn to jam—and survive tough political times—together.

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Death, Let Me Do My Show

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Death, Let Me Do My Show

A specter is haunting Rachel Bloom—the specter of death. In fact, Death is sitting in the fifth row of her show, Death, Let Me Do My Show, looking suspiciously like Bloom’s friend David Hull, the “moderately successful actor who seems stuck between leading man and character roles” (as she describes him). And Death insists on being acknowledged, contrary to Bloom’s plan to deliver the show as she conceived it in 2019.

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Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion

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Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion

Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion is a new parody from the creators of  The Play That Goes Wrong—this time aimed at magicians. The production is about the relationship between a magician and his stooge, played by Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer respectively, who cowrote this show as well as Play That Goes Wrong with Henry Shields. While Mind Mangler easily segues back and forth from a spoof of a magic show to actual sleight of hand to a dramatic story involving the two leads, not all its parts are equally successful.

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Export Quality

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Export Quality

Export Quality, a play centered on the mail-order bride system in the Philippines—a practice that usually leads to the trafficking, rape, abuse and death of many women by American men. Although the mail-order bride industry has existed for decades, Export Quality is a reminder to the public that this issue persists. The four main characters who introduce themselves at the outset are commodified and stripped of their fundamental human rights—sentenced to a life of indentured servitude.

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