Michael Dale - Page 134

Anika Noni Rose and Raul Esparza star in Marc Blitzstein's historic pro-labor protest musical.

N.C. Hunter's bittersweet drama of aging parents is filled with pathos and charm.

If the sexiest part of the body is the brain, Jeff Gould's comedy is an effective argument for celibacy.

Jonathan Tolins' comical Streisand fantasy re-opens at Barrow Street Theater.

Though I'll admit it strikes the ear rather oddly to hear a character referred to as another one's slave in a play set in 1930s upstate New York, that's just one of the risks involved when transporting Shakespeare into a more modern setting. Nevertheless, director Daniel Sullivan's zippy new Delacorte Theater production of The Comedy of Errors hits the ears and eyes just right for 90 minutes of good laughs and snazzy dancing.

Jenny Schwartz's Somewhere Fun, receiving a splendidly performed and whimsically mounted production from director Anne Kauffman at the Vineyard, is one of those plays where an author's traditional response to the traditional post-viewing question is, 'Well, what do you think it means?'

The argument for using the pop music method of 'slant rhyming' (frowned on by musical theatre lyricists as 'false rhyming' or using 'sound-a-likes') is that by not limiting lyricists to using perfect rhymes it greatly expands the number of ideas that can be expressed.  If that's so, the number of slant rhymes used in Venice, the new hip-hop/rock musical riff on Shakespeare's Othello, could potentially contain enough ideas to fill up a First Folio.

Through clever use of multimedia, playwright/performer Moe Angelos' Sontag: Reborn offers glimpses at both the precocious enthusiasm of youth and the wry remembrances of one looking back upon those same years.  ('Childhood: a terrible waste of time.')  Both come in the form of novelist, essayist, literary critic and inspiration for at least one Broadway showtune, Susan Sontag.

I must admit to smirking a bit when, only a few minutes into Israel's Gesher Theater Company's stage adaption of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, the main character removed his clothing and started soaking in a bathtub, contributing to the odd trend that has hit New York stages in the past couple of seasons of plays and musicals featuring nude (or almost nude or suggested nudity) bathtub scenes.  (Bonnie and Clyde, Macbeth, Sleep No More, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Nance, If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, Through The Yellow Hour, Nice Work If You Can Get It… Have I missed any?)

By Disney standards the year and a half run of the original Broadway production of The Little Mermaid was a bit of a disappointment.  In theory, a competently created musical based on the hit animated film would probably run for a year and a half based on the title recognition alone.  My opinion of that show was higher than most of my colleagues.  I enjoyed it, but mostly for the vaudevillian pleasure of seeing a cast of terrific Broadway performers each getting a star turn or two.  But after some script revisions and a whole new visual concept, director Glenn Casale's production of the new Mermaid that just opened at Paper Mill is a well-crafted, delightfully designed and performed charmer.

I'd be hard-pressed to find a more accurate musical theatre representation of the idealized fantasy of 1950s suburbia than the lovely Kelli O'Hara in a lovely housedress singing in her lovely soprano of her enrapturement with her lovely life via Far From Heaven's opening song, 'Autumn in Connecticut.'  It's a magical height from which she will surely descend in Richard Greenberg (book), Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie's (lyrics) enrapturing new musical drama that features a gorgeously textured score and the actress' finest New York performance to date.

Director Brian Kulick sets Classic Stage Company's interesting and spirited new production of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle during the fall of the Soviet Union, 'when the hammer and sickle were replaced by the Coca-Cola bottle.'  The production's Playbill cover depicts a satisfied looking Christopher Lloyd scribbling over that iconic communist emblem with a piece of chalk.  This is certainly an unusual take for a play that, when it premiered in 1948, was intended to depict the fairness to be found in Soviet leadership.

If I were a classical music critic I might describe The Giacomo Variations as an ambitious exploration of common themes expressed in the three operas Mozart composed with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

The last time Mark Brown's charming and witty stage adaptation of Jules Verne's Around The World In 80 Days played Off-Broadway, it was in a pocket-sized production highlighted by a pair of on-stage Foley artists providing live sound effects.  But in the eye-popping new Off-Broadway production, director/designer Rachel Klein is working with considerably larger pockets.

City Center Encores! Off-Center and The Lobby Project (http://www.nycitycenter.org/content/stage/off-center.aspx). It's exciting enough that Encores! will be exploring Off-Broadway this summer with concert performances of three landmark musicals, The Cradle Will Rock, Violet and I'm Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road, but ticket-holders will also be invited to attend The Lobby Project, a series of free pre-show exhibitions and discussions. Participants and topics include Oskar Eustis, Amy Herzog and Sam Gold discussing how personal politics impacts art, Idina Menzel talking about A BroaderWay Foundation, an arts camp she created in 2010 with Taye Diggs for girls from underserved communities and Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford discussing their creation of Getting My Act Together…

One Chekhovian country house exits the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and a new Chekhovian country house enters.  But Richard Nelson's Nikolai and the Others, enjoying an elegant staging by director David Cromer, is a more sober-minded effort than the venue's last tenant, Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike.

Earlier this week I posted how I voted for this season's Outer Critics Circle Awards, so now here are the picks from my ballot for the Drama Desk Awards, which will be presented Sunday night.

The Constitution is the only document you get more knowledge of it, the drunker you get.  Why?  It was written during a four month drunken binge. The bills from those days show thousands of dollars in wine, port, beer.  They were all drinking.

'Gossip is the lube by which this town slips it in.'