Ben Peltz - Page 16

The audience greets their star's entrance with a long round of enthusiastic cheers as she takes her place center stage and she, in turn, glares back at them with a look of unrestrained contempt.  That's the charm of Jackie Hoffman's relationship with her fans.  She always seems utterly annoyed at the prospect of being there and they love her for it.

When it was announced that Transport Group's compact production of bookwriter Douglas Carter Beane and composer/lyricist Lewis Flinn's giddily fun and sexy musical combo of Aristophanes and college hoops, Lysistrata Jones, was moving to Broadway, there was some understandable concern about the Off-Broadway production - originally staged on a gym's half-court - being able to fill out the much larger space.  Not to worry.  It turns out LJ was just aching for some much-needed elbow room to really fly.  At the Walter Kerr, the production values have been expanded to enhance the freestyle romp without overwhelming it, the performances have grown with Broadway-sized confidence and the show is funnier and more delightful than ever.

Call me envious, but the genre of plays that feature smart, educated, financially well-off characters screwing up their lives under the knowing smirks of the maid serves as a kind of comfort food for me.  And while the discomfort in class, racial and gender issues experienced by the LeVay family in Lydia R. Diamond's funny and quite heated family drama, Stick Fly, may seem a bit too familiar at times, director Kenny Leon and his terrific ensemble help deliver a lively evening.

While you probably wouldn't expect period recordings of 'Let's Do It' and 'St. Louis Woman' to be part of the pre-show soundtrack for a family friendly production of Snow White, director/choreographer Austin McCormick's Company XIV has never been a group to provide the expected.

'We began this production with the simplest and most time-honored of theatrical practices,' writes New York Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis.  'We were looking for the next great role for Jay O. Sanders.'

The new musical inspired by the careers of Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow begins with stars Jeremy Jordan and Laura Osnes, as the infamous title duo, sitting dead from multiple bullet wounds in the front seat of a Ford.  I resisted the temptation to give them entrance applause.

For many Americans - okay, white suburban middle classers into traditional gender roles - the 1950s was an idyllic time when the country could rest easily with our post-war status as the world's super-power before the internal unrest of the 60s began exposing the ugly imperfections.  For stressed out, caffeinated 21st Century urbanites, a trip to the world depicted in period sitcoms like Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or the nostalgic recreation, Happy Days, might offer a welcome mental vacation to a less-complicated era of structured roles and lower expectations.  Or perhaps even a permanent lifestyle change.

No matter how early you enter the house for New York Theatre Workshop's production of Once, the play is already well underway.  Most of the thirteen-member ensemble, all of whom play musical instruments, seem to have long been gathered inside designer Bob Crowley's cozy Dublin pub, playing traditional folk songs, dancing a bit and singing their hearts out.  The festive mood resembles the kind of improvised jam session you might luckily stumble upon some night and never want to leave, especially since audience members are welcome to join them on stage, purchase a drink or two and linger a while.

Whether it's historic Off-Broadway theatres being replaced by chain stores and condos after their rents are tripled or beloved long-time Coney Island businesses facing eviction if they don't conform to the bland, antiseptic vision of new planners, New Yorkers are very familiar with the culture vs. commerce issues Anton Chekhov was writing about in The Cherry Orchard.

Jacques Brel is dead and buried and entombed in French Polynesia and the Zipper Theatre, home of the very satisfying revival of Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris several seasons back is now a beloved memory, but the producers of that mounting have been keeping the 'ol carousel madly turning for nearly a year now with regular presentations of Jacques Brel Returns, up at The Triad.

In The Book of Mormon, the young Ugandan ingénue sings of a fantasy world she imagines where all the warlords are friendly.  And while in J.T. Rogers' intriguing drama of 1980s American foreign policy, Blood and Gifts, Afghan warlord Abdullah Kahn isn't exactly depicted as a saint, the author paints him as a man deeply dedicated to his family and the culture of his people who, like a typical American father, has job-related headaches (trying to secure weapons to defend his soil against the Soviets) and can't understand the music his son listens to (Rod Stewart's 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy' and Tina Turner's 'What's Love Got to Do with It').  As played by Bernard White, he is a humble and patriotic man of dignity.

White Christmas is just too good a musical to be limited to holiday-time productions.  Especially when you have Larry Blank's ultra-snazzy swing orchestrations vibrantly delivering a gold-plated assortment of Irving Berlin classics and Randy Skinner's dancers heating up the floor with some sensational tapping.

Theresa Rebeck provides plenty of mindless fun for the aggressively hip in Seminar, a breezy and enjoyable new comedy that will especially appeal to those who love showing off their urban cultural elitism by laughing very loudly at derogatory references to short stories published in The New Yorker and howling with yuks when a pseudo-intellectual mispronounces Inigo Jones' name while passionately giving a vapid description of the Yaddo artists' colony.

Known primarily for their excellent work with the Prospect Theatre Company (of which she is Producing Artistic Director and he is Resident Writer), the husband and wife team of director/bookwriter Cara Reichel and composer/lyricist/bookwriter Peter Mills are responsible for some of the most exciting and innovative musical theatre New York has seen since the company was founded in 1998.  And I daresay that with Iron Curtain, they and their inspired cohorts fully succeed in presenting one of their most difficult and risk-taking concepts yet; a fast, loud and funny 1950s-style musical comedy.

Just like Pope Paul VI figured when The Vatican told followers to go ahead and celebrate mass in the vernacular, John-Michael Tebelak figured that if the musical he penned with Stephen Schwartz, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, was going to connect with young people, it had to be done in their language.  So when Godspell premiered Off-Broadway forty years ago, the son of God and his disciples were depicted as soft pop and folk singing flower children who were too busy learning how to spread love to be bothered with sex, drugs and burning their draft cards.  Arriving on Broadway after Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, it was the first major rock musical that didn't scare the hell out of parents.

The funny thing about the truth is that it can be totally subjective and personal stories rarely involve just one person.  So, in Jon Robin Baitz's darkly comic drama, Other Desert Cities, when a depression-plagued writer tries curing the block following the success of her freshman effort with a book describing her view of her celebrity family's past tragedy, the holiday conversation crackles like a Yule log.

Three years ago I posted a review emphatically praising the Prospect Theatre Company's developmental production of Jim and Ruth Bauer's The Blue Flower, calling it, 'a unique, intelligent and wondrously creative evening of musical theatre' that 'skillfully tackles the tricky business of mixing the art of musical theatre with the anti-art movement of Dada.'  A German creation born amidst the rubble of the First World War, Dada was an artistic, literary and theatrical movement that attacked the sensibilities of a culture that could send millions of young men to slaughter by celebrating anarchy and irrationality.

If Hamlet is the reward an actor gets for showing great promise in his youth, King Lear is the thank you he receives in the latter years of a distinguished career.  At age 35, Sam Waterston's Hamlet became one of the iconic performances to come out of the New York Shakespeare Festival.  Now, at 71, The Public Theater's gift for his decades of admirable stage work is the opportunity to essay the maddening royal whose rages against a perceived betrayal by the mosT Loving of his three daughters sets in motion the bloody collapse of a monarchy.  Unfortunately, the gift has not been wrapped very attractively.

'You're an insane woman,' a character says to the protagonist in Michael John LaChiusa's intriguing new musical, Queen of The Mist.

The inner city teenage girls in Kirsten Greenidge's moving new drama, Milk Like Sugar, want only one thing from a boy... a baby.