Michael Dale - Page 10

If you're like this reviewer, you're a sucker for stories about young people loudly and aggressively voicing their rebellions through art. Three years ago, screenwriter/director John Carney's indie hit 'Sing Street' told of a beaten-down 1980s Dublin teenage lad who forms a rock band initially to impress a girl, but then finds it as an outlet to write and perform songs expressing his range towards the adults who are supposed to be his role models. (Oh yeah, and he writes a song to try and make the girl like him, too.)

Since its first publication in 1843, Charles Dickens' holiday classic, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, has been adapted countless times for various stages, screens and pages, but undoubtedly the most authentic presentations of the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts who assist in his transformation into a kind and generous soul were the numerous live readings the author gave during the last 18 years of his life.

At least once a year, this reviewer feels compelled to take to his keyboard and urge any representatives of the MacArthur Foundation to bestow one of their a?oeGenius Granta?? fellowships to Company XIV's founding artistic director Austin McCormick, who throughout this young century has conceived, directed and choreographed some of the most joyfully thrilling theatre to be experienced in New York.

As played by Judith Ivey and Ken Narasaki in Samuel D. Hunter's touching and emotion-twisting drama Greater Clements, Maggie and Billy seem like the kind of couple who would have spent many happy decades together after being high school sweethearts, had Maggie's father, a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific, not forbidden her from getting further involved with the Japanese-American young man.

'Don't worry, you can laugh. Your children don't get the jokes,' the wise guy British comic Paul Dabeck, a/k/a The Trickster glibly remarks after a slightly naughty comment as he hosts THE ILLUSIONISTS: MAGIC OF THE HOLIDAYS.

Late in the second act of Jagged Little Pill, the new musical with a score derived primarily from Alanis Morissette's same-titled 1995 album, a group of young people, outraged at both the occurrence of a rape at a recent party and the existence of a culture that discourages the victim from telling her side of the story and a witness from revealing what he saw, hold a protest rally, carrying signs with slogans about believing those who say they were raped, respecting the refusal (or the incapability) of consent and how rape and rape culture effects all people, regardless of gender.

'We're going to bond, Alan, and that means you have to pay attention to everything I say,' the title character of George Eastman's HARRY TOWNSEND'S LAST STAND informs his son a minute or so into the proceedings.

Time stands still but life goes on might be one way of looking at Will Eno's charming and sweetly philosophical The Underlying Chris, receiving a fine premiere production directed by Kenny Leon at Second Stage.

Roughly two months ago American Theatre announced that for the second time in the past three seasons, Lauren Gunderson has topped their list of the most-produced playwrights in the country, her 33 professional productions among the 385 Theatre Communications Group's member theatres easily surpassing second place finisher Lauren Yee's 18, Tennessee Williams' 17 and more than doubling the totals of August Wilson and Neil Simon. She came in at #2 on last year's list after her first #1 finish the year before. (For the record, Shakespeare, who would surely rank #1 every season, is excluded.)

Six years before the world premiere of part one of his eventual Pulitzer-winning, monumental theatre epic ANGELS IN AMERICA, Tony Kushner was an inexperienced 26-year-old playwright who, as inexperienced 26-year-old playwrights are wont to do, wrote and directed an Off-Off Broadway play about young, optimistic bohemians living in Berlin during the rise of Adolf Hitler, which was regularly interrupted by a then-contemporary character offering commentary on the parallels between the emergence of the Third Reich and what was going on in America at the present time.

In 1979 a strike by the New Orleans Police Department led to the city's official cancellation of that year's public Mardi Gras celebration. The people of New Orleans had something else in mind.

'I've got a little favor to ask of you,' an American president asks the members of the Supreme Court on the night he's lost his re-election bid.

Marley is still dead to begin with, and near the end we're still reminded of Tiny Tim's observation, 'God bless Us, Every One!' But in between... Let's just say I never thought I'd have to fact-check the plot before reviewing a production of A Christmas Carol.

'In this town you're either a slut or a snob, no in-betweens,' explains the put-upon wife of a local celeb racecar driver in Abbie Spallen's tryptic of character studies, Pumpgirl, now getting a very well-acted production at the Irish Rep.

There is a firm, but understated strength that permeates the atmosphere during Broadbend, Arkansas, the beautifully realized two-person chamber musical created by composer Ted Shen and librettists Ellen Fitzhugh and Harrison David Rivers, depicting an event during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in one act and its legacy in the next.

'He thought of all the men who died in those years and what they might have become, what the world would look like today had they been allowed to end their story on their own terms. Eric wondered what his life would be like if he had not been robbed of a generation of mentors, of poets, of friends and, perhaps even lovers.'

Great comedy is often the byproduct of political scandal and those who humorously comment on the news often overshadow the newsmakers themselves.  You might say that more Americans learned about the controversies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon from watching The Smothers Brothers and Mort Saul, rather than Walter Cronkite.  For over forty years our perceptions of world leaders have been defined more by the impersonations seen on Saturday Night Live than by actual news clips.  And today there are a multitude of television hosts combining comedy with deep analysis and investigative journalism to editorialize on the goings-on of the current administration.

While there are many artistically pleasing moments to be savored on stage as the entrancingly funny Russian clown piece SLAVA'S SNOWSHOW returns to Broadway for a limited run through the holiday season, you can also have a heck of a good time if you just like having things thrown at you, dropped on you, sprayed at you or bouncing off of you.

The cleverest part of adaptor/director Erica Schmidt's new musical based on Edmond Rostand's classic CYRANO DE BERGERAC is that the two times a character makes mention of the title fellow's very large nose, there is a pause before the word, making it clear that the speaker was about to say something else, but thought better of it.

It's been a long-time point of pride among New Yorkers to be living in the most culturally and ethnically diverse spot on the planet, and given the history of the planet you can say that, comparatively, the city has done pretty well in encouraging a society of integration and acceptance.