Michael Dale - Page 11

With a stage career spanning half a century that includes dozens of notable performances in New York alone, Andre De Shields knows a thing or two about seducing an audience.  And that's exactly what he does at the opening of Anais Mitchell's exhilarating bluesy mythological folk opera HADESTOWN, which has finally landed on Broadway after a premiere engagement at New York Theatre Workshop, followed by stints in Edmonton and London.

For over a dozen years, the brilliant director/choreographer Austin McCormick and the intriguing troupe of artists he's gathered to create and expand Company XIV have been luring audiences to witness productions that evolve classic tales we've loved as children (The Nutcracker, Cinderella, Snow White) into visits to sensually-charged wonderlands.

The phrase 'toxic masculinity' wasn't exactly in the vernacular in 1987, when Circle Rep's buzz-producing run of Lanford Wilson's Burn This moved uptown to Broadway. So perhaps coked-up, homophobic, violently aggressive, possessive bullies were considered sexier than they are now.

When director Sam Mendes' beautifully realized production of Jez Butterworth's Olivier-winning drama The Ferryman opened on Broadway last October, leading man Paddy Considine and several other members of the excellent ensemble cast had been with the play since its April 2017 Royal Court premiere, with additional members having joined the company during its transfer stint at the Gielgud.

An empathy coach is hired to hold workshops at a debt collection agency. Sounds like comedy gold to this reviewer, who has been on the receiving end of phone calls from high-pressure, goal-oriented professionals suggesting I try borrowing money from friends in order to not 'feel like a deadbeat.'

As with setting a Shakespeare comedy in outer space or a Wagner opera in a subway station, director Daniel Fish's jaunty riff on Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1943 classic Oklahoma! may not look or sound the way the authors imagined, but it's a lot more faithful to its source than other musical revivals that seem determined to rewrite history.

In recalling the great comedies penned by William Shakespeare, classics like TWELFTH NIGHT, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and the one about all the errors have been making audiences bust out in laughter for hundreds of years. But King Lear? Certainly one of the English language's great tragedies, with the title character's vanity coupled with his descent into madness providing great older actors a chance to fully display their dramatic skills.

In June of 1937, the United States government padlocked New York's Maxine Elliot Theatre and sent security guards to prevent the performance of a new musical, but the unknown leading lady Olive Stanton courageously fought her fears and led an act of defiance that made headlines the morning after opening night.

Perhaps if Jacobean playwright John Webster had access to hard-driving techno music and live-stream video technology, his blood-soaked revenge drama The White Devil might have had a successful 1612 premiere at London's Red Bull Theatre, as performed by the resident company, Queen Anne's Men.

This morning President Donald Trump signed an executive order spelling out steps to combat the importation of Squips into the United States.

'Would you please raise your hand if you are a white man who also owns property?', playwright/performer Heidi Schreck asks her audience. The number of respondents is typically a very low percentage of the house.

Like a sad, lonely island, depleted of its bounty, a single floor of the offices of Lehman Brothers is revealed, isolated, lofted above the endless business of a bustling Manhattan. It is empty, save for the boxes of files stacked on top of each other after declaring bankruptcy in 2008 and the memory of three brothers who founded the company 158 years earlier and their descendants who kept it thriving as a global investment bank.

'Today, we give to the dirt of the earth, our beloved brother and friend, Brother Righttocomplain,' Father Freeman announces to the audience at commencement of Jordan E. Cooper's aggressively satirical surrealist vaudeville of African-American experiences, AIN'T NO MO'.

'I should let you know I am not okay,' playwright/performer Maddie Corman advises the audience at the outset of her completely absorbing solo piece ACCIDENTALLY BRAVE. 'This isn't one of those shows where I'm here to tell you that I was okay and then I wasn't okay but now I am okay.'

'These words might be more offensive now than they were back then,' ponders playwright/actor Ronnie Marmo in the guise of one of 20th Century America's most controversial artists in his (mostly) solo performance, I'M NOT A COMEDIAN... I'M LENNY BRUCE.

One of the quirky charms of the musicals that packed Broadway houses during early decades of the 20th Century, was the practice of allowing a stray remark that has nothing to do with anything that's going on to serve as the cue for a novelty song that has nothing to do with anything that's going on.

And as we look out at what the country has become in recent years, and how social media has illuminated what we have always been, it's necessary to have artists like Suzan-Lori Parks around to keep us thinking, and talking, about what we can aspire to.

'You never know who was hating you and singing along to your record,' musses Otis Williams in playwright Dominique Morisseau's excellent bio-musical, AIN'T TOO PROUD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE TEMPTATIONS.

White letters on a black screen introduce the place and time of an early scene in FX's limited series 'Fosse/Verdon' as 'Hollywood, 19 years left.'

Sturdy, richly-voiced and subtly droll, John Larroquette is one of those actors with a wonderful talent for creating enormously funny moments by taking in the madness surrounding him and cutting it down with a look or an utterance.