Michael Dale - Page 16

One of the tightest ensembles of actors you're apt to see applying their craft on a New York stage these days is the quartet of youngsters portraying siblings aged 5-12 in Bess Wohl's engrossing drama of childhood memories, Make Believe.

'They're out of control,' an exasperated Bradley Dean cries out in a plea of victimization. 'Can you believe they tried to destroy my new housing project?' And from there you can pretty much predict where the plot of Jim Steinman's wildly oddball and frequently hilarious Bat Out of Hell is going.

a?oeAs terrifying as anything I've seen,' is how a young fellow describes the natural phenomenon that gives playwright Simon Stephens' solo piece SEA WALL its title.

It was forty years ago when Shakespeare in the Park's Delacorte Theater was last invaded by The Bard's CORIOLANUS, but perhaps The Public's politically-minded artistic director Oskar Eustis thought this would be a good time to present a drama about an inexperienced politician who initially gains favor on a wave of populism, only to suffer downfall when his disdain for those outside of his privileged class is exposed.

Perhaps if, like most first attempts at playwrighting penned by a young unknown who is also cast in the leading role, Domenica Feraud's RINSE, REPEAT had a modestly-produced premiere production in a small black box theatre, this reviewer would be more enthused to recommend an interesting work in progress by a new and underrepresented voice.

It's doubtful one will find a more romantic, nor a sexier theatergoing experience within the five boroughs this summer than seated close to someone special in one of Theatre XIV's cozy champagne couches when nearly directly above you, aerialists Marcy Richardson and Nolan McKew are performing a sensuous display of glistening muscles and elegant eroticism while maneuvering their nearly nude bodies in a variety of tableaus while hanging from a crown-shaped chandelier.

Like Aaron Posner's UNCLE VANYA-inspired LIFE SUCKS, still packing in the disillusioned masses at Theatre Row, the new offering by MCC is more of a freestyle riff on its sullen source material, lifting subtext to the surface in contemporary vernacular and shaving the whole thing down to a quick-paced 90 minutes.

When he passed on at age 60 in 1933, Addison Mizner was best known as the architect whose Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean style helped define the emerging visual culture of South Florida. When his younger brother Wilson Mizner died two months later, he was best known as a raconteur whose name could occasionally be found among the writing credits of a Broadway play or Hollywood feature.

From his hit Off-Broadway debut with A VERY MERRY UNAUTHORIZED CHILDREN'S SCIENTOLOGY PAGEANT to his Broadway bow with BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON to his current mounting of BEETLEJUICE, that crazily imaginative Alex Timbers has spent the past 15 years or so establishing himself as New York's top director for turning weird ideas into terrific times at the theatre.

In the second act of Chris Urch's excellent drama about a particularly ugly era of Uganda's intolerance of homosexuals, The Rolling Stone, James Udom is granted what might be considered the most challenging acting assignment to be currently witnessed on a New York stage.

Sometime between the era when a tap-dancing hopeful would go out there a youngster and come back a star and nowadays when tourists go out to Applebee's hungry and come back with a less than satisfying dining experience, many of the Broadway venues on that legendary strip of real estate called 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues were converted into grindhouse theatres exclusively screening low-budget attractions in such genres as Blaxploitation, Martial Arts Flicks and Carsploitation.

When bookwriter Chris D'Arienzo's 1980s hair-band tuner Rock of Ages moved from Off-Broadway's New World Stages to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in April of 2009 - with a score made up of rock classics by Journey, Styx, Asia, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, Foreigner and a bunch of others - it was, to this reviewer's recollection, the first Broadway jukebox musical to acknowledge the silliness of jamming hit songs into an unrelated story.

Perhaps it would be regarded as exploitative to directly quote the passage here, but the last several minutes of playwright Isaac Gomez's THE WAY SHE SPOKE consists primarily of the names, ages, causes of death and physical states of the corpses of several dozen women who were murdered, in scenarios usually involving rape, in the Mexican border city of Juarez during the horrific rise of femicide that has plagued the city since the 1990s.

In Alfaro's take on Euripides' MEDEA, titled Mojada, the varying attitudes towards assimilation within a family of Mexican refugees who lack documentation lead to a devastating conflict.

Through the leadership of Reverend Bernard Scott, Greenwich Village's Judson Memorial Church became a center for emerging artists during the 1950s, welcoming the experimental, the avant-garde and the political to have their work seen without fear of censorship.

Despite an oeuvre that includes a questioning of the sanity of American social conventions and an exploration into the motivations of presidential assassins, INTO THE WOODS might be regarded as the most subversive of Stephen Sondheim's musicals.

Chamber musicals don't get much more chamber than composerlyricistbookwriter Grace McLean's In the Green, an intriguing new piece receiving its premiere at LCT3's Claire Tow Theater. Musically complex, dramatically abstract and, as presented by director Lee Sunday Evans, intensely intimate in style, In the Green may need some sharpening to clarify its storytelling, but as a whole it is an ambitious work that's worthy of the focused attention it demands.

The last time a well-known actor not especially noted for singing graced a major New York stage with a one-person autobiographical musical that focused on personal tragedy, it was Suzanne Somer's unmissably jaw-dropping narcissistic spectacle, THE BLONDE IN THE THUNDERBIRD.  But fear not, playgoers, for while David Cale does provide quite a few original ditties to augment his childhood memoir, WE'RE ONLY ALIVE FOR A SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME, his not-quite-Sinatra-level vocals are way more suited for this captivating presentation than a more elegant songbird's trill.

Unlike the vast majority of musicals granted concert productions by City Center's Encores! Off-Center, the collaborate effort known as WORKING did not play an Off-Broadway run before hitting Times Square. Instead, Chicago's Goodman Theatre production transferred to the 46th Street Theatre in 1978, where it garnered numerous Tony nominations, including best musical.

From the epic poetry of Ernest Lawrence Thayer's 'Casey At The Bat' to the sharp-edged vernacular of Ring Lardner's newspaper columns and the nostalgic innocence of Roger Kahn's 'The Boys of Summer,' baseball has been inspiring great literary flourishes for well over a century.