Michael Dale - Page 18

'How many of you would just... pretty much like to have sex with me?', a character asks audience members in the middle of a play.

Her fans ate it up, with calls of 'We love you, Regina,' peppering her two-hour concert, the latest entry of the theatre's In Residence On Broadway series, presenting a variety of artists in short runs until TINA, the new Tina Turner musical, starts previewing in October.

'Only my dogs will not betray me,' confesses a world-renowned opera diva in Charles Ludlam's 1983 downtown triumph, GALAS.

'Don't roll your eyes at me,' a person of influence instructs a promising young musical theatre writer. 'I'm the chair of the Second-Coming-Of-Sondheim Award so I know what the f... I'm talking about!'

There's a rather highbrow gag in the long-ago Broadway musical TOVARICH, where a Gatsby-era gentleman asks an elegant lady if she's read James Joyce's new novel, 'Ulysses.' 'Just the final fifty pages,' she replies with a lustful wink in her voice.

A young African-American woman living in 1964 rural South Carolina is interrupted on her way to a voter registration rally by a pair of white men who not only rough her up until she's on the ground and bloody, but convince a police officer that it was her fault.

If, when the smoke clears on the Democratic Party's selection process, their next nominee for President of the United States turns out to be recent Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, history might point to director Kenny Leon's fun and stylish Shakespeare In The Park production of Much Ado About Nothing as the event that truly kick-started interest.

Though Zhu Yi's YOU NEVER TOUCHED THE DIRT is set in a large estate on the outskirts of Shanghai, New Yorkers will certainly recognize it as a gentrification story, where the homogeneous conveniences of the modern would come at the expense of a community's history and distinctive character.

When the audience enters Atlantic Theater's Stage 2 for Carla Ching's Nomad Motel, presented as part of their New Play Development program, there's a very familiar type of character already hard at work on stage; a quiet young man, seriously at work composing music with his electric guitar.

Playwright Christopher Shinn, who directs Second Stage's new production of his 2008 Pulitzer finalist Dying City, places a large black void at the upstage wall as part of designer Dane Laffrey's otherwise realistic depiction of rather non-descript Manhattan apartment. Don't, like this reviewer did, spend any part of your time at this 90-minute drama waiting for some practical use of this seemingly out-of-place feature. Its purpose, perhaps, is to represent that emptiness that can be felt by both individually and collectively after.

It's the players, more so than the play, that's the thing in director Erica Schmidt's psychologically intriguing Shakespeare adaptation titled Mac Beth. As with the current Daniel Fish-directed Broadway production of OKLAHOMA!, the focus of the evening is not so much on the text, but on the characters the actors are portraying who are portraying the characters in the text.

'This is an unscripted show. I have no idea what I'm going to do,' the internationally acclaimed composer and pianist Yanni tells his audience at the outset of his debut Broadway performance.

'I guess I want you to play the most beautiful music ever written and dedicate it to us,' a hopeful romantic requests of the radio station he's phoned from his date's apartment.

One of the many skills of the extraordinary, detail-oriented stage actor Marin Ireland is a habit of being so good that she can lift the audience's perception of a play that isn't quite there. For example, a year ago at this time, as she was making Tennessee Williams' SUMMER AND SMOKE, generally regarded as one of the great playwright's B-level efforts, appear to be just as rich and dramatically thick as A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.

Though the 1976 musical SO LONG, 174th STREET didn't even last a fortnight on Broadway, it wouldn't be surprising to see the York Theater Company's completely delightful revised version, ENTER LAUGHING, THE MUSICAL, return the Joseph Stein/Stan Daniels effort to the main stem someday, especially if director/adaptor Stuart Ross' slam-bang mounting keeps getting a little snazzier and a little funnier every time they bring it back.

There's a scene in poet-turned-playwright Aziza Barnes' fast and furiously funny debut stage piece, BLKS, where the main characters, a trio of black Brooklyn women in their 20s 'out on a mission to resurrect our fly back' find themselves at the corner of Prince Street and Broadway, where the N,R subway station entrance displays the faces of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in an ad for their Netflix comedy series, 'Grace and Frankie,' a show about two women who are there for each other during life's rough patches. In another time, the station might have shown an ad for 'Girls' or 'Sex and The City,' or any other such high-profile program where the default setting for the women who stick together is white.

Playwright Chisa Hutchinson, describes Constance Daley, the character who voices her solo play, Proof of Love, as 'close as you can get to a WASP while being black.'

Latecomers to director Terry Kinney's finely-acted Signature Theatre revival of Sam Shepard's 1977 dysfunctional family drama, Curse of the Starving Class, will miss the showstopping bit of stagecraft that opens the production, as set designer Julian Crouch's kitchen interior of a worse-for-wear California Valley farmhouse literally becomes a house divided, splitting horizontally with the top half appearing to crumble upwards.

Though the world-famous 35-year-old Montreal-based entertainment troupe Cirque du Soleil has never been known for making political statements with their extravaganzas of culture and athleticism - and while the timing is undoubtedly just coincidental - one can't help at least a passing thought of how appropriate it is to have their glorious new showpiece, LUZIA: A WAKING DREAM OF MEXICO, on tour during a time when America's president continually attempts to villainize our southern neighbor.

That crazy cacophony of choreographic chaos that careens across the City Center stage shortly after the commencement of Act II is the main reason for Encores! to bring back the smash hit 1947 musical comedy High Button Shoes.