Michael Dale - Page 20

Don't let the abundance of cuteness fool you. Isabella Rossellini's LINK LINK CIRCUS is one of the brainiest shows in town.

Though Shakespeare's The Tempest commences with a spectacular act of revenge, director Laurie Woolery stresses in her program notes for Mobile Unit's thoroughly enrapturing new production her intention to highlight the play's moments of forgiveness, leaving audiences to ponder 'what it means to use one's power to heal rather than to destroy and what it means to break the a cycle of retribution and violence.'

If you're like this male theatre critic, you'll spend the first twenty minutes or so of Halley Feiffer's The Pain of My Belligerence wondering why the woman at the center of the story is putting up with the atrocious immature behavior of the guy who's her arrogant and disrespectful dinner date. If you're like the woman who was my theatre companion for the evening, you'll know exactly what's going on.

'Holy crap! A ballad already?', sneers the leading man as he interrupts the opening song of his starring vehicle; a funeral dirge sung by his co-star, backed by a chorus of mourners.

Long before the term clickbait entered into pop culture infamy, Chief Editor Larry Lamb of the Fleet Street tabloid The Sun was offering his staff a bonus every time the eye-catching words 'Win,' 'Free' and 'Love' appeared on the front page.

Following in the footsteps of NETWORK and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Robert Horn (book) and David Yazbek's (score) musical comedy Tootsie continues this Broadway season's welcome trend of adapting classic, decades-old source material into brand new stage pieces that examine familiar stories through a contemporary lens.

While many scoff at Broadway's habit of bringing back so many American classics from decades ago, a well-timed revival of an early work by one of our great masters might reveal a bit about how the young, emerging voices of another era were dealing with the same kinds of issues that we still debate (or avoid) at family dinners today.

Don't let the title scare you. All you need to know about Shakespeare's infamously bloody revenge tragedy before laughing yourself silly at Taylor Mac's Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, is that the Bard's final dead body count among Roman nobles is exceedingly high.

'Would you rule justly?' the ancient Greek philosopher who serves as title character of Tim Blake Nelson's drama Socrates asks a fellow citizen who claims he would do a better job than the current political leaders. 'I'd rule to make Athens great,' answers the metal-craftsman, whose support of the current war might be influenced by the income he receives molding breastplates and spears for soldiers.

'If the universe is infinite,' Laurie Metcalf, playing Laurie Metcalf, explains to the audience at the outset of Lucas Hnath's sharp and funny bit of political fan fiction, Hillary and Clinton, 'then that means that everything that happens in it happens many times, over and over, and that that means there are an infinite number of planet earths.'

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.