Michael Dale - Page 22

'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.

According to this reviewer's admittedly casual bit of Googling, the first Broadway production based on Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' was playwright Alice Gerstenberg's version, which opened at the Booth in 1915. But undoubtedly there were many other variations before then.

Buried amongst the over twenty names receiving the smallest-sized billing for their contributions to Roundabout Theatre Company's hot new revival of Cole Porter and Sam & Bella Spewack's masterpiece of kick-back musical comedy entertainment, Kiss Me, Kate, is the credit 'Additional Material' with the name of the accomplished Broadway lyricist Amanda Green written below.

It was three seasons ago that French playwright Florian Zeller's Moliere Award winning THE FATHER came to Broadway from London in an English translation by Christopher Hampton. Frank Langella earn a Tony playing an aging dementia-stricken man whose faltering memory causes his perceptions of his past and present to change in every scene.

When composer/lyricist Joe Iconis and bookwriter Joe Tracz's hard-rocking, super-charged and very well written science fiction musical comedy Be More Chill ended its month-long premiere engagement at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey less than four years ago, the thought of a Broadway production may have seemed as far-fetched and phantasmagoric as the plot of its source material, Ned Vizzini's same-named 2004 novel.

While this reviewer is always up for a tub of popcorn and a screening of 'Crossing Delancey' or 'Muriel's Wedding,' Suzy Conn's spirited CHICK FLICK, THE MUSICAL is more accurately aimed at connoisseurs of the genre; those whose everyday conversation is packed with quotes from Nora Ephron screenplays and who are experts at determining which chardonnays go with Barbra and which with Meryl.

The conflict between seeing multiple sides of an issue and the insistence that there is only one correct side is the power that fuels Bekah Brunstetter's sweet and provocative multi-layered comedy/drama The Cake, a fictional story that offers evenly sliced arguments regarding the news-making debates involving same-sex couples planning their wedding receptions and bakers who decline their cake-creating business.

With the exception of those specifically dedicated to making it their mission, there isn't a theatre company in New York whose output contains such a high percentage of productions by women playwrights as The Mint.

If a contemporary Hollywood screenwriter pitched the plot of Sean O'Casey's classic 1923 drama, The Shadow of a Gunman to a movie producer ('A struggling poet gets in over his head when he allows his neighbors to believe he's an IRA gunman in order to impress an attractive young woman.') it might get sold as a wacky romantic comedy.

Over 160 years after she first gained fame tending to wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War, the name Florence Nightingale is still recognized as a symbol of selfless caregiving and she is often regarded as the founder of modern nursing. But there was another woman who was just as beloved by soldiers for her bravery and leadership during that conflict. And though the name Mary Seacole has drifted into obscurity among Americans, she is still revered by the British as a pioneer in nursing.

The soft clanging of pots and pans gently hitting each other is the first indication that the title characters of South African playwright Athol Fugard's 1969 indictment of Apartheid segregation, Boesman and Lena have arrived.