Michael Dale - Page 42

Despite its provocative title, and despite a game effort by director Scott Elliott's ensemble cast, Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's fact-inspired drama DOWNTOWN RACE RIOT, is a bit of a bore.

Feel free to lavish director Tina Landau with a flood of praise for spinning seaweed into gold with SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS, the hyperactive new musical based on the long-running Nickelodeon animated series that brings a cartoon vaudeville to the famed Palace Theatre.

Before every performance by The Public Theater's Mobile Unit, the audience is reminded of Joseph Papp's credo that the plays of William Shakespeare belong to everyone. The theatre pioneer created the world-famous Shakespeare In The Park based on that simple philosophy, and it's the driving force behind this unique outreach branch helping to fulfill the historic company's mission.

While there's nary a mention of global warming or human-made climate change in Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens', captivating and joyous Caribbean story-theatre musical ONCE ON THIS ISLAND, director Michael Arden's exhilarating new Broadway production of the popular 1990 hit based on Rosa Guy's novel My Love, My Love, smacks audience members with the issue as soon as they enter Circle In The Square.

Don't be fooled. That familiar-sounding melody played at the top of Matthew Lombardo's hilariously subversive WHO'S HOLIDAY is not Welcome Christmas, the joyous chorale from the beloved television adaptation of Dr. Seuss' equally beloved How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

Donald Trump hadn't even won his first Republican primary when Henri Becque's comedy of sexual liberation, LA PARISIENNE, created such an uproar at its 1895 Paris premiere. But while the current president never makes an appearance in Beau Willimon's new version of the story, THE PARISIAN WOMAN, the current White House resident is certainly on the tips of everyone's tongues.

They say communication is the key to a successful relationship. They also say there's such a thing as overdoing it.

For over a decade, the unquestionably brilliant director/choreographer Austin McCormick's Company XIV has been dazzling audiences with unexpected wonders.

The almost completely circular, arena style seating of Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater makes it a perfect venue for The Wolves, Sarah DeLappe's 2017 Pulitzer finalist drama about the individuality hidden beneath the uniformity of a girls soccer team.

Though the teenage girls at the center of Jocelyn Bioh's endearing and poignant SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY all have wonderful qualities that should be appreciated and nurtured during their years at Aburi Girls Boarding School in central Ghana, there is one quality that prevents them all from having a chance to represent their country in the 1986 Miss Universe Pageant. They all look like a teenage girl from Ghana.

With the audience seated family style at several long tables, director Andrew Neisler seats the actors at elevated places around the perimeter. As they talk across the room to each other, it becomes evident that we're supposed to imagine them as strangers who are actually seated in a group.

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (which really could be called Home For Christmas since that's the only holiday mentioned) is a 90-minute concert starring three vocalists who first gained fame by winning television talent programs.

Though her aggressive style of dishing out insults has earned her the title of standup comedy's Queen of Mean, Lisa Lampanelli comes somewhat closer to being the Empress of Empathy in her comedy revue about the serious subject of food and body image, STUFFED.

Like the city where it was born and nurtured, the American musical play differs from similar stage entertainments because it was developed by a combination of cultures merging into a unique new art form. It would be difficult to find greater evidence of this fortunate merger than in the musicals of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

When David Henry Hwang's 1988 Best Play Tony-winner M. BUTTERFLY, inspired by the romance between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Peking opera singer Shi Pei Pu, who the Frenchman didn't know was a) a Communist spy, and b) a man, first played on Broadway, there was a not so small detail that tended to baffle audience members.

When John Leguizamo's poignant, provocative and, yes, downright hilarious LATIN HISTORY FOR MORONS premiered at The Public Theater in March of this year, a country that was created by white people whose bloodlines go back to immigrants and refugees was, as it still is, debating the new president's policies regarding immigrants and refugees who are predominantly not white.

Sex is sex and rape is rape. That's the cut and dry explanation we often hear nowadays. And while there are obvious instances where any reasonable person would determine that rape has occurred, there are also those instances that straddle the line between one and the other, where human subjectivity determines the label. Where, as demonstrated in Anna Ziegler's absorbing and thought-provoking new drama, ACTUALLY, one partner can be sure the sex was consensual and the other can be sure it was rape.

To watch New York stage treasure Everett Quinton engaged in his classic brand of silliness - or, to be more accurate, ridiculousness - is just as fulfilling a cultural experience as watching a great tragedian immersed in a dramatic Shakespearean role.

If there were any concerns that David Yazbek and Itamar Moses' exquisitely melodic and introspective musical, THE BAND'S VISIT would have lost any of its understated beauty while moving from the intimate confines of its Off-Broadway home provided by The Atlantic Theater Company to its new Broadway digs at Broadway's Barrymore, have no fear.

he sudden act of violence that occurs early on in on Julia Cho's urgent and sensitive drama OFFICE HOUR, is certainly not unexpected. The opening scene sets up the audience to be prepared for exactly this kind of thing to happen.