Michael Dale - Page 44

To give credit where it's due, Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning STRANGE INTERLUDE is perhaps the best play imaginable about women's sexuality that could have been written by a 35-year-old American man in 1923.

Back in 1931, when the firm Kaufman, Ryskind, Gershwin & Gershwin had the novel idea to infuse that stodgy old music/theatre entertainment, the Broadway operetta, with the jauntiness of showtune and a chaotic mixture of comedic highbrow and lowbrow to tell the tale of an unqualified, but charismatic American politician who rides a wave of popular support for his questionable platform to the United States presidency, musical comedies typically employed a bit more on-stage and front-of-stage talent than audiences are accustomed to seeing nowadays.

As anyone who has ever seen A CHORUS LINE will tell you, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger's screen classic THE RED SHOES has been tantalizing young dancers with dreams of ballet stardom since premiering in 1948.

To the average working stiffs among us, money is a tangible thing. We can count it by the number of dead presidents in our wallets and the reasonably manageable digits in our modest portfolios. But to the financially elite, figures ranging in billions on top of billions become so impossible to represent as legal tender that they're said to take on an abstract, nearly fictional quality.

If the spot-on hilarity of first scene of director/playwright John Patrick Shanley's THE PORTUGUESE KID could be replicated for the play's remaining three-quarters, this review would be happily exclaiming that New York has got a solid, old-school sexy romantic comedy in town.

When Sophocles' OEDIPUS REX was first performed over 400 years B.C., the Greek chorus that opened the play wore the traditional identical masks. But in Luis Alfaro's contemporary adaptation, OEDIPUS EL REY, the unifying costume piece for the Latino men who make up the choro is the orange jumpsuits worn by inmates of the California State Prison in Delano.

As societies in post-apocalyptic stories go, the one envisioned by playwright Zoe Kazan in her insightful relationship drama AFTER THE BLAST, seems to have it pretty good.

Date movie would be too tepid a phrase to describe director Tom Gustafson's sizzling film adaptation of Michael John LaChiusa's tensely erotic 1993 musical drama, HELLO AGAIN. The term foreplay flick comes to mind.

The term 'alternative facts' wasn't part of the popular lexicon when Stephen Adly Guirgis' superb drama of public morality and personal convictions, JESUS HOPPED THE 'A' TRAIN premiered in 2000, but a major point of play is how, in our legal system, a lie can be regarded as truth when believed from a different angle.

It was thirty-five years ago when FORBIDDEN BROADWAY's genius creator/lyricist Gerard Alessandrini first collaborated, so to speak, with Tony-winning composer/lyricist Maury Yeston. That's when he spoofed New York theatre's then obsession with religion-themed played by twisting the lyric of NINE's Be Italian to Be a Catholic.

'We opened for an eight-week limited engagement and could not give a ticket away for three weeks.' That's how Harvey Fierstein described the giant leap of faith that, in 1981, brought a trio of his one-act plays that had each premiered separately on East 4th Street at the basement of Ellen Stewart's La MaMa, E.T.C., to an Off-Off-Broadway mounting on West 62nd Street, produced by John Glines' non-profit company, The Glines.

When their current engagement at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club concludes this weekend, members of the Belarus Free Theatre will return to their homeland, where they and their audience members can be arrested by the Belarussian K.G.B. for creating and attending a play.

To describe Diana Oh's newest performance art installation as the pep rally that precedes the dismantling of the patriarchy is by no means a knock on her vibrantly raucous mixture of glitter, soap bubbles, anger, art and activism. It's just that, unlike many of her previous ventures, she's unlikely to encounter negative audience vibes, or actual physical harassment, in the defiantly progressive confines of the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Playwright/director Aaron Mark has a habit of leaving audiences in the dark. Not that his plays are especially hard to grasp, but the author who specializes sending chills up and down spines with his solo theatrical thrillers seems to enjoy having audience members sitting in pitch blackness for at least a part of every production. It works wonders for the creepiness factors.

I will be in Hell because I don't love my mom, the central character of Max Posner's comedic drama THE TREASURER causally admits to the audience with unemotional matter-of-factness.

Regarded by The Public Theater's artistic director Oskar Eustice as a resident company of the Astor Place venue, Elevator Repair Service's niche has always been productions with a clear focus on words, such as their fully staged complete-text reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby,' titled GATZ, or ARGUENDO, their legal vaudeville centered on documents pertaining to a Supreme Court case regarding strip clubs and the First Amendment.

When J.B. Priestley's absorbing and poetic drama, Time and the Conways premiered on the West End in 1937, you couldn't blame London audiences if they felt a bit wistful observing the playwright's wealthy Yorkshire characters feeling carefree and invincible as they emerged from the so-called War To End All Wars picturing nothing but happy days ahead.

For over twenty years, artistic director Dan Wackerman's Peccadillo Theater Company has specialized in mounting handsome productions of infrequently revived Broadway fare of notable pedigree, such as Elmer Rice's COUNSELLOR AT LAW, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d'Usseau's LADIES OF THE CORRIDOR and, most notably, a sparkling, uproarious revival of John Murray & Allen Boretz's classic comedy, ROOM SERVICE.

It may have been underestimated how popular TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS would prove to be when it opened at The Public's Shiva Theater last November. Actor/playwright Nia Vardalos' warm, funny and endearing adaptation of the same-named book of collected advice columns written for the literary website The Rumpus by Cheryl Strayed, under the pen name Sugar, packed fans into the 100-seat space, making the quietly emotional play one of the town's hottest tickets.

If director Alexandra Spencer-Jones' intention was to stage an erotic word ballet that finds beauty in the well-chiseled male form through highly-stylized acts of choreographed violence, then the latest offering at New Work Stages certainly fulfills that goal.