Michael Dale - Page 48

Even if you've never heard a note sung by Ella Fitzgerald (and if that's the case, you should stop reading this review immediately and look up some of her recordings on YouTube) Andrea Frierson's duo-bio solo show, ME & ELLA, can be related to by anyone whose life was influenced by a popular artist they've never met.

Though your ticket says you're seated at The Public's Anspacher Theater, don't be surprised if once director Sam Gold's jaunty mounting of Shakespeare's Hamlet shifts into gear, you find yourself wondering if you may have stumbled into some indie production playing in the back room of a hipster bar on the Brooklyn side of the L train.

A folk-singing black man with an optimistic view of America looks back at our nation's history of angry white people finding no better way to cope with their grievances than by firing a gun at the president.

In December of 2015, shortly before her excellent drama SKELETON CREW opened Off-Broadway, playwright Dominique Morisseau essayed an article for American Theatre titled 'Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theatre Patron, and What That Says About Our Theatres.'

After PARAMOUR, last season's ambitious but underwritten attempt to incorporate their world-class circus arts performers into a book and score Broadway musical, Cirque du Soleil returns to town doing what they do best.

While it's not unexpected to have the title character of a musical based on Henry Fielding's infamously bawdy 1749 novel "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" be introduced to the audience while enjoying the afterglow of a lusty time with an agreeable lass, what's a bit surprising at first about BASTARD JONES is that while singing of juicy peaches, pulsing blood, bees, flowers and whatnot, their post-coital intimacy includes her helping to strap on his wooden leg.

After thirteen years and eighteen directing credits for major Off-Broadway companies such as Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard, Lincoln Center Theatre and The New York Theatre Workshop, another accomplished New York stage talent, Anne Kauffman, takes her overdue Broadway bow with Roundabout's revival of Scott McPherson's 1990 darkly comic drama MARVIN'S ROOM.

As America's great playwrights go, Horton Foote, who passed on in 2009, just shy of his 93rd birthday, was perhaps the most understated of them all.  In a prolific career that involved golden age television dramas, Academy Award winning screenplays and dozens of stage works, his favorite source of inspiration was the relatives and neighbors he observed growing up in the quiet comfort of East Texas.

The newest offering at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow Theater features a beautiful dreamscape depicting a woman in a small boat being guided through swelling ocean waves by a friendly face painted on the moon. As designed by Brett J. Banakis (set), Montana Levi Blanco (costumes) and Eric Southern (lights), it's a romantic tribute to a style of theatre that made box offices buzz over a hundred years ago.

Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, the first human baby conceived by artificial insemination was born and the Tigers won the World Series, but for much of the world, the public perception of the year 1984 was forever shaped in 1949, with the publishing of George Orwell's dystopian novel, titled 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.'

The recent Signature Theatre revival of Suzan Lori-Parks' VENUS, based on the true story of Saartjie Baartman, depicted a 19th Century African woman who was subjected to exploitation because of white people's fascination with her prominent posterior.  But the mood is considerably lighter over at Playwrights Horizons these days, where the title character of Kirsten Childs' joyfully old-fashioned, but sneakily subversive new musical, BELLA: AN AMERICAN TALL TALE, is a 19th Century African-American woman who celebrates the attention her queenly derriere receives and uses it as a source of empowerment.

Ask any New York Mets fan and they'll tell you that one of the unique quirks about watching a game at the teams' Flushing home - be it the now-demolished Shea Stadium or the current Citi Field - is the frequent rumbling of planes coming in and out of LaGuardia airport.

When playwright/actor Jim Brochu was announced as the 2010 Drama Desk Outstanding Solo Performance Award winner for his loving tribute to the great Zero Mostel, ZERO HOUR, circumstances of the evening set up an opportunity for him to open his acceptance speech with an incredibly funny, totally filthy line involving something Mitzi Gaynor supposedly told him to do.

The new Off-Broadway production of SWEENEY TODD just got a whole lot meatier.  No, the chef hasn't been adding more filling to the tasty meat pies audience members can enjoy before the performance.  The new reason for checking into the Barrow Street Theater is a chance to see two top shelf singer/actors, Norm Lewis and Carolee Carmello, transform a production that opened in March as an amusing Grand Guignol melodrama into a deeply moving and gorgeously sung evening of thrilling musical theatre.

Though the lonely, out-of-work truck driver Eddie continued to text love notes to his estranged wife's cell phone number long after her death, he never expect to get an answer.

For the past 400+ years, the title character in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has been traditionally regarded as one of the good guys. Oh sure, there was that time back in '37 when Orson Welles staged a production that had the Roman ruler interpreted as a stand-in for Mussolini, but The Bard's text is generally taken as a case where a powerful, but ultimately benevolent leader is assassinated by a group of questionably motivated, dagger-wielding senators who paint him as an ambitious populist seeking absolute power.

The confusion one might feel trying to follow Atlantic Theater Company's production of British playwright Clare Lizzimore's psychological study, Animal, is no doubt an intentional reflection of the emotional state of its central character.

In the opening scene of MCC's American premiere production of THE END OF LONGING, playwright/star Matthew Perry, playing the drunk, caustic and cocky Rolling Stone photographer Jack, looks deeply into the eyes of Stephanie, his latest attempt at a cocktail lounge pickup.

Though Anton Chekhov popularized the notion that there's nothing sadder than a Russian comedy, playgoers seeking a few more yuks than can be found in a night at THE CHERRY ORCHARD can look to one of The Good Doctor's countrymen, Nikolai Gogol, whose rip-roaring classic The Government Inspector is granted a gloriously silly mounting by Red Bull Theater.

By necessity, Robert Schenkkan's tense and frightening political drama, BUILDING THE WALL, had to be a rush job written with the understanding that national events could sap it of its impact at any moment.