Michael Dale - Page 58

The Long Island Rail Road doesn't have a station in Levittown, so the central character of Richard Greenberg's clever, sentimental and occasionally steamy drama travels the play's namesake, THE BABYLON LINE, to nearby Wantagh, in order to arrive at his weekly gig teaching creative writing to adults, most of whom are only there because their preferred classes were full.

The Twentieth Century was only in its teens when playing Times Square's Palace Theatre was established as the pinnacle of success for vaudeville artists, so it's very appropriate that the latest Broadway offering from THE ILLUSIONISTS, titled TURN OF THE CENTURY, is playing the Palace.

While FUN HOME and HAMILTON have certainly not been the only high-quality new musicals to hit Broadway in the past two seasons, they've both displayed the kind of originality and relevance in subject matter, expertise in writing and imagination in execution that works wonders in elevating public awareness of the dramatic potential of the art form and smashing the lingering bias that says singing and dancing diffuses the impact of serious theatre.

When the new musical based on Chazz Palminteri's autobiographical solo play, A BRONX TALE had its world premiere at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse earlier this year, it boasted a solid first act, a terrific star performance by Nick Cordero, an Alan Menken/Glenn Slater song that every Sinatra-styled saloon singer will want to grab. It also featured some of those traditional second act problems that often plague new musicals looking for a Broadway home.

For a musical about the accidental death of six teenagers and a contest to select just one of them to return to life, Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond's Ride the Cyclone, mounted by MCC after development in Canadian cabarets and a successful Chicago run, is curiously lacking in any kind of emotion or tension.

While Debra Barsha and Hollye Levin's A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME isn't the first musical to contrast the accepted female gender roles of the 1950s with the liberated revolution of the 1960s (Off-Broadway's second visit from THE MARVELOUS WONDERETTES is still running at the Kirk.) the York's fun and frothy new entry features a dynamite cast and enough tuneful cleverness for a brightly entertaining evening.

As with their Vineyard Theatre success of five years ago, THE LYONS, in THIS DAY FORWARD, the team of playwright Nicky Silver and director Mark Brokaw display an impressive talent for packaging complex family drama as hip, off-beat comedy before getting to the guts of the long-term effects of dysfunctionality.

Ever since it opened in 1966 as the Broadway production that made the Palace Theatre go legit, the final scene of Neil Simon (book), Dorothy Fields (lyrics) and Cy Coleman's (music) hyper-swinging Sweet Charity has been a trouble spot.

While the work of director John Doyle has been a frequent presence at Classic Stage Company for the past few years, his tenure as the company's artistic director gets off to an impressive start this season with a crisp and engaging world premiere production of Tom Schulman's DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

To say that The Q Brothers put a new spin on OTHELLO might be too obvious a pun, but their fun and lively hip-hop retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy of racism and revenge, Othello: The Remix not only sets the Elizabeth characters to rap rhythms, but switches the whole story around to the present-day music industry.

The term 'generation gap' first came into use during the 1960s, when sociologists and trend-watchers began noting the extreme differences in lifestyle, politics, fashion, music and language between the American parents who fought the Axis in World War II and the Baby Boom teenagers they raised.

No, you didn't fall asleep on the Q train on your way to Broadway's latest musical and accidentally wind up at the largest, and perhaps rowdiest Russian supper club in all of Brighton Beach.

The symbolic nature of Suzan-Lori Parks' 1990 free-form dramatic riff, THE DEATH OF THE LAST BLACK MAN IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD AKA THE NEGRO BOOK OF THE DEAD is made apparent to viewers as soon as they open their programs and see the characters have names like 'Black Woman With Fried Drumstick,' 'Before Columbus' and 'Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork.'

It can be safely assumed that the majority of playgoers filing into The Public's LuEsther Theater for the 7:30 opening night performance of author/director Richard Nelson's Women Of a Certain Age on Tuesday night took their seats expecting to see Hillary Clinton declared the President-Elect of The United States sometime during the party that followed.

The subject of sensitive, well-intentioned white people growing up unaware of their own privilege has been receiving more and more attention in American, but back in 1982, South African playwright Athol Fugard approached the issue as experienced in his apartheid-infested homeland.

The doorway to the neighborhood bar designed with great detail by John Lee Beatty for director Kate Whoriskey's tense and finely-acted mounting of Lynn Nottage's hard-hitting new drama, Sweat, is decorated with a neon light advertising Yuengling Beer, the Pennsylvania brew that dates back to 1829.

Placed throughout Anna Deavere Smith's revealing new theatre piece, NOTES FROM THE FIELD, are violent video clips that have become all too familiar to any American with access to YouTube.

An older man makes it clear that he intends to have his way with a young woman who trusted him. When she struggles, he assures her that she won't be believed if she says she wasn't asking for it, and she knows he's right.

Playwright Qui Nguyen is a tricky fellow. First he has an actor appear on stage, claiming to be him, welcoming the audience with the usual pre-show ritual about turning off cell phones and warning against any form of recording.

The fact that William Finn and James Lapine's 1992 Broadway musical FALSETTOS began as two separate one-act musicals - parts two and three of a trilogy - that premiered Off-Broadway nine years apart makes it unique theatre piece, especially when you consider that the heighted awareness of the AIDS epidemic that occurred during those nine years gave each one, despite being about the same characters, significantly different tones.