Michael Dale - Page 9

Sometime between the era when a tap-dancing hopeful would go out there a youngster and come back a star and nowadays when tourists go out to Applebee's hungry and come back with a less than satisfying dining experience, many of the Broadway venues on that legendary strip of real estate called 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues were converted into grindhouse theatres exclusively screening low-budget attractions in such genres as Blaxploitation, Martial Arts Flicks and Carsploitation.

When bookwriter Chris D'Arienzo's 1980s hair-band tuner Rock of Ages moved from Off-Broadway's New World Stages to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in April of 2009 - with a score made up of rock classics by Journey, Styx, Asia, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, Foreigner and a bunch of others - it was, to this reviewer's recollection, the first Broadway jukebox musical to acknowledge the silliness of jamming hit songs into an unrelated story.

Perhaps it would be regarded as exploitative to directly quote the passage here, but the last several minutes of playwright Isaac Gomez's THE WAY SHE SPOKE consists primarily of the names, ages, causes of death and physical states of the corpses of several dozen women who were murdered, in scenarios usually involving rape, in the Mexican border city of Juarez during the horrific rise of femicide that has plagued the city since the 1990s.

In Alfaro's take on Euripides' MEDEA, titled Mojada, the varying attitudes towards assimilation within a family of Mexican refugees who lack documentation lead to a devastating conflict.

Through the leadership of Reverend Bernard Scott, Greenwich Village's Judson Memorial Church became a center for emerging artists during the 1950s, welcoming the experimental, the avant-garde and the political to have their work seen without fear of censorship.

Despite an oeuvre that includes a questioning of the sanity of American social conventions and an exploration into the motivations of presidential assassins, INTO THE WOODS might be regarded as the most subversive of Stephen Sondheim's musicals.

Chamber musicals don't get much more chamber than composerlyricistbookwriter Grace McLean's In the Green, an intriguing new piece receiving its premiere at LCT3's Claire Tow Theater. Musically complex, dramatically abstract and, as presented by director Lee Sunday Evans, intensely intimate in style, In the Green may need some sharpening to clarify its storytelling, but as a whole it is an ambitious work that's worthy of the focused attention it demands.

The last time a well-known actor not especially noted for singing graced a major New York stage with a one-person autobiographical musical that focused on personal tragedy, it was Suzanne Somer's unmissably jaw-dropping narcissistic spectacle, THE BLONDE IN THE THUNDERBIRD.  But fear not, playgoers, for while David Cale does provide quite a few original ditties to augment his childhood memoir, WE'RE ONLY ALIVE FOR A SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME, his not-quite-Sinatra-level vocals are way more suited for this captivating presentation than a more elegant songbird's trill.

Unlike the vast majority of musicals granted concert productions by City Center's Encores! Off-Center, the collaborate effort known as WORKING did not play an Off-Broadway run before hitting Times Square. Instead, Chicago's Goodman Theatre production transferred to the 46th Street Theatre in 1978, where it garnered numerous Tony nominations, including best musical.

From the epic poetry of Ernest Lawrence Thayer's 'Casey At The Bat' to the sharp-edged vernacular of Ring Lardner's newspaper columns and the nostalgic innocence of Roger Kahn's 'The Boys of Summer,' baseball has been inspiring great literary flourishes for well over a century.

'How many of you would just... pretty much like to have sex with me?', a character asks audience members in the middle of a play.

Her fans ate it up, with calls of 'We love you, Regina,' peppering her two-hour concert, the latest entry of the theatre's In Residence On Broadway series, presenting a variety of artists in short runs until TINA, the new Tina Turner musical, starts previewing in October.

'Only my dogs will not betray me,' confesses a world-renowned opera diva in Charles Ludlam's 1983 downtown triumph, GALAS.

'Don't roll your eyes at me,' a person of influence instructs a promising young musical theatre writer. 'I'm the chair of the Second-Coming-Of-Sondheim Award so I know what the f... I'm talking about!'

There's a rather highbrow gag in the long-ago Broadway musical TOVARICH, where a Gatsby-era gentleman asks an elegant lady if she's read James Joyce's new novel, 'Ulysses.' 'Just the final fifty pages,' she replies with a lustful wink in her voice.

A young African-American woman living in 1964 rural South Carolina is interrupted on her way to a voter registration rally by a pair of white men who not only rough her up until she's on the ground and bloody, but convince a police officer that it was her fault.

If, when the smoke clears on the Democratic Party's selection process, their next nominee for President of the United States turns out to be recent Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, history might point to director Kenny Leon's fun and stylish Shakespeare In The Park production of Much Ado About Nothing as the event that truly kick-started interest.

Though Zhu Yi's YOU NEVER TOUCHED THE DIRT is set in a large estate on the outskirts of Shanghai, New Yorkers will certainly recognize it as a gentrification story, where the homogeneous conveniences of the modern would come at the expense of a community's history and distinctive character.

When the audience enters Atlantic Theater's Stage 2 for Carla Ching's Nomad Motel, presented as part of their New Play Development program, there's a very familiar type of character already hard at work on stage; a quiet young man, seriously at work composing music with his electric guitar.

Playwright Christopher Shinn, who directs Second Stage's new production of his 2008 Pulitzer finalist Dying City, places a large black void at the upstage wall as part of designer Dane Laffrey's otherwise realistic depiction of rather non-descript Manhattan apartment. Don't, like this reviewer did, spend any part of your time at this 90-minute drama waiting for some practical use of this seemingly out-of-place feature. Its purpose, perhaps, is to represent that emptiness that can be felt by both individually and collectively after.