I don't think I'm giving away a major spoiler when I mention that toward the end of Thomas Bradshaw's Burning, there's a reference to one of the characters as having won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Play. I'm not sure I'd appreciate the honor if I was John Benjamin Hickey, as the character referred to is one of the sleazier ones in a play filled with sleaziness.
SEE flying saucers invade Nevada! SEE a giant mutant destroy whole cities! SEE a killer robot reduce man to skeleton!
Known primarily for their excellent work with the Prospect Theatre Company (of which she is Producing Artistic Director and he is Resident Writer), the husband and wife team of director/bookwriter Cara Reichel and composer/lyricist/bookwriter Peter Mills are responsible for some of the most exciting and innovative musical theatre New York has seen since the company was founded in 1998. And I daresay that with Iron Curtain, they and their inspired cohorts fully succeed in presenting one of their most difficult and risk-taking concepts yet; a fast, loud and funny 1950s-style musical comedy.
Just like Pope Paul VI figured when The Vatican told followers to go ahead and celebrate mass in the vernacular, John-Michael Tebelak figured that if the musical he penned with Stephen Schwartz, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, was going to connect with young people, it had to be done in their language. So when Godspell premiered Off-Broadway forty years ago, the son of God and his disciples were depicted as soft pop and folk singing flower children who were too busy learning how to spread love to be bothered with sex, drugs and burning their draft cards. Arriving on Broadway after Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, it was the first major rock musical that didn't scare the hell out of parents.
The funny thing about the truth is that it can be totally subjective and personal stories rarely involve just one person. So, in Jon Robin Baitz's darkly comic drama, Other Desert Cities, when a depression-plagued writer tries curing the block following the success of her freshman effort with a book describing her view of her celebrity family's past tragedy, the holiday conversation crackles like a Yule log.
Three years ago I posted a review emphatically praising the Prospect Theatre Company's developmental production of Jim and Ruth Bauer's The Blue Flower, calling it, 'a unique, intelligent and wondrously creative evening of musical theatre' that 'skillfully tackles the tricky business of mixing the art of musical theatre with the anti-art movement of Dada.' A German creation born amidst the rubble of the First World War, Dada was an artistic, literary and theatrical movement that attacked the sensibilities of a culture that could send millions of young men to slaughter by celebrating anarchy and irrationality.
With Marilyn Maye wrapping up her Jerry Herman tribute at Feinstein's, let's take a look back at both of them in the 1960s.
If Hamlet is the reward an actor gets for showing great promise in his youth, King Lear is the thank you he receives in the latter years of a distinguished career. At age 35, Sam Waterston's Hamlet became one of the iconic performances to come out of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Now, at 71, The Public Theater's gift for his decades of admirable stage work is the opportunity to essay the maddening royal whose rages against a perceived betrayal by the mosT Loving of his three daughters sets in motion the bloody collapse of a monarchy. Unfortunately, the gift has not been wrapped very attractively.
'You're an insane woman,' a character says to the protagonist in Michael John LaChiusa's intriguing new musical, Queen of The Mist.
Transport Group's Queen of the Mist is a world premiere musical with words and music by 5-time Tony nominee Michael John LaChiusa (The Wild Party, Marie Christine, Hello Again). Based on an astounding, outrageous, and haunting true story, two-time Tony nominee Mary Testa (Guys and Dolls, Xanadu, 42nd Street) stars as Anna Edson Taylor, who, in 1901, set out to be the first woman to shoot Niagara Falls, in a barrel of her own design.
The inner city teenage girls in Kirsten Greenidge's moving new drama, Milk Like Sugar, want only one thing from a boy... a baby.
Love's Labor's Lost, generally not regarded as a top tier Shakespeare effort, might get performed a lot more frequently if more productions were as fun and frisky as director Karin Coonrod's madcap mounting for The Public Theater's Public Lab series.
'Atmosphere is more real than truth,' explains Michael Evans, the narrating character recalling his childhood days in Brian Friel's thickly atmospheric Dancing At Lughnasa, now enjoying a warm and lovely mounting by Charlotte Moore at the Irish Rep.
Ever hear the one about the handicapped restroom at a Chinese tourist attraction that was labeled for English-speaking visitors, 'Deformed Man's Toilet'? Or the one about the American trying to seduce his new Chinese love in her native language with the romantic words, 'Frog loves to pee'? Such miscommunications serve as the inspiration for David Henry Hwang's hip, sexy and very funny comedy of cultural awkwardness, Chinglish.
I'm taking up a collection to buy Elaine Stritch a pair of pants.
SEE flying saucers invade Nevada! SEE a giant mutant destroy whole cities! SEE a killer robot reduce man to skeleton!
SEE flying saucers invade Nevada! SEE a giant mutant destroy whole cities! SEE a killer robot reduce man to skeleton!
The three one-act comedies that comprise Relatively Speaking are said to be connected by their common theme of finding humor blossoming from the family tree. But really, don't be bothered with any themes or messages in this one. All that matters is that playwrights Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen, director John Turturro and a company loaded with top-notch comedy actors have whipped up a solid evening of laughs that just gets funnier and funnier as the night goes on.
'I want you to know that the most exciting part I've received recently is my new knee.'
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