As we sauntered along 48th Street on our way to the venerable Cort
Theatre, we noticed a handsome plump tabby being held snuggly in a
blanket in the arms of its escort. Instinctively a friend who was also
headed to the play yelled out, "Are you going on stage tonight? Break a
paw." Wouldn't you know that the sly puss slowly turned its head around
blinked and glared at her, as if to say, "Where else would I be going
on this chilly night?"
Cat and escort disappeared through the stage door entrance, where Vito
Vincent (as identified in the program credits) evidently did warm up
or lap up. At any rate, he gave a memorable and totally mesmerizing
performance that included a little extra turn-of-the-head toward his
owner Holly Golightly.
Holly is played by the also beguiling if slightly less stage worthy
Emilia Clarke, who is making her Broadway debut. Since Vincent who
plays "Cat" is not really the star of Richard Greenberg's stage
adaptation of Truman Capote's 1958 novella, I'll say no more about his
supporting although significant role except that he out-classes and
out-performs many of the actors. As directed by Sean Mathias, most of
the support players seem to believe that becoming grotesque
caricatures would help define them in this Holly's shallow, stupefying
world.
It isn't easy to get the image of Holly's most famous and adored
interpreter Audrey Hepburn out of one's mind, or of the utterly romantic
mood (be it ever so wrong) created by director Blake Edward's for his
1961 film version. I was marginally gratified by the colder, more
depressing vision that Greenberg and Mathias, as well as scenic
designer Derek McLane and projectionist Wendall K. Harrington have
created to bring us back unromantically to the novel's time period New
York City in 1943, 1944 and 1957.
The last date is the point of departure for the flashbacks as recalled
by Fred (Cory Michael Smith). As the play's narrator and Holly's
erstwhile friend and Capote's alter ego, he is by 1957 is a successful
writer. We thus see him return to the East Side neighborhood bar and
frequent hangout for Holly and her entourage where he is seen bathed in
the drearily atmospheric glow provided for most of the play by lighting
designer Peter Kaczorowsky. George Wendt gives a very nice performance
as Joe Bell, the bartender with a crush on Holly.
But given the wonderful views of the city — the vintage photos of (some
recognizable) Stork Club-ers, theater marquees, even sailors on the
prowl that are indeed atmospheric — the sliding panels that expose the
episodic and thematically redundant goings-on are not all that
compelling. Yet within the dingy brownstone building where Fred, who is
gay, becomes infatuated with the flighty, unmercifully mercenary,
free-spirited party girl known as Holly, there are fleeting moments in
which Capote's prose takes flight.
Fred provides a genuinely fascinating and extremely personable ho ok
into Holly's world, be it ever so humble for a (sshh don't say it out
loud) hooker. For Smith, who was terrific in both The Cockfight Play
and The Whale Off Broadway, this is an impressive Broadway debut.
It's both curious and wonderful that the actor puts Fred in the
somewhat perverse situation of making us care more about him than we do
about that twit who managed to fascinate him. His warm Southern drawl
is as affecting as is his personable narration that brings forth
memories of Tom in The Glass Menagerie. When it comes to
allusions to other dramatic relationships, Fred's and Holly's bonding is
remarkably similar to that of Cliff Bradshaw and Sally Bowles in Cabaret.
Holly, that misplaced girl from Tulip, Texas, is slim and attractive
and looks quite appealing in Colleen Atwoods's not overly pretentious
attire (forget about Hepburn in Givenchy). Though Clarke's performance
is overly shrill and superficially manufactured performance, there is
a glint of innocent sophistication that makes her a reasonable
prospect for the many unattractive, wealthy, and foolish men who will
vie for her favors and keep her solvent.
Fred, although smitten by Holly in his own way, is no innocent when it
comes to finding sex in the city (he gets fired for having sex in the
stock room of the New Yorker Magazine). He and Holly have a nice
but completely unnecessary in-the-nude rendezvous in a bathtub without
the suds, emotional or otherwise.
It's hard to fathom why the producers would want Mathias, who directed a different but failed version, of the story in London ( Curtainup's review )
to try his hand again when a completely fresh approach would seem the
better choice. Not that any previous attempt has worked. Some might
recall the 1966 musical version that starred Mary Tyler Moore and
Richard Chamberlain that closed during preview.
I can't help but wonder of how long it will take to get the memory out
of my mind of all those impossible-to-watch supporting players (some who
I have been seen to better advantage) who have been made to portray
the host of hideous and revolting characters that populate (or is it
pollute?) Holly's soirees?
Where's that darn cat when we need it? Meow!
Breakfast at Tiffany's
By Richard Greenberg, adapted from the novella by Truman Capote
Directed by Sean Mathias
Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street
800-432-7250 or 212-239-6200
Tickets: $37.00 - $132.00
Performances: Tuesday at 7 pm, Wednesday at 2 pm and 7 pm, Thursday at 7
pm, Friday at 8 pm, Saturday at 2 pm and 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm.
From 03/04/13 Opened 03/2013
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/21/13
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
The Mound Builders
There is the aura of a very old B movie here, say from around the very
late 1920s, when long stretches of dialogue were spoken by people
talking to or at each other mostly from stationary positions so the
actors would not to leave the area where microphones were carefully
placed and hidden. It was quite a novelty at one time just to hear the
sound of the human voice.
But there's no novelty in the tedium that comes from listening to the endlessly pontificating science-saturated characters in Lanford Wilson's 1975 play The Mound Builders. That's even if they actually do get to move a bit about their quarters.
In these characters' various fields of highly qualified expertise, questions are posed and answered at great length. Questions range from whether archaeologists ought to or ought not take their wives and relatives on digs, and whether ancient Indian burial grounds should make way for a modern hotel and highways.
If the dialogue is what's 0meant to be the saving grace of this protracted talkfest, it isn't. The exception is when it is being spoken by the least erudite and intellectually bright character in the interesting actor Will Rogers. Rogers, who was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2012 for his work in Unnatural Acts at Classic Stage Company, plays the outsider — a local who has tentatively ingratiated himself among a small group of scientists, their wives, one eleven-year-old daughter and one of the scientist's loony sister.
The group, led by archeologist Professor August Howe (David Conrad), has gotten permission to return to a section of the Blue Shoals area of Illinois owned by Chad's father to continue their archeological research and the necessary digging for buried artifacts and treasures of an ancient civilization. Surprise, surprise! It is Howe's assistant, Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth), who is figuratively and literally destined to be sacrificed to the ancient gods in this tediously philosophical play?
The events leading up to the tragic finale are presented through flashback, as narrated by a droning Conrad. His talk is illustrated with some authentic-looking slides of a dig, as well as with flashes of his family at work and at play.
The play appears mainly concerned with Chad's growing apathy and distrust towards the various occupants of the household as well as his increasing anxiety about reaping hoped for financial gain by putting up a hotel on the excavation site. But anxiety doesn't stop the increasingly unhinged Chad from having a furtive sexual dalliance with Howe's restless wife and professional photographer Cynthia (Janie Brookshire); lusting rather brazenly after Dan's pregnant gynecologist wife Dr. Jean Loggins (Lisa Joyce); and once, after a fishing expedition, even attempting to seduce a very drunk Dan.
Rachel Resheff is fine as the eleven-year-old Kirsten, who appears mature enough to ignore what's obviously going on. Would that we had her option?
Most undeniably un-hinged of all these peple them all is Howe's presumably convalescing sister Delia (Danielle Skraastad). She's a successful writer and international gadabout who, full of self-pity and self-loathing, mostly sits on the sofa being critical of everyone and everything when she isn't simply looking as if she is in a state of mind somewhere between crazed and dazed.
The interior of the wooden cabin setting designed by Neil Patel survives the violent rain storm and the ensuing rage (as perpetrated by the terrific Rogers) that marks better Act II that follow the interminable and boring Act I.
Jo Bonney's direction of this play is undoubtedly responsive to Wilson's gift for lyrical realism. So too are the actors in their efforts to excavate and resuscitate Wilson's often poetic, but mainly gimme-a-break, dialogue.
More important than knowing why the ancients were compelled to build mounds is why the powers that be at The Pershing Square Signature Theater thought this of the many fine plays by Wilson (Talley's Folly is a lovely play now being given a splendid revival at the Roundabout's Laura Pel Theater) was the one most worthy of digging up.
The Mound Builders By Lanford Wilson Directed by Jo Bonney
Cast: David Conrad (Professor August Howe), Janie Brookshire (Cynthia Howe), Rachel Resheff (Kirsten), Will Rogers (Chad Jasker), Zachardy Booth (Dr. Dan Loggins), Lisa Joyce (Dr. Jean Loggins), Danielle Skraastad (Delia Eriksen)
Scenic Design: Neil Patel
Costume Design: Theresa Squire
Lighting Design: Rui Rita
Sound Design: Darron L. West
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes including intermission
The Romulus Linney Courthouse Theater at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, 480 West 42nd Street
(212) 244 - 7529
Tickets: $25.00
Performances: Tuesday through Friday at 7:30PM; Saturday at 8PM; Matinees at 2PM on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
From 02/26/13 Opened 03/17/13 Ends 04/14/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/20/13
But there's no novelty in the tedium that comes from listening to the endlessly pontificating science-saturated characters in Lanford Wilson's 1975 play The Mound Builders. That's even if they actually do get to move a bit about their quarters.
In these characters' various fields of highly qualified expertise, questions are posed and answered at great length. Questions range from whether archaeologists ought to or ought not take their wives and relatives on digs, and whether ancient Indian burial grounds should make way for a modern hotel and highways.
If the dialogue is what's 0meant to be the saving grace of this protracted talkfest, it isn't. The exception is when it is being spoken by the least erudite and intellectually bright character in the interesting actor Will Rogers. Rogers, who was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2012 for his work in Unnatural Acts at Classic Stage Company, plays the outsider — a local who has tentatively ingratiated himself among a small group of scientists, their wives, one eleven-year-old daughter and one of the scientist's loony sister.
The group, led by archeologist Professor August Howe (David Conrad), has gotten permission to return to a section of the Blue Shoals area of Illinois owned by Chad's father to continue their archeological research and the necessary digging for buried artifacts and treasures of an ancient civilization. Surprise, surprise! It is Howe's assistant, Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth), who is figuratively and literally destined to be sacrificed to the ancient gods in this tediously philosophical play?
The events leading up to the tragic finale are presented through flashback, as narrated by a droning Conrad. His talk is illustrated with some authentic-looking slides of a dig, as well as with flashes of his family at work and at play.
The play appears mainly concerned with Chad's growing apathy and distrust towards the various occupants of the household as well as his increasing anxiety about reaping hoped for financial gain by putting up a hotel on the excavation site. But anxiety doesn't stop the increasingly unhinged Chad from having a furtive sexual dalliance with Howe's restless wife and professional photographer Cynthia (Janie Brookshire); lusting rather brazenly after Dan's pregnant gynecologist wife Dr. Jean Loggins (Lisa Joyce); and once, after a fishing expedition, even attempting to seduce a very drunk Dan.
Rachel Resheff is fine as the eleven-year-old Kirsten, who appears mature enough to ignore what's obviously going on. Would that we had her option?
Most undeniably un-hinged of all these peple them all is Howe's presumably convalescing sister Delia (Danielle Skraastad). She's a successful writer and international gadabout who, full of self-pity and self-loathing, mostly sits on the sofa being critical of everyone and everything when she isn't simply looking as if she is in a state of mind somewhere between crazed and dazed.
The interior of the wooden cabin setting designed by Neil Patel survives the violent rain storm and the ensuing rage (as perpetrated by the terrific Rogers) that marks better Act II that follow the interminable and boring Act I.
Jo Bonney's direction of this play is undoubtedly responsive to Wilson's gift for lyrical realism. So too are the actors in their efforts to excavate and resuscitate Wilson's often poetic, but mainly gimme-a-break, dialogue.
More important than knowing why the ancients were compelled to build mounds is why the powers that be at The Pershing Square Signature Theater thought this of the many fine plays by Wilson (Talley's Folly is a lovely play now being given a splendid revival at the Roundabout's Laura Pel Theater) was the one most worthy of digging up.
The Mound Builders By Lanford Wilson Directed by Jo Bonney
Cast: David Conrad (Professor August Howe), Janie Brookshire (Cynthia Howe), Rachel Resheff (Kirsten), Will Rogers (Chad Jasker), Zachardy Booth (Dr. Dan Loggins), Lisa Joyce (Dr. Jean Loggins), Danielle Skraastad (Delia Eriksen)
Scenic Design: Neil Patel
Costume Design: Theresa Squire
Lighting Design: Rui Rita
Sound Design: Darron L. West
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes including intermission
The Romulus Linney Courthouse Theater at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, 480 West 42nd Street
(212) 244 - 7529
Tickets: $25.00
Performances: Tuesday through Friday at 7:30PM; Saturday at 8PM; Matinees at 2PM on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
From 02/26/13 Opened 03/17/13 Ends 04/14/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/20/13
Hands on a Hard Body
Staring for almost two and one half hours at a bright shiny new Nissan
pick-up truck with no other inanimate object or scenic distraction in
view isn't something that might seem like the best option for someone
seeking a diverting theatrical experience. But if that truck at the
center of the stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theater doesn't come
accessorized with a heart and soul, the people who gather around it do
and prove to be quite a novel and often rewarding diversion.
This truck that turns and gets pushed around is not only the object of desire for a group of needy, poor, and disillusioned Texans, but a symbol of hope and survival. It is certainly the visual focal point for us in the new musical Hands on a Hard Body.
The point is that there is plenty of heart and soul being revealed in this small-scaled musical about ordinary people with big feelings. These feelings declarative of their wishes and woes, are expressed through a truck-load of terrific songs by Trey Anastasio (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics and music).
Anastasio, who is a founding member of the rock group Phish as well as being named by Rolling Stone as one of the great guitarists of all time, has made a memorable musical theater debut with sixteen songs that prove him to be a real melodist. Green, the daughter of the incomparable Adolph Green (Singin' in the Rain etc.), delivers her finest work yet following her impressive lyrical contributions to the exuberant Bring It On earlier this season, and as she did previously with her debut show High Fidelity.
The show is inspired by a 1997 documentary film of the same title in which a limited number of people were able to enter a contest through a lottery sponsored by a local Texas auto dealership to promote business. Yet, this is one musical that could be said to be totally original in form, content and style. It's all about the one who can keep one of his gloved hands on the truck, allowing for fifteen-minute-breaks every six hours and a five minute break every hour will win the truck — no leaning or sitting down allowed.
But this is more than an endurance contest for the hard-scrabble and scrappy real life characters from whom book writer Doug Wright drew his inspiration. We watch each in his and her own way — with whatever mental, physical, and spiritual strength, even rage and defiance, muster the strength to survive the heat, stress and strain to end up the winner— and remain sane. Wright most celebrated as the author of I Am My Own Wife (Pulitzer Prize and Tony) and Grey Gardens, has probably succeeded as well as possible to connect the dots of these people's private and personal lives into one collectively unified experience. Despite its fragmented plot, Hands on a Hard Body is harmlessly enjoyable.
Aside from the two contentious co-managers of the dealership, a radio announcer, a doctor and an outside entertainer, there are the mostly out-of-work contestants who bring their anxieties, dreams and despair to the fore. Also at the fore, is the exciting and clever staging by Sergio Trujillo that keeps not only bodies in motion, but also that darn truck.
One has to assume that it is Neil Pepe's direction that has tied the variously emotional and ingratiating elements of this unique musical into a cohesive whole. If there is a sense of wholeness and unity of purpose in highlighting the plight of the various contestants, there is also a strange feeling that the key characters are not the most interesting, or the ones who manage to illicit our strongest emotional ties. This is a musical filled with colorful, courageous, and pitiful souls, but surprisingly we never feel connected to or compelled to root for the two most central characters. It takes courage to actually frame a musical around a contest in which we have no collective stake in the outcome for a central character.
The text does give added weight and time to the misfortunes of two characters: Middle-aged JD Drew (Keith Carradine), who fell off an oil rig, suffered a broken leg and was fired with no pension to support him or his wife Virginia (Mary Gordon Murray) . . . and Benny Perkins (Hunter Foster), who is tormented by the suicide of his son, a young marine, as well as by the fact that his wife ran off with another man in the truck that Benny won the year before. Carradine does sing, along with Murray, one of the score's most beautiful ballads "Alone With Me" in which is expressed his sense that he failed himself and his wife.
Carradine's twangy voice is appealing and suits his role. If there is a pivotal role it belongs to Perkins. As played with a demonstrably antagonist attitude by the formidably talented Foster (almost didn't recognize him). He is an anti-hero who is inexplicably out front and center as a kind of jaded binder to the already loose narrative without any indication that he might eventually win our empathy. Yet, there is little about either of these two men, their sorrows or their situations that give them an edge over the feelings we begin to have for the others.
A bevy of stand-out characters include Norma Valverde (Keala Settle). She's heavy-set, religious woman who lets her religiosity reach an ecstatic peak (quite a demonstration of out-of-control laughter), as well as instigating a high spirited gospel number. There's also Chris (David Larsen), an angry, maladjusted ex-marine; Jesus Peña (Jon Rua), Ronald (Jacob Ming-Trent) an African-American who loves the heat, but it doesn't love him; a young Mexican-American who dreams of going to veterinary school; Heather Stovall (Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone), the pretty and sexy blonde who hopes to win by seducing the dealership's manager Frank Nugent (Scott Wakefield).
I was most impressed and emotionally involved with a young man and woman, disarmingly portrayed by Jay Armstrong Johnson and Allison Case. The pair meet hands on at the truck, fall in love and with hands-off start a life together.
Interestingly, there is more tension built up in the desperate manager whose dealership is on the verge of being closed than in the contest. His unethical shenanigans do not go unnoticed by Cindy Barnes (Connie Ray) his racist, no-nonsense co-worker. And Heather's shenanigans do not go unnoticed by a feisty Janice Curtis (Dale Soules), who leads a rebellion with "It's a Fix." You get the picture.
This picture created by the talented collaborators within the inauspicious setting by designer Christine Jones falls short of being a really great show without an in-depth focus on its principal characters. It is, nevertheless, an often stirring collage depicting the undaunted spirit of the American dreamer, or as the rousing final song advises, "Keep Your Hands On It."
Hands on a Hard Body
Book by Doug Wright (based on a film by S.R. Bindler)
Lyrics by Amanda Green
Music by Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green
Directed by Neil Pepe
Musical Staging by Sergfio Trujillo
Brooks Atkinson Theater, 265 West 47th Street
(877) 250 - 2929
Tickets: $55.00 - $$155.00
Performances: Monday at 7:30pm, Tuesday at 7:30pm, Wednesday at 2pm and 7:30pm, Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm
From 02/23/13 Opened 03/21/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/19/13
This truck that turns and gets pushed around is not only the object of desire for a group of needy, poor, and disillusioned Texans, but a symbol of hope and survival. It is certainly the visual focal point for us in the new musical Hands on a Hard Body.
The point is that there is plenty of heart and soul being revealed in this small-scaled musical about ordinary people with big feelings. These feelings declarative of their wishes and woes, are expressed through a truck-load of terrific songs by Trey Anastasio (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics and music).
Anastasio, who is a founding member of the rock group Phish as well as being named by Rolling Stone as one of the great guitarists of all time, has made a memorable musical theater debut with sixteen songs that prove him to be a real melodist. Green, the daughter of the incomparable Adolph Green (Singin' in the Rain etc.), delivers her finest work yet following her impressive lyrical contributions to the exuberant Bring It On earlier this season, and as she did previously with her debut show High Fidelity.
The show is inspired by a 1997 documentary film of the same title in which a limited number of people were able to enter a contest through a lottery sponsored by a local Texas auto dealership to promote business. Yet, this is one musical that could be said to be totally original in form, content and style. It's all about the one who can keep one of his gloved hands on the truck, allowing for fifteen-minute-breaks every six hours and a five minute break every hour will win the truck — no leaning or sitting down allowed.
But this is more than an endurance contest for the hard-scrabble and scrappy real life characters from whom book writer Doug Wright drew his inspiration. We watch each in his and her own way — with whatever mental, physical, and spiritual strength, even rage and defiance, muster the strength to survive the heat, stress and strain to end up the winner— and remain sane. Wright most celebrated as the author of I Am My Own Wife (Pulitzer Prize and Tony) and Grey Gardens, has probably succeeded as well as possible to connect the dots of these people's private and personal lives into one collectively unified experience. Despite its fragmented plot, Hands on a Hard Body is harmlessly enjoyable.
Aside from the two contentious co-managers of the dealership, a radio announcer, a doctor and an outside entertainer, there are the mostly out-of-work contestants who bring their anxieties, dreams and despair to the fore. Also at the fore, is the exciting and clever staging by Sergio Trujillo that keeps not only bodies in motion, but also that darn truck.
One has to assume that it is Neil Pepe's direction that has tied the variously emotional and ingratiating elements of this unique musical into a cohesive whole. If there is a sense of wholeness and unity of purpose in highlighting the plight of the various contestants, there is also a strange feeling that the key characters are not the most interesting, or the ones who manage to illicit our strongest emotional ties. This is a musical filled with colorful, courageous, and pitiful souls, but surprisingly we never feel connected to or compelled to root for the two most central characters. It takes courage to actually frame a musical around a contest in which we have no collective stake in the outcome for a central character.
The text does give added weight and time to the misfortunes of two characters: Middle-aged JD Drew (Keith Carradine), who fell off an oil rig, suffered a broken leg and was fired with no pension to support him or his wife Virginia (Mary Gordon Murray) . . . and Benny Perkins (Hunter Foster), who is tormented by the suicide of his son, a young marine, as well as by the fact that his wife ran off with another man in the truck that Benny won the year before. Carradine does sing, along with Murray, one of the score's most beautiful ballads "Alone With Me" in which is expressed his sense that he failed himself and his wife.
Carradine's twangy voice is appealing and suits his role. If there is a pivotal role it belongs to Perkins. As played with a demonstrably antagonist attitude by the formidably talented Foster (almost didn't recognize him). He is an anti-hero who is inexplicably out front and center as a kind of jaded binder to the already loose narrative without any indication that he might eventually win our empathy. Yet, there is little about either of these two men, their sorrows or their situations that give them an edge over the feelings we begin to have for the others.
A bevy of stand-out characters include Norma Valverde (Keala Settle). She's heavy-set, religious woman who lets her religiosity reach an ecstatic peak (quite a demonstration of out-of-control laughter), as well as instigating a high spirited gospel number. There's also Chris (David Larsen), an angry, maladjusted ex-marine; Jesus Peña (Jon Rua), Ronald (Jacob Ming-Trent) an African-American who loves the heat, but it doesn't love him; a young Mexican-American who dreams of going to veterinary school; Heather Stovall (Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone), the pretty and sexy blonde who hopes to win by seducing the dealership's manager Frank Nugent (Scott Wakefield).
I was most impressed and emotionally involved with a young man and woman, disarmingly portrayed by Jay Armstrong Johnson and Allison Case. The pair meet hands on at the truck, fall in love and with hands-off start a life together.
Interestingly, there is more tension built up in the desperate manager whose dealership is on the verge of being closed than in the contest. His unethical shenanigans do not go unnoticed by Cindy Barnes (Connie Ray) his racist, no-nonsense co-worker. And Heather's shenanigans do not go unnoticed by a feisty Janice Curtis (Dale Soules), who leads a rebellion with "It's a Fix." You get the picture.
This picture created by the talented collaborators within the inauspicious setting by designer Christine Jones falls short of being a really great show without an in-depth focus on its principal characters. It is, nevertheless, an often stirring collage depicting the undaunted spirit of the American dreamer, or as the rousing final song advises, "Keep Your Hands On It."
Hands on a Hard Body
Book by Doug Wright (based on a film by S.R. Bindler)
Lyrics by Amanda Green
Music by Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green
Directed by Neil Pepe
Musical Staging by Sergfio Trujillo
Brooks Atkinson Theater, 265 West 47th Street
(877) 250 - 2929
Tickets: $55.00 - $$155.00
Performances: Monday at 7:30pm, Tuesday at 7:30pm, Wednesday at 2pm and 7:30pm, Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm
From 02/23/13 Opened 03/21/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/19/13
Talley's Folly
Any modern play that can begin with "Once upon a time" better live up to
that pretension. Lanford Wilson's 1980 Pulitzer-Prize winning play
Talley's Folly most certainly does as it famously begins with one of the
most engaging monologues ever written as a preamble to the body of a
play. It is disarmingly delivered by Danny Burstein, as Matt Friedman, a
bespectacled Jewish accountant from St. Louis, in the sparkling revival
now at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theater.
In that monologue, Matt reminds us more than once that it is a play in three-quarter time. And Burstein, the multi-award-winning actor who never seems to run out of ways to amaze us with his unorthodox charm and his unexpected displays of versatility whether either in musicals (Follies, South Pacific) or plays (Golden Boy) reminds us that he is the one to set the mood and the tone of this exactly "ninety-seven minute" (as he tells us) play.
The time is July 4, 1944 with the action taking place on the property of the Talley's ancestral home in Lebanon, Missouri. Essentially a romantic duet, Burstein's partner in Wilson's lyrical play is the terrific Sarah Paulson. She plays Sally Talley, the only other character — the woman who Matt loves.
Using a special blend of ethnic and colloquial humor, Wilson captures the heart and mind, as his two people metaphorically voyage beyond the confines of a dilapidated Victorian boathouse into a wondrous and enchanted reality that is as inspiring as it is entertaining.
The first thing one sees upon entering the Laura Pels Theater is the boathouse setting designed by Jeff Cowie, a breathtaking eyeful. With the house lights fully on, we can see the shell of a warped rowboat at rest within the rotting skeleton of the vine-encroaching boathouse and gazebo . . . victims of neglect. Within the expressionistic floral frame, the fantastical structure with its chipped gingerbread is bathed with the light of a glowing sunset. Eventually, as the evening progresses, the twinkling of the stars. Lighting designer Rui Rita works overtime for these wondrously romantic effects.
Matt enters even before the lights dim and talks to us. He wants to make it quite clear that we are in a theater, a completely artificial environment. As a genial host would make his visitors comfortable in his home, so Matt makes us settle back in our seats in this manufactured but convivial atmosphere. He is soon confiding in us as to why he has returned to woo and win a certain woman with whom he has had an earlier fling.
Matt can cue in the proper sound effects on command, notably the barking of a dog. At the performance I saw, his request for a dog barking brought a number of barks to which he said, "I didn't ask for a kennel." But who could not respond to his request? Even the moonlight responds to his will. A touching and completely believable romance is now played against this fairy tale setting. The magic of believing is proved in Wilson's warm, compassionate and always intelligent writing.
Fantasy and reality mix rather well when the author believes they can through characters that are as genuine as the person sitting next to you. Paulson, who more than held her own against the formidable Linda Lavin in the Broadway revival of Collected Stories, once again confidently makes memorable a role in which she is more responsive than aggressive as spinster Sally, the nurses' aide who has evidently become a disgrace to the Talley family. She charms Matt in the pretty new yellow print frock even as we can see that she is a bundle of anxiety and insecurity.
At first, we feel Sally is no match for Matt, who can dramatize and over dramatize his feelings with words Sally never heard before. But Sally has a strength that is finally tapped by this Galahad in a drab business suit enhanced by boldly patterned necktie that he has purchased for the occasion. Disarmingly funny in his clumsily clownish attempt to ice skate on the wooden planks of the dock, Matt nevertheless assumes a disquieting poignancy as he reveals to Sally his traumatic childhood, fleeing the Nazis in Europe. Replete with improvisations and jokes, he is a vaudevillian at heart, and with a heart that he wants to give to Sally.
While much of Burstein's performance as the bearded New York-accented Jew in a land of shotgun-toting Gentiles is warm, honest, and delightfully comedic, Paulson takes more time letting down her feisty façade. But when she does let her defenses down, her emotional transitions are intense and moving.
These lovingly combative people intimately involve us not only in their own rekindled relationship, but also by making us care about the lives of people not even seen on stage. When a play is as deceptively small scaled as this and so well written and performed, the direction could almost be inadvertently taken for granted. I choose not to take the excellent direction of Michael Wilson for granted.
When Talley's Folly first opened at the Circle Repertory Theater in 1979 (before it moved to Broadway) the play's original director Marshall W. Mason gave it what many consider to be the definitive and often imitated production. One can not only feel the play's forever lilting tempo in Wilson's vibrant new direction, but also the feel of freshness that comes from a director who reveres it but not as an embalmed classic.
Talley's Folly is the first play in a trilogy that includes The Fifth of July and A Tale Told which was later renamed Talley & Son. Now wouldn't it be nice to see all three plays in repertory, especially at the Roundabout Theater.
Talley's Folly
By Lanford Wilson
Directed by Michael Wilson
Roundabout Theater at the Laura Pels Theater, 111 W. 46th Street
(212) 719-1300
Tickets: $81.00
Performances: Tuesday, Thursday - Friday, 7:30PM, Wednesday & Saturday, 2PM & 7:30PM, Sunday, 2PM
From 02/08/13 Opened 03/05/13 Ends 05/12/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/13/13
In that monologue, Matt reminds us more than once that it is a play in three-quarter time. And Burstein, the multi-award-winning actor who never seems to run out of ways to amaze us with his unorthodox charm and his unexpected displays of versatility whether either in musicals (Follies, South Pacific) or plays (Golden Boy) reminds us that he is the one to set the mood and the tone of this exactly "ninety-seven minute" (as he tells us) play.
The time is July 4, 1944 with the action taking place on the property of the Talley's ancestral home in Lebanon, Missouri. Essentially a romantic duet, Burstein's partner in Wilson's lyrical play is the terrific Sarah Paulson. She plays Sally Talley, the only other character — the woman who Matt loves.
Using a special blend of ethnic and colloquial humor, Wilson captures the heart and mind, as his two people metaphorically voyage beyond the confines of a dilapidated Victorian boathouse into a wondrous and enchanted reality that is as inspiring as it is entertaining.
The first thing one sees upon entering the Laura Pels Theater is the boathouse setting designed by Jeff Cowie, a breathtaking eyeful. With the house lights fully on, we can see the shell of a warped rowboat at rest within the rotting skeleton of the vine-encroaching boathouse and gazebo . . . victims of neglect. Within the expressionistic floral frame, the fantastical structure with its chipped gingerbread is bathed with the light of a glowing sunset. Eventually, as the evening progresses, the twinkling of the stars. Lighting designer Rui Rita works overtime for these wondrously romantic effects.
Matt enters even before the lights dim and talks to us. He wants to make it quite clear that we are in a theater, a completely artificial environment. As a genial host would make his visitors comfortable in his home, so Matt makes us settle back in our seats in this manufactured but convivial atmosphere. He is soon confiding in us as to why he has returned to woo and win a certain woman with whom he has had an earlier fling.
Matt can cue in the proper sound effects on command, notably the barking of a dog. At the performance I saw, his request for a dog barking brought a number of barks to which he said, "I didn't ask for a kennel." But who could not respond to his request? Even the moonlight responds to his will. A touching and completely believable romance is now played against this fairy tale setting. The magic of believing is proved in Wilson's warm, compassionate and always intelligent writing.
Fantasy and reality mix rather well when the author believes they can through characters that are as genuine as the person sitting next to you. Paulson, who more than held her own against the formidable Linda Lavin in the Broadway revival of Collected Stories, once again confidently makes memorable a role in which she is more responsive than aggressive as spinster Sally, the nurses' aide who has evidently become a disgrace to the Talley family. She charms Matt in the pretty new yellow print frock even as we can see that she is a bundle of anxiety and insecurity.
At first, we feel Sally is no match for Matt, who can dramatize and over dramatize his feelings with words Sally never heard before. But Sally has a strength that is finally tapped by this Galahad in a drab business suit enhanced by boldly patterned necktie that he has purchased for the occasion. Disarmingly funny in his clumsily clownish attempt to ice skate on the wooden planks of the dock, Matt nevertheless assumes a disquieting poignancy as he reveals to Sally his traumatic childhood, fleeing the Nazis in Europe. Replete with improvisations and jokes, he is a vaudevillian at heart, and with a heart that he wants to give to Sally.
While much of Burstein's performance as the bearded New York-accented Jew in a land of shotgun-toting Gentiles is warm, honest, and delightfully comedic, Paulson takes more time letting down her feisty façade. But when she does let her defenses down, her emotional transitions are intense and moving.
These lovingly combative people intimately involve us not only in their own rekindled relationship, but also by making us care about the lives of people not even seen on stage. When a play is as deceptively small scaled as this and so well written and performed, the direction could almost be inadvertently taken for granted. I choose not to take the excellent direction of Michael Wilson for granted.
When Talley's Folly first opened at the Circle Repertory Theater in 1979 (before it moved to Broadway) the play's original director Marshall W. Mason gave it what many consider to be the definitive and often imitated production. One can not only feel the play's forever lilting tempo in Wilson's vibrant new direction, but also the feel of freshness that comes from a director who reveres it but not as an embalmed classic.
Talley's Folly is the first play in a trilogy that includes The Fifth of July and A Tale Told which was later renamed Talley & Son. Now wouldn't it be nice to see all three plays in repertory, especially at the Roundabout Theater.
Talley's Folly
By Lanford Wilson
Directed by Michael Wilson
Roundabout Theater at the Laura Pels Theater, 111 W. 46th Street
(212) 719-1300
Tickets: $81.00
Performances: Tuesday, Thursday - Friday, 7:30PM, Wednesday & Saturday, 2PM & 7:30PM, Sunday, 2PM
From 02/08/13 Opened 03/05/13 Ends 05/12/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/13/13
The Flick
It isn't always easy to pinpoint exactly what there is about the style,
craft or even the perspective of a young up-and-coming playwright that
makes them the darling of the critics as well as the public almost
overnight. The now thirty-one-year-old Annie Baker became just that in
2009 with Circle Mirror Transformation (see links below), about a
group of generally unremarkable people who become personally involved
in each others lives while playing theater games at a community center.
The mostly positive response to it following its premiere at Playwrights
Horizons was unprecedented, as it proceeded to become one of the most
frequently produced plays in regional theaters.
Baker, whose other plays have also been lauded for their informally structured, protracted naturalistic style, may perhaps be demanding a lot, especially from one segment of the audience, with her new and exceedingly long and yet ultimately remarkable new play in which movie games replace theater games. The Flick has been afforded a cleverly designed (by David Zinn) production at Playwrights Horizons where the setting for all the action is the interior of a small neighborhood movie house in central Massachusetts. Our perspective of the stage from where the screen would be; in other words, we face the raked rows of seats and the back wall of the theater with a view into the tiny window of the projection booth.
Continuing her association with her director of choice and close collaborator Sam Gold, Baker is fortunate to have found someone who knows how to transfer what could appear as an exercise in excessive self-indulgence into a compelling theatrical experience. Whereas Circle Mirror Transformation took an hour and forty five minutes to complete its purposefully redundant dramatic convolutions, The Flick takes three full hours — or I should say three pause-saturated hours to wend its way to its conclusion. A poignant one! This play, much more so than did Circle Mirror Transformation, left me in a state of both sadness and elation? What's more, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
One has to see the ad copy and design on the playbill to see how the title is meant as a double entendre, and how it speaks reams to a turn of events that include the dissolution of a triangled relationship. While it's a play that might seem to be solely for and about movie lovers, it is essentially about consuming obsessions that fill up the lives of life's loners and the lonely. It will certainly resonate with those who can identify with Baker's own acknowledged love of movies as she was growing up. More significantly, it will impact anyone who's been motivated and driven by an obsession, or know someone who does. The four cast members (one is in a very small supporting role) are very fine actors and all appear to be on the same concerted wave length as Baker and Gold.
And speaking of length, a play, of course, is not defined by it, but it can be defined by the lengths to which a playwright goes to indulge a personal objective or mission. The abundant and extended pauses by the characters in this play make characters in any Pinter play by contrast seem as if they are on speed.
One thing that was apparent at the performance I attended was the preponderance of young people, almost all of whom appeared (as I looked around) rapt in their recognition of the precisely distilled interaction between the play's characters, low-paid employees. What was remarkable to witness was the willingness of a generation engaged in speedy if not instant visual and communicative gratification to plunge into Baker's signature world of people who articulate in halting, half-sentences and through the subtlest indications of body language.
We can see that Sam (Matthew Maher) enjoys his seniority. He is almost twice the age of Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), the twenty-something African-American to whom he is showing the simple cleaning routine that they are to follow between showings and after the last patron has left. Their conversation amid the sweeping of the aisles and the collecting of trash is sparked when Sam realizes that Avery is as obsessed with movie trivia as he is, particularly of the parlor game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," that (without going into detail) is the ultimate test of one's knowledge of movies and the actors in them.
The less-educated Sam's has a wary regard for the brighter Avery, who has revealed he has taken a break from college for personal reasons. He shares with him his hope for a long overdue promotion at the movie house, possibly becoming a projectionist. This job, however, is currently filled by Rose (Louisa Krause), a not unattractive but sloppily attired twenty-something woman who has apparently been avoiding the love-sick Sam's overtures.
Rose's interest in the socially and emotionally remote Avery leads her to test him sexually while they are alone watching a film. Her lack of feelings for the increasingly jealous and resentful Sam reach a breaking point in a rather pathetic confrontation. The complex relationships begin to disintegrate when an on-going box-office scam to make a little extra money is discovered by the management, one in which Sam and Rose had pressured the reluctant Avery to become a party.
Maher is terrific as the pathetic Sam who may have to face a future that will never be as bright as the light from the projection booth. Krause impresses as the dour, emotionally wilted Rose who, nevertheless, makes an aggressive play for Avery with a bit of hip hop-ography. Moten is effective as the passive, introspective, most probably sexually-conflicted Avery. Alex Hanna is fine in two small roles in what is surely Baker's most deliberately demanding play yet. The Flick will undoubtedly appeal to adventurously receptive theater goers. But I suspect that it will flicker most brightly for cinephiles.
The Flick
By Annie Baker Directed by Sam Gold
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street
(212) 279 - 4200
Tickets: $70.00
Performances: Tuesday & Wednesday, 7PM, Thursday & Friday, 8PM, Saturday, 2:30PM & 8PM, Sunday, 2:30PM & 7:30PM
From 02/15/13 Opened 03/12/13 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 09/09/13
Baker, whose other plays have also been lauded for their informally structured, protracted naturalistic style, may perhaps be demanding a lot, especially from one segment of the audience, with her new and exceedingly long and yet ultimately remarkable new play in which movie games replace theater games. The Flick has been afforded a cleverly designed (by David Zinn) production at Playwrights Horizons where the setting for all the action is the interior of a small neighborhood movie house in central Massachusetts. Our perspective of the stage from where the screen would be; in other words, we face the raked rows of seats and the back wall of the theater with a view into the tiny window of the projection booth.
Continuing her association with her director of choice and close collaborator Sam Gold, Baker is fortunate to have found someone who knows how to transfer what could appear as an exercise in excessive self-indulgence into a compelling theatrical experience. Whereas Circle Mirror Transformation took an hour and forty five minutes to complete its purposefully redundant dramatic convolutions, The Flick takes three full hours — or I should say three pause-saturated hours to wend its way to its conclusion. A poignant one! This play, much more so than did Circle Mirror Transformation, left me in a state of both sadness and elation? What's more, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
One has to see the ad copy and design on the playbill to see how the title is meant as a double entendre, and how it speaks reams to a turn of events that include the dissolution of a triangled relationship. While it's a play that might seem to be solely for and about movie lovers, it is essentially about consuming obsessions that fill up the lives of life's loners and the lonely. It will certainly resonate with those who can identify with Baker's own acknowledged love of movies as she was growing up. More significantly, it will impact anyone who's been motivated and driven by an obsession, or know someone who does. The four cast members (one is in a very small supporting role) are very fine actors and all appear to be on the same concerted wave length as Baker and Gold.
And speaking of length, a play, of course, is not defined by it, but it can be defined by the lengths to which a playwright goes to indulge a personal objective or mission. The abundant and extended pauses by the characters in this play make characters in any Pinter play by contrast seem as if they are on speed.
One thing that was apparent at the performance I attended was the preponderance of young people, almost all of whom appeared (as I looked around) rapt in their recognition of the precisely distilled interaction between the play's characters, low-paid employees. What was remarkable to witness was the willingness of a generation engaged in speedy if not instant visual and communicative gratification to plunge into Baker's signature world of people who articulate in halting, half-sentences and through the subtlest indications of body language.
We can see that Sam (Matthew Maher) enjoys his seniority. He is almost twice the age of Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), the twenty-something African-American to whom he is showing the simple cleaning routine that they are to follow between showings and after the last patron has left. Their conversation amid the sweeping of the aisles and the collecting of trash is sparked when Sam realizes that Avery is as obsessed with movie trivia as he is, particularly of the parlor game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," that (without going into detail) is the ultimate test of one's knowledge of movies and the actors in them.
The less-educated Sam's has a wary regard for the brighter Avery, who has revealed he has taken a break from college for personal reasons. He shares with him his hope for a long overdue promotion at the movie house, possibly becoming a projectionist. This job, however, is currently filled by Rose (Louisa Krause), a not unattractive but sloppily attired twenty-something woman who has apparently been avoiding the love-sick Sam's overtures.
Rose's interest in the socially and emotionally remote Avery leads her to test him sexually while they are alone watching a film. Her lack of feelings for the increasingly jealous and resentful Sam reach a breaking point in a rather pathetic confrontation. The complex relationships begin to disintegrate when an on-going box-office scam to make a little extra money is discovered by the management, one in which Sam and Rose had pressured the reluctant Avery to become a party.
Maher is terrific as the pathetic Sam who may have to face a future that will never be as bright as the light from the projection booth. Krause impresses as the dour, emotionally wilted Rose who, nevertheless, makes an aggressive play for Avery with a bit of hip hop-ography. Moten is effective as the passive, introspective, most probably sexually-conflicted Avery. Alex Hanna is fine in two small roles in what is surely Baker's most deliberately demanding play yet. The Flick will undoubtedly appeal to adventurously receptive theater goers. But I suspect that it will flicker most brightly for cinephiles.
The Flick
By Annie Baker Directed by Sam Gold
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street
(212) 279 - 4200
Tickets: $70.00
Performances: Tuesday & Wednesday, 7PM, Thursday & Friday, 8PM, Saturday, 2:30PM & 8PM, Sunday, 2:30PM & 7:30PM
From 02/15/13 Opened 03/12/13 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 09/09/13
Ann
Ann, the one-person biographical play about Texas governor Ann
Richards, as written and performed by Holland Taylor, begins
auspiciously with a short film clip of the real Richards. She is
delivering her famed keynote speech at the Democratic National
Convention in 1988 during which she reminds the cheering throng that she
is only the second Texas woman since Barbara Jordan to deliver a
keynote speech at this convention. "Two women in a
hundred and sixty years is about par for the course . . .if you give us a
chance, we can perform."
It's a humdinger of a performance that Taylor gives of the formidable and just as often feisty and funny woman who realized that "A funny woman is tricky in politics," but also reminded noted that "Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, she just did it backwards and in hi-i-gh heels!" There's only a bit more speechifying to come from the former governor of Texas as the screen disappears and we see Holland as Richards warmly welcomed to the stage of the auditorium of a fictitious college where she will address the graduating class. We hear the strains of Chariots of Fire theme as Richards, sartly dressed in a stylish white suit with gold buttons, ignores the podium, and instead uses the breadth of the stage making personal and persuasive contact with her audience.
A staunch Democrat despite her signature look, the immaculately coiffed white "Republican hair," (as it was aptly described by newspaper columnist and fan Molly Ivers) Taylor, like the woman she portrays, puts the audience (us) at ease from the get-go. "I notice that most you guys who tease me about my hair don't' have any." Richards is clearly not someone who is going to stick to or even consult her notes (although they are in evidence), but rather plunges right into her story-telling mode. The stage is therefore not a platform for a persuasive speech, but rather a field of dreams fulfilled for one of the most astonishing women to have ever exceeded her expectations. The size of the Vivian Beaumont Theater's stage is no hinderance to the feeling of intimacy that is created by Taylor. The way she effectively uses both the center as well as the outer reaches of the stage to corral everyone's attention is commendable
Literally, figuratively and certainly politically coming out of the left field, Ann Richards was not the candidate most likely to win the election in 1990 that made her the governor of Texas, only the second woman to gain that office in the most right-est state in the union. Despite a reality check that could define her as a former alcoholic and divorcee with strong feminist views, Richards wowed them in the lone star state with her often scathing humor and her cut-to-the-chase politics.
Despite serving only one term, it was enough for many of us to see what this astonishing woman was made of and stood for. She was definitely not to the manor-born, or as she was to describe her successor George W. Bush - "born with a silver foot in his mouth." She did come to the American people with an agenda, one that she apparently addressed in her autobiography Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places.
Taylor has a lot invested in this play that she based on Richard's writing, interviews with member of her staff, friends and family, film records, news publications, anecdotes, and imagination. Her heaviest investment is in portraying Richards with a loving informality and in a deliberately unpretentious manner. Well known for her work in such TV sitcoms as Bosom Buddies and Two and a Half Men as well as a long and significant stage and film career, Taylor easily disarmed us from the start with a well-honed Texas drawl. But it is spunky, sassy down-home image that she affixes to Richards that is most affectionately created.
Credit Taylor for capturing both the wizened harder-edged woman that Richards was to become as well as the embodying the uncommonly energized, optimistic younger Ann determined to measure up to the high standards set by both her father and mother. Filled with funny anecdotes, Ann makes no apology for the humor for which she became known. "My daddy was the greatest story teller. Awful, bawdy stories just the worst. It's why I developed such a taste for dirty jokes." You can be sure we are offered a sampling.
Although the play is book-ended by the graduation speech and marked initially by a recap of her family history and a touching epilogue, the centerpiece is the governor's office (a handsome setting by Michael Fagin) that glides forward. Richards is seen as fast talker who not only gets the first but the last word in the numerous phone conversations she has with various staffers and politicos during the course of one day.
Richards' description of herself as "strong as mustard gas" discards her shoes in order to get into full stride as Richards decides whether to sign a stay of execution, has brief chats on the phone with Bill Clinton and also gives hell to her speech writer and others as she aggressively paces around her desk.
The actress like her subject, keeps control of the ever coiling cord with the skill of rancher with a lasso. But this bit of officiating tends to become a little wearisome and try our patience as does an over-cooked through-line regarding the playing of charades, deciding who is bringing the ham and who is baking the pies for a proposed family outing.
The core of the play, affably directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, allows plenty of time to cover Richards'struggle with alcoholism and the unforeseen dissolution of her marriage to civil rights attorney Dave Richards. Most exhilarating is her response to a pro-choice advocate, "tsk, tsk, tsk, we're going to make you have more children you can't afford."
Ann succeeds in some measure as a cornucopia of quotes from its eminently quotable subject, it succeeds as a testament to Richard's indomitable spirit — and to Taylor, the fine actor who has lassoed it to a chariot of fire.
Ann
Written and starring Holland Taylor
Directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein
Vivian Beaumont Theater at LCT, 150 West 65th Street
(212) 239 - 6200
Tickets: $75.00 - $125
Performances: Beginning March 11: Tuesday and Thursday at 7pm Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm, Wednesday and Saturday at2pm, Sunday at 3pm.
From 02/18/13 Opened 03/07/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/06/13
It's a humdinger of a performance that Taylor gives of the formidable and just as often feisty and funny woman who realized that "A funny woman is tricky in politics," but also reminded noted that "Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, she just did it backwards and in hi-i-gh heels!" There's only a bit more speechifying to come from the former governor of Texas as the screen disappears and we see Holland as Richards warmly welcomed to the stage of the auditorium of a fictitious college where she will address the graduating class. We hear the strains of Chariots of Fire theme as Richards, sartly dressed in a stylish white suit with gold buttons, ignores the podium, and instead uses the breadth of the stage making personal and persuasive contact with her audience.
A staunch Democrat despite her signature look, the immaculately coiffed white "Republican hair," (as it was aptly described by newspaper columnist and fan Molly Ivers) Taylor, like the woman she portrays, puts the audience (us) at ease from the get-go. "I notice that most you guys who tease me about my hair don't' have any." Richards is clearly not someone who is going to stick to or even consult her notes (although they are in evidence), but rather plunges right into her story-telling mode. The stage is therefore not a platform for a persuasive speech, but rather a field of dreams fulfilled for one of the most astonishing women to have ever exceeded her expectations. The size of the Vivian Beaumont Theater's stage is no hinderance to the feeling of intimacy that is created by Taylor. The way she effectively uses both the center as well as the outer reaches of the stage to corral everyone's attention is commendable
Literally, figuratively and certainly politically coming out of the left field, Ann Richards was not the candidate most likely to win the election in 1990 that made her the governor of Texas, only the second woman to gain that office in the most right-est state in the union. Despite a reality check that could define her as a former alcoholic and divorcee with strong feminist views, Richards wowed them in the lone star state with her often scathing humor and her cut-to-the-chase politics.
Despite serving only one term, it was enough for many of us to see what this astonishing woman was made of and stood for. She was definitely not to the manor-born, or as she was to describe her successor George W. Bush - "born with a silver foot in his mouth." She did come to the American people with an agenda, one that she apparently addressed in her autobiography Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places.
Taylor has a lot invested in this play that she based on Richard's writing, interviews with member of her staff, friends and family, film records, news publications, anecdotes, and imagination. Her heaviest investment is in portraying Richards with a loving informality and in a deliberately unpretentious manner. Well known for her work in such TV sitcoms as Bosom Buddies and Two and a Half Men as well as a long and significant stage and film career, Taylor easily disarmed us from the start with a well-honed Texas drawl. But it is spunky, sassy down-home image that she affixes to Richards that is most affectionately created.
Credit Taylor for capturing both the wizened harder-edged woman that Richards was to become as well as the embodying the uncommonly energized, optimistic younger Ann determined to measure up to the high standards set by both her father and mother. Filled with funny anecdotes, Ann makes no apology for the humor for which she became known. "My daddy was the greatest story teller. Awful, bawdy stories just the worst. It's why I developed such a taste for dirty jokes." You can be sure we are offered a sampling.
Although the play is book-ended by the graduation speech and marked initially by a recap of her family history and a touching epilogue, the centerpiece is the governor's office (a handsome setting by Michael Fagin) that glides forward. Richards is seen as fast talker who not only gets the first but the last word in the numerous phone conversations she has with various staffers and politicos during the course of one day.
Richards' description of herself as "strong as mustard gas" discards her shoes in order to get into full stride as Richards decides whether to sign a stay of execution, has brief chats on the phone with Bill Clinton and also gives hell to her speech writer and others as she aggressively paces around her desk.
The actress like her subject, keeps control of the ever coiling cord with the skill of rancher with a lasso. But this bit of officiating tends to become a little wearisome and try our patience as does an over-cooked through-line regarding the playing of charades, deciding who is bringing the ham and who is baking the pies for a proposed family outing.
The core of the play, affably directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, allows plenty of time to cover Richards'struggle with alcoholism and the unforeseen dissolution of her marriage to civil rights attorney Dave Richards. Most exhilarating is her response to a pro-choice advocate, "tsk, tsk, tsk, we're going to make you have more children you can't afford."
Ann succeeds in some measure as a cornucopia of quotes from its eminently quotable subject, it succeeds as a testament to Richard's indomitable spirit — and to Taylor, the fine actor who has lassoed it to a chariot of fire.
Ann
Written and starring Holland Taylor
Directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein
Vivian Beaumont Theater at LCT, 150 West 65th Street
(212) 239 - 6200
Tickets: $75.00 - $125
Performances: Beginning March 11: Tuesday and Thursday at 7pm Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm, Wednesday and Saturday at2pm, Sunday at 3pm.
From 02/18/13 Opened 03/07/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/06/13
Belleville
Amy Herzog's compelling, well-written After the Revolution, 4000 Miles and The Great God Pan have brought distinction to the Off Broadway scene for the past few seasons. With, Belleville she has added a humdinger, a real psychological shocker, not unlike those usually ascribed to film auteur Alfred Hitchcock.
A cry of "Don't," was yelled out by someone in the audience at the performance I saw during a scene in which a carving knife is raised in the air. But it is not the only instance that the audience responded viscerally and vocally to a number of harrowing scenes. Bloody good stuff here.
However, Belleville is not a horror tale. It is experienced from the gripping, emotionally searing perspective of two people in love who have become entrapped in a web of each other's deceptions. It is also dramatized by a perceptive playwright who knows what she is doing and how to do it. This, despite program notes that interestingly chronicle the many changes in Herzog made between the first drafts to opening night.
It's hard to imagine a more unexpectedly romantic, enviably idyllic beginning to married life than that granted to the young American couple Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller). They have taken up a residency in a spacious apartment in the multi-cultural Belleville section of Paris. Zack, a recent medical school graduate, has presumably been fortunate to get a job here doing medical research while Abby appears to be making the most of her daily shopping expeditions in the colorful neighborhood.
Returning to their comfortable, unpretentiously furnished apartment (evocatively designed Julia C. Lee — check out those marvelously tall slender louvered French windows and shutters), Abby lets out a piercing scream when she opens the bedroom door. She's startled because she thought she was alone in the middle of the afternoon. Thankful at not discovering an intruder, she is, however, noticeably unnerved at the sight of her nude husband masturbating to porn on his computer. "You're having a slightly Victorian reaction," he says in an attempt to temper the situation, even as we also begin to see how being unnerved, overly stressed and jittery seems to not only be Abby's norm, but also specifically symptomatic of her severe psychological disorder.
What is also not immediately exposed is besides Zack's dalliance with internet porn and his frequent pot smoking is what exactly he is really doing during the day? The evidence of passion in play is quite graphically presented, but there is a more unsettling interplay between the couple. Zack appears to be deliberately careful about practically everything he says to Abby. He is especially cautious about how to say things without them appearing to her as condescending, baiting, judgmental or unsympathetic, since she is presumably attempting to detoxify from her dependence on anti-depressants.
If we get glimpses of acute paranoia in Abby's behavior, we can also see why Zack is reticent about telling her any more than she needs to know, particularly the fact that he has not paid the rent for the past four months. The play's other two characters, Alioune (Phillip James Brannon) and Amina (Pascale Armand), are the French-speaking Black Muslim landlords of the apartment building. They have maintained respectful regard for their tenants, even speaking English with them.
Alioune graciously accepts Christmas cookies from Abby as well as invitations to smoke pot with Zack. The relationship they have with Zack gets a bit dicey, when Zack's excuses for not paying the rent are no longer acceptable. Also no longer acceptable is his rather recklessly guarded secret and its effect on Abby whose own mental stability appears to be disintegrating at a rapid rate.
Abby clings neurotically to her phone and the calls to New Jersey where her father keeps her informed about the impending birth of her sister's baby. There is nothing for Zack to cling to except Abby. Her excessive drinking leads to the play's grossest moment and a stunning, heart-breaking denouement in which we see only Alioune and Amina as they quietly and ruefully speak to each other in (easy to grasp) French.
Director Anne Kaufman has to be praised for enabling four splendid actors to stay brilliantly true to the course of this roller coaster ride of temperaments, tempers and tantrums. Kaufman's staging is notably defined by its control of characters who are constantly in and out of control. Keller's tightly wound, almost scarily unpredictable performance keeps you guessing when and at what point will he reach the end of his tenuous rope. You won't be able to take you eyes off Dizzia who maneuvers manically through Abby's fear that she has wrongfully and selfishly manipulated her protector.
This may be Herzog's most gut-wrenching play. It is also a deeply compassionate exploration into why people will sometimes depart from what is rational, prudent and even sane to protect the ones they love.
Belleville
By Amy Herzog
Directed by Anne Kauffman
New York Theater Workshop, 79 East 4th Street
(212) 279 - 4200
Tickets: $70.00
Performances Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 7:00pm, Thursdays and Fridays, 8:00pm, Saturday, 3pm, 8pm, Sunday, 2 pm, 7pm
From 02/12/13 Opened 03/03 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/11/13
A cry of "Don't," was yelled out by someone in the audience at the performance I saw during a scene in which a carving knife is raised in the air. But it is not the only instance that the audience responded viscerally and vocally to a number of harrowing scenes. Bloody good stuff here.
However, Belleville is not a horror tale. It is experienced from the gripping, emotionally searing perspective of two people in love who have become entrapped in a web of each other's deceptions. It is also dramatized by a perceptive playwright who knows what she is doing and how to do it. This, despite program notes that interestingly chronicle the many changes in Herzog made between the first drafts to opening night.
It's hard to imagine a more unexpectedly romantic, enviably idyllic beginning to married life than that granted to the young American couple Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller). They have taken up a residency in a spacious apartment in the multi-cultural Belleville section of Paris. Zack, a recent medical school graduate, has presumably been fortunate to get a job here doing medical research while Abby appears to be making the most of her daily shopping expeditions in the colorful neighborhood.
Returning to their comfortable, unpretentiously furnished apartment (evocatively designed Julia C. Lee — check out those marvelously tall slender louvered French windows and shutters), Abby lets out a piercing scream when she opens the bedroom door. She's startled because she thought she was alone in the middle of the afternoon. Thankful at not discovering an intruder, she is, however, noticeably unnerved at the sight of her nude husband masturbating to porn on his computer. "You're having a slightly Victorian reaction," he says in an attempt to temper the situation, even as we also begin to see how being unnerved, overly stressed and jittery seems to not only be Abby's norm, but also specifically symptomatic of her severe psychological disorder.
What is also not immediately exposed is besides Zack's dalliance with internet porn and his frequent pot smoking is what exactly he is really doing during the day? The evidence of passion in play is quite graphically presented, but there is a more unsettling interplay between the couple. Zack appears to be deliberately careful about practically everything he says to Abby. He is especially cautious about how to say things without them appearing to her as condescending, baiting, judgmental or unsympathetic, since she is presumably attempting to detoxify from her dependence on anti-depressants.
If we get glimpses of acute paranoia in Abby's behavior, we can also see why Zack is reticent about telling her any more than she needs to know, particularly the fact that he has not paid the rent for the past four months. The play's other two characters, Alioune (Phillip James Brannon) and Amina (Pascale Armand), are the French-speaking Black Muslim landlords of the apartment building. They have maintained respectful regard for their tenants, even speaking English with them.
Alioune graciously accepts Christmas cookies from Abby as well as invitations to smoke pot with Zack. The relationship they have with Zack gets a bit dicey, when Zack's excuses for not paying the rent are no longer acceptable. Also no longer acceptable is his rather recklessly guarded secret and its effect on Abby whose own mental stability appears to be disintegrating at a rapid rate.
Abby clings neurotically to her phone and the calls to New Jersey where her father keeps her informed about the impending birth of her sister's baby. There is nothing for Zack to cling to except Abby. Her excessive drinking leads to the play's grossest moment and a stunning, heart-breaking denouement in which we see only Alioune and Amina as they quietly and ruefully speak to each other in (easy to grasp) French.
Director Anne Kaufman has to be praised for enabling four splendid actors to stay brilliantly true to the course of this roller coaster ride of temperaments, tempers and tantrums. Kaufman's staging is notably defined by its control of characters who are constantly in and out of control. Keller's tightly wound, almost scarily unpredictable performance keeps you guessing when and at what point will he reach the end of his tenuous rope. You won't be able to take you eyes off Dizzia who maneuvers manically through Abby's fear that she has wrongfully and selfishly manipulated her protector.
This may be Herzog's most gut-wrenching play. It is also a deeply compassionate exploration into why people will sometimes depart from what is rational, prudent and even sane to protect the ones they love.
Belleville
By Amy Herzog
Directed by Anne Kauffman
New York Theater Workshop, 79 East 4th Street
(212) 279 - 4200
Tickets: $70.00
Performances Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 7:00pm, Thursdays and Fridays, 8:00pm, Saturday, 3pm, 8pm, Sunday, 2 pm, 7pm
From 02/12/13 Opened 03/03 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/11/13
The Old Boy
Many of our greatest American playwrights have given birth to characters
that seem to have risen suddenly and mysteriously out of their fertile
imaginations. Many others seem to have been channeled by characters who
have lingered and matured within the deep recesses of their creator's
minds until they were ready to spring forth to assert their own reality.
Through Tennessee Williams's southern dreamers, Lillian Hellman's southern schemers, Eugene O'Neill's disheartened, boozing New Englanders, Arthur Miller's disillusioned, socio-politicized working class, and certainly through August Wilson's generations of African-Americans transiting ten decades in the USA, we have gotten very incisive perspectives of these playwrights as well as of the particular characters and worlds they parented.
One of the most distinctive dramatic chroniclers of a particular class of people is A.R. Gurney. Though perhaps never, to be acknowledged among the titans of American playwrights, Gurney has nevertheless secured himself a place as an acute observer of that distinctly American class of people — the upper-class WASP, most familiarly acknowledged as inhabitants of the USA's northeast corridor.
As we move forward into the more unprotected societal trenches of the 21st century plays like The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour and Love Letters, appear in retrospect increasingly quaint and indeed remote. Their most keenly embedded facet is the well-bred-ocracy that governs the lives of their characters.
Rather than go into the list of Gurney's most recent plays that still feed into the notion that theirs is a vanishing world, I suspect there may, indeed, be a resurgence spurred by the increase of one percenters who appear to be relentlessly bent on re-ghetto-ing society into the haves and have-nots.
Be that as it may, The Old Boy is now being revived by the admirable Keen Company noted for declaring its dedication to "sincere" plays. Under the carefully finessed direction of Jonathan Silverstein, it is certainly an example of a sincere effort by Gurney to show the inevitable shift in the traditional WASP landscape which in this play is a private New England boarding school in the early 1990s, with some scenes in the late 1960s. Though not a great Gurney it's short, well-meaning and "sincerely" acted.
Sam (Peter Rini), a Secretary of State for Political Affairs with his eye on a run for governor, has been invited to return to the exclusive school he attended to give the commencement address. During it, he is going to announce the gift of an indoor tennis facility to be built in memory of Perry (Chris Dwan) a former student who has recently died.
Donating the funds for this is Perry's extremely wealthy mother Harriet (Laura Esterman). It's in part her grand thank you gesture to Sam, who was Perry's "old boy," the term used for upper classmen who served as both mentors and guides to new boys. Harriet is also using this as an opportunity to secure a spot for Perry's son at the school. Attending the ceremony with her is Perry's wife Alison (Marsha Dietlein Bennett) who we learn had more than a fling with Sam before her marriage to Perry. It appears that she has always harbored a hope to rekindle the old flame. What better time, after so many years apart than now?
Also present is Sam's campaign manager Bud (Cary Donaldson) who is not happy about this detour which he views as a politically detrimental decision in the light of Perry's death from AIDS (there's also a hint of suicide). Since Sam seems to have been completely unaware of Perry's out-of-the-closest escapades after his marriage to Alison, he finds himself in the middle of an easily politicized predicament. A flashback in which Sam sees how naive he was to pick up ON Perry's admission of his sexual preference is a device that is used as a bridge to understanding the brief, unlikely friendship between Sam and Perry as school buddies — with Rini playing the older and younger Sam quite convincingly, and often amusingly.
Dwan is quite good at addressing the nuances that characterize Perry's presumably conflicted personality. While it is easy to see how far off course Perry has been driven by his mother to mold him into a respectable junior member of the WASP high society, it is also easy to see where and how the play begins to veer discomfortingly off its course and away from Gurney's usually more insightful perspective of a class of people who know how and when to keep things under control and in check.
The play's most glaring flaw is dialogue that sounds like unwittingly contrived pandering to an elite breed. As noted in the script, this is a new version of the play that originally opened in 1991 at Playwrights Horizons. One has to suppose it was a good idea.
The Old Boy's modest merits continue to rest in the artfully projected mannerisms and arched decorum that define and refine his characters. This is most notable in Harriet, as played with a staunchly patrician sense of self by the excellent Esterman and in Alison, as believably played with prevailing sense of cheek and chic by the slim and blonde Bennett.
It's a reunion of sorts for Sam, Harriet and Alison; also for Dexter (Tom Riis Farrell), the school's affably still-in-the-closet Episcopal minister, who makes occasional forays into the handsomely furnished wood-paneled room of the exclusive school, nicely evoked by set designer Steven C. Kemp. The school serves as a conduit to these characters' past: Sam's shallow, homophobic youth, Harriet's denial of her son's sexuality, and Alison's not only discovering it too late but also that she was also used by the womanizing Sam as a pawn. It's all part of the prickly political and social issues, guilt-ridden memories, and unforgiving attitudes that are revealed in through the present and in flashbacks.
Oddly, the scenes in the past are undermined by being queasily naïve, almost corny. You want to wince when Perry admits he would rather be Viola in a school production of Twelfth Night than continue playing tennis, the one sport in which he is good enough to win a trophy. Another gulper is Sam trying to make a man of Perry when they have a chance to pick up some girls on the road, and then attempting to fix him up with one of his soon-to-be-discarded girl friends which is, of course, Alison. The echoes of Robert Anderson's similarly themed 1953 play about a sensitive young man's coming of age Tea and Sympathy are unmistakable.
It probably isn't important whether one buys into or not the sentiments expressed in Sam's off-the-cuff commencement speech ("I tried to make him fit in. I tried to make him act against the promptings of his own soul"). Call it his Episcopal epiphany, but it is hard to buy into the clichés that are used to define Perry almost solely through his love of theater and, even more, for opera. The special passion for La Forza del Destino is a rather obvious intimation of Perry's ill-fated life-style. I suspect that director Silverstein had more to do with selecting this unnecessary revival of The Old Boy than any inferred force of destiny.
The Old Boy
By A.R. Gurney Directed by Jonathan Silverman
The Clurman Theater, Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street
(212) 239 - 6200
Tickets: $62.50
Performances: Tuesday at 7pm, Wednesday - Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm, Sunday at 3pm
From 02/12/13 Opened 03/05/13 Ends 03/30/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/01/13
Through Tennessee Williams's southern dreamers, Lillian Hellman's southern schemers, Eugene O'Neill's disheartened, boozing New Englanders, Arthur Miller's disillusioned, socio-politicized working class, and certainly through August Wilson's generations of African-Americans transiting ten decades in the USA, we have gotten very incisive perspectives of these playwrights as well as of the particular characters and worlds they parented.
One of the most distinctive dramatic chroniclers of a particular class of people is A.R. Gurney. Though perhaps never, to be acknowledged among the titans of American playwrights, Gurney has nevertheless secured himself a place as an acute observer of that distinctly American class of people — the upper-class WASP, most familiarly acknowledged as inhabitants of the USA's northeast corridor.
As we move forward into the more unprotected societal trenches of the 21st century plays like The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour and Love Letters, appear in retrospect increasingly quaint and indeed remote. Their most keenly embedded facet is the well-bred-ocracy that governs the lives of their characters.
Rather than go into the list of Gurney's most recent plays that still feed into the notion that theirs is a vanishing world, I suspect there may, indeed, be a resurgence spurred by the increase of one percenters who appear to be relentlessly bent on re-ghetto-ing society into the haves and have-nots.
Be that as it may, The Old Boy is now being revived by the admirable Keen Company noted for declaring its dedication to "sincere" plays. Under the carefully finessed direction of Jonathan Silverstein, it is certainly an example of a sincere effort by Gurney to show the inevitable shift in the traditional WASP landscape which in this play is a private New England boarding school in the early 1990s, with some scenes in the late 1960s. Though not a great Gurney it's short, well-meaning and "sincerely" acted.
Sam (Peter Rini), a Secretary of State for Political Affairs with his eye on a run for governor, has been invited to return to the exclusive school he attended to give the commencement address. During it, he is going to announce the gift of an indoor tennis facility to be built in memory of Perry (Chris Dwan) a former student who has recently died.
Donating the funds for this is Perry's extremely wealthy mother Harriet (Laura Esterman). It's in part her grand thank you gesture to Sam, who was Perry's "old boy," the term used for upper classmen who served as both mentors and guides to new boys. Harriet is also using this as an opportunity to secure a spot for Perry's son at the school. Attending the ceremony with her is Perry's wife Alison (Marsha Dietlein Bennett) who we learn had more than a fling with Sam before her marriage to Perry. It appears that she has always harbored a hope to rekindle the old flame. What better time, after so many years apart than now?
Also present is Sam's campaign manager Bud (Cary Donaldson) who is not happy about this detour which he views as a politically detrimental decision in the light of Perry's death from AIDS (there's also a hint of suicide). Since Sam seems to have been completely unaware of Perry's out-of-the-closest escapades after his marriage to Alison, he finds himself in the middle of an easily politicized predicament. A flashback in which Sam sees how naive he was to pick up ON Perry's admission of his sexual preference is a device that is used as a bridge to understanding the brief, unlikely friendship between Sam and Perry as school buddies — with Rini playing the older and younger Sam quite convincingly, and often amusingly.
Dwan is quite good at addressing the nuances that characterize Perry's presumably conflicted personality. While it is easy to see how far off course Perry has been driven by his mother to mold him into a respectable junior member of the WASP high society, it is also easy to see where and how the play begins to veer discomfortingly off its course and away from Gurney's usually more insightful perspective of a class of people who know how and when to keep things under control and in check.
The play's most glaring flaw is dialogue that sounds like unwittingly contrived pandering to an elite breed. As noted in the script, this is a new version of the play that originally opened in 1991 at Playwrights Horizons. One has to suppose it was a good idea.
The Old Boy's modest merits continue to rest in the artfully projected mannerisms and arched decorum that define and refine his characters. This is most notable in Harriet, as played with a staunchly patrician sense of self by the excellent Esterman and in Alison, as believably played with prevailing sense of cheek and chic by the slim and blonde Bennett.
It's a reunion of sorts for Sam, Harriet and Alison; also for Dexter (Tom Riis Farrell), the school's affably still-in-the-closet Episcopal minister, who makes occasional forays into the handsomely furnished wood-paneled room of the exclusive school, nicely evoked by set designer Steven C. Kemp. The school serves as a conduit to these characters' past: Sam's shallow, homophobic youth, Harriet's denial of her son's sexuality, and Alison's not only discovering it too late but also that she was also used by the womanizing Sam as a pawn. It's all part of the prickly political and social issues, guilt-ridden memories, and unforgiving attitudes that are revealed in through the present and in flashbacks.
Oddly, the scenes in the past are undermined by being queasily naïve, almost corny. You want to wince when Perry admits he would rather be Viola in a school production of Twelfth Night than continue playing tennis, the one sport in which he is good enough to win a trophy. Another gulper is Sam trying to make a man of Perry when they have a chance to pick up some girls on the road, and then attempting to fix him up with one of his soon-to-be-discarded girl friends which is, of course, Alison. The echoes of Robert Anderson's similarly themed 1953 play about a sensitive young man's coming of age Tea and Sympathy are unmistakable.
It probably isn't important whether one buys into or not the sentiments expressed in Sam's off-the-cuff commencement speech ("I tried to make him fit in. I tried to make him act against the promptings of his own soul"). Call it his Episcopal epiphany, but it is hard to buy into the clichés that are used to define Perry almost solely through his love of theater and, even more, for opera. The special passion for La Forza del Destino is a rather obvious intimation of Perry's ill-fated life-style. I suspect that director Silverstein had more to do with selecting this unnecessary revival of The Old Boy than any inferred force of destiny.
The Old Boy
By A.R. Gurney Directed by Jonathan Silverman
The Clurman Theater, Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street
(212) 239 - 6200
Tickets: $62.50
Performances: Tuesday at 7pm, Wednesday - Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm, Sunday at 3pm
From 02/12/13 Opened 03/05/13 Ends 03/30/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 03/01/13
The Revisionist
It’s hard to fathom at first why David (Jesse
Eisenberg), the young American who has just been welcomed by the
elderly Maria (Vanessa Redgrave) into her modest apartment in
Szezecin, a large port city in Poland, would be so observably
nervous and on-edge. He enters without any outward show of
respect, warmth or affection for the Polish-Jewish woman who has
been anxiously awaiting his arrival from America. David’s jittery
behavior and curt reactions to Maria’s attempt at hospitality
would seem to indicate the kind of social defensiveness and
awkwardness often associated with those with Asberger’s Syndrome.
Well, that’s my take if not necessarily the playwright’s. At any rate, under the circumstances that prevail, it’s never a consideration.
Maria is clearly hurt by his refusal to sit down and eat the chicken dinner she has prepared for him. His claim to be a vegetarian is not nearly as strange and unsettling to her, however, as is the dispiritingly evidence of witnessing him as a substance abuser when he is alone in the one bedroom she has relinquished for his comfort. But it will be the duplicity and insincerity of his visit that will be even more discouraging.
David is portrayed by Eisenberg with enough neurotic fidgeting and ill-tempered social graces to suggest this character needs more help in finding himself and corralling his talent than this week-long visit with his presumably second cousin. A writer who has had a modest success with his first book for “young adult readers,” David has been suffering the proverbial writer’s block. Turned down by various writers’ colonies, he finally, after traipsing around the world, has taken his grandfather’s advice to visit Maria, with whom the American side of the family has had only limited contact.
Does Maria, who has followed David’s career —she has a framed copy of the New York Times review of his book on the wall — and has photos of other family members filling up the walls imagine that David has come all this way to hear her story as a survivor of the holocaust? If she doesn’t know how to broach the topic, she also doesn’t seem able to penetrate David’s overt hostility. She is tolerant as we are subjected to David’s flaws to the point of annoyance. But how long do we have to wait before his intentions are revealed?
We are able to see how David makes clear that he has little interest in familial empathy either at home or here and that he has no interest in establishing a bond of kinship with Maria who does everything but dance a jig to make him feel comfortable and welcome.
It's hard to understand David’s agenda? What is even harder to understand is the apathy he directs toward Maria’s close male friend Zenon (Daniel Oreskes) whose visits provide some interesting examples of diverse cultural humor. In one of the play’s few amusing moments, David attempts to perform the famous “Who’s on first” routine to the delight of Maria. Unfortunately, very little of what happens during the course of the play makes as much sense as that Abbott and Costello routine does.
With The Revisionist, Eisenberg is once again starring in a play he has also written. As with Asuncion , also produced by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, he has director Kip Fagan tying its occasionally interesting aspects together. The multi-talented Eisenberg (Oscar nominated for playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) has apparently drawn his inspiration from family history, specifically a visit by him to the town in Poland where his 100 year-old aunt had emigrated. All well, good and noble, but he has done a disservice to his central character by making him appear as a totally self-centered, incorrigible jerk without a single redeeming quality.
Tne one fortunate element within the play is the character of Maria, as played by Redgrave with a wonderfully textured display of emotions and fractured-English that somehow withstands David’s egregious displays of emotional immaturity. We listen intently, as one is obliged to do given the long wait for supposed revelations, as Maria does, indeed, recount the tragic circumstances that she survived. They are the twist in the plot that turns out after all to be rather predictable.
There are a number of lapses in credulity. They begin (silly as it is) with David coming to Poland without having his cousin’s telephone number, although it is somewhat amusingly addressed in an opening exchange. Then we begin to wonder how he managed to get through customs inspectors and the dogs with his stash of marihuana and its accompanying pipe — not to mention leaving Poland without making sure that they are safely hidden, especially in the light of Zenon’s hurried and sloppy packing of David’s suitcase.
It is, however, the lack of clarity with regard to David’s intentions and motives that fails to define him as a needy human being and worthy of either our or Maria’s concerns. We never see this incredibly shallow young man for an instant as someone whom we might care to understand. He is certainly difficult to tolerate during the time he is afforded within the homey, sentimental confines of the apartment that designer John McDermott convinces us is Polish contemporary.
Oreskes is quite fine as Zenon, Maria’s friend, a widower and taxi driver. He not only takes her shopping but devotedly sees to her welfare, even shaving her legs in a warm bucket of water, an affectionate gesture. This, Maria explains to the mortified David, helps him recall the love he had for his mother. Zenon mostly speaks in Polish except for the few words in English that he volleys back and forth with the more English-proficient Maria and, of course, the indefensibly condescending David. All I kept thinking of long before it actually happens is, “throw the bum out.”
The Revisionist
By Jesse Eisenberg
Directed by Kip Fagan
Cast: Vanessa Redgrave (Maria), Jesse Eisenberg (David), Daniel Oreskes (Zenon)
Set Design: John McDermott
Costume Design: Jessica Pabst
Lighting Design: Matt Frey
Sound Design: Bart Fasbender
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes no intermission
Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street
(212) 627 – 2556
Tickets: $86.00
Performances: Tuesday - Friday at 8pm; Saturday at 2pm and 8pm; Sunday at 3pm
From 02/15/2013 Opens 02/28/13 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/26/13
Well, that’s my take if not necessarily the playwright’s. At any rate, under the circumstances that prevail, it’s never a consideration.
Maria is clearly hurt by his refusal to sit down and eat the chicken dinner she has prepared for him. His claim to be a vegetarian is not nearly as strange and unsettling to her, however, as is the dispiritingly evidence of witnessing him as a substance abuser when he is alone in the one bedroom she has relinquished for his comfort. But it will be the duplicity and insincerity of his visit that will be even more discouraging.
David is portrayed by Eisenberg with enough neurotic fidgeting and ill-tempered social graces to suggest this character needs more help in finding himself and corralling his talent than this week-long visit with his presumably second cousin. A writer who has had a modest success with his first book for “young adult readers,” David has been suffering the proverbial writer’s block. Turned down by various writers’ colonies, he finally, after traipsing around the world, has taken his grandfather’s advice to visit Maria, with whom the American side of the family has had only limited contact.
Does Maria, who has followed David’s career —she has a framed copy of the New York Times review of his book on the wall — and has photos of other family members filling up the walls imagine that David has come all this way to hear her story as a survivor of the holocaust? If she doesn’t know how to broach the topic, she also doesn’t seem able to penetrate David’s overt hostility. She is tolerant as we are subjected to David’s flaws to the point of annoyance. But how long do we have to wait before his intentions are revealed?
We are able to see how David makes clear that he has little interest in familial empathy either at home or here and that he has no interest in establishing a bond of kinship with Maria who does everything but dance a jig to make him feel comfortable and welcome.
It's hard to understand David’s agenda? What is even harder to understand is the apathy he directs toward Maria’s close male friend Zenon (Daniel Oreskes) whose visits provide some interesting examples of diverse cultural humor. In one of the play’s few amusing moments, David attempts to perform the famous “Who’s on first” routine to the delight of Maria. Unfortunately, very little of what happens during the course of the play makes as much sense as that Abbott and Costello routine does.
With The Revisionist, Eisenberg is once again starring in a play he has also written. As with Asuncion , also produced by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, he has director Kip Fagan tying its occasionally interesting aspects together. The multi-talented Eisenberg (Oscar nominated for playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) has apparently drawn his inspiration from family history, specifically a visit by him to the town in Poland where his 100 year-old aunt had emigrated. All well, good and noble, but he has done a disservice to his central character by making him appear as a totally self-centered, incorrigible jerk without a single redeeming quality.
Tne one fortunate element within the play is the character of Maria, as played by Redgrave with a wonderfully textured display of emotions and fractured-English that somehow withstands David’s egregious displays of emotional immaturity. We listen intently, as one is obliged to do given the long wait for supposed revelations, as Maria does, indeed, recount the tragic circumstances that she survived. They are the twist in the plot that turns out after all to be rather predictable.
There are a number of lapses in credulity. They begin (silly as it is) with David coming to Poland without having his cousin’s telephone number, although it is somewhat amusingly addressed in an opening exchange. Then we begin to wonder how he managed to get through customs inspectors and the dogs with his stash of marihuana and its accompanying pipe — not to mention leaving Poland without making sure that they are safely hidden, especially in the light of Zenon’s hurried and sloppy packing of David’s suitcase.
It is, however, the lack of clarity with regard to David’s intentions and motives that fails to define him as a needy human being and worthy of either our or Maria’s concerns. We never see this incredibly shallow young man for an instant as someone whom we might care to understand. He is certainly difficult to tolerate during the time he is afforded within the homey, sentimental confines of the apartment that designer John McDermott convinces us is Polish contemporary.
Oreskes is quite fine as Zenon, Maria’s friend, a widower and taxi driver. He not only takes her shopping but devotedly sees to her welfare, even shaving her legs in a warm bucket of water, an affectionate gesture. This, Maria explains to the mortified David, helps him recall the love he had for his mother. Zenon mostly speaks in Polish except for the few words in English that he volleys back and forth with the more English-proficient Maria and, of course, the indefensibly condescending David. All I kept thinking of long before it actually happens is, “throw the bum out.”
The Revisionist
By Jesse Eisenberg
Directed by Kip Fagan
Cast: Vanessa Redgrave (Maria), Jesse Eisenberg (David), Daniel Oreskes (Zenon)
Set Design: John McDermott
Costume Design: Jessica Pabst
Lighting Design: Matt Frey
Sound Design: Bart Fasbender
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes no intermission
Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street
(212) 627 – 2556
Tickets: $86.00
Performances: Tuesday - Friday at 8pm; Saturday at 2pm and 8pm; Sunday at 3pm
From 02/15/2013 Opens 02/28/13 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/26/13
Passion
Stepping into the Classic Stage Company’s three-quarters in the
round space our gaze quickly turns toward the dimly illuminated
setting that sprawls out before us, as designed by
director John Doyle. The simple elegance of the patterned, dark
marble floor, with its chipped edges and the pair of matching
ornate mirrors hanging from a shiny black brick back wall, might
be construed as more austere than romantic — except for the
passionate embracing in the middle of the floor of a handsome
uniformed man and a gorgeous woman in a billowing gown in post
coital ecstasy. What better way to begin a love story.
To the extent that the days when the appeal and success of an American musical was primarily measured by its number of hit tunes, there have been relatively few musicals since the post “golden age” that are credited with actually redefining what an originally composed American musical could/would be. Of those composers most responsible for revitalizing this genre, Stephen Sondheim is at the top, reaching perhaps close to his peak of musical audacity with Passion, which was duly recognized with the 1994 Tony Award for Best New Musical.
The current revival is the first major one in almost twenty years. It's, been given a stunning production at the Classic Stage Company, where it has the distinction of being the first musical ever produced by this esteemed company now celebrating its 45th anniversary.
Considering the public’s originally tempered response to it on Broadway, it remains to be seen whether the level of sensitivity and invention afforded it by director Doyle (best known for his revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company ), the degree of intelligence that prevails in the concise book by James Lapine (based on Igino Tarchetti’s little known 1869 novel Fosca) and the emotionally compacted range of the score is enough to attract more than Sondheim’s fans this time around.
This beautifully conceived staging includes the gracefully varied placement of straight-back chairs as moved about by members of the company. It also highlights nine splendid musicians perched high above the stage right and udder the direction of Rob Berman.
I would hope that Sondheim, who was initially attracted to the story from the 1981 film version of the novel (Passione d’amore) feels well served by all the members of this by-passion-propelled company. Aside from the almost constant stream of voluptuous and seductively sung music, all the sexy, contentious, and earthy aspects that also drive Passion are in the hands of singing actors who can mine the gold they have been given.
Much of this meticulously crafted musical is structured around the sending and receiving of a series of love letters. The story revolves around, a handsome young army captain who, though smitten with his beautiful, but married mistress, falls prey to the relentless passions of an extremely homely and sickly woman.
Of course, Judy Kuhn is far from homely but she is terrifyingly gaunt even slightly vampiric as Fosca. Melissa Errico is radiant and tantalizing as the mistress. Caught between in the cross-fire of their love is Ryan Silverman who impressively transits the changing aspects of his affections as they arise in Milan and in a remote frontier post.
Aside from looking like the shadow of death, it is Kuhn’s intensely focused gaze as she follows Fosca’s singular desire that is most gripping in her portrayal. Kuhn, who previously sang the role in 2002 as part of the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim celebration, has said recently that she wants “to come to this completely new.” New or old, it’s a powerful portrait of a woman driven by her obsessive-compulsive needs. One note of disapproval is her short haircut. It doesn’t seem quite right for the era, especially as Sondheim in a interview remarked on the custom of the time for women to have a lock of their hair cut off and sent to their lover when they died.
Speaking of hair, there is none more glorious than what crowns and ripples about Errico’s lovely face. However it's hardly a distraction from her impassioned performance as the lonely Clara who slowly loses her grasp on her increasingly conflicted lover. Silverman, who has starred as Raoul (who hasn’t?) in Phantom of the Opera uses his fine singing and dramatic gifts to contribute significantly to our total belief in this tragic romantic triangle.
To pause for a silly digression: With Giorgio caressing Clara and declaring again and again “You are too beautiful,” I half expected him to begin the more familiar song with that title by Rodgers and Hart. Nevertheless, he looks quite spiffy, as do all the men in the cast, in the handsome black and red accented 19th century regiment uniforms designed by Ann Hould-Ward.
The clever staging makes good use of the regiment within their remote Italian garrison as they are used to both frame the action and serve as an integral part of the plot. Among this altogether fine detachment, Stephen Bogardus is outstanding as the calculating Colonel Ricci, as is Tom Nelis as the well-intentioned Doctor Tambourri.
You may have to remind yourself to breathe now and again over the course of this musical’s one hundred minutes as you become captive to the conflicting emotions of the three sensual people caught in a vortex of their emotions. You may also wonder where to place Passion in the Sondheim canon — after Sweeney Todd but before Company, somewhere between Follies and A Little Night Music, or to just wishfully project perhaps Sondheim sharing his thoughts on his next project, “You’re Going to Love Tomorrow.”
Passion
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by James Lapine
Directed and Designed by John Doyle
Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street
(212) 352 – 3101
Tickets: $80.00 - $60.00
Performances: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7 pm; Thursdays and Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 3pm and 8pm; and Sundays at 3pm. Also Wednesday matinees at 3pm on March 6, 27 and April 3.
From 02/08/13 Opened 02/28/13 Ends 04/07/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/21/13
To the extent that the days when the appeal and success of an American musical was primarily measured by its number of hit tunes, there have been relatively few musicals since the post “golden age” that are credited with actually redefining what an originally composed American musical could/would be. Of those composers most responsible for revitalizing this genre, Stephen Sondheim is at the top, reaching perhaps close to his peak of musical audacity with Passion, which was duly recognized with the 1994 Tony Award for Best New Musical.
The current revival is the first major one in almost twenty years. It's, been given a stunning production at the Classic Stage Company, where it has the distinction of being the first musical ever produced by this esteemed company now celebrating its 45th anniversary.
Considering the public’s originally tempered response to it on Broadway, it remains to be seen whether the level of sensitivity and invention afforded it by director Doyle (best known for his revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company ), the degree of intelligence that prevails in the concise book by James Lapine (based on Igino Tarchetti’s little known 1869 novel Fosca) and the emotionally compacted range of the score is enough to attract more than Sondheim’s fans this time around.
This beautifully conceived staging includes the gracefully varied placement of straight-back chairs as moved about by members of the company. It also highlights nine splendid musicians perched high above the stage right and udder the direction of Rob Berman.
I would hope that Sondheim, who was initially attracted to the story from the 1981 film version of the novel (Passione d’amore) feels well served by all the members of this by-passion-propelled company. Aside from the almost constant stream of voluptuous and seductively sung music, all the sexy, contentious, and earthy aspects that also drive Passion are in the hands of singing actors who can mine the gold they have been given.
Much of this meticulously crafted musical is structured around the sending and receiving of a series of love letters. The story revolves around, a handsome young army captain who, though smitten with his beautiful, but married mistress, falls prey to the relentless passions of an extremely homely and sickly woman.
Of course, Judy Kuhn is far from homely but she is terrifyingly gaunt even slightly vampiric as Fosca. Melissa Errico is radiant and tantalizing as the mistress. Caught between in the cross-fire of their love is Ryan Silverman who impressively transits the changing aspects of his affections as they arise in Milan and in a remote frontier post.
Aside from looking like the shadow of death, it is Kuhn’s intensely focused gaze as she follows Fosca’s singular desire that is most gripping in her portrayal. Kuhn, who previously sang the role in 2002 as part of the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim celebration, has said recently that she wants “to come to this completely new.” New or old, it’s a powerful portrait of a woman driven by her obsessive-compulsive needs. One note of disapproval is her short haircut. It doesn’t seem quite right for the era, especially as Sondheim in a interview remarked on the custom of the time for women to have a lock of their hair cut off and sent to their lover when they died.
Speaking of hair, there is none more glorious than what crowns and ripples about Errico’s lovely face. However it's hardly a distraction from her impassioned performance as the lonely Clara who slowly loses her grasp on her increasingly conflicted lover. Silverman, who has starred as Raoul (who hasn’t?) in Phantom of the Opera uses his fine singing and dramatic gifts to contribute significantly to our total belief in this tragic romantic triangle.
To pause for a silly digression: With Giorgio caressing Clara and declaring again and again “You are too beautiful,” I half expected him to begin the more familiar song with that title by Rodgers and Hart. Nevertheless, he looks quite spiffy, as do all the men in the cast, in the handsome black and red accented 19th century regiment uniforms designed by Ann Hould-Ward.
The clever staging makes good use of the regiment within their remote Italian garrison as they are used to both frame the action and serve as an integral part of the plot. Among this altogether fine detachment, Stephen Bogardus is outstanding as the calculating Colonel Ricci, as is Tom Nelis as the well-intentioned Doctor Tambourri.
You may have to remind yourself to breathe now and again over the course of this musical’s one hundred minutes as you become captive to the conflicting emotions of the three sensual people caught in a vortex of their emotions. You may also wonder where to place Passion in the Sondheim canon — after Sweeney Todd but before Company, somewhere between Follies and A Little Night Music, or to just wishfully project perhaps Sondheim sharing his thoughts on his next project, “You’re Going to Love Tomorrow.”
Passion
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by James Lapine
Directed and Designed by John Doyle
Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street
(212) 352 – 3101
Tickets: $80.00 - $60.00
Performances: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7 pm; Thursdays and Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 3pm and 8pm; and Sundays at 3pm. Also Wednesday matinees at 3pm on March 6, 27 and April 3.
From 02/08/13 Opened 02/28/13 Ends 04/07/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/21/13
The Madrid
One has to assume from the start of Liz Flahive’s very strange
play, The Madrid, that someone with a strong feeling and a
genuine need to run away from their job, their home and all
family obligations is harboring a very real, possibly more
pervasive than we realize, neurosis. This mental state, a
condition that seems likely to cause maternal and marital,
perhaps occupational, claustrophobia is apparently what is
applicable to forty-eight year old Martha (Edie Falco). She's
the play’s central character, a kindergarten teacher, who has
just barely managed to hold on to her recurring tendency to
simply pack up and leave it all behind her, and for whatever it’s
worth, does.
There is a hint of what is in store for Martha and for those who care about her in a short prologue. It takes place in the school room where she is showing the class drawings and stories submitted by the youngsters, only to suddenly suggest to a most precocious little girl (Brooke Ashley Laine) that she take over as the teacher. Putting her sweater on the amused girl’s shoulders, Martha says, “Keep going, I know you can do it.” She then leaves the room. And, as we soon find out she has also left her family – without a trace. That includes her husband John (John Ellison Conlee), a high school history teacher; Sarah (Phoebe Strole), her twenty-two year old daughter who has just graduated from college, and Rose (Frances Sternhagen) her aging mother who has already been feeling the effects of progressive dementia.
In what is essentially the play’s first of many puzzling and even confounding scenes that unfortunately don’t lead to a satisfying conclusion, John has already been aggressively packing up whatever Martha has left behind. He's also preparing all the home’s furnishings for a major sale. Long-time 30-something friends and neighbors, Becca (Heidi Schreck) and Danny (Christopher Evan Welch), are there for support, if also without a clue to Martha’s whereabouts even though Becca and Martha have been close friends. On the other hand, it's revealed that Danny has some carefully suppressed psycho-sexual needs but his history with young ladies is an embellishment that is only fleetingly addressed and becomes a kind of red-herring.
John is sullen, confused but apparently not angry at this awkward juncture in his life. Sarah has, with her Dad’s connections, been able to get a job as a substitute teacher while also working nights at a local Starbucks. It's quite a shock for Sarah when her mother walks quite matter-of-factly into the store one evening and begins a casual conversation with her. It seems that she has been living in an inner city apartment building, a real dump called The Madrid and invites Sarah over to see it, possibly have a beer and spend a night — but without offering any reasons or explanations. She does disclose that she has cashed in her life insurance policy and has been working un-paid in a bar where she is an emcee on talent night.
One might think that Flahive, who in 2008 won the John Gassner Playwriting Award from the Outer Critics Circle for her first play From Up Here (also produced by the Manhattan Theater Club) would have some cute trick or unconventional contrivance up her sleeve when Martha gives Sarah $10,000 (kept in a tin box in the kitchen) as a bribe not to tell her father about the meeting (of which there will be more), but hopefully as a propellant to make Sarah, do as she has done, and go out on her own.
If Flahive’s intention is to illuminate how easily our repressed desires and our need to be self-fulfilled can be both attained and assuaged and done with a minimum of hurt and harm to those we presume to love and who love us is certainly a subject worth exploring. However, she seems to want to exploit it without exploring its dramatic potential. Leigh Silverman who's once again her director of choice at MTC keeps the rather dully developed convolutions of the painfully slow-moving plot in play. The actors just seem as if they are being pulled along for the ride. The various simply functional settings by David Zinn, that include a living room, inside and outside a bar, and the room in The Madrid, are also pulled into place with a little more purposefulness.T
Falco doesn’t have it in her to be a less than an interesting actor (House of Blue Leaves and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune on Broadway and, of course, The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie on TV). She does what she can to invest some idiosyncratic behavior, even a little bit of singing — "Tonight You Belong to Me" as you have never heard it before — in a role that seems to be more of a disappearing act than the actual character she is playing. Strole is fine as the conflicted daughter who is left with the decision to string it out or stick it out.
What can one say about the ever hopeful and yet resigned John who, as commendably played by Conlee, is not above considering the possibilities offered by Match.com. Are we surprised that Sternhagen embraces her dementia valiantly and her every line with the verve of an old pro? Seth Clayton is making an impressive Off-Broadway debut as Becca and Danny’s socially awkward son Dylan. He’s afflicted with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a painful swelling of the bump on the upper part of the shinbone, just below the knee. It’s obvious that he can’t easily run far from his home. What a shame.
A final thought: Flahive is a producer on Showtime's Nurse Jackie so one can imagine her telling Falco, “Have I got a role for you.” Too bad it wasn't as wonderful an offer as Falco deserves.
The Madrid
By Liz Flahive
Directed by Leigh Silverman
Manhattan Theatre Club Stage 1, 131 West 55th Street
(212) 581 – 1212
Tickets: $85.00
Performances: Tuesday and Wednesday at 7pm; Thursday through Saturday at 8pm. Matinees on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. From 02/05/13 Opened 02/26 Ends 04/21/13
There is a hint of what is in store for Martha and for those who care about her in a short prologue. It takes place in the school room where she is showing the class drawings and stories submitted by the youngsters, only to suddenly suggest to a most precocious little girl (Brooke Ashley Laine) that she take over as the teacher. Putting her sweater on the amused girl’s shoulders, Martha says, “Keep going, I know you can do it.” She then leaves the room. And, as we soon find out she has also left her family – without a trace. That includes her husband John (John Ellison Conlee), a high school history teacher; Sarah (Phoebe Strole), her twenty-two year old daughter who has just graduated from college, and Rose (Frances Sternhagen) her aging mother who has already been feeling the effects of progressive dementia.
In what is essentially the play’s first of many puzzling and even confounding scenes that unfortunately don’t lead to a satisfying conclusion, John has already been aggressively packing up whatever Martha has left behind. He's also preparing all the home’s furnishings for a major sale. Long-time 30-something friends and neighbors, Becca (Heidi Schreck) and Danny (Christopher Evan Welch), are there for support, if also without a clue to Martha’s whereabouts even though Becca and Martha have been close friends. On the other hand, it's revealed that Danny has some carefully suppressed psycho-sexual needs but his history with young ladies is an embellishment that is only fleetingly addressed and becomes a kind of red-herring.
John is sullen, confused but apparently not angry at this awkward juncture in his life. Sarah has, with her Dad’s connections, been able to get a job as a substitute teacher while also working nights at a local Starbucks. It's quite a shock for Sarah when her mother walks quite matter-of-factly into the store one evening and begins a casual conversation with her. It seems that she has been living in an inner city apartment building, a real dump called The Madrid and invites Sarah over to see it, possibly have a beer and spend a night — but without offering any reasons or explanations. She does disclose that she has cashed in her life insurance policy and has been working un-paid in a bar where she is an emcee on talent night.
One might think that Flahive, who in 2008 won the John Gassner Playwriting Award from the Outer Critics Circle for her first play From Up Here (also produced by the Manhattan Theater Club) would have some cute trick or unconventional contrivance up her sleeve when Martha gives Sarah $10,000 (kept in a tin box in the kitchen) as a bribe not to tell her father about the meeting (of which there will be more), but hopefully as a propellant to make Sarah, do as she has done, and go out on her own.
If Flahive’s intention is to illuminate how easily our repressed desires and our need to be self-fulfilled can be both attained and assuaged and done with a minimum of hurt and harm to those we presume to love and who love us is certainly a subject worth exploring. However, she seems to want to exploit it without exploring its dramatic potential. Leigh Silverman who's once again her director of choice at MTC keeps the rather dully developed convolutions of the painfully slow-moving plot in play. The actors just seem as if they are being pulled along for the ride. The various simply functional settings by David Zinn, that include a living room, inside and outside a bar, and the room in The Madrid, are also pulled into place with a little more purposefulness.T
Falco doesn’t have it in her to be a less than an interesting actor (House of Blue Leaves and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune on Broadway and, of course, The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie on TV). She does what she can to invest some idiosyncratic behavior, even a little bit of singing — "Tonight You Belong to Me" as you have never heard it before — in a role that seems to be more of a disappearing act than the actual character she is playing. Strole is fine as the conflicted daughter who is left with the decision to string it out or stick it out.
What can one say about the ever hopeful and yet resigned John who, as commendably played by Conlee, is not above considering the possibilities offered by Match.com. Are we surprised that Sternhagen embraces her dementia valiantly and her every line with the verve of an old pro? Seth Clayton is making an impressive Off-Broadway debut as Becca and Danny’s socially awkward son Dylan. He’s afflicted with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a painful swelling of the bump on the upper part of the shinbone, just below the knee. It’s obvious that he can’t easily run far from his home. What a shame.
A final thought: Flahive is a producer on Showtime's Nurse Jackie so one can imagine her telling Falco, “Have I got a role for you.” Too bad it wasn't as wonderful an offer as Falco deserves.
The Madrid
By Liz Flahive
Directed by Leigh Silverman
Manhattan Theatre Club Stage 1, 131 West 55th Street
(212) 581 – 1212
Tickets: $85.00
Performances: Tuesday and Wednesday at 7pm; Thursday through Saturday at 8pm. Matinees on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. From 02/05/13 Opened 02/26 Ends 04/21/13
Katie Roche
The discovery, or as I should say, the re-discovery of Irish playwright
Teresa Deevy (1894 - 1963) by the Mint Theater continues to offer a
real treat to its regular subscribers as well as to all adventurous
theatergoers previously unfamiliar with her fine and, indeed, dandy
contributions to dramatic literature. The current production of Katie Roche
is the final of three plays of a programmed series that has focused on
Deevy who was once proclaimed by another Irish dramatist, Lennox
Robinson, as "the most important dramatist writing (at the time) for
Irish theater."
As presented by this admirable theater, under the deft direction of Jonathan Banks, Katie Roche may not have the dramatic heft of either of the previously presented Wife to James Whelan (2010) or Temporal Powers (2011), but it is despite its featherweight story nonetheless quietly disarming. It is substantially strengthened by Deevy's gift for creating arresting, slightly eccentric characters and by a company of actors fresh with the skills and cadences of the dialect and deportment.
Katie Roche mostly provides a peek into the inherent provincialism of Lower Ballycar, Ireland in 1936 and how its prevailing manners and mores affect the lives and the relationships within a family. The story dotes heavily on the capricious desires and whimsical nature of its title character. As charmingly played with a courageously exasperating pretense of purpose by Wrenn Schmidt, Katie Roche can easily be seen from the start as the one with whom the other characters have to reckon. Almost twenty years old, Katie has been since her birth something akin to a family retainer. Born out of wedlock to a local woman now deceased, she was given a home and raised as a housekeeper and companion to Amelia Gregg (Margaret Daly), a middle-aged spinster.
The basic situation begins to bubble when Amelia's slightly older brother Stanislaus (Patrick Fitzgerald), an architect who mainly works and lives and Dublin, takes more than a fancy to grown-up Katie and surprises her as well as his sister with his proposal of marriage. But Katie's young and foolish heart belongs to Michael McGuire (Jon Fletcher), a nice enough lad who doesn't mind dallying with the pretty and flirtatious Katie, but sees no future for them in the light of his family's objections.
There is some amusement in seeing Katie's many changes in mind and heart, particularly as she decides that she might really prefer being a wife than a nun. The age difference between her and Stan is only a momentary issue, as is his being a somewhat stuffy, stiff-necked autocrat. Katie's marriage and a re-defined sense of security do not, as you may suspect, make her a sensible, reasonable or even caring wife. Her almost ludicrous leap into religiosity, the last phase of her self-indulging caprices, encourages laughter.
While the docile, accommodating Amelia takes all of Katie's shenanigans with a grain of salt, her disapproving and interfering married older sister Margaret (Fiana Toibin) wouldn't mind seeing the marriage dissolved, especially in the light of a presumed indiscretion. There's also a secret being kept and about to be revealed by Reuben (Jamie Jackson), a mysterious spiritual advisor about town who wanders about visiting those in need?
The play moves rather slowly and deliberately through three acts with all the action taking place within the cozily furnished main room of the cottage (beautifully designed by Vicki R. Davis). The cottage's front door is the frequent passage for eight characters over a period of one year. While I was amused to see just how the headstrong Katie will eventually fare in the sheer face of her often wrong-minded fancies, I was also somewhat intrigued by the glimmer of passion and the purposefulness of his patience that would escape on occasion from Fitzgerald's otherwise rigid performance as Stan.
Daly gives a graceful account of Amelia who cow-tows to brother's every wish. There's a nice scene well played by John O'Creagh as Frank Lawlor, a prospective suitor who comes-a-calling for the startled Amelia. There are smatterings of what is at stake but there is also no real sense of urgency about them. And none of them have those whimsical flights of abstracted lyricism that often embellish, indeed, distinguish the folksy Irish plays to which we have become accustomed. Nevertheless, the voice of Deevy is distinctive, and not to be taken as lightly as the characters she has given life to in this otherwise rather endearing trifle.
Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy
Directed by Jonathan Bank
Mint Theater 311 West 43rd Street
From 1/26/13; opening 2/25/13; closing 3/31/13.
Tuesday through Thursday at 7 PM, Friday at 8 PM, Saturday at 2 PM & 8 PM, and Sunday at 2 PM.
Tickets, $55.
Reviewed by Simon saltzman at 2/20 press preview
As presented by this admirable theater, under the deft direction of Jonathan Banks, Katie Roche may not have the dramatic heft of either of the previously presented Wife to James Whelan (2010) or Temporal Powers (2011), but it is despite its featherweight story nonetheless quietly disarming. It is substantially strengthened by Deevy's gift for creating arresting, slightly eccentric characters and by a company of actors fresh with the skills and cadences of the dialect and deportment.
Katie Roche mostly provides a peek into the inherent provincialism of Lower Ballycar, Ireland in 1936 and how its prevailing manners and mores affect the lives and the relationships within a family. The story dotes heavily on the capricious desires and whimsical nature of its title character. As charmingly played with a courageously exasperating pretense of purpose by Wrenn Schmidt, Katie Roche can easily be seen from the start as the one with whom the other characters have to reckon. Almost twenty years old, Katie has been since her birth something akin to a family retainer. Born out of wedlock to a local woman now deceased, she was given a home and raised as a housekeeper and companion to Amelia Gregg (Margaret Daly), a middle-aged spinster.
The basic situation begins to bubble when Amelia's slightly older brother Stanislaus (Patrick Fitzgerald), an architect who mainly works and lives and Dublin, takes more than a fancy to grown-up Katie and surprises her as well as his sister with his proposal of marriage. But Katie's young and foolish heart belongs to Michael McGuire (Jon Fletcher), a nice enough lad who doesn't mind dallying with the pretty and flirtatious Katie, but sees no future for them in the light of his family's objections.
There is some amusement in seeing Katie's many changes in mind and heart, particularly as she decides that she might really prefer being a wife than a nun. The age difference between her and Stan is only a momentary issue, as is his being a somewhat stuffy, stiff-necked autocrat. Katie's marriage and a re-defined sense of security do not, as you may suspect, make her a sensible, reasonable or even caring wife. Her almost ludicrous leap into religiosity, the last phase of her self-indulging caprices, encourages laughter.
While the docile, accommodating Amelia takes all of Katie's shenanigans with a grain of salt, her disapproving and interfering married older sister Margaret (Fiana Toibin) wouldn't mind seeing the marriage dissolved, especially in the light of a presumed indiscretion. There's also a secret being kept and about to be revealed by Reuben (Jamie Jackson), a mysterious spiritual advisor about town who wanders about visiting those in need?
The play moves rather slowly and deliberately through three acts with all the action taking place within the cozily furnished main room of the cottage (beautifully designed by Vicki R. Davis). The cottage's front door is the frequent passage for eight characters over a period of one year. While I was amused to see just how the headstrong Katie will eventually fare in the sheer face of her often wrong-minded fancies, I was also somewhat intrigued by the glimmer of passion and the purposefulness of his patience that would escape on occasion from Fitzgerald's otherwise rigid performance as Stan.
Daly gives a graceful account of Amelia who cow-tows to brother's every wish. There's a nice scene well played by John O'Creagh as Frank Lawlor, a prospective suitor who comes-a-calling for the startled Amelia. There are smatterings of what is at stake but there is also no real sense of urgency about them. And none of them have those whimsical flights of abstracted lyricism that often embellish, indeed, distinguish the folksy Irish plays to which we have become accustomed. Nevertheless, the voice of Deevy is distinctive, and not to be taken as lightly as the characters she has given life to in this otherwise rather endearing trifle.
Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy
Directed by Jonathan Bank
Mint Theater 311 West 43rd Street
From 1/26/13; opening 2/25/13; closing 3/31/13.
Tuesday through Thursday at 7 PM, Friday at 8 PM, Saturday at 2 PM & 8 PM, and Sunday at 2 PM.
Tickets, $55.
Reviewed by Simon saltzman at 2/20 press preview
Lend Me a Tenor
As I previously reviewed Ken Ludwig’s opera-spoofing,
door-slamming farcical 1989 comedy Lend Me A Tenor for
CurtainUp when it was revived on Broadway in 2010, please
check out that review for more
details. I do, however, want to praise this terrifically
acted and directed production now at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
Despite anticipating all the silliness that comprises this hardy
laugh-getter, my pleasure was increased by having my nine year
old grandson as a companion who, without any prodding from me,
applauded with apparent joy at the end of every scene and every
bit of shtick.
Ludwig, who was in attendance on opening night and took a bow with the company, must have felt good hearing how enthusiastically the capacity audience reacted to his most successful comedy. The near-to-sublime farceurs, under the direction of Don Stephenson, helped to make this irresistibly inane romp a welcome response to the depressing news and nasty weather that has lately been thrust upon us.
Stephenson has staged this production with the kind of full-throttle ferocity the action calls for, as well as injecting into it the tiny traces of credibility that would otherwise belie this play’s inherent absurdities. To complement his apparent affection for the play, each member of the company has poured into his or her character an exactingly calculated element of lunacy.
A bespectacled David Josefsberg affixes an endearing nebbish-ness to his role as Max, the aspiring, but insecure, singer working as a gofer for a provincial (Cleveland) opera company. If John Treacy Egan has the bigger and broader countenance of a world-class Italian tenor, it is the many small but devilishly disarming expressions that make his performance a knockout…and not because his character succumbs to sedatives and liquor.
There is no confusion better than mass confusion and Michael Kostroff creates the prescribed surplus of raw-unnerved hysteria as Saunders, the opera company’s tyrannical but panic-stricken impresario who is forced to deal not only with Maria (a temper-tantrum fueled Judy Blazer) the tenor’s jealous wife, but with own willful daughter Maggie's (an adorable Jill Paice) reckless trysts.
Mark Price gets his share of laughs as well as a few well-rounded notes, as the obnoxious autograph-seeking bellhop. Nancy Johnston is delightfully daft as Julia, the awe-struck chairman of the opera guild. As the ambitious and lusty opera diva Diana, Donna English amuses in and out of her stylish wardrobe.
The action occurs on the evening of a gala Opera Guild benefit. The setting: a first-class hotel suite is designed by John Lee Beatty. It is similar if not identical to the one he created for the Broadway revival.
It says a lot for a comedy when you find yourself laughing heartily and so soon at the same lines and situations. More importantly, it says a lot for a company that can lend to it, besides a tenor, something fresh and new.
Lend Me A Tenor By Ken Ludwig
Directed by Don Stephenson
The Paper Mill Playhouse, 22 Brookside Drive, Millburn, N.J.
(973) 376 – 4343
Tickets: $26 - $97
Performances: Wednesday at 7:30 pm, Thursday at 1:30 pm and 7:30 pm, Friday at 8 pm, Saturday at 1:30 pm and 8 pm and Sunday at 1:30 pm and 7 pm.
From 02/13/13 Opened 02/17/13 Ends 03/1013
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/17/13
Ludwig, who was in attendance on opening night and took a bow with the company, must have felt good hearing how enthusiastically the capacity audience reacted to his most successful comedy. The near-to-sublime farceurs, under the direction of Don Stephenson, helped to make this irresistibly inane romp a welcome response to the depressing news and nasty weather that has lately been thrust upon us.
Stephenson has staged this production with the kind of full-throttle ferocity the action calls for, as well as injecting into it the tiny traces of credibility that would otherwise belie this play’s inherent absurdities. To complement his apparent affection for the play, each member of the company has poured into his or her character an exactingly calculated element of lunacy.
A bespectacled David Josefsberg affixes an endearing nebbish-ness to his role as Max, the aspiring, but insecure, singer working as a gofer for a provincial (Cleveland) opera company. If John Treacy Egan has the bigger and broader countenance of a world-class Italian tenor, it is the many small but devilishly disarming expressions that make his performance a knockout…and not because his character succumbs to sedatives and liquor.
There is no confusion better than mass confusion and Michael Kostroff creates the prescribed surplus of raw-unnerved hysteria as Saunders, the opera company’s tyrannical but panic-stricken impresario who is forced to deal not only with Maria (a temper-tantrum fueled Judy Blazer) the tenor’s jealous wife, but with own willful daughter Maggie's (an adorable Jill Paice) reckless trysts.
Mark Price gets his share of laughs as well as a few well-rounded notes, as the obnoxious autograph-seeking bellhop. Nancy Johnston is delightfully daft as Julia, the awe-struck chairman of the opera guild. As the ambitious and lusty opera diva Diana, Donna English amuses in and out of her stylish wardrobe.
The action occurs on the evening of a gala Opera Guild benefit. The setting: a first-class hotel suite is designed by John Lee Beatty. It is similar if not identical to the one he created for the Broadway revival.
It says a lot for a comedy when you find yourself laughing heartily and so soon at the same lines and situations. More importantly, it says a lot for a company that can lend to it, besides a tenor, something fresh and new.
Lend Me A Tenor By Ken Ludwig
Directed by Don Stephenson
The Paper Mill Playhouse, 22 Brookside Drive, Millburn, N.J.
(973) 376 – 4343
Tickets: $26 - $97
Performances: Wednesday at 7:30 pm, Thursday at 1:30 pm and 7:30 pm, Friday at 8 pm, Saturday at 1:30 pm and 8 pm and Sunday at 1:30 pm and 7 pm.
From 02/13/13 Opened 02/17/13 Ends 03/1013
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/17/13
Donnybrook
The reasons for a musical’s failure on Broadway can often be as unforeseeable and numerous and as there are reasons why some often inexplicably become hits. Despite how sweet the singing and how smart the staging, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of the 1961 musical Donnybrook! at the Irish Repertory Theater (of all places), there is otherwise very little evidence to explain why this dalliance into musical theater by popular composer-lyricist Johnny Burke and his book writer Robert E. McEnroe was deemed worthy of resurrection.
Following on the heels of last season’s more deserving Irish Rep. revival of New Girl in Town, Donnybrook! certainly supports the notion that taking a fresh look at some forgotten shows is sometimes worth the trouble. If there is a lost treasure to be unearthed, however, this isn’t one. Basing their show on the film (and short story by Maurice Walsh) The Quiet Man, the musical’s collaborators should have known from the start that the adored and hugely popular 1952 film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara would be a hard act to follow. It was and it proved to be Burke’s only Broadway score.
Punchy as are its displays of Gallic humor and predictable are its dramatic devices, Donnybrook! nevertheless tries hard to stand on its own as a boisterous musical comedy, sometimes succeeding with the dancing, boozing and the brawling. It also offer proof, however, that the talented Burke was a little out of his comfort zone despite his fame primarily as a Hollywood-based (Paramount Studios) lyricist, and where he mostly shared the song-writing honors with his composer of choice Jimmy Van Heusen.
It is interesting that this revival interpolates three lovely standards by Burke and Van-Heusen including “It Could Happen to You” and “But Beautiful” to beef up an otherwise merely pleasant score. Purists will gripe about why liberties have been taken with the original score, while others will simply say how nice it is to have a hit tune or two where you need one even though the two cited above seem to be almost arbitrarily inserted.
Although there is nothing remotely inhospitable or standoffish about either the songs or the romantic or mischievous shenanigans, there is nothing about this show that says it needed to be afforded the loving attention given it. Much credit does go to director Charlotte Moore and choreographer Barry McNabb for stirring up a bit of the old sod on the Irish Rep’s small stage.
A fine cast of supporting players doing yeomen work not only by sparking up the action right from the start with the jaunty “Sez I” with some bracing step dancing, but also by assisting with the transitions to various locations as they appear courtesy of a turntable in designer James Noone’s evocatively accommodating settings.
Donnybrook! is story of John Enright (James Barbour) a professional Irish-Yankee pugilist who has hung up his gloves after he killed a man with a punch during a bout in the USA and decided to never to fight anyone again. Seeking to give himself a fresh start, he returns to his native Inisfree in Ireland where he is not only goaded into a fight with the fierce, feisty and passionate (yes, all three) Mary Kate Danaher (Jenny Powers), the woman he instantly falls for and intends to marry, but with her belligerent, bullying, and domineering (yes, all three) brother Will Danaher (an excellent Ted Koch).
Of course, there’s also a fight a brewing over Mary Kate’s dowry that becomes show’s biggest contention as well as the big, but also rather silly and protracted fist fight (hence the play’s title) between Sean and Will that serves as the show’s climactic showdown as in an old western.
The fight also brings together the show’s secondary couple — the town shrewdly impish matchmaker Flynn (Samuel Cohen) and the town’s richest widow/pub owner Kathy Carey (Kathy Fitzgerald). It is their comically contrived relationship that provides the most entertaining portion of the show. It’s wonderful to see how crisply Fitzgerald and Cohen keep their character’s dancing feet and vaudeville-like personas in high gear, notably during a scene in which the gullible Kathy Carey almost falls for Flynn’s matchmaking deviltry in a delightful duet “I Wouldn’t Bet One Penny.”
Barbour has some choice opportunities to fill the theater with the sound of his vibrant baritone voice especially in his grandiose “Soliloquy/A Quiet Life.” His duets with the beguiling and lovely red-haired Powers, s melodically engaging are his duets with the beguiling and lovely red-haired Powers, while engaging, also reveal egregiously stiff, expressionless acting. We are grateful for the snap and verve that Powers puts into the Mary Kate’s affections for Sean. She has her shining moment singing the wishful ballad “When Is Sometime,” even though that song, the third from the Burke and Van Heusen songbook, was written for the Bing Crosby film A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
To be sure, the stage at the Irish Rep isn’t going to suggest the green and rolling countryside of the Emerald Isle in 1951 as did the film. But you can feel the fresh breeze that prods the flinty and folksy characters to life that comes from the four fine musicians, under the direction of John Bell, huddled in the corner of the stage. Whatever its shortcomings (including, I presume, some extensive pruning of the original to bring it in under two hours), I would still bet more than one penny that aficionados of obscure musicals are certain to make a bee-line for the Irish Rep.
Donnybrook!
Music and lyrics by Johnny Burke
Book by Robert E. McEnroe
Directed by Charlotte Moore
Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street.
(212) 727 – 2737
Tickets: $55-$65
Performances: Wednesdays at 3pm and 8pm; Thursdays at 7pm; Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 3pm and 8pm; and Sundays at 3pm.
From: 02/07/13 Opened 02/17/13 Ends 03/31/13
Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 02/14/13
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