"The Other Josh Cohen" (at the Paper Mill Playhouse through March 16,2014)

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Left to right Ken Triwush, Kate Wetherhead, Hannah Elles, David Rossmer, Vadim Feichtner, Steve Rosen, Cathryn Salamone (photo credit: Billy Bustamonte)

Traditionalists, i.e. long-time Paper Mill Playhouse subscribers as well as one-show-at-a-time ticket buyers, have a surprise, actually a treat, in store for them with the current production of The Other Josh Cohen . Although it garnered hugely enthusiastic reviews and had a short run Off Broadway in 2012 , it is still relatively unknown in the canon of musicals and represents an adventurous choice for this thousand-seat theater.

Noteworthy is how beautifully and effectively this relatively small-scale farcical musical with a big heart fills up the stage. Although Valentine's Day has come and gone, it plays an important role in this funny, touching, clever and musically lively (yes, all of that) ode to pathetic but lovable mensch Josh Cohen. He's a guy who just can't get a break, make a good living, or find the right woman.

It is the work of David Rossmer and Steve Rosen, who not only collaborated on the book, music and lyrics but also share the honor and rewards of playing the role(s) of Josh Cohen; that is as a before and as a now Josh Cohen and often together at the same time. Confused? Good. Because so is disheartened Josh who can't understand why he is so unlucky in love and why his life seems to be nothing but a torrent of rejections and disappointments. (to read the complete review please go to CurtainUp  http://curtainup.com/joshcohennj.html

"Dinner With Friends" (Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre)

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Marin Hinkle and Jeremy Shamos (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Donald Margulies’ 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Dinner With Friends” is unquestionably an intelligent and provocative play about two married couples neither of whom during the course of it create much empathy either for themselves or earn our sympathy for their disintegrating relationship to each other and their respective partners. Despite this, a very admirable and commendably acted revival has been produced by Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre.

My reaction to the play hasn’t notably changed since I first saw it, and that is to continue to not give a hoot and holler whether globe-hopping professional food journalist Gabe (Jeremy Shamos) and his editor wife Karen (Marin Hinkle) have elevated their passion and interest in food at the expense of their waning sexual interest in each other.  My feelings are also quite neutral regarding their best friends Tom (Darren Pettie) a lawyer and Beth (Heather Burns) an artist who don’t seem deserving of any more that what they get, that is trying to mold them themselves and their inherent incompatibilities into a marriage as presumably as harmonic as the one lived by their role models Gabe and Karen.

It’s true that many marriages come and go, succeed and fail as well as survive in a state of respectful resignation, and Margulies does create a somewhat unique situation in which we see that Tom and Beth’s marriage   was from the start ill-advised, misguided and based on a fantasy. What we witness, however, is the sudden change in course for one couple whose failure to resonate in the light of their friends ultimately proves to be an inadvertent blessing. It is certainly an opportunity for personal growth and renewal, let alone finding new partners. What is equally disheartening, perhaps poignant if you are sentimental, is how Gabe and Karen fail to consider the possibility that a long-term relationship should not be taken for granted.

Until that point arrives, the play, alternates scenes filled with personal admissions of remorse, regrets and recriminations and those fueled by disbelieve and denial. The action is spread between the present and twelve years earlier, when the already married Gabe and Karen have manipulated a blind date between Gabe’s college buddy Tom, and Karen’s co-worker Beth at their summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. The kitchen of the summer home is one of seven fluidly meshed scenes expertly designed by Allen Moyer.

This play is not only a reminder that Margulies is a superb writer (Time Stand Still,” “Collected Stories,” “Sight Unseen”) but how a basically humdrum plot can be elevated by insight and wit. It is also a tribute to the current cast that is able to vigorously mine the subtext of four basically irritating characters that could otherwise grate on one’s nerves.

There is no fault to be found in the plot or the able direction of Pam McKinnon, although the characters who propel it seem to be otherwise caught on a treadmill of explaining to themselves and to each other. It is easy to imagine the burden and the pressure on Beth and Tom as their life together seems to have been fitted within the framework of their friends’ presumably perfect marriage.

Pettie is excellent as Tom who has finally gotten plenty off his chest by declaring he’s been unhappy in his marriage to Beth for years. He decides that he wants out, and getting out could include the freeing himself from Gabe’s influence. In a way Burns has the most curious, complex and exasperating character to play, as her Beth makes the most unexpected u-turns among the characters. Karen (fine acting by Hinkle) is certainly the most frustrated of the four by not having read the signs of unrest in their friends. Hinkle’s performance is a wonderfully subtle and expressive portrait of a wife whose desires are not exactly fulfilled by a good dinner and a glass of wine. Shamos is terrific as the immovable but hardly clueless Gabe whose head you may want to hit with the nearest cook book when he can’t bring himself to be emotionally responsive to Karen.

“Dinner With Friends” is, nevertheless, filled with deftly integrated psychological nuance that to fault its perspective is an unworthy response. A good play is always worthy of revival especially one that gives you plenty to think about.

“Dinner With Friends” (through April 13)

Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46^th Street

For tickets ($82.00) call 212.719.1300

"The Tribute Artist" (at 59E59 Theatres)

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Cynthia Harris and Charles Busch (photo: James Laysne)

It’s easy to understand how Jimmy (Charles Busch), a middle-aged female impersonator (oops “tribute artist”), suddenly and unfortunately at-large after years of steady employment in a drag show at the Flamingo Lounge in Las Vegas, isn’t thrilled to hear Adriana (Cynthia Harris), the wealthy, elderly, ailing and very grandiose widow from whom he rents an upstairs room in her elegant, four-story New York Greenwich Village townhouse, tell him that she is planning to sell the house.

Although Jimmy has always come back to New York to the affordable room between shows, he is ceremoniously told (in a brilliantly protracted monologue by a terrific Harris) that he will have to vacate the premises. With no money or savings Jimmy turns for help and advice to his best friend Rita (Julie Halston). Glib and sassy and a smart dresser, she was Jimmy’s former partner in their cabaret act who has since pursued a not very lucrative career as a realtor? She shows up whenever Jimmy is in town.

As we know from Halston’s hilarious performances in past Busch shows such as “The Divine Sister,” that she is the spark that will ignite a sputtering scene, which she does on more than one occasion. What makes Jimmy even sadder is that Adriana, who has been living in relative seclusion knowing that she is dying, is also giving away all the elegant gowns she designed from her former years as an haute couturier. 

Jimmy love those glamorous gowns as well as Adriana’s high fashioned wig. They fit him so perfectly that when Adriana dies suddenly on the sofa in the to-die-for parlor (stunningly designed by Anna Louizos), it seems like there might be a way for Jimmy, abetted by quick-thinking-faster-talking Rita, to remain there by assuming Adriana’s identity. The deliberations on how this is to be done are too convoluted and preposterous for us to be overly concerned. Their agenda, however, does include buying their own rental property with the money.

We are not surprised that Busch plays a character with a penchant and a flair for using classic lines exactly as spoken by classic film stars in their classic movies, is in rare form. Perhaps looking just a little chunkier in what is essentially a rather clunky farce, Busch, nevertheless, keeps us glued to the play’s absurdist twists and turns through the sheer bravura of his performance. His Jimmy is also, after all, someone worthy of our compassion and empathy.

It is easy enough to keep on laughing through a series of mad-cap machinations and behavior that soon involves Adriana’s estranged, highly neurotic, bi-polar niece Christina (Mary Bacon) and her transgender son/daughter Oliver (Keira Keely). Christina believes that the house is hers to sell even as she also believes that Jimmy is Adriana. Bacon’s frantically funny performance displays Christina’s many neuroses. Keely is excellent and endearing as Oliver. Also showing up to become embroiled in the mix is Adriana’s long-forgotten, live-in boy-toy Rodney (a comically charismatic Jonathan Walker) who has evolved into a smarmy crook with a dastardly agenda of his own.  

Despite an occasional lag in the action, under the abetting direction of Carl Andress, everyone flails about as if trying to catch up with the floundering plot. But the play’s perpetrators are having such great fun that it is a pleasure to just sit back and ponder what would Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Norma Shearer (if you have to ask, there’s no help for you) have done to get out of a situation like this: Exactly what Busch does and in what he wears (wonderfully glamorous costumes by Gregory Gale) that’s what, and that’s fine with me.

“The Tribute Artist” (through March 30, 2014)

59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59^th Street

For tickets ($70) www.primarystages.org (212) 840-9705   

"Outside Mullingar" (MTC at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

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Brian F. O'Byrne and Debra Messing (photo: Joan Marcus)

The notion that you can’t go home again is answered unequivocally with a yes-you-can by Pulitzer Prize-winner (“Doubt”) John Patrick Shanley with his Irish-ized, romantically-motivated comedy “Outside Mullingar.” A pairing of well-matched stars – Brian F. O’Byrne and Debra Messing ­– not only insured it a Broadway berth, but it also brings further validation of the inherent quality and worthiness of Shanley’s entire canon.

There is a touching and delightful mix of grit and wit with a touch of malarkey in what is essentially a love story that stretches credibility. The plot hinges on the rightful ownership and future of a small tract of land situated between two neighboring families. But fueling that issue is the strange relationship between thirty-something farmer Anthony Reilly (O’Byrne), a sullen loner and the thirty-something Rosemary Muldoon (Messing), a gregarious and also gorgeous neighbor that has gone unresolved over the years, The play also lingers on a long-standing squabble between Anthony and his father Tony (Peter Maloney) that prompts lots of bickering and airing of regrets until, of course, everyone lives happily ever after and content with the way things turn out. Although this is not a musical, the original underscoring by Fizz Patton is mood-enhancing and charming.

It doesn’t really matter that superb Byrne, who played the alleged pedophile in “Doubt,” appears to be too good-looking, sturdy and virile have totally given up on romance since being jilted by a girlfriend years ago, or that a wonderful Messing, best known for her TV roles in “Will and Grace’ and “Smash,” gives us flashes of the kind of feminine fire that will remind you of Irish film star Maureen O’Hara. Together they establish an almost John Wayne meets O’Hara rapport under the bright and tender when necessary direction of Doug Hughes.

One might swear there is music embedded in the words that Shanley has put into the mouths of his glib characters, basically to give voice to the contentiousness of two families – The Reillys and the Muldoons ­– locked into fight over the rightful ownership of the tiny piece of land that divides their farms. There is more than a bit of bitterness in the volatile relationship between Anthony and Tony his obstinate father (played with a spirited belligerency by Maloney) whose unjustifiable intention is to leave the farm to a distant cousin in America rather than to the sullen but steadfast Anthony who has taken care of the farm all his life.

Neither Rosemary nor her mother Aoife (Dearbhla Molloy) has any intention of giving up the land that became theirs in one of those implausible plot twists. Molloy is wonderful to watch as she gets her dander up in confrontations with Maloney.. Tempers flare and emotions run high among these close neighbors as we wait patiently knowing that a true and lasting love is bound to be poignantly revealed between two people destined to be a couple.

There is a climactic revelation that borders on the silly, if not absurd, but it somehow seems ultimately acceptable in the light of Shanley’s lyrical prose, much of it very funny. John Lee Beatty’s four settings evoke the Midlands of Ireland, as does this exemplary, Irish cast, including the terrifically authenticated Messing.

“Outside Mullingar” (through March 16, 2014, extension possible)  

 Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47^th St.

For tickets ($67.00 - $127.00)