“Twelfth Night, or What You Will” Opened December 14 at Classic Stage Company

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 The Fiasco Players  Photo: Joan Marcus

There is not a better way to celebrate the holidays than a visit to the Classic Stage Company where they are hosting the Fiasco Theater’s entertaining and very funny production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night, or What You Will.” If you are wondering what play to introduce your child to the Bard right now, this one is it.

Every now and then there is that rare confluence of conception, acting, directing, and in this instance a lot of extra songs and (with no apologies) silly cavorting that adds up to sheer pleasure for two and one half hours. We have heard for years from contrarian Bardologists how this is arguably either a perfect comedy and also one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays. How about just letting it stand now forever as his best and most appealing to all ages and generations.

Notwithstanding the sublime imported production from the Globe Shakespeare Company with Mark Rylance in 2013 (playing Olivia) this more modestly staged but even more immodestly performed production has beautifully addressed the play’s outrageously convoluted plotting and considered the bountiful mix of tomfoolery and romance in a most delightful way.  

Here is a totally disarmingly staging with only a few props and set pieces, actors who not only sing and dance but play musical instruments. This staging is filled to the brim with the kind of boldly comical conceits that are allowed to take precedence over the issues of sexual identity that can sometimes smother our pleasure. That’s a good thing for those of us who are more apt to welcome the antics of the secondary characters over the plight of the principals.

Just to refresh your memory: The courting of wealthy and titled Lady Olivia by the personable but dull Duke Orsino of Illyria becomes complicated by the arrival of Viola, a young girl who masquerades as a page to the duped Duke after a traumatic separation from her twin Sebastian during a violent storm at sea. Viola unwittingly falls in love with the Duke only to discover that Olivia has fallen head over heels in love with her as Cesario, the page. The arrival of look-alike Sebastian to Ilyria, who, instantly smitten with ardor upon seeing the fair Olivia, adds another layer of burlesque to a comedy already over-layered with “what you will.”

If Shakespeare’s delightful crew of secondary characters is usually encouraged to run amuck in order to confuse us as well as the lovers, they suddenly seem to have inherited an importantly comedic weight. Arguably strained and incredulous, the story nevertheless, seems to benefit from the co-direction by Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld. This is not to imply that the sentiments of the play have been forfeited for the sake of the silliness that now seems to pervade the action. Those who savor the former will also be rewarded.

That suave sentimentalist Duke Orsino is winningly played by the co-director Brody. Traditionally the Duke is remembered best for his brief yearnings for the love of Lady Olivia (played with an appealing vibrancy by Fiasco co-artistic director Jessie Austrian.) Orsino is mostly troubled by his attraction to Viola/Cesario (a wonderfully spunky Emily Young) an issue that adds a dimension to his conflicted personality. It is no small feat that Young makes as good an impression as a woman as she does in the guise of a man. Her sweet but commanding acting style is a cause for celebration. As Sebastian, Javier Ignacio may not get as much stage time as her twin but he gives us a robust account of an easily provoked and more easily infatuated young man.

Most happily, the antics appear organic to the broadly comical artistry displayed by Andy Grotelueschen  as a wild-haired and bearded Sir Toby Belch and Paco Tolson,  as his dim-witted but amusingly dapper sidekick Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Paul L. Coffey projects just the right amount of deplorable arrogance as the maligned "affectionate ass" Malvolio. This, as he succumbs to the unkind plot machinations as devised by the clever servant Maria, lustily played by Tina Chilip, making her Fiasco debut. There’s no fool like a glib fool (“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”) and Ben Steinfeld’s disarming Feste is a feast.

The costume designer Emily Rebholz outfits the company in humorously contemporary casual. Viola and Sebastian in twin brown fisherman knit sweaters. How cool is that? The directors have taken what is naturally strained and equally incredulous in Shakespeare to heart. But they take Shakespeare’s mixture of parody and poignancy just one or two steps farther into the realm of sidesplitting bliss. . .all to the good and all for our merriment.

“Twelfth Night, or What You Will” Opened December 14 at Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street Ends January 6, 2018

"Cruel Intentions" Opened December 11 at the (le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street

Lauren Zakrin in “Cruel Intentions  Photo credit: Jenny Anderson

Sometimes the experience of being with an audience that is largely half your age and that knows not only more than you do about what we are about to see but knows every line and situation as if it was “Casablanca” can be amusing as well as eye-opening. Such was the case with me and my companion at the press preview of “Cruel Intentions,” a stage adaptation by co-creators Jordon Ross and Lindsey Rosin of the cult 1999 film that is now entertaining its fans at (le) Poisson Rouge, a nightclub in Greenwich Village.

The experience, most of it really good and definitely exhilarating, began even as we approached the club on Bleecker Street a good half hour before curtain time to see a long line stretched down the street waiting for the doors open. Many of the seats inside are on a first come-first served basis, others can be reserved. The word was evidently out before the reviews that this production (after its debut in L.A. in 2015 and a remounting in 2016)  was rekindling the same vibes that made it a hit film and an unexpected phenomenon with young audiences almost a generation ago. We shared a table with two fans who knew every word, song and scene like we knew “Casablanca.”

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Although the film was inspired by the classic 1782 French novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (itself the source for a number of both film and stage adaptations), it tapped into the pop culture of teens at the time and catapulted the career of a young Reese Witherspoon. What it also did was to make its story about sex, seduction, deception and cruelty relevant to a young audience by setting it in the present time and in and around an upper East Side prep school.

The plot about two diabolical step siblings who set out to deflower and defame schoolmates hit a chord. Speaking of chord, the film was filled with pop and rock hits of the time...a perfect segue for the stage adaptation which has added more pop tunes of the time as well as including those already on the film’s soundtrack to further engine the characters and narrative. Here are a few: “Lovefool,” “Just a Girl,” Only Happy When It Rains,” and “Bittersweet Symphony.” It you get it, you got it.

   

Not that you could hear most of the lyrics from the cheering of recognition from a packed room (including standees) of each iconic song (don’t ask) and each sexy situation. More importantly, director Lindsey Rosin and choreographer Jennifer Weber put their talented company through their paces in a show that moves with the fury of a hurricane. More a concert staging than a fully conceptualized show, “Cruel Intentions,” nevertheless, is performed with a terrific band on a small stage that gets plenty of action, often spilling out into the audience.  

While shadow hanky-panky and discreet nudity are cleverly displayed, the trendy couture designs also reveal plenty about the characters. Among the many standout performers who revel with expressive abandon in the sex-capades are a seductive Lauren Zakrin as the conniving Kathryn and the hard body Constantine Rousouli, as the licentious, hard-hearted Sebastian. Good voices, great bodies and amusingly insinuating performances are factors that make “Cruel Intentions” an entertaining variation on those liaisons of lore.

“Cruel Intentions” (through February 19)

Tickets: General Admission: $59 for standing room, $79 for table seating and $109 for reserved seating.

“Oedipus El Rey” at the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall through December 3

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The cast    photo credit: Joan Marcus

Luis Alfaro’s “Oedipus El Rey” is one of the more exciting of the new plays to open Off Broadway so far this season. A collaboration between The Sol Project and the Public Theater, it is a strikingly new approach to Sophocles classic tragedy “Oedipus Rex.” Alfaro, making his New York theater debut, has twisted and turned the famous plot just a bit and transported the original’s horrific romantics from ancient Greece to contemporary South Central Los Angeles. That the old story resonates quite remarkably for us today is due, of course, to the playwright’s skill. But that we can still be stunned by its theme - the force of destiny - and the plight of cursed, ill-fated lovers is also the result of a terrific production under the direction of Chay Yew.

Splendid casting of all the supporting roles is a boost but it is the performances of Juan Castano as Oedipus and Sandra Delgado as Jocasta that propel this production that should leave you as blinded as I by the sheer force of presentation.

Visually impressive while also minimalist in conception and execution, the play begins within the cells of the California State Prison where inmates (who serve as a Greek chorus) inform us of the curse that drives Oedipus and that will determine his fate. A young Latino who has spent most of his youth in prisons for various non-violent crimes, Oedipus has been tutored in prison by an old blind man Tiresias (Julio Monge) who saved and raised Oedipus as his own son after the boy’s real father Laius (Juan Francisco Villa) had order the boy killed right after his birth. The learned Tiresias had amazingly been incarcerated in the same prison with Oedipus after committing a robbery.

Intense physical training and intellectual studies make have made Oedipus quite a specimen of manhood, but his fate is, nevertheless, sealed when he is released and in an unexpected encounter kills Laius a belligerent man whom he doesn’t know is his real father. The core of the play is passion as it intercedes with the inherent violence and the maintenance of power in the Latino hierarchy in street gangs. Oedipus falls almost instantly in love with Jocasta, the sister of his friend Creon (Joel Perez) not knowing she is the widow of the man he killed, also his real father. Yes, just as the old story tells it, Oedipus unwittingly falls in love with the still beautiful and still in mourning Jocasta. She has lived with no clue that her baby may have survived and has now come back into her life.

Be prepared for one of the most explicit but beautifully staged nude love scenes. Sensitively and sensually choreographed, it doesn’t compromise the integrity of a play about embracing your karma and ultimately having to pay the dept for your deeds. UnkleDave’s Fight-House deserves kudos for directing the intimacies (also staging some exciting fight scenes) It doesn’t hurt that both Castano and Delgado have beautiful bodies, either exposed or wearing the fine costumes designed by Anita Yavich.

One of visual highlights is Oedipus’s encounter with a trio of mystics who morph into a dragon. Wow! Also splendid lighting designs by Lap Chi Chu. Don’t  worry if you only have a vague idea about Oedipus, that famous Freudian complex or the story that prompted the name for the neurosis. The playwright has made it immediate and accessible and above all created with the help of an imaginative production team, the kind of sexy-visceral theatrical experience you won’t soon forget.

“Tiny Beautiful Things” at the Public’s Newman Theater (now through December 31st)

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Nia Vardalos  (photo: Joan Marcus)

Sincere but why? That is how I responded to the dramatic form given to a stream of popular inter-active on-line advice columns originally written by Cheryl Strayed, a non-professional known to her net-work of help-seekers as “Dear Sugar.” Some of these have been adapted from her book for the stage by writer/actress Nia Vardalos (“My Greek Wedding”) who stands in for Strayed. As commendably directed by Thomas Kail in this return engagement (presumably by popular demand), the exchanges are all semi-passive, a steady stream of shared and responsive confessionals and quires of a very personal nature.

These are the typical quandaries that people find themselves mired in such as romance, sex, death, physical abuse and drugs, the columns had built-in pathos with their notable displays of empathy and expressions of compassion for the troubled souls. Listening to advice, no matter how well-intended or sincerely spoken, does not make great theater. To be fair, the audience at the performance I attended sat attentively while I started to squirm about midway through the seventy-five minutes.

Vardalos plays the well-meaning guru with an engaged sincerity (that word again.) This, as she busily inhabits the excellently designed living-room, dining room and kitchen area of Dear Sugar’s home as well designed by Rachel Hauck. We not only hear but see the people behind the back and forth internet exchanges. These characters are effectively played by Teddy Canez, Hubert Point-du Jour and Natalie Woolams-Torres. They wander in and about as required and provide what little action the play provides. This device certainly gives some life support to what would otherwise be simply Dear Sugar’s exchanges with her flock/followers.

What I found most interesting is how Dear Sugar used her own traumatic life experiences as a springboard for a personal philosophy - a mixture of metaphysics and psychology - as a practical process for healing. This has apparently worked for others as it had worked for herself as a working professional, wife and mother. The actors make a concerted effort to not sound like they are reading their epistolary-like text but it doesn’t solve the problem of this being a play without any solidified confrontations.

Nevertheless, some very sad stories are revealed and you  would have to have a heart of stone to not be moved to some degree. Granted that these are all interesting characters who are yearning for love and understanding that comes back to them neatly wrapped in wise and meaningful advice. They also remain, however, part of the heart-breaking, complex, poignant, and tragic conditions and components that have comprised the human experience since the beginning of civilization and that have been more affectingly and effectively dramatized since plays were first written.

"M. Butterfly" at the Cort Theatre

Clive Owen and Jin Ha
Phoro Credit: Matthew Murphy

Playwright David Henry Hwang made an auspicious Broadway debut in 1988 with M. Butterfly. The play and its original two stars - John Lithgow and B.D. Wong -  received deserved awards and accolades. Almost thirty years later, the play remains overflowing with ideas and enigmas. The plot cannot help but grip an  audience with its strange and thoroughly engrossing fictionalized account of a true newspaper story about a French diplomat, convicted of passing top secrets to a spy over a period of 20 years. The diplomat had maintained that he never knew that the spy, also his lover - a Chinese actor and Beijing Opera diva - was a man. This provoking revival has been directed by Julie Taymor (Lion King) with tweaks and updates by the author.

Told in flashback from his cell in a French jail, the story of Rene Gallimard’s (Clive Owen) surrender to a bizarre affair, that seemingly defies Western sensibilities, logic and rationale, is evocatively paralleled with the male-female relationship in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Evidently infatuated from the moment he sees the intriguing Song Liling (Jin Ha) perform the title role at the opera, the timid Gallimard is quickly swept away by the adoration and attention lavished upon him by the femme fatale with kimono.

In his riveting play, Hwang deftly exposes and explores the bridge that exists between Western and Eastern thought on every subject from race to class to sex to politics. But his play doesn’t dwell on the familiar clichés usually associated with East meets West. In fact, the more the relationship between Rene and Song appears harder to accept in light of their prolonged affair, the more Hwang appears to be probing complex feelings about Eastern and Western cultures specifically the chasm between assertive and submissive sex.

Focused more on Gallimard’s more private feelings (“Will anyone beautiful ever want me?”), the first half of the play is a little less compelling than the stunning denouement which exposes Song’s  own unashamedly revelatory account of the affair. As an empathetic observer, it is shattering to see the tragically deceived Gallimard descend into abyss of total fantasy and even madness.

Owen’s Gallimard is emphatically second rate yet we see him as the eager manipulator who envisions  himself, for the first time in his life, as confident lover rather than as the duped dummy he really is. For all his converging feelings and emotional ambiguities, Owen gives a restrained but totally convincing performance. It is certainly as assured and compelling as the one he gave a few season back in Harold Pinter’s Old Times, his Broadway debut.

Certainly more extravagant in its concept, the role of Song is both cynically and excitingly portrayed by Ha, who is making his Broadway debut. I can’t imagine how the cataclysmic collision of Song’s feminine and masculine natures could be more thrillingly revealed than it is by Ha. Taymor’s crisp direction sweeps the action along, in and around designer Paul Steinberg’s often spectacularly painted panels that frame the play. Humor and drama weave through vivid scenes of traditional and post revolutionary Chinese operas as the cast moves from semi-detached narrative back into character and from fantasy to reality.

The often stunning costumes is the work of designer Constance Hoffman) Designer Donald Holder’s superb lighting enhanced both the intimate and the more extravagantly staged scenes. Choreographer Ma Cong gives the small corps of dancers a chance to shine in both the traditional Chinese Opera scenes with its martial arts and another that exploits the  fervor of armed Cultural Revolutionaries.

Murray Bartlett is excellent as Gallimard’s boorish friend as is Michael Countryman as Gallimard’s snide superior and in other roles. Enid Graham is appropriately frosty as Gallimard’s wife Agnes. Celeste Den, making her Broadway debut, is standout as a stereotypical member of the Cultural Revolution. These minor characters make significant impact in a powerful and mysterious play that is as fascinating to contemplate as it is entertaining to watch.

"M. Butterfly" at the Cort Theatre 138 W. 48th Street  

Torch Song Opened October 19 2017

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Mercedes Ruehl and Micharel Urie
Photo: Joan Marcus

Torch Song by Harvey Fierstein is making a sentimental if not quite a sensational  return to its Off-Broadway roots. This time uptown. Originally comprised of three related one-act plays (with their genesis more notably downtown than midtown), it became a hit in 1982 at the Little Theatre a small Broadway house where it continued a long and successful life under the umbrella title Torch Song Trilogy. In its original run Fierstein play the principal role of the drag queen Arnold. Unloading the Trilogy from the title and compressing the three parts into two doesn’t really remove the feeling, in the current production under the direction of Moises Kaufman at the Second Stage, that the play’s three parts, however compellingly presented, are distinctively different in tone, temperament and style.

Trimmed of its original combined length of nearly four hours to a little more than two and one half hours, the play remains a complex comedy-drama about a young man’s search for love and to be a part of a respected family unit and despite living as a homosexual on the fringe of normalcy. This theme is explored with an extravagance that is both exhilarating and enervating at the same time. It is the story of Arnold Beckoff, a drag-queen whose on-again off-again affair with a bi-sexual married lover becomes complicated when he becomes a foster parent for a gay teenage boy. This, to the chagrin of his Jewish mother whose unsettling visit becomes unexpectedly therapeutic.

That’s it in a nutshell, except that that nutshell is filled to overflowing with breathless and sometimes breathtaking monologues and some brutal confrontations that appear as both surreal and also quite ordinary. If the plot that covers more territory and more traumas than it can comfortably accommodate, it remains an emotional hodgepodge, an intensely personal story without the wider and perhaps wiser inclusion of social and political issues that Tony Kushner explored in his gay-centric trilogy Angels in America.

In the first play International Stud, Arnold, as flamboyantly played by the always astonishing Michael Urie, has the stage virtually to himself both in and out of drag. In a motor-mouthed monologue, Arnold shares with us his promiscuousness in his search for the right man in gay bars. This was 1974 before the awareness and the impact of AIDS s would curtail anonymous backroom sex. In such a bar where Arnold’s timidity (funny considering his profession) is funnily addressed with a semi-graphic encounter, Arnold has already met good-looking bi-sexual teacher Ed (fine performance by Ward Horton) destined to be his semi-partner in life.

A few years later in the more surreally imagined Fugue in a Nursery, Ed is comfortably married to attractive Laurel (nice impact by Roxanna Hope Radia) and has no qualms about inviting Ed’s ex lover to their summer home for a weekend in the country, especially now that Arnold has a new very handsome young lover Alan (very fine Michael Rosen.) Alan, however, finds it hard to resist the moves made on him by Ed. Various hanky panky and heart-to-hearts are played out by the couples on a very large bed.

The final act is Widows and Children First and takes place five years later in which a tragedy brings Ed to Arnold’s side but also to help him cope with the raising of 15 year-old David (Jack DiFalco.) Both seem to be involved in seeing that the very bright lad gets a high school education. What puzzles me is how the foster parents organization feels about or considers Arnold’s profession....or is Arnold pursuing another career that is not revealed?

What we do know very quickly is how Arnold’s mother (Mercedes Ruehl) feels about him and his life-style when she arrives for a visit. The acting by all during this final play is close to farcical as it takes place in Arnold’s apartment. Ruehl’s amusing, if also audience pandering, performance as a stereotypical Jewish mother can be most easily defined as sit-com reality. Cutting one-liners fly through the air as breezily as do the acrid recriminations and searing regrets. . .all neatly attached to the play’s over-the-top layer of sentimentality.

We have to surmise that director Kaufman (“The Heiress” with Jessica Chastain) knows exactly what he wanted to do with these three conjoined plays whose distinct personalities will forever be in conflict. This is typified by scenic designer David Zinn’s three functional purposefully incompatible settings. Perhaps the key to unlocking the play is revealed through the character of  Ed who, like Jennie in Lady in the Dark, just can’t make up his mind. Maybe that just doesn’t matter so much anymore in the light of our evolving and devolving obsession with modern sexuality. Thirty five years later, Fierstein’s Torch Song is still touching but also a bit tired. Simon Saltzman

Torch Song (limited run) at Second Stage Theater, Tony Kiser Theater (212) 246 4422