Kevin Vavasseur

AS  ¡AMERICANO! AS APPLE PIE The Merriam-Webster dictionary (remember dictionaries?) lists two definitions for the word dreamer. The first is simply “one that dreams.” The second definition is “a person living in the United States without legal status who arrived as the child of someone who did not have the documentation required for legal entry…

FINALLY IN THE LOOP A Strange Loop, the new Broadway musical that currently towers above the rest, is a Brilliant show. With book, music and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson, this Brilliant show is also a Personal show. And a Troubling show. And a Pulitzer Prize-winning show. And a Thoughtful show. And a Silly show….

WALTZING AROUND AUNT SUSAN Aunt Susan & Her Tennessee Waltz by Toby Armour is one play in two acts that feels more like two, one-act plays on the same bill. The acts have little in common, other than being dramatizations of two early champions of Women’s Suffrage – Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt….

FUNNY, HOW IT KINDA WORKS On the Internet exists a theater-centered, YouTube channel called “Staged Right”. And there’s an episode on Staged Right called Fanny & Barbra and the Legacy of Funny Girl. This thirty-minute documentary explores the real Fanny Brice, how the original stage production of Funny Girl came to be and how the…

NOT ENOUGH LAYERS IN THIS BIRTHDAY CAKE In playwright Noah Haidle’s new play Birthday Candles, currently running at the American Airlines Theatre, television star Debra Messing ages before our very eyes. When she first enters the stage, Ms. Messing is 17. Then she’s 18. Then she’s 38. We know that because it is in the…

NOT SO LITTLE ANYMORE Once upon a time there was an aviator. One day, the aviator’s plane crash landed in the Sahara Desert. The aviator survived but his plane was damaged. After landing, the aviator soon met a little prince from another planet — a planet so small it only held a rose, some shrubs,…

PLAY BALL! Get your popcorn and peanuts and Cracker Jack. Grab your Empires pennant and Empires cap and maybe your Empires team jacket. Then head on down to the ballpark or, in this case, the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. For inside is now housed a locker room, a dugout, a field of dreams and…

GONG WITH THE WIND In Charles L. White’s new play Gong Lum’s Legacy, currently running at Theatre @ St. Clements in New York City, things happen very quickly. A young Chinese man, a recent immigrant from China, falls in love with a young African American woman within a few minutes of meeting her. However, the…

A NOT SO PLAIN JANE Did you know that William Shakespeare was a narcissistic, whiny, pansexual, selfish, misogynistic, plagiarizing, womanizing fop? Scholars may debate the accuracy of this description but in playwright Talene Monahon’s riotous new comedic farce, The Lamentable Comedie of JANE ANGER, that Cunning Woman, and also of Willy Shakefpeare and his Peasant…

DECORATIVE CHINA Immediately upon entering The Shiva Theater within The Public Theater building, the audience for The Chinese Lady is greeted with an onstage shipping container that fills the playing space. It is a bit off-putting but mostly curious. And, as it turns out, a perfect image to start playwright Lloyd Suh’s exploration of the…

VIRGIN PLAY GETS TESTED AT IRISH REP Ciara Ní­ Chuirc’s new play Made By God, now being given its world premiere run by Irish Rep, is described in the show’s promotional materials thusly: Made by God features the true and tragic story of the 1984 death of Ann Lovett and her newborn baby in Granard,…

A 1913 PLAY IN MINT CONDITION In a coal-mining district in the Erewash Valley of the English Midlands, lives a young miner named Luther. Luther has been married to his hyper-critical bride Minnie for all of seven weeks. Luther’s father is dead but his domineering mother, Mrs. Gascoyne, is very much alive. His younger brother…

MUSIC MAN HATH CHARMS TO SOOTH THE SAVAGE BREAST “Oh, there’s nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you, when we treat you, which we may not do at all” sing the taciturn and straight-shooting citizens of River City, Iowa, shortly after the curtain rises on Meredith Willson’s classic Americana musical The Music Man….

BLACK NO MORE: A NEW MUSICAL George Schuyler’s classic novel Black No More — written during the famous Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s — is a funny, absurdist, searing indictment of American White Supremacy ideology. It also pointedly skewers hierarchies based on physical appearance created during American slavery that privileged a white, European…

MAC’S MULTI-TALENTED TRIBE AND FABULOUS PHILOSOPHERS HANG AT HERE Taylor Mac is nothing if not creative. Perhaps oppressively so. Mac’s latest on-stage extravaganza is titled The Hang and is currently hanging out at HERE Arts Center in New York City. It offers such a clever torrent of color, music, intellect, dance, joy, design, queerness, ideas,…

CONRAD RICAMORA OFFERS A NEW SEYMOUR Audrey II is back and New York’s got……Him? Her? It? Hard to tell, especially since this giant-alien-Venus Flytrap has an insatiable appetite for human flesh. And a great singing voice. And impeccable comic timing. And an energetic new production from which the plant continues to grow and grow –…

A PRAYER GRANTED FOR THE THEATER “Exquisite” is probably a devalued and over-used descriptive at this point is our society. However, Manhattan Theatre Club’s current production of Prayer for the French Republic deserves this particular adjective. Painstakingly written by Joshua Harmon, this three-hour exploration of Jewish identity and human cruelty via multiple generations of a…

A GREAT CREW OF ACTORS BRING THIS SKELETON TO LIFE There is a family onstage in Dominique Morisseau’s expertly crafted new play Skeleton Crew, which had its Broadway opening at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater last night. There’s a focused, worried Father figure — Reggie. There’s an experienced, solid Mother or maybe Grandmother or maybe…

A PLAY TO MAKE YOU KVELL AND KVETCH Crazy Meshugga Hurricane Earthquake by Amy Coleman is a play about parallels. Parallel religious practices. Parallel childhoods. Parallel abuses. Parallel fathers. Parallel lives. And Ms. Coleman’s attempt to bring all these parallel situations together is both the strength and weakness of her play. While Ms. Coleman has…