Victoria Linchong

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DANCED Move over Evita, there’s another Queen of Hearts in town. And she likes diamonds too. I’m talking about Imelda Marcos’”she of the thousand pairs of shoes’”who is the centerpiece of a dazzling new pop operetta by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. It’s called Here Lies Love, which is what Imelda…

MUCH BETTER THAN GOOD The last thing that Brecht would have wanted is the audience to identify with his characters. But that’s where the Foundry Theatre’s production of Good Person of Szechwan so brilliantly succeeds. Rather than distancing the audience with didactic Marxism and dubious Orientalia, the play dives headlong into the despair of a…

GOING POSTAL OVER NEW YORK Soaked to the skin and wrestling with a flimsy umbrella, I splashed across Eighth Avenue while reading the inscription on the James A. Farley Post Office, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Well, here was…

CALIFORNIA DREAMS The 2012 Ice Factory Festival closes with The Girl of the Golden West, a heartfelt musical ode to the great American myth based on David Belasco’s 1911 novel, which had previously inspired Puccini to write his most experimental opera, La Fanciulla del West. In its own way, Rady&Bloom’s production of The Girl of…

SEX, LIES, AND ELEPHANTS There’s an elephant in the room in Miss Lilly Gets Boned and it’s not just the sexuality of the eponymous Sunday school teacher. It’s an extraordinary hulking beast made of cloth and cardboard that blinks its eyes and is articulate in more ways than one. Created by James Ortiz and operated…

HISS HISS BANG BANG Four writers stand onstage and in unison announce their thesis, “We thought that making a show strictly about our poverty and history of abuse would make us severely unpopular: so we decided to splice our story with a science fiction narrative about snakes.” So begins Flying Snakes in 3D!!, a campy…

ALL IN ZI FAMILY In Russian Transport, comedienne Janeane Garofalo expands her range by playing a wisecracking Russian-Jewish matriarch whose domineering attitude toward her daughter conceals a family secret.   The able cast is solidly directed by Scott Elliott in this slice-of-life coming-of-age story, but ultimately, by failing to convey the external pressures and dangers that…

UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS AT THE FLEA The Flea Theater is currently providing New York theater audiences an interesting illustration of the cultural gap between Asian-Americans and Asians from Asia. Not that I usually am so divisive — I generally feel that everyone has a lot more in common than they have differences — but this month, the…

WAITING FOR PINTER National Asian American Theater Company (NAATCO) takes a steampunk spin on The Dumb Waiter, Harold Pinter’s classic absurdist thriller.   Director Andrew Pang makes great use of the ambient details of a run-down building and masterfully guides two very fine actors, Louis Ozawa Changchien and Steven Park, in a suspenseful study of two…

THE SALVAGING OF TONGUES In her marvelously inventive play, The Language Archive, Julia Cho weaves together the story of two unhappy couples as a gateway to a whimsical exploration of the mysterious, anguished, tender, exquisite language of love. Â  Buoyantly absurdist, with a frothy meandering plotline, the play is ultimately a heartbreakingly eloquent discourse on love…