New York

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…

LIKE KISSING AN ASHTRAY The chirpy puppet-style musical is no longer a novelty but a genre; shows with lyric-dense, upbeat, simple-rhyme songs performed in rapid-fire succession are the 21st century’s light opera.  The Last Smoker in America may have personalized the genre a bit by including the framework of a sitcom, but Bill Russell’s book reads…

HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR DUMMIES As the audience settled in and Stephen Bradbury, who plays the waiter and also serves as a partial narrator in Otho Eskin’s new play Final Analysis, came out onto the stage dressed in full tails (lovely costumes by Jenny Green) and, with a bemused yet somewhat foreboding grin, delivered the admonitions…

RICE MILK Vassily Sigarev’s powerful play Black Milk takes place in a remote train station in the hinterlands of Russia, where a couple of young con artists, having just swindled the local yokels, wait for a train to take them back to the capital. While there, they encounter various denizens from the area, including an…

FINDING YOUR TRIBE Theatre of Identity is a fascinating phenomenon: this genre promotes a particular people’s cultural identity and invites members of that culture and other cultures to experience that culture’s joys, problems, history, traditions, and point of view.   Plays like Torch Song Trilogy, The Boys Next Door, and Yellow Face were written to shed…

FUGEDDABOUDIT! To use a slightly modified quote from a certain NYU professor notorious for his directness (which was misinterpreted by many sensitive arts students as brutality), here is the review of Vincent Gogliormella’s Whatta Ya Nuts!, directed by Charles Messina, in a nutshell: “Script bad, directing bad, show bad. Next!” Except for a couple 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…

FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell’s play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant young scientist, assembles and brings to life what he hopes will be a beautiful creation, only to have it turn out a grotesque and hideous creature (John Zdrojeski in a…

DOG OF A MUSICAL The musical theatre canon is filled with bad ideas that made very good musicals. Stories of vengeful barbers, decadence in Nazi Germany, and even wife beaters have all gone on to become gold standards. Unlike Sweeney Todd, Cabaret, and Carousel, Dogfight, which is currently on the boards at the Second Stage,…

HELL WITH NO INTERMISSION Hell: Paradise Found. Genesis: And so did Seth Panitch rummage through the intellectual compost heap and picketh he out from it clumps of sour clichés and bits of rotted old jokes, and collecteth he from it pieces of spoilt ideas, which were so far past their expiration date that they no…

THE GOOD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER Watching The Amoralists’ production of Derek Ahonen’s entertaining new play The Bad and The Better, an image comes to mind of a virtuoso juggling act, with Mr. Ahonen and director Daniel Aukin keeping 26 actors, over 30 characters, and an extraordinary number of plot lines in the air…

MUSICAL ERRANT Expectations should always be lowered a bit when seeing revivals of musicals written before Oklahoma!.   In pre-war musicals, songs weren’t intended to move plots forward or reveal new depths of characterization.   Laced with inappropriate racial epithets, the original musical version of Nymph Errant (1933) by Cole Porter and Romney Brent would have been…

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…

DOWNTOWN DINOSAURS The Off-Broadway Musical is an endangered species.   The perfect storm of escalating real estate rents, union expectations, and production costs render producing commercial Off-Broadway musicals a dubious venture at best.   Enter Triassic Parq, The Musical, the 2010 Award-Winning FringeNYC show for Best Musical, eager to please and ready to challenge the conventional wisdom….

MORE IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS When making a show consisting of several short plays about the disabled, one must be concerned, it seems, with the possibility of the whole thing becoming more about message than art. It’s unlikely under such circumstance that, for example, a disabled character, say a wheelchair-bound girl,…

THREE’S COMPANY ON SHROOMS The concept of David Adjmi’s flawed but entertaining new play 3C is an intriguing one: to take Three’s Company, an iconic, milquetoast ABC sitcom (which starred John Ritter and ran from 1977 to 1984), and subvert it, removing the innocuous, bourgeois-TV-show veil, and turning its characters and themes on their heads….

THEATER NOIR: STYLE VS. SUBTEXT Supreme command of stagecraft is evident in every aspect of Somerled Charitable Foundation’s production of Jim Henry’s initially riveting but ultimately unsatisfying new play, the noirish psychological thriller 7th Monarch. In general, the first act has so much style and focus that one becomes hopeful for the second act to…

THIS IS LIFETIME TV AS THEATER In Megan Hart’s first full-length play This is Fiction, Amy (Aubyn Philanbaum) is on the verge of signing the contract to publish her first book when she panics and runs out of her publisher’s office. After a brief encounter with likable young school teacher Ed (Bernardo Cubrí­a), she rushes…

THE VANYA EXPERIMENT The wunderkinds of American theater, Annie Baker and Sam Gold, ages 31 and 34 respectively, follow up their earlier collaborations, among them Ms. Baker’s remarkably successful Circle Mirror Transformation, with another innovative production, this time of Chekhov’s classic Uncle Vanya (adapted by Ms. Baker, with Mr. Gold directing). The goal of Ms….

DIME STORE PROPAGANDA One of the problems with watching a play that has an agenda, political or otherwise, is the difficulty of enjoying with a good conscience even those parts that work; knowing the playwright’s intentions to be dishonest (in that he’s serving up propaganda as art), one feels foolish being affected emotionally, as though…