New York

MAGNIFICENT CHARACTER ACTOR ON THE BUMPY ROAD TO DAMASCUS When Andrew Weems enters the stage to perform Damascus, a solo play he also wrote, the 4th Street Theater immediately fills with his rich inner life.   Weems is one of the great unsung actors of the American stage, the one whom you took for granted in…

A HAPPENING OF THE HIGHEST THEATRICAL ORDER The Flea Theatre’s young resident acting ensemble, The Bats, is re-mounting their production of These Seven Sicknesses.   If you’re looking for an engaging summer theatrical event in New York City (and have already seen Sleep No More), These Seven Sicknesses might just be your ticket. Under Ed Sylvanus…

THEATER AS A COLLECTIVE DREAM The band is already playing, the show underway, as we enter The Kitchen Theatre by way of the stage, which is set up like the parlor of a mystic or a fortuneteller, full of old books and odd, antiquated objects. As we take our seats we are offered wine from…

CHILDREN OF HOPE AND SORROW We enter the theater, which has been configured thrust-style like an amphitheater, and take our seats. The tiny stage below has an unfinished cement floor, a small wooden desk with a chair behind it, and two more chairs, one plain and one with a tablet arm. Behind them is a…

THE HOUSE OF LOVE AND MUSIC Many artists, being generally unsuited for life in normal society, have often dreamed of a place where they could be with others of their ilk. Where they would be free to live and create without the sinewy hand of mediocrity shackling them with public morals and conventions. A place…

IN PURSUIT OF DRAMA Beneath the stairwell sign assuring guests that all cigarettes smoked on stage are herbal, the following sign might as well have been posted regarding The Roundabout’s new production of Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit: “Please rest assured that even the most profound dialogue in this play contains nothing that might cause…

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have expected from the author of Proof: clean, articulate, measured, intelligent, carefully researched, and, finally, Saharan-dry and as dull as a persistently cloudy…

PLENTY OF NOTHING Even before The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, it was fraught with controversy.    A New York Times puff piece on the Boston American Repertory Theater production was pitched in such a way that director Diane Paulus, adaptor Suzan Lori-Parks, and star Audra McDonald came across as arrogant, which  inspired Stephen Sondheim to…

Stage and Cinema sent Harvey Perr back to the east coast to catch up on this very busy time of the season in New York City theater, when new shows open one right after the other and Tony fever is in the air.   Here’s a hearty and tasty stew of what he saw go down….

DON’T EVEN BOTHER Broadway producers often hope lightning will strike twice as they mount shows very similar to past successes. We have recently seen the creative team of Hairspray unsuccessfully try to replicate that triumph with the flop Cry Baby. The folks who brought you a competent Lombardi are now serving us a mediocre Magic/Bird.  …

LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP Americans love popular stories of miracles and redemption. And really, who doesn’t? Few things are more gratifying than God taking time out of His schedule to break all the rules of Nature, which He created, just to do you a favor. How uplifting is a tale of a corrupted soul that…

THEATER OF THE ADVENTUROUS I hadn’t realized how deeply entrenched in my unconsciousness the Peter Pan legend was; that is, until I found myself, in the last minutes of the rousing and miraculously innovative Peter and the Starcatcher, gently weeping.   Not that the show in any way jerked tears out of me – make no…

BEYOND REALISM The living room and foyer of the modest house on 9th Street in the South Philadelphia of 1986, created by David Meyer, is as dank and dreary as social realism will allow.   And when the door to the kitchen opens, we may not see the kitchen sink, but we can readily imagine exactly…

THEATRE GHOST In uncertain times such as these, audiences crave familiarity and nostalgia.   Broadway, which once turned plays into movies, is now glutted with adaptations of popular films because it’s easier to sell a show as a known quantity based on a “title.”   While producers play on our nostalgia, they usually diminish the source material,…

YOU’RE GONNA STAND UP: Sometimes in the theater, all you need are four chairs and four actors and a director who knows how to move them around so that everything they do is as natural as breathing.   Welcome to You Better Sit Down: Tales From My Parents’ Divorce, the newest project of the innovative and…

BLOODY MASSACRE, DULL SONG As they march through (or are flung through) the doors of an abandoned slaughterhouse, their bodies bloodied, one wonders what battle zone of what war they have come from.   But it turns out that this group of survivors have merely killed a mean neighbor.   Who would have thought there’d be so…

LIVING EVITA LOCA Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber – together with lyricist Tim Rice – released the Evita “rock opera concept album” in 1976, a few years before the first theatrical production came to life on the West End and ultimately Broadway, a production that I vividly remember.   It was truly exhilarating to witness Patty LuPone…

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD Ever since Crimes of the Heart won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1981, a cloud of skepticism has followed the award.   The announcement that last year’s winner Clybourne Park was coming to Broadway was met with a blend of excitement and cynicism.   While Clybourne Park also won several major new…

ONE HIT, TWO GUVNORS Once upon a time, you could attend theatre by Americans and watch actors who had worked together for decades.   Long rehearsal periods to explore classical texts were commonplace until Reagan cut the NEA.   Acting companies were devastated.   Today American audiences rarely get to see finely honed ensembles perform collaboratively developed classical…