New York

PLODDING ALONG THE TRAIN TRACKS What does it mean to persist in a world without hope? Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver tackles human mortality with grim poetic grace, but the New York premiere production at Signature Theatre lacks theatrical drive. A desolate graveyard lies beneath rusted train tracks in a South African squatter camp just…

IT AIN’T MOZART Louis Nowra’s Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find himself directing mental patients in a play adapted from Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto to Mozart’s opera, Cosi Fan Tutte, which deals with issues…

CLAP YOUR HANDS IF YOU BELIEVE A theatrical revolution is taking place at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where a high-tech Broadway spectacle has been swapped for the homespun magic of a talented troupe of players and the audience’s engaged imaginations. Peter and the Starcatcher, a captivating prequel to Peter Pan, inspires childlike wonder. Suspend belief…

TRAPPED IN VIRTUAL LIFE Tune into Findlay//Sandsmark’s fractured bones / let’s get lost for an immersive meditation on the mediatization of contemporary culture. This Norwegian performance art bombards its audience with technological trappings that thrill and terrify, both enhancing and reducing the human bodies on stage. What better location to explore virtual reality than a…

EXPLOSIVE AND EXQUISITE “I’d rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another,” says the Man about the Woman, in Philip Ridley’s outstanding new play Tender Napalm, about a couple’s love in an abyss of tragedy. While hardly a simple statement, this dynamite production at 59E59 is as minimalist as it gets. The theater…

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT Unless the overview of a story is grossly inadequate, people seldom ask for both the summary and details.   Presented as two monologues on a sparsely furnished stage, Mathew MacKenzie’s The Particulars provides both in sequence, beginning with the broad strokes of a harrowing situation, followed by a more deliberate…

FUN, FRIVOLOUS, FLAMBOYANT, AND  FULLY FORGETTABLE The remarkable thing about Bullet for Adolf, the new play written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, is how entertaining it is despite its many shortcomings. Numerous jokes, believable dialogue, likeable characters, fun physical humor, and a soundtrack and popular video images from the 1980’s all make for an amusing…

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…