Distracted
Laura Pels Theater

I've remarked on the fact that the shows produced by the Roundabout in its Laura Pels Theater venue tend to be unsatisfying in one way or another, but Distracted is a notable exception to that general rule. Cynthia Nixon gives an impeccable performance in Lisa Loomer's well-crafted play about a mother seeking effective treatment for her son's attention deficit disorder.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Finian's Rainbow
City Center

I can't let the City Center Encores! presentation of Finian's Rainbow go without praising it to high heaven. The Irish Rep gave us an excellent, small-scale revival of this show a few seasons back, but it was great to see and hear it at City Center with a full orchestra playing that classic Burton Lane-E.Y. Harburg score.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage
Abrons Arts Center - Harry de Jur Playhouse

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage is a new down for downtown. Mack the Knife meets Sweeney Todd meets Beowulf, in the dark historical streets of violence put to music. But this composer surrenders Weill and Sondheim sophistication and smarts to banal punk melodies and lyrics.You either like nihilistic, repetitious, childish punk jokes or you don't. If you do, welcome to an irritating but amusing, well-directed and performed, big-band musical, and a very, very hip reduction of literature's oldest and most boring poem to an exercise in absurdity.

Rhonda Coullet
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Happiness
Lincoln Center - Mitzi Newhouse Theater

Remember Steambath or Outward Bound? Plays that take place in limbo where people don't know they're dead? Happiness, book by John Weidman, music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie, now at Lincoln Center, is another one, and this time, the transition vehicle is a subway car filled with a warm, friendly cross-section of New York. They are to pick a happy time in their lives, revisit it, and then can stay there forever. An earnest Hunter Foster is the conductor, and all of the very large cast can sing well.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Chasing Manet
59E59 Theaters

Can a nursing home be the site of a comedy? Playwright Tina Howe gives a resounding "Yes!" and successfully pulls off her concept in her new play, Chasing Manet.

In a pleasant New England nursing-home room, cranky Catherine Sargent (Jane Alexander) fumes about, often crying "Out!" The elegant, Boston-born former painter doesn't want to be there. Just because she's legally blind, why should she be there? Her frequent verbal fisticuffs with her son Royal (Jack Gilpin), who put her there, display her wrath.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Hamlet
The Duke

Hamlet, clearly directed by David Esbjornson and now at The Duke on 42nd Street, is a well-crafted, modern dress (costumes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy), contemporary rendition of Shakespeare's play with a fine actor, Christian Camargo, in the title roll, my old mime teacher, Alvin Epstein, as a crotchety Polonius, and a mostly strong supporting cast on an imaginative set by Antje Ellerman with fine lighting by Marcus Doshi.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Bobs, The
Metropolitan Room

It's shocking to discover a musical group that is brilliant, possesses a huge cult following, and is (until now) completely unknown to oneself! The Bobs, appearing at the Metropolitan Room, filled me with pleasure, leaving me astounded and wondering where here have I been all my life, and where have The Bobs been all my life? This is a highly talented, intelligent, deeply original, humor-and-jazz-quartet that captivates us with charming, family-friendly, superb entertainment. They invent sounds and rhythms that put us into a whole new world of musical expression.

Nicholas Wolfson
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Bobs, The
Metropolitan Room

The Bobs is a lively, exciting a cappella group who do all the orchestral sounds with their mouths as they sing. It's a fun throwback for me, and probably a new experience for most of you, but this is a hot, entertaining gang in top-level, world-class performance. Who needs instruments? They are the instruments, and their songs range from amusing to amazing. I haven't had so much fun since I stood in a stairwell At Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and do-wopped with two math majors and a chicklet.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Cody Rivers Show, The
Kraine Theater

The Cody Rivers Show impresses as powerfully and uniquely as Blue Man Group did when it first appeared years ago: original brilliance. Two men, Andrew Connor and Mike Mathieu, wearing brightly-colored satin wrestlers' costumes, perform perfectly synchronized, mostly abstract movements and dance while telling stories and reciting punchlines. And their verbal riffs tickle the mind as they fix a car using foreign words to describe auto parts, as they do an interview in Greenland, as they do a romance between two chairs, and perform a sketch on "Opposite Night."

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Dinner and Delusion
The Cell

The Center for Contemporary Opera's production of Dinner & Delusion, with libretto by Nancy Manocherian and music by Michael Sahl, gives us a company of accomplished singers in an opera about a Jewish family reality, and a boy's fantasy of romance as he grows from early teens to old age. It's an engaging, entertaining work with humor, good voices and a quirky story including a handsome fairy godfather (Christopher Herbert), a taste of the Hippie era, a female trio with a hookah, and a dream of mother's chicken.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Coming Aphrodite!
La MaMa E.T.C.

Coming Aphrodite!, a musical adaptation of Willa Cather's novella, written and directed by Mary Fulham, with music by Mark Ettinger and lyrics by Paul Foglino, is a charming musical about a handsome young artist (Greg Henits), his neighbor, an aspiring actress/dancer (Liz Kimball), his dog (Clayton Dean Smith), and a landlady (Anne Gaynor- a terrific singer who also plays a sexy performer).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Aristocrats
Irish Repertory Theater

Brian Friel's Aristocrats, at the Irish Rep, is an odd dish to swallow. It starts with long exposition by a family in a crumbling large manor house in Donegal, Ireland, as they talk legend and perhaps some fact to an American writing a piece about Irish past and personalities - while intrusive piano music dampens comprehension. As it goes on we see the play is a view of Irish "Aristocrats" as very ordinary and not very interesting people. A couple of possibilities for action are not pursued. At intermission, I asked several people what they thought the play is about.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Humor Abuse
City Center - Stage II

Lorenzo Pisoni was stunning as the major horse in the recent production of Equus. Now Manhattan Theater Club is presenting him in his one-man show, Humor Abuse, his life as a clown, starting at age 3, with his father in the Pickle Family Circus. So for over thirty years, this superb performer has been honing and perfecting his circus skills, which he tells us about and shows us in this captivating, marvelous show. He is handsome and charming, and his warm, unpretentious performance is dazzling in its complexity and his mastery of the genre.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Incident at Vichy
Beckett Theater

If you want to see a perfectly directed (by Scott Alan Evans), beautifully acted play written by a master who knew how to construct a play in terms of content, dialogue and action better than almost any American writer of the last hundred years, don't miss Arthur Miller's brilliant 1964 work, Incident at Vichy. Set in a detention room in southern France as the Nazis are taking command and searching for Jews, men are sitting and talking and wondering in this dangerous situation. It is one of the most exciting theatrical experiences in town.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Incident at Vichy
Beckett Theater

When Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy was first produced in 1964, it was not a popular success, although it had garnered at least one glowing critical review: by the then-New York Times theater critic. The play deals with an incident during the Holocaust, reputed to be factual. Perhaps audiences were not ready to deal with such issues at that time. Now The Actors Company Theater (TACT) is staging the play's first major New York revival since its premiere.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Good Negro, The
Public Theater

There are many stories floating around concerning Martin Luther King, Jr., and the various events of the early Civil Rights days. Although King's name is never mentioned in The Good Negro, it is obvious that playwright Tracey Scott Wilson has utilized information, some factual some fictional, to present an involving work dealing with King and that intense period in the 60s.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Gates of Gold
59E59 Theaters

As an Irish theater buff (fifteen years as reviewer for "Irish Voice" newspaper), I was looking forward to seeing Frank McGuinness's Gates of Gold, which advance publicity had advertised would be the story of the founding of the famed Gate Theatre in Dublin.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Freshwater
Julia Miles Theater

Virginia Wolfe wrote one play, Freshwater,.to be performed one time by her friends and family for "a laughing evening." The brilliant, innovative director Anne Bogart has now staged it for the rest of us. Since I wasn't onstage myself having a good time, or part of a family in-group watching friends be foolish, it didn't quite work for me.

They try for farce, but the actors mock the characters they are playing, so all gestures are broad, all words recited. To be truly funny, one has to be real in odd situations.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Lansky
St. Luke's Theater

In Lansky, by Richard Krevolin and Joseph Bologna, the charismatic and fascinating actor Mike Burstyn gives us an odd portrait of a Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky, who was the brains, the money-manipulator, behind a lot of Mafia activities during prohibition.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Enter Laughing
St. Peter's Church

The York Theater's production of Enter Laughing, the musical based on Carl Reiner's book, with book by Joseph Stein and songs by Stan Daniels, is a delightful romp - a simple, old-fashioned romantic comedy. It's beautifully staged by Stuart Ross, acted with great charm by a super cast of actor/farceurs, and graced by terrific choreography to give us the funniest physical comedy now on stage in New York next to The 39 Steps. Terrific set by James Morgan, great costumes by David Toser, and lighting by Chris Robinson, all lift the proceedings.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Becky Shaw
Second Stage Theater

Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfriddo opens with a most irritating, fast-talking performance by David Wilson Barnes. It's a grating exhibition of repulsiveness as tedious reminiscences are shared with his faux sister with nothing happening, and the word "fuck" used as an adjective every other paragraph.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Connection, The
The Living Theater

The Living Theater lives! In 1960 I came upon The Living Theater, the premiere avant-garde theater in this country at the time. They were performing Jack Gelber's play The Connection. I worked there for three years, and it was quite a flashback to the past, theatrically and as a reality, to see the new production of that play resurrected and directed by Judith Malina. The play is a slice of sleazy life -a real jump back to a cigarette-filled theater with a bunch of doomed outcasts as they wait for their heroin connection -- plus a terrific jazz quartet.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Broadway By The Year: Broadway Musicals of 1924
Town Hall

Prohibition was in full swing, so that made "The Drinking Song" from The Student Prince a particular favorite in 1924. Another song that was auspiciously published that year and proved to be even more enduring was "Happy Birthday." In honor of that, Scott Siegel, the host-writer-creator of this invaluable series, asked if anyone in the audience was celebrating a birthday. A few shouted out "yes," and the Ross Patterson Little Big Band played it backed up by a chorus of 1500 voices.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Cherry Orchard, The
Brooklyn Academy of Music - Harvey Theater

Country doctor/playwright Anton Chekhov completed his last play, The Cherry Orchard, one year before his death, in 1904, at age 44, of advanced tuberculosis. In this new version by Tom Stoppard, directed by Sam Mendes, the play reverberates, as always, with poignancy and yearning, with lost love, lost hope. Yet it is infused with beauty and renewed hopefulness. It is tragic but has moments of comic relief.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Dust
Westside Theater - Downstairs

Dust by Billy Goda, now at The Westside Theater, an exciting adventure play, has a Broadway-level cast with Richard Masur and Hunter Foster as a sympathetic anti-hero with a past and an older, rich egotist flaunting his power. Helped by a terrific soundscape by Sharath Patel and lighting by Charles Foster, on a fine flexible set by Caleb Wertenbaker, as directed by Scott Zigler, the play is a thriller -- with jeopardy, romance (with the lovely, thin Laura E.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2008
Garden of Earthly Delights
Minetta Lane Theater

Martha Clarke's Garden of Earthly Delights, based on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, is a masterpiece of Performance Art. It has images and utilizations of the human body you've never seen before - anywhere, even in the painting.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2008
Cripple of Inishmaan, The
Atlantic Theater

During the time that then-27-year-old Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh was having his first great Broadway success with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, he was also represented in 1998 at the Public Theater Off Broadway with a production of The Cripple of Inishmaan. While the former play boasted the original cast from the Galway-based Druid Theatre Company under the direction of Garry Hynes, the latter had a mostly American cast under the direction of Jerry Zaks. The over-all reception was not kind, with most reviewers taking exception to Zaks' approach.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
December 2008
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Bailiwick Arts Center

There are fundamentally two kinds of clown shows: the family-friendly romps featuring childlike buffoonery ( e.g., chase-and-tag games ) , and the darker Guignol satires, peopled by grotesque caricatures engaging in sinister, often violent, activities. In attempting to meld Robert Louis Stevenson's Victorian horror tale with masked commedia dell'arte, the Bricklayers ensemble walks an uneven line between the dissimilar stylistic motifs.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2008
Eureka!
The Living Theater

The Living Theater's production of Eureka is an extraordinary theatrical experience in action, movement, projections, text based on Edgar Allan Poe's prose poem, and music by Patrick Grant. They create the universe, from the periodic table to infinity and back again, and you are part of it. With a good looking cast of actor/dancers who can really move, director/co-writer (with the late Hanon Reznikov) Judith Malina gives us a performance-art experience that is rare and wonderful.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Gazillion Bubble Show, The
New World Stages

The Gazillion Bubble Show, a solo extravaganza creating bubble magic at New World Stages, has a Las Vegas flavor as it starts with a commercial for itself. Then, Ana Yang, a charming bubblemeister, creates wonderful, imaginative images, fascinating shapes and mixes of color with bubbles, including bubbles in bubbles and smoke in bubbles. It's a rare display of technique, creativity and artistry.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Golddiggers of 1633
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

A colorful, cartoonish house, bricked-in from its Parisian surroundings but for a huge gate to one side, sets the tone for a mix of 17th-century Moliere and modern delightful silliness. Enter the cast, on strings like puppets, in pop-period dress and wigs -- all but two masked men in black tux. A throwback to the zanies or traditional masked clowns of Italian commedia that so influenced Moliere, they function also as French puppet manipulators who are seen onstage and often act as narrators.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Mamma Mia!
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Is Mamma Mia! becoming the new Cats?

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Body of Water, A
59E59 Theaters

Lee Blessing's A Body of Water is one of the world's strangest plays. Each day starts anew with no memories for the (probably) married couple who wake up next to each other in bed every morning in a beautiful house on a gorgeous lake (Neil Patel's superb setting changes with the hours and the seasons, abetted by Jeff Croiter's fine lighting). Actually not so strange if you've seen Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's film "50 First Dates." Same premise, except that in the film, only she had the aberration.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Enter Laughing
St. Peter's Church

No one loves a good dramatic musical more than I do -- but sometimes, rather than cry along with the music, you just wanna laugh. Thanks to two of New York City's best Off-Broadway theater companies, the York and the Atlantic, we have two great new opportunities to do just that.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Damn Yankees
City Center

The devil himself, in the form of a human male, transforms a tired old geezer into a paragon of youth, vigor, and beauty, promising to make all his dreams come true in return for eternal possession of his soul.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Ensemble Studio Theater One-Act Marathon 2008
Ensemble Studio Theater

Ensemble Studio Theater's annual One-Act Festival is now on, and, as usual, it's a major treat of the year; they select a variety of good plays, and the level of acting is always high.

Series A of Marathon 2008 had two surprises: a musical, A Little Soul Searching by Willie Reale, a humorous sketch lightly skewering Earth customs, with the outstanding Karen Trott, and a well-directed (by Kathleen Dimmick) play with no words, Wedding Pictures by Quincy Long.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
Ensemble Studio Theater One-Act Marathon 2008
Ensemble Studio Theater

Ensemble Studio Theater's annual One-Act Festival is now on, and, as usual, it's a major treat of the year; they select a variety of good plays, and the level of acting is always high.

Series B has a special reward: Laila Robins, radiant in a Neil LaBute domestic squabble, The Great War. She's nicely matched by Grant Shaud and well-directed by Andrew McCarthy. Lloyd Suh's Happy Birthday William Abernathy is an interesting view of racial mixing with an old white man (Joe Ponazecki) and his Asian grandson (Peter Kim).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
Ensemble Studio Theater One-Act Marathon 2008: Series C
Ensemble Studio Theater

Some brief notes on Ensemble Studio Theater's Marathon 2008 Series C:

Piscary by Frank D. Gilroy, crisply directed by Janet Zarish. A squabble including fish. Good acting by Mark Alhadeff and Diane Davis. Good writing, too.

In Between Songs by Lewis Black gives us the essence of stoned, as it really captures the idiotic brain trips of old stoners. As directed by Rebecca Nelson and performed by Jack Gilpin, David Wohl and Cecilia DeWolf, it's truly funny.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2008
Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland
Ontological-Hysteric Theater - St. Mark's Church

on Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (A Richard Foreman Theater Machine), which Foreman wrote, designed, directed (stage and film) and created the sound for:

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2008
Gypsy
St. James Theater

The question was not whether Patti LuPone would be any good as Mamma Rose; the question was just how incendiary would she be? Would she sledgehammer her way through the role with Mermanesque bravado? Would she act the hell out of it (with the occasional eccentric musical phrasing and slurred lyric just to be uniquely Patti)? Would she use her relative youth to soften and sensualize the role, a la Bernadette Peters, the previous Broadway Rose?

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2008

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