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(see Criticopia review under "25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The")
The work of playwright Charles Ludlum, who created a kind of goofy, singular brilliance at his old Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York's Greenwich Village, shines in his most popular play, The Mystery of Irma Vep. It's a goofy Gothic send-up of several mystery books and horror movies.
The opening of Actors Alliance Fest is a resounding success. If the four one-acts and two one-pagers presented in Program #1 are any indication, this is going to be a festival you should see.
The Corpse Bride is produced, adapted, and directed by Mike Sears and stars Kelly Eubanks, Amir Khastoo, Juan Manzo, Sandra Ruiz, and Lisa Berger. Jason Johnson wrote and performed the musical accompaniment. It's a terrifying old story of a poor farmer off to be wed to a beauty when he playfully practices his vows to a tree and puts the ring on a small branch. Alas and alack, he has just wed a long dead corpse. Sears' adaptation is a delight.
The don't-miss performance of this holiday season occurs on one of the smallest stages in town, within the confines of the intimate Studio Theater. The limited seating will make it difficult to get tickets to see Richard Halverson in Trying, but it's worth rearranging one's schedule to find a way to see Halverson, a veteran Milwaukee actor, in this sad-but-touching portrait of Francis Biddle. If the name doesn't ring a bell, Biddle was very much a part of shaping national events prior to and following World War II.
The Nuns are at it again.
In 1985 playwright Dan Goggin's highly successful Nunsense opened off Broadway. There has been over 5,000 productions worldwide, translated into 21 languages. The playwright, taking advantage of the immense popularity, has written five sequels: Nunsense 2: The Second Coming, Sister Amnesia's Country Western Nunsense Jamboree, Nuncrackers: The Nunsense Christmas Musical, Meshuggah_Nuns!, and Nunsensations: The Nunsense Vegas Revue.
I really didn't belong there. I wasn't invited. I didn't know these women. I felt like a voyeur observing the most intimate moments of a family's life. But it wasn't real; it was Katie Forgette's play, The O'Conner Girls, on the stage of Scripps Ranch Theater.
Script by Harvey Fierstein. Direction by Tim Irving. Cast of Matthew Weeden, Barron Henzel, Sidney Franklin, Amanda Sitton, Tom Zohar and Jill Drexler. All the ingredients necessary for a fantastic production of Torch Song Trilogy, which is exactly what we get with Diversionary's current offering.
The star at the top of this critic's Christmas tree belongs to Greetings!, presented by Milwaukee's Next Act Theater. The show is a revival of sorts for the company, which offered Greetings! as part of its season eight years ago. As the play opens, we meet Phil and Emily Gorski, a long-married couple who live in a working-class section of Pittsburgh. It is the night before Christmas, and they are bustling about making last-minute preparations.
Sadly, this year's Artists Festival is over. It has been the best to date, with expectations even higher for next year. As for Program Five of the Fest:
In many ways, Anton in Show Business is an ideal selection for this company's tenth anniversary production. Renaissance Theaterworks was created by a group of women to explore dramatic issues from a feminine perspective.
Milan's most congenial experimental theater, the Teatro Verdi, hosted a production by sister site Teatro del Buratto that combined black-light puppetry with the customary avant-garde, mixed media presentation. Inspired by the works of George Perec and Italo Calvino, the text concerns three travelers on a voyage of self-discovery. A rather obnoxious sophisticate (Evelina Primo as Camilla) finds herself with the most unlikely and detestable companions: a mute woman (Ornella Vancheri as Io) and a next-to-useless guy (Gennaro Ponticelli as Moro).
Luigi Pirandello is the greatest Italian playwright of all time, and fully merited the Nobel Prize in Literature bestowed on him in 1934. The current production, unnecessarily retitled "Absolutely! (Perhaps), premiered in 1917, and is usually known as "Right You Are If You Think You Are." The new version, by Martin Sherman (best known for Bent), ever- so-slightly tightens the original and is eminently actable. This is the seventh of Pirandello's 44 plays, and like many of them, is an elaboration of one of his short stories.
Memories of Sid Caesar's brilliant satires arise while watching this classic, written by Shakespeare's major playwriting competitor. The period and platitudes in which Ben Jonson existed are vividly depicted in the recent hit movie, "Shakespeare In Love." Much of that scenario is apparent in this play, as it reflects the corruption of London society confronted with the Great Plague. The rapscallion elements thriving amid such social conditions are in full bloom.
Pari Saberi Review: Dramatic Arts Center Iran had the honor of being the first foreign company to appear at Rome's newly-restored Coliseum this past summer. Their production of Antigone was subsequently restaged for indoor performance at Vahdat Hall in Tehran.
It's difficult to mar the grandeur of Shakespeare's most sweeping, lyrical and romantic tragedy. But director Steven Pimlott and his stars, Alan Bates and Frances de la Tour, seem to be trying their level best to do just that. De la Tour has been acting on the RSC's mainstage for nearly as many years as Cleopatra lived. When she bared her breast to apply the fatal asp, my pulse didn't quicken one iota.
The Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra is made dramatic and distinctive by a strong triumvirate of male performances topped by Patrick Stewart's electric Antony. Passionate, emotional, lusty and exuberant, this is quite a change from Stewart's cerebral roles in "Star Trek" and Arthur Miller's The Ride Down Mount Morgan. Yes, he has grey hair (as Shakespeare's text specifies), but his body is lean, and his movements are athletic.
She at the piano in slinky gown with trailing long white scarf, he coming from behind a theatrical trunk in dinner jacket and tails: it could be Gertie and Noel. After all, it is 1930 in Monte Carlo! Rather, svelte, auburn-haired Irina Borislensko is Russian pianist Nadia, singing "Somewhere I'll Find You" about her former lover.
And Stratford has a second hit musical, Cole Porter's Anything Goes. Stratford's Anything Goes is the last Broadway version of Cole Porter's musical, with additional songs not in the original show, and P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton's book tricked up by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and most recently fixed up by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman. The plot is foolish enough to have required endless tinkering, but this most recent updating doesn't lose its `30s flavor. Despite major miscastings, Stratford's revival is a crowd-pleasing, fun-filled picnic.
If meant to give Parisians a glimpse of what Christmastide is like for Maine marrieds, Apocalyptic Butterflies begins negatively. Jeffrey Bracco's woeful Hank Tater finds a cold morning on his 29th birthday. His wife Muriel isn't feeling very warm toward him either. His father-in-law (Paul Vincent, a proper cipher) has dumped thousands of dollars worth of totem poles on his lawn. For luck.
There are about four uncomfortable instances in the dialogue of Apple to explain this play's seemingly unconnected title, including Evelyn's anxious warning to her husband, when he chews on her nipple, that it isn't an apple to bite on. That's uncomfortable because we know she fears that she has breast cancer. Nothing in the script ultimately turns out to be unconnected. And all the connections are uncomfortable.
As if dramatized artwork by Watteau in the making, a tale is "painted" first with the use of puppets, then peopled with commedia characters co-directed by the troupes Pantalone. A terrible corsaire has captured and kept Beatrice to present to the Grand Mufti, but Captain Florindo loves and wants to marry her and bring her home to Venice. In turn, Beatrice promises to bring together lovers Arlequin and Columbine. Obstacles to both couples consist of the Captain's rich father Pantalone, the corsaire, and jealous Brighella.
G.B. Shaw's beloved comedy is so engagingly light-hearted that it no longer plunges us into any serious thought. That's partly because its satire against war, "heroism," and social pretense was never especially unconventional anyway. To try to make a philosophical tract of this almost-farce would be deadly, and misguided. Arms and the Man deserved to be made into a musical called "The Chocolate Soldier." And it was. (I saw a Chocolate Soldier with banal choreography by George Balanchine.)
For any play with only a few characters, success relies not only on brilliance of text but also the star magnetism of its actors -- and personal touch of its director. It's not enough to have "talented" actors. In 1996, London audiences embraced Albert Finney, Tom Courtney and the lesser-known Ken Stott. Superstar Sean Connery is co-producer of the still-running West End production, which garnered critical accolades and walked off with all of London's 1998 theatre awards.
This work, which received the best-play Moliere Award in Paris, has, in its English version, gone on to win Evening Standard and Olivier Awards for best comedy. "Art" [sic] is indeed full of laughs but betrays an increasingly serious underpinning as it proceeds through its 85 intermissionless minutes. For 15 years three men have been good friends: Marc, an aeronautical engineer; Serge, a dermatologist; and Yvan, a sales agent for stationery, who is about to be married.
We would have loved to attend the literally hundreds of Fringe Festival plays and one-person shows, both serious and comic, in venues all over Edinburgh, but time and energy prevented that. However, we luckily came across an extra-added performance at 11:30 in the morning of this Stephen Sondheim musical we had never seen.
After strains of "After You've Gone," curtain opens on a bedroom with fading flowered, green wallpaper, lighter where pictures have been removed. There's one door that Kemp first entered three days earlier, rushing because of a wire that his auntie, his sole living relative whom he hasn't seen in 30 years, is dying and wants to see him. There's one window through which he sees and often talks to or about the outside world. There's one chair for him to sit between the fringed-shaded lamp and bed where the old lady is propped up on pillows.
The repeatedly enterprising Bridewell Theatre is offering, as part of the City of London Festival, the European premiere of The Ballad of Little Jo, which was first presented by Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe in 2000. The musical is based on Maggie Greenwald's 1993 film of the same name -- and both treat actual historical characters from the 19th century with some artistic license.
Big house, SRO audience, big musical score and story about real people in the North of England at the start of the `80s era of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Big-Business conservatives: Still (unfortunately) relevant!
When The Birthday Party had its first London staging in 1957, it was so savaged by the daily press, it closed after a week. Since then, the play has rightly been recognized as a masterpiece, but one would not realize this on the basis of the carelessly directed and pallidly acted revival now on the boards. In this mounting, the three acts are played without intermission -- which has the virtue of letting us go home as soon as possible.
Director Geordie Johnson, a veteran actor at Stratford, saw The Blonde, The Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead while visiting Australia, immediately thought of Stratford actress Lucy Peacock, and was so impressed with the piece that he insisted on getting the rights to direct it in Canada. No wonder.
This long-running hit has a great story at the core: two brothers separated at birth who die at the instant they learn of their kinship. But there's no memorable music to go along with this intriguing yarn. That doesn't stop Russell from trying to pound one of his ephemeral creations into our brains. Over and over, the boys' mom -- played perkily by Petula Clark clone Lyn Paul -- sings new riffs on the opening number, "Marilyn Monroe." They're just as tangential to the twins' story as the title implies.
This doublebill marks Hooshang Hessami's return to directing after a hiatus of twenty years. As a well-respected translator he has introduced many Western classics and contemporary plays to Iranian audiences. Although Wendy Wasserstein's monologue, Bodybuilding, might seem an unusual choice, the audience at this performance seemed to appreciate the pragmatic feminism the character advocated. <
Having avoided any of Marc Camoletti's 15,800 worldwide productions of his biggest hit for more than four decades, the time seemed right to see what the fuss was about. We braved a horrid squall, no air conditioning in an old but lovely theatre, and crowds from children to seniors for the last two, side seats at a late night performance. Found: a simple farce about a roue (really a pretty nice guy, as played by David Marchal) who spreads his affections among three "fiancis." They're airline stewards from America (Marie Leburge), Germany (Brigitte Margerin), and France (Emmanuelle Galabru
In 19th century New England, "boston marriage" referred, according to sociological scribe Lillian Faderman, to "a long-term monogamous relationship between two otherwise unmarried women." Independent, often feminists, whether or not lesbians, they shared values and related primarily to women.
The Theatre du Rond-Point is said to be enjoying a renaissance, with renovations and a variety of presentations, plus a going restaurant and bar. I couldn't tell, though, from its latest featured production much about its success. True, the theater was almost full on a Sunday afternoon. But then, so it was a few years ago when I saw The Three Musketeers -- done, of course, in Dumas' French -- as the last offering of a departing traditional director.
For his final production as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble courageously chose Ibsen's Brand, a work rarely mounted. Ibsen wrote this huge verse drama in 1865 to be read rather than staged, and it caused an immediate sensation. Its first production did not take place for two decades, when it ran six and a half hours. Noble has used the admirable 1959 translation by Michael Meyer, Ibsen's foremost biographer, who cut the work down to manageable size by eliminating several large, extraneous digressions unrelated to the main plot.
No matter how extended the engagement, thanks to its two leads, David Hare's rather undistinguished two-hander could have played forever, judging by those crowded lines at the box office. (I got a day seat yet paid more for it than any play I'd ever attended in London.) Now The Breath of Life is headed for New York, minus Judi Dench. It figures: Maggie Smith has almost all the best lines. She plays art historian Madeleine, the seemingly self-sufficient owner of a "busy" art-and-book-filled home on the Isle of Wight.
The author's intention was noble enough: portray British archetypes whose innocence "has been corroded by the deadening effects of a rotten subculture, cheap tabloids, easy racism and slobbering consumerism." Dear Conjunction probably thought it was presenting hard-headed realism. The result itself, however, smacks of cheap sensationalism. (I was told the company wanted to use Sudden Theatre for rehearsals of a revived hit it'd be taking out of town but had to rent the house long enough for a production; this was it.) What a strange choice to appeal to its bilingual audiences.
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