Broadway Alphabet Series, Round 2:
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
The Nosebleed at Lincoln Center
“Who here loves their father? Who here hates their father?” Aya asks the audience each time for a show of hands, and then volunteers: “I hated my father.”
Aya Ogawa’s “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater is much the same offbeat, intimate autobiographical play I saw ten months ago at the Japan Society, but I noticed one difference, which changed the way I reacted to it. The play still focuses on Ogawa’s long-dead father and their failed relationship, telling the story in an oblique and inventive way…
Teacher! Teacher! P.S. I Love You
Once again, Theater for a New City is touring a free, original hour-long musical through New York City streets, playgrounds and parks, as it has nearly every summer for almost half a century. As in the past, “Teacher! Teacher! Or PS I Love You” fuses a jazzy eclectic score (by Peter Dizozza), with a makeshift mix of dance, song, silly costumes, painted backdrops, satire in sometimes questionable taste and scattershot social consciousness. In this year’s show, the focus (to the extent there is one) is on the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion, on toxic emissions from power plants and on gun regulation in New York City
The Week in Theater News
The current cast of Into The Woods will remain intact through Sunday, September 4th (The show itself, with some cast changes, is running through October 16th)
You Will Get Sick. This is true, but it’s also the name of a play running 10/14-12/11, opening Nov 6 , at Roundabout, starring Linda Lavin, Daniel K Isaac and Marinda Anderson (Playwright Noah Diaz wrote it BEFORE the pandemic)
James Monroe Iglehart, Phillipa Soo, Steven Pasquale & Jessie Mueller will lead “Guys And Dolls” at the Kennedy Center, October 7 – 16, 2022.
A Texas church illegally performs “Hamilton,” changing the script so that it includes anti-LGBT message. (OnStage Blog)
In the third essay in his series, The Reformation, Jesse Green questions “the pervasive and pernicious maxim: The show must go on. “The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.”
Rest in Peace
George Bartenieff, 89, a fixture of downtown theater, a founder of both Theater for a New City and Theater Three Collective. “He was on Broadway before he was 15 and in the 1960s appeared there in plays by Edward Albee and John Guare…But ‘more than fame or fortune, he wanted to make a difference with his art,’ says his widow the playwright Karen Malpede.
Oral History interview with Bartenieff in 2015.
