As the season has revved up, and a new show is opening nearly every day, they tend to run together, in more ways than one. This is obvious of course in “Forbidden Broadway,” which depends on the audience’s awareness of other shows. But I was struck by three plays that use dramatic confrontations to explore contemporary issues. “The Witness Room,” a legal drama about cops that opened over the weekend, featured guns, as does “Job” on Broadway. These felt not just unnecessary; they undermined the dramatic impact. The third, “The Ask,” a two-character play like “Job,” didn’t need a lethal prop to grab attention.
Might the theater world consider some form of gun control on stage?
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole A Song
he parodies in this latest edition of Forbidden Broadway range from hilarious (Cabaret) to clever but not especially funny (Back to the Future) to lame (Wicked.) In other words, it’s hit and miss, as usual. But couldn’t you say the same about “Saturday Night Live”? Forbidden Broadway is almost as old – and arguably just as much an icon-taunting institution, albeit for a narrower constituency.
Gerard Alessandrini debuted his first Forbidden Broadway revue in 1982 – the same year, as he points out in a program note, that marked the premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” Hence, the subtitle of this, the 27th Off-Broadway edition, and the rationale (as if anybody needed one) for the songs of Sondheim to take up about a quarter of the more than two dozen numbers in this 90-minute show; Sondheim even appears as a character. Alessandrini also uses the show’s long life as an excuse to do what the revue has always done, mix old Broadway with what’s currently on the boards. Full review
The Witness Room
Pedro Antonio Garcia, who is a criminal defense attorney as well as a playwright…attempts to convince us that the criminal justice system is corrupt…with a story that Garcia takes pains to invest with a gritty authenticity…yet the production is ultimately unpersuasive as a pointed slice-of-life legal drama…Full review
The Ask
The confrontation in “The Ask” involves no guns, nor even any shouting. It’s not a confrontation at all, by any typical definition these days in either theater or politics. Greta, a long-time donor to the American Civil Liberties Union, stopped contributing to the organization last year, and Tanner, a fundraiser for the ACLU, is paying a visit to Greta in her tasteful Upper West Side apartment to get her to resume. What unfolds over the eighty minutes of Matthew Freeman’s subtle, intelligent two-character play is not so much a clash of worldviews, but small, specific differences that provoke some large questions – about the complexity of power, and freedom, and change. Full review
Our Class
“Our Class” is inspired by the true story of the Jedwabne pogrom in 1941, in which dozens of residents of the Polish town of Jedwabne locked hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in a barn, and burned the barn down. Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodziane wrote the play in 2008 after recent investigations and histories (especially Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors) finally unearthed the details that had long been suppressed. Some of the characters in the play are composites of the real people involved, others directly correspond to individuals, some with their real names. That the play is rooted in a true story makes “Our Class,” which some would otherwise find unbearable, feel like an important history lesson. Full Review
Dogugaeshi.
It’s been compared to a psychedelic trip, and the latest video game, but Basil Twist’s dazzling hour-long abstract journey through mind-bending optical illusions and mythical beasts – which he likes to describe as “a sliding, gliding, horizontal game of suspense, concealment, revelation and transformation” – is derived from a form of Japanese puppet theater that is said to have been born hundreds of years ago in the Awa region of Japan. The genre is called “Dogugaeshi,” and that’s the title Twist has given his show, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary
Preview: Edges of Ailey: A Broadway Revelation
Alvin Ailey was a New York actor – performing, yes, in Broadway musicals with Lena Horne and Pearl Bailey starting in 1954, the very year he arrived in New York at the age of 23. But he was also an actor in straight plays both on Broadway and Off Broadway, co-starring with the likes of Robert Duvall and Cicely Tyson, and he even studied with the great acting teacher Stella Adler, taking her lessons on acting – and those by her teacher, Konstantin Stanislavski – to heart.
That is among the revelations in “Edges of Ailey,” an ambitious exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American about the visionary artist and activist best known for founding the world-famous Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
The Week in New York Theater News
Now a second reason to be excited about Gypsy — Danny Burstein will play Herbie. Opening December 19th at the Majestic
Buena Vista Social Club, which had a run in 2023 Off Broadway, is moving to Broadway — opening on March 19 as the Schoenfeld Theater, the 33rd show to be announced in the Broadway 2024-2025 season.
Emily Shooltz has been named the new artistic director of Signature Theater For 14 years, she has been Associate Artistic Director of Ars Nova.
Stereophonic has been extended one final time to January 12, 2025
Oh, Mary has been extended through January 19, 2025
Adam Lambert and Auli‘i Cravalho last week joined the cast of “Cabaret” as the Emcee and Sally Bowles.
