New Yorkers have a busy week ahead: the Jimmy Awards tonight; tomorrow Primary Election Day; all week, Pride events — including the last of three plays of the Criminal Queerness theater festival — culminating in next weekend’s Pridefest and the Pride March. Five shows are closing on Broadway, and a couple are opening Off Broadway.
But my attention this morning has been on two plays by Sanaz Toossi,Wish You Were Here and English, about everyday life in Iran
The Week in Reviews
Prosperous Fools. Taylor Mac bites the hands that fund the arts.
After two hours satirizing an arts fundraising gala with barbed caricatures, loopy shtick and shameless slapstick, Taylor Mac takes the stage alone in a fool’s cap to deliver a coda in rhymed couplets summarizing the point of the play — the corruption of theater art and artists by self-serving billionaire philanthropists. Mac asks:
“Could be our meta play is not
So self-involved, but food for thought?”
Couldn’t it be both? “Prosperous Fools,” based loosely – very loosely — on Molière’s “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme,” is overlong, self-indulgent, and chaotic, but also colorful, often clever, sometimes funny and impressively spot-on. The well-portrayed caricatures call to mind not just familiar types, but precise figures in the news.
“Bear Grease” is billed as a reimagining of the musical Grease, “told through an Indigenous lens” by a husband-wife duo who call themselves LightningCloud. But this proudly amateurish production…offers little evidence they have even seen a live version of “Grease” — nor any professional stage musical….There is a good reason to root for “Bear Grease” despite the actual show. It began in “Treaty 6 territory…
The circus performers in “Passengers” are both powerful athletes and graceful artists, achieving awe-inspiring feats of physical prowess. They are also travelers, and storytellers, in ways that I found more thought-provoking than the creative might have intended.
The Gilded Age Season 3: Six reasons for theater lovers to see it. Four ways it’s annoying.
The Week in Theater News
Broadway Box Office: Sunset Blvd,Purpose, Oh Mary see big Tonys boost (Hollywood Reporter)
Tony fallout:: “Dead Outlaw” will close June 29, having played 73 regular performances and 14 previews. It had its fans; to me this musical about an unburied corpse felt like the kind of idea hatched at a late night smoke-hazed party in a college dorm.
This is the third show, after Smash and Real Women Have Curves, to announce an early and imminent closing after failing to win any Tony awards for which it was nominated.
Closed June 22: Floyd Collins, Smash, The Last Five Years
Closing June 28: Glengarry Glen Ross
June 29: Real Women Have Curves, Sondheim’s Old Friends, and now Dead Outlaw.
Also closing on June 29: The Picture of Dorian Gray, which won two Tonys.
Jinkx Monsoon will portray Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh Mary from August 4 to September 27
“Girls Will Be Girls,” a new play by Claire Mack, is opening July 24 at Signature. It’s described as three college girls who reclaim their virginity over one unhinged night fueled by pink liquor and a boy in just a Speedo. What is grabbing people’s attention is summed up in a People Magazine headline: Jodie Foster’s Son Charlie Joins Anora Breakout Luna Sofía Miranda in Off-Broadway’s Girls Will Be Girls
“It doesn’t feel as if we’re emancipated now” – Andre De Shields at Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth
