September 24, 2018 Leave a comment
Shakespeare knew Kavanaughs well: “Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true”
The 2018-2019 Broadway season, launching in earnest this week with two plays, is shaping up after several exciting announcements. Check out the preview guide
September 23, 2018 Leave a comment
La Femme’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ late, little-known play about four women living and working and bickering with one another, offers something you won’t find in A Glass Menagerie — though it’s set in the same year (1937) and place (a rundown section of St. Louis), contains a familiar dose of heartbreak, and reflects the playwright’s poetic sensibility and deep compassion. But “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” despite its precious title, is also wickedly witty, Williams creating smart-mouthed characters and letting them loose on one another.
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September 22, 2018 Leave a comment
As the family gathers for a Thanksgiving right before everything starts to fall apart, Knox (Russell Harvard) gives thanks for “three things I used to think weren’t gifts at all: Deafness… Being gay…. Addiction. They are gifts… Each brought me to great clarity.”
Clarity is the great aim of Playwrights Horizons’ production of “I Was Most Alive With You,” Craig Lucas’s play about a family that suddenly must cope with a series of calamities. But it’s an unusual kind of clarity for the theater – clarity for deaf people.
As I point out in my article for TDF Stages, 14 actors are performing the play divided into two casts playing the same seven roles: Russell Harvard, Lois Smith and five other actors portray the characters on stage, while simultaneously seven other actors use ASL to portray the same characters from a balcony above. “We’re not just interpreting, we’re part of the story,” signs Anthony Natale, one of the seven “shadow cast” members in the balcony.
If that’s not complicated enough, two of the five characters are deaf. One of them is portrayed by Harvard, who is himself deaf. best known for his performances in Tribes and in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening on Broadway.
He delivers that Thanksgiving speech in ASL (with supertitles projected onto a screen on the stage.) But sometimes Knox speaks in English; then Harold Foxx, who is the “Shadow Knox,” performs the same dialogue in ASL on the balcony.
“It’s been enormously challenging and complicated,” says director Tyne Rafaeli. “It is also very deep and important. The play is about how we tell the story of our lives — what language we use, how we struggle to communicate. Having people on different levels in different languages is a lot for the human brain to take in. The audience has to work hard — and I don’t think that is a bad thing.”
More on TDF Stages
September 21, 2018 Leave a comment
“Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2” tops the list of what will be the most produced plays nationwide among the 531 non-profit theaters that are part of the Theatre Communications Group, according to American Theatre Magazine. Hnath will also be the most produced playwright.
Twenty-seven theaters are scheduled to produce A Doll’s House, Part 2. Nine each have “Once” or “Pride and Prejudice” on their season calendar. (The magazine has excluded Shakespeare and A Christmas Carol in order to give other plays a fighting chance)
September 20, 2018 Leave a comment
As Polly Noonan, Edie Falco, late of The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, can make almost any show more engaging than it would otherwise be, even a relatively sedate one like “The True,”…
Except….Polly is only partly the fruit of the playwright’s imagination. “The True” is more or less true. There was an Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd who in 1977 was facing his first primary challenge in 35 years; he did have a long-time aide named Dorothea “Polly” Noonan who was rumored to be in a romantic relationship with him. And what’s more, Polly Noonan gave birth to a daughter, also named Polly Noonan, and that daughter gave birth to Kirsten E. Gillibrand, now a U.S. Senator from New York, who is said to be a likely candidate for president in 2020. Gillibrand has called her grandmother “my greatest political hero.”
Full review on DC Theatre Scene
September 19, 2018 Leave a comment
Karma, a “dirty little hood rat” of 17, is looking for her missing former foster brother Terrell, though she didn’t know him long and he didn’t like her much. He was, however, all she had. The first place she looks is the funeral parlor of Madam Rose Profit, 65, who insists her last name is pronounced Pro-fee, but she indeed profits from the tragedies in her community.
The two women, both portrayed by extraordinary actresses — Kara Young as Karma, Lynda Gravátt as Madam Profit — more or less compete to dominate the play by Jonathan Payne, who is making an arresting New York debut as a professional playwright.
September 17, 2018 Leave a comment
2018 Theatre Hall of Fame inductees:
Actors Rene Auberjonois, Christine Baranski, Cicely Tyson
Playwrights Maria Irene Fornes, David Henry Hwang, Adrienne Kennedy
Director Joe Mantello
Producer James Houghton, posthumously.
Below: Complete casting for Glenda Jackson’s King Lear and To Kill a Mockingbird; highlights reel from Marin Mazzie’s career.
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September 16, 2018 2 Comments
Although billed as “an intimate immersive production,” what “Stars in the Night” actually offers, at its best, is the exact opposite — a spectacular public setting. An audience of no more than a dozen at a time are led through several locations indoors and outdoors in DUMBO, a Brooklyn neighborhood that feels inherently theatrical: It has its own dramatic Chiaroscuro lighting, a backdrop of magnificent bridges and distinctive, gentrified 19th century buildings, and a colorful cast of passersby who, on a night with good weather, crowd the cobbled streets and newly green parkland on the river’s edge.
Unfortunately, most of the show’s characters, portrayed by eight members of the Los Angeles-based company Firelight Collective, are not much more developed during the show than those passersby. The story they act out is vague, arty, clichéd and confusing – so much so that some 90 minutes after the show began and a cast member deposited us on Jay Street, the other theatergoers and I stood around waiting for the next performer to come along and lead us somewhere, not realizing “Stars in the Night” had come to an end.
September 15, 2018 Leave a comment
When Jenna Gavigan made her Broadway debut at age 16 as a member of the ensemble in the 2003 revival of Gypsy, she shared the stage at the Shubert Theater not just with stars Bernadette Peters and Tammy Blanchard, but with Tim Federele, who was also making his Broadway debut – and also, presumably, with a family of mice. Federle has since become the author of the Nate series of young adult novels peering backstage at Broadway.
Now Gavigan has made her own contribution to the genre with “Lulu the Broadway Mouse
Author and actress Jenna Gavin
September 14, 2018 Leave a comment
“I think there has been a growth in Trump fatigue,” says Tony Stinkmetal, who admits that he himself shares it — which is why it’s surprising that he has created a show called “SlashR” that’s been promoted as an “outrageous, sexy, and bloody political satire that massacres Trump and the current era of American politics.” It is one of at least three Trump-related satires currently on New York stages with brief or sporadic runs.
