New York Theater

Torch Song Review and Pics

October 19, 2017 Leave a comment

Michael Rosen and Michael Urie.

It’s crazy, says Michael Urie as Arnold, that “after all these years I’m still trying to justify my life.” Arnold means his life as a gay man, and though he is talking specifically to his mother (Mercedes Ruehl), the comment lands with force in Torch Song, the Off-Broadway revival of the 1982 Broadway play that launched Harvey Fierstein’s mainstream career as both playwright and performer.

It would be terrific to report that the issues Fierstein wove into his Tony winning comedy about Arnold Beckoff’s life and loves make the play seem dated 35 years later…But the search for love and acceptance and self-acceptance remains as fresh as a wound….What does feel dated, though, is a steady beat of jokes as if set to the metronome of an old-fashioned Broadway comedy…Torch Song can probably best be appreciated, even celebrated, as a piece of living gay history.

Click on any photograph by Joan Marcus to see it enlarged

Roxanna Hope Radja, Ward Horton, Michael Urie and Michael Rosen

Michael Urie

War Horton, Jack DiFalco, Michael Urie, Mercedes Ruehl

Mercedes Ruehl and Michael Urie

Michael Urie, Jack DeFalco, Ward Horton

Mercedes Ruehl as Ma

Estelle Getty as Ma and Fierstein in the Broadway production of Torch Song Trilogy

The 1988 film Torch Song Trilogy with Harvey Fierstein as Arnold, and Matthew Broderick as Alan, Arnold’s lover (Broderick originally portrayed David, Arnold’s adopted son, in the production Off-Broadway)

Harvey Fierstein today

Full review on DC Theatre Scene

Hair Hits 50. Lin-Manuel Asks Sondheim. The Boss Extends. Week in NY Theater

October 18, 2017 Leave a comment

Fifty years ago, Hair was the very first show to play in the old Astor mansion, which was transformed into Joseph Papp’s first year-round Public Theater. (even though it feels like the Public has always been with us)

Blown away by the love today, especially from our uptown family who just practiced and shot this in ONE take! 💛 to @HamiltonMusical! #Hair50 pic.twitter.com/sxYIh9bMhM

— The Public Theater (@PublicTheaterNY) October 18, 2017

An assistant director of the original production recalls the new “love-rock musical” at the old Astor Library that Joseph Papp had convinced New York City to rent him for $1 a year

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Filed under New York Theater, New York Theater Weekly Summary Tagged with and the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, Home for the Holidays with Josh Kaufman, Nikki Blonsky drops out of Stuffed, Quiara Hades dismisses Weinsten, Victor Rasuk drops out of Jesus Hopped the A Train

Café Play Review: At the Cornelia Street Café, Overhearing Fellow Diners and Inanimate Objects

October 17, 2017 Leave a comment

Café Play is a site-specific work of theater that’s being held at four different times of day in the back dining room at the Cornelia Street Café, with different food choices depending on whether you attend for breakfast, lunch, tea or late-night snack (all frankly paltry, though I did like my crème brulee). Put together by the endlessly innovative theater company This Is Not A Theatre Company (who’ve previously offered a play in a swimming pool, another in a private apartment, and “pod plays” to listen to on the subway and the Staten Island ferry), the conceit of the show is that we the diners are overhearing the conversations of fellow diners, and waiters, and one unwanted intruder (“Please don’t step on me!”)

click on any photograph by Maria Baranova Suzuki to see it enlarged

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Filed under New York Theater, Off-Off Broadway, Site Specific, Theater Reviews

Burning Doors Review: Belarus Free Theatre and Pussy Riot Unite to Fight For Human Rights

October 16, 2017 Leave a comment

In “Burning Doors,” Belarus Free Theatre’s latest arresting, arousing, athletic and anarchic play about state-sponsored injustice, one of the eight cast members strips naked as he tells the story of a man who had been sentenced to death by firing-squad for a political crime, but was given a last-minute reprieve. The man was distraught at the thought of having to live on, having made his peace with dying.

The ironic story, as we’re told in a caption when it’s finished, is an excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. It presents in microcosm both the hypnotic appeal and the challenge of the work by this extraordinary 12-year-old avant-garde ensemble.

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Filed under New York Theater, Off-Off Broadway, Theater Reviews Tagged with Belarus Free Theatre, Pussy Riot

The Siege Review and Pics: Palestinian Theater about Bethlehem Standoff

October 15, 2017 Leave a comment

Faisal Abualhayjaa and Hassan Taha in The Siege

The Siege, a play dramatizing the 2002 siege by armed Palestinians of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, is in several ways the exact opposite of Oslo, the last drama about the Palestinian-Israel conflict to run in New York.

Oslo, which won the 2017 Tony for Best Play, was American playwright J.T. Rogers’ attempt at a balanced look at the high-level negotiations that led to the first Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. The Siege is Palestinian playwright Nabil Al-Raee and his co-director Zoe Lafferty’s ground-level look, from a Palestinian point of view, at a half dozen of the people who were holed up in the church, one of the holiest sites in the Christian religion, for the 39-day standoff. It is produced by the Freedom Theatre, a Palestinian company in the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, which is presenting the play for the first time in the United States, at NYU’s Skirball Center through October 22.

Full review at DC Theatre Scene

Click on any photograph by Baraa Sharqawi. Skip Schiel or Ian Douglas to see them enlarged.

Faisal Abualhayjaa, Alaa Abu Gharbieh, and Ghantus Wael

Rabee Hanani

Rabee Hanani and Alaa Abu Gharbieh

Faisal Abualhayjaa, Motaz Malhees, Alaa Abu Gharbieh, Hassan Taha (lying down)

Alaa Abu Gharbieh

Faisal Abualhayjaa and Hassan Taha

Faisal Abualhayjaa

Rabee Hanani

Faisal Abualhayjaa and Hassan Taha

Filed under DC Theatre Scene, New York Theater, Off-Broadway, Photographs, politics, Theater Reviews Tagged with Freedom Theatre, Palestinian theater

Time and the Conways Review: Elizabeth McGovern And Her Uninteresting Family

October 13, 2017 Leave a comment

Elizabeth McGovern, Charlotte Parry and Anna Baryshnkov in 1919, in Time and the Conways

Matthew James Thomas, Gabriel Ebert, Steven Boyer and Charlotte Parry in 1937, in Time and the Conways

It took five minutes into the revival of “Time and the Conways” starring Elizabeth McGovern to realize this was no “Downton Abbey,” the TV series that for six seasons featured McGovern as Lady Grantham; it took another ten minutes to support a city ordinance that would ban American actors from affecting upper-class British accents, especially shrill trills, on a Broadway stage; and after the 35 minutes of the first scene, I wondered why anybody would bring J.B. Priestley’s play back from the dead. The Roundabout production is the first time it’s been on Broadway since its debut in 1938, when it got mixed reviews (“a tenderly wistful play” Brooks Atkinson wrote, but “most of his characters are uninteresting people”), and closed after just 32 performances despite a cast that included Dame Sybil Thorndike and a young Jessica Tandy.

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Filed under Broadway, New York Theater, Theater Reviews

Springsteen on Broadway Reviews: Simple, Intimate, Profound

October 13, 2017 Leave a comment

Bruce Springsteen sings 15 songs, and reads from a teleprompter to tell stories that were also in his year-old memoir, “Born to Run,” in a Broadway debut that has the critics cheering; some swooning.