Ben Peltz - Page 15

Our Postmodern Town might be a more descriptive title for Will Eno's Middletown, a play that coats the Thornton Wilder standard of normal American life as it pertains to the cycle of life and death with a whitewash of Samuel Beckett absurdity.  And if even half of the play's two hours contained the vivacity of the first few minutes, where David Garrison rhythmically recites an all-inclusive list describing any possible type of audience member who might be in attendance - concluding with his pointing out the fire exits - a trip to Middletown might prove a worthy excursion.

Early on in Lisa Kron's politically-charged romantic comedy/drama, In The Wake, audiences are reminded of a scene that traditionally takes place in many American households every fourth Thursday of November.  While the rest of the family is ready to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, there's one person pleading to keep the television on for just a little longer, obsessed with the score and loudly complaining about the officiating.  Only this time it's Thanksgiving Day, 2000 and Kron's central character, Ellen (Marin Ireland), isn't concerned with a football game, but is jumping up and down in front of the MSNBC broadcast, wildly cheering for a come-from-behind Al Gore victory in the contested presidential election.

Three quarters of a century before a Frank Rich review had the power to close a Broadway show on opening night, New York City Police Commissioner William McAdoo accomplished the same feat with his pan of the 1905 American premiere of George Bernard Shaw's, Mrs. Warren's Profession.

Abigail Grotke... a real-life person named Abigail Grotke... has been collecting vintage books on relationship advice for 25 years, amassing over a thousand volumes published from 1822 to 1978, with titles such as The Unfair Sex, She Cooks to Conquer, How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What To Do With Him When You Get Him and A Virtuous Woman: Sex Life in Relation to the Christian Life.   In her archival website, Miss Abigail's Time Warp Advice, questions like, 'Is a man abnormal if he likes art and dislikes sports,' are answered by quoting the wisdom of experts like Fred Brown and Rudolf T. Kempton, authors of 1950's Sex Questions and Answers: A Guide to Happy Marriage ('Every normal man has a bit of woman in him and every woman contains some of the male in her personality.').

Perhaps not content with merely being the best comic actress on the New York stage, Jan Maxwell follows her hilarious turns in last season's revivals of The Royal Family and Lend Me A Tenor by refreshing her dramatic chops a with a riveting, edge of your seat performance in John Doyle's senses-tingling production of Arthur Kopit's 1978 drama, Wings.

'Let's see if we can do this without a microphone,' peeped Jo Sullivan Loesser, as she prepared to fill the 1,495-seat Town Hall with 'Somebody, Somewhere,' which she introduced in the 1956 original Broadway production of The Most Happy Fella.  While the age of the widow of the great Frank Loesser is a fact you'll not find via Google, let's just say she's a few decades beyond the point where audiences would expect to hear such lovely, expressive and, yes, loud soprano tones from an unamplified voice.  The house, still and silent for those few minutes of bliss, finally erupted with appreciative cheers for the brief reminder of a time when all Broadway musicals were sung that way.

As Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, inspired by the true story of a collection of miners who art history books now refer to as The Ashington Group, commences, the title characters are quite figuratively blank canvases.  Raised to spend nine hours a day working the northern English coal mines from the time they're still boys, the small gathering of fellows who decided they wanted to learn a bit about culture through weekly visits from a university art professor have never set foot in a gallery and know nothing of the great works most of their countrymen would recognize as part of common knowledge.  Their understanding is that there is some 'secret' behind art that only the elite know about, giving them the ability to determine what's good and what isn't.

For decades, the great and not-so-great vocal artists of cabarets and nightclubs have put their own personal spins on the songs of the sumptuous Noel Coward catalogue; changing a tempo here, adjusting a rhythm there.  Similarly, adaptor/director Emma Rice makes a marvelous party out of her theatrical riff on Coward's bitter sweet one-act romance, Still Life, by way of the play's 1945 film version, Brief Encounter.  The happy result is a stage play where characters occasionally dissolve into glorious black and white screen images or evolve into musicAl Hall entertainers singing commentary on the tense and understated love story.

They say we've become a society anesthetized from violent images since the days when graphic television news footage from Vietnam helped spark the largest anti-war movement this country had seen up until that time.  But the video clips from Gaza shown in Pulitzer-winning journalist Lawrence Wright's solo piece, The Human Scale, are enough to test any playgoer's stomach.

When asked how she kept her voice strong and healthy week after week while starring on Broadway, Ethel Merman famously quipped, 'You have to live like a f***ing nun!'  If that's the case then I suppose Scott Shepherd should be up for sainthood any day now.  In Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service's cover-to-cover, word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Shepherd reads the narrating role of Nick Carraway, which I'm guessing is roughly 75% of the text in this theatre piece which, at the performance I attended, began at 3pm and let out around 11:20, allowing for two fifteen minute intermissions and an hour and fifteen minute dinner break.

Though set designer Anna Louizos supplies a realistically grimy subway platform for Primary Stages' mounting of the new a cappella musical In Transit, the characters scurrying underground are disappointingly squeaky clean.

It's always a good sign when you walk into a theatre for a comedy and right away the set is making you laugh.  Such was the case for me with the playful space Jo Winiarski created for the Pearl Theatre Company's uproariously funny mounting of The Sneeze, Michael Frayn's vaudevillian octet of comedies adapted from early Chekhov one-acts and short stories.

Castro's invading, integration is the new frontier and you have to be much larger than a size 6 to be considered plus-size.  Welcome to the '60s and welcome to Paper Mill's big, bubbly and thoroughly loveable production of Hairspray.

Michael Frayn's 1975 comedy, Alphabetical Order, is the type of play that, either as a compliment or as a dismissal, American audiences are likely to label as 'very British.'  Its humor is subtle, its themes are sub-textual and the characters all talk in these funny accents.  But even those who appreciate the delicacy of that type of play may find this early work by the versatile writer who went on to pen the riotous Noises Off and the heady Copenhagen a little padded and lacking in both humor and bite.  Still, director Carl Forsman and the Keen Theatre Company serve up a lively production that boasts its charms, particularly in the performances of the engaging ensemble.

While Sarah Ruhl and director Rebecca Taichman haven't exactly made children's theatre out of Virginia Woolf's transgendering 1928 novel, Orlando (unless you approve of full adult nudity in your kiddie matinees), there are generous doses of playful whimsy in this well-mounted CSC production; though the playwright's approach seems to dilute the material's effectiveness a bit.

Perhaps it's a sign of economic hardship continuing to plague Off-Broadway that not one drop of V-8 Vegetable Juice Cocktail is poured over the leading lady's head, nor is even one slice of watermelon smacked onto an actor's skull in Ivo van Hove's deliciously stark and chilly interpretation of Lillian Hellman's classic 1939 melodrama, The Little Foxes.  The director whose proclivity for covering characters in chocolate sauce and ketchup must have done a number on the dry-cleaning budgets for New York Theatre Workshop's productions of Hedda Gabler and The Misanthrope, comes clean in this one, but don't be foolhardy enough to expect anything near a traditional mounting of this tale of greed and gender politics among the siblings of an aristocratic Southern family.

I suppose it's about time someone came up with a name for that genre of plays where a handful of actors each impersonate a varied assortment of characters to tell a sprawling story, i.e., The 39 Steps, The Complete Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged).  When that jolly day arrives certainly Chris Weikel's hilarious Charles Dickens send-up, Penny Penniworth: A Story of Great Good Fortune, should be regarded as one of its more sparkling examples.

There's a strong essence of familiarity to be whiffed at Edward Albee's latest, Me, Myself & I, especially if you have fond memories of his far superior absurdist effort, The Play About The Baby.  Once again there's a bickering couple bearing a strong resemblance to an older version of ...Virginia Woolf?'s George and Martha, especially in their dominating relationship to a younger couple and the matter of a child who may or may not exist.  This isn't necessarily a flaw in the piece, but when farce isn't funny, when wordplay lacks crackle and when a play about identity can't seem to claim its own, the mind tends to wander to sunnier days.

After reading far too many obituaries claiming, while not exactly mourning, the death of the Broadway musical, insisting that the art form can only be revived by injections of the kind of music that appeals to today's young audiences, I decided to take a night off from cabarets and piano bars a couple of Sundays ago to see what kind of songs were going to save the hallowed grounds of Gershwin, Porter and Rodgers.

It's not shaping up to be a very promising season for alumni of The Carol Burnett Show.  Just like the recently closed Viagra Falls, Kenny Solms' It Must Be Him offers a terrific company of comical pros working hard to inject any mirth possible into ninety minutes of tepid material.