Ben Peltz - Page 9

In The Book of Mormon, the young Ugandan ingénue sings of a fantasy world she imagines where all the warlords are friendly.  And while in J.T. Rogers' intriguing drama of 1980s American foreign policy, Blood and Gifts, Afghan warlord Abdullah Kahn isn't exactly depicted as a saint, the author paints him as a man deeply dedicated to his family and the culture of his people who, like a typical American father, has job-related headaches (trying to secure weapons to defend his soil against the Soviets) and can't understand the music his son listens to (Rod Stewart's 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy' and Tina Turner's 'What's Love Got to Do with It').  As played by Bernard White, he is a humble and patriotic man of dignity.

White Christmas is just too good a musical to be limited to holiday-time productions.  Especially when you have Larry Blank's ultra-snazzy swing orchestrations vibrantly delivering a gold-plated assortment of Irving Berlin classics and Randy Skinner's dancers heating up the floor with some sensational tapping.

Theresa Rebeck provides plenty of mindless fun for the aggressively hip in Seminar, a breezy and enjoyable new comedy that will especially appeal to those who love showing off their urban cultural elitism by laughing very loudly at derogatory references to short stories published in The New Yorker and howling with yuks when a pseudo-intellectual mispronounces Inigo Jones' name while passionately giving a vapid description of the Yaddo artists' colony.

Known primarily for their excellent work with the Prospect Theatre Company (of which she is Producing Artistic Director and he is Resident Writer), the husband and wife team of director/bookwriter Cara Reichel and composer/lyricist/bookwriter Peter Mills are responsible for some of the most exciting and innovative musical theatre New York has seen since the company was founded in 1998.  And I daresay that with Iron Curtain, they and their inspired cohorts fully succeed in presenting one of their most difficult and risk-taking concepts yet; a fast, loud and funny 1950s-style musical comedy.

Just like Pope Paul VI figured when The Vatican told followers to go ahead and celebrate mass in the vernacular, John-Michael Tebelak figured that if the musical he penned with Stephen Schwartz, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, was going to connect with young people, it had to be done in their language.  So when Godspell premiered Off-Broadway forty years ago, the son of God and his disciples were depicted as soft pop and folk singing flower children who were too busy learning how to spread love to be bothered with sex, drugs and burning their draft cards.  Arriving on Broadway after Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, it was the first major rock musical that didn't scare the hell out of parents.

The funny thing about the truth is that it can be totally subjective and personal stories rarely involve just one person.  So, in Jon Robin Baitz's darkly comic drama, Other Desert Cities, when a depression-plagued writer tries curing the block following the success of her freshman effort with a book describing her view of her celebrity family's past tragedy, the holiday conversation crackles like a Yule log.

Three years ago I posted a review emphatically praising the Prospect Theatre Company's developmental production of Jim and Ruth Bauer's The Blue Flower, calling it, 'a unique, intelligent and wondrously creative evening of musical theatre' that 'skillfully tackles the tricky business of mixing the art of musical theatre with the anti-art movement of Dada.'  A German creation born amidst the rubble of the First World War, Dada was an artistic, literary and theatrical movement that attacked the sensibilities of a culture that could send millions of young men to slaughter by celebrating anarchy and irrationality.

If Hamlet is the reward an actor gets for showing great promise in his youth, King Lear is the thank you he receives in the latter years of a distinguished career.  At age 35, Sam Waterston's Hamlet became one of the iconic performances to come out of the New York Shakespeare Festival.  Now, at 71, The Public Theater's gift for his decades of admirable stage work is the opportunity to essay the maddening royal whose rages against a perceived betrayal by the mosT Loving of his three daughters sets in motion the bloody collapse of a monarchy.  Unfortunately, the gift has not been wrapped very attractively.

'You're an insane woman,' a character says to the protagonist in Michael John LaChiusa's intriguing new musical, Queen of The Mist.

The inner city teenage girls in Kirsten Greenidge's moving new drama, Milk Like Sugar, want only one thing from a boy... a baby.

Love's Labor's Lost, generally not regarded as a top tier Shakespeare effort, might get performed a lot more frequently if more productions were as fun and frisky as director Karin Coonrod's madcap mounting for The Public Theater's Public Lab series.

'Atmosphere is more real than truth,' explains Michael Evans, the narrating character recalling his childhood days in Brian Friel's thickly atmospheric Dancing At Lughnasa, now enjoying a warm and lovely mounting by Charlotte Moore at the Irish Rep.

Ever hear the one about the handicapped restroom at a Chinese tourist attraction that was labeled for English-speaking visitors, 'Deformed Man's Toilet'?  Or the one about the American trying to seduce his new Chinese love in her native language with the romantic words, 'Frog loves to pee'?  Such miscommunications serve as the inspiration for David Henry Hwang's hip, sexy and very funny comedy of cultural awkwardness, Chinglish.

I'm taking up a collection to buy Elaine Stritch a pair of pants.

The three one-act comedies that comprise Relatively Speaking are said to be connected by their common theme of finding humor blossoming from the family tree.  But really, don't be bothered with any themes or messages in this one.  All that matters is that playwrights Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen, director John Turturro and a company loaded with top-notch comedy actors have whipped up a solid evening of laughs that just gets funnier and funnier as the night goes on.

'I want you to know that the most exciting part I've received recently is my new knee.'

'Do you really think Apple doesn't know?'

After more than 14 months at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, Mark St. Germain's clever and engrossing two-hander, Freud's Last Session, which depicts a visit between the aging atheist Sigmund Freud and the young, newly-Christian C.S. Lewis, who had satirized the famed psychiatrist in The Pilgrim's Regress, is the latest in the trend of hit shows moving to New World Stages.

Back in 2009, The Public Theatre presented Tracy Scott Wilson's ambitious and very capable drama, The Good Negro, a work of fiction with one character obviously meant as a stand-in for DR. Martin Luther King, Jr., which depicted the leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement as everyday human beings with normal flaws, making what they accomplished a greater achievement than if it were done by the demi-gods some would make them out to be.  To that end, the playwright showed the fictional King and his colleagues orchestrating a fight for racial equality by pushing only the most media-friendly images of black people before the press.

When Jerry Herman was pegged by producer Gerard Oestreicher to write the score for a Broadway musical set in the fledgling State of Israel, he was a 28-year-old composer/lyricist mostly known for writing clever lyrics and snazzy tunes for Greenwich Village topical reviews like Nightcap and Parade.  But now, instead of writing for hip, downtown performers like Charles Nelson Reilly and Dody Goodman, he'd be penning a romantic score for opera stars Mimi Benzell and Robert Weede, with special comic relief material for Yiddish Theatre legend Molly Picon.