Michael Dale - Page 10

It's the players, more so than the play, that's the thing in director Erica Schmidt's psychologically intriguing Shakespeare adaptation titled Mac Beth. As with the current Daniel Fish-directed Broadway production of OKLAHOMA!, the focus of the evening is not so much on the text, but on the characters the actors are portraying who are portraying the characters in the text.

'This is an unscripted show. I have no idea what I'm going to do,' the internationally acclaimed composer and pianist Yanni tells his audience at the outset of his debut Broadway performance.

'I guess I want you to play the most beautiful music ever written and dedicate it to us,' a hopeful romantic requests of the radio station he's phoned from his date's apartment.

One of the many skills of the extraordinary, detail-oriented stage actor Marin Ireland is a habit of being so good that she can lift the audience's perception of a play that isn't quite there. For example, a year ago at this time, as she was making Tennessee Williams' SUMMER AND SMOKE, generally regarded as one of the great playwright's B-level efforts, appear to be just as rich and dramatically thick as A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.

Though the 1976 musical SO LONG, 174th STREET didn't even last a fortnight on Broadway, it wouldn't be surprising to see the York Theater Company's completely delightful revised version, ENTER LAUGHING, THE MUSICAL, return the Joseph Stein/Stan Daniels effort to the main stem someday, especially if director/adaptor Stuart Ross' slam-bang mounting keeps getting a little snazzier and a little funnier every time they bring it back.

There's a scene in poet-turned-playwright Aziza Barnes' fast and furiously funny debut stage piece, BLKS, where the main characters, a trio of black Brooklyn women in their 20s 'out on a mission to resurrect our fly back' find themselves at the corner of Prince Street and Broadway, where the N,R subway station entrance displays the faces of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in an ad for their Netflix comedy series, 'Grace and Frankie,' a show about two women who are there for each other during life's rough patches. In another time, the station might have shown an ad for 'Girls' or 'Sex and The City,' or any other such high-profile program where the default setting for the women who stick together is white.

Playwright Chisa Hutchinson, describes Constance Daley, the character who voices her solo play, Proof of Love, as 'close as you can get to a WASP while being black.'

Latecomers to director Terry Kinney's finely-acted Signature Theatre revival of Sam Shepard's 1977 dysfunctional family drama, Curse of the Starving Class, will miss the showstopping bit of stagecraft that opens the production, as set designer Julian Crouch's kitchen interior of a worse-for-wear California Valley farmhouse literally becomes a house divided, splitting horizontally with the top half appearing to crumble upwards.

Though the world-famous 35-year-old Montreal-based entertainment troupe Cirque du Soleil has never been known for making political statements with their extravaganzas of culture and athleticism - and while the timing is undoubtedly just coincidental - one can't help at least a passing thought of how appropriate it is to have their glorious new showpiece, LUZIA: A WAKING DREAM OF MEXICO, on tour during a time when America's president continually attempts to villainize our southern neighbor.

That crazy cacophony of choreographic chaos that careens across the City Center stage shortly after the commencement of Act II is the main reason for Encores! to bring back the smash hit 1947 musical comedy High Button Shoes.

Don't let the abundance of cuteness fool you. Isabella Rossellini's LINK LINK CIRCUS is one of the brainiest shows in town.

Though Shakespeare's The Tempest commences with a spectacular act of revenge, director Laurie Woolery stresses in her program notes for Mobile Unit's thoroughly enrapturing new production her intention to highlight the play's moments of forgiveness, leaving audiences to ponder 'what it means to use one's power to heal rather than to destroy and what it means to break the a cycle of retribution and violence.'

If you're like this male theatre critic, you'll spend the first twenty minutes or so of Halley Feiffer's The Pain of My Belligerence wondering why the woman at the center of the story is putting up with the atrocious immature behavior of the guy who's her arrogant and disrespectful dinner date. If you're like the woman who was my theatre companion for the evening, you'll know exactly what's going on.

'Holy crap! A ballad already?', sneers the leading man as he interrupts the opening song of his starring vehicle; a funeral dirge sung by his co-star, backed by a chorus of mourners.

Long before the term clickbait entered into pop culture infamy, Chief Editor Larry Lamb of the Fleet Street tabloid The Sun was offering his staff a bonus every time the eye-catching words 'Win,' 'Free' and 'Love' appeared on the front page.

Following in the footsteps of NETWORK and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Robert Horn (book) and David Yazbek's (score) musical comedy Tootsie continues this Broadway season's welcome trend of adapting classic, decades-old source material into brand new stage pieces that examine familiar stories through a contemporary lens.

While many scoff at Broadway's habit of bringing back so many American classics from decades ago, a well-timed revival of an early work by one of our great masters might reveal a bit about how the young, emerging voices of another era were dealing with the same kinds of issues that we still debate (or avoid) at family dinners today.

Don't let the title scare you. All you need to know about Shakespeare's infamously bloody revenge tragedy before laughing yourself silly at Taylor Mac's Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, is that the Bard's final dead body count among Roman nobles is exceedingly high.

'Would you rule justly?' the ancient Greek philosopher who serves as title character of Tim Blake Nelson's drama Socrates asks a fellow citizen who claims he would do a better job than the current political leaders. 'I'd rule to make Athens great,' answers the metal-craftsman, whose support of the current war might be influenced by the income he receives molding breastplates and spears for soldiers.

'If the universe is infinite,' Laurie Metcalf, playing Laurie Metcalf, explains to the audience at the outset of Lucas Hnath's sharp and funny bit of political fan fiction, Hillary and Clinton, 'then that means that everything that happens in it happens many times, over and over, and that that means there are an infinite number of planet earths.'