Michael Dale - Page 22

With the audience seated family style at several long tables, director Andrew Neisler seats the actors at elevated places around the perimeter. As they talk across the room to each other, it becomes evident that we're supposed to imagine them as strangers who are actually seated in a group.

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (which really could be called Home For Christmas since that's the only holiday mentioned) is a 90-minute concert starring three vocalists who first gained fame by winning television talent programs.

Though her aggressive style of dishing out insults has earned her the title of standup comedy's Queen of Mean, Lisa Lampanelli comes somewhat closer to being the Empress of Empathy in her comedy revue about the serious subject of food and body image, STUFFED.

Like the city where it was born and nurtured, the American musical play differs from similar stage entertainments because it was developed by a combination of cultures merging into a unique new art form. It would be difficult to find greater evidence of this fortunate merger than in the musicals of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

When David Henry Hwang's 1988 Best Play Tony-winner M. BUTTERFLY, inspired by the romance between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Peking opera singer Shi Pei Pu, who the Frenchman didn't know was a) a Communist spy, and b) a man, first played on Broadway, there was a not so small detail that tended to baffle audience members.

When John Leguizamo's poignant, provocative and, yes, downright hilarious LATIN HISTORY FOR MORONS premiered at The Public Theater in March of this year, a country that was created by white people whose bloodlines go back to immigrants and refugees was, as it still is, debating the new president's policies regarding immigrants and refugees who are predominantly not white.

Sex is sex and rape is rape. That's the cut and dry explanation we often hear nowadays. And while there are obvious instances where any reasonable person would determine that rape has occurred, there are also those instances that straddle the line between one and the other, where human subjectivity determines the label. Where, as demonstrated in Anna Ziegler's absorbing and thought-provoking new drama, ACTUALLY, one partner can be sure the sex was consensual and the other can be sure it was rape.

To watch New York stage treasure Everett Quinton engaged in his classic brand of silliness - or, to be more accurate, ridiculousness - is just as fulfilling a cultural experience as watching a great tragedian immersed in a dramatic Shakespearean role.

If there were any concerns that David Yazbek and Itamar Moses' exquisitely melodic and introspective musical, THE BAND'S VISIT would have lost any of its understated beauty while moving from the intimate confines of its Off-Broadway home provided by The Atlantic Theater Company to its new Broadway digs at Broadway's Barrymore, have no fear.

he sudden act of violence that occurs early on in on Julia Cho's urgent and sensitive drama OFFICE HOUR, is certainly not unexpected. The opening scene sets up the audience to be prepared for exactly this kind of thing to happen.

To give credit where it's due, Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning STRANGE INTERLUDE is perhaps the best play imaginable about women's sexuality that could have been written by a 35-year-old American man in 1923.

Back in 1931, when the firm Kaufman, Ryskind, Gershwin & Gershwin had the novel idea to infuse that stodgy old music/theatre entertainment, the Broadway operetta, with the jauntiness of showtune and a chaotic mixture of comedic highbrow and lowbrow to tell the tale of an unqualified, but charismatic American politician who rides a wave of popular support for his questionable platform to the United States presidency, musical comedies typically employed a bit more on-stage and front-of-stage talent than audiences are accustomed to seeing nowadays.

As anyone who has ever seen A CHORUS LINE will tell you, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger's screen classic THE RED SHOES has been tantalizing young dancers with dreams of ballet stardom since premiering in 1948.

To the average working stiffs among us, money is a tangible thing. We can count it by the number of dead presidents in our wallets and the reasonably manageable digits in our modest portfolios. But to the financially elite, figures ranging in billions on top of billions become so impossible to represent as legal tender that they're said to take on an abstract, nearly fictional quality.

If the spot-on hilarity of first scene of director/playwright John Patrick Shanley's THE PORTUGUESE KID could be replicated for the play's remaining three-quarters, this review would be happily exclaiming that New York has got a solid, old-school sexy romantic comedy in town.

When Sophocles' OEDIPUS REX was first performed over 400 years B.C., the Greek chorus that opened the play wore the traditional identical masks. But in Luis Alfaro's contemporary adaptation, OEDIPUS EL REY, the unifying costume piece for the Latino men who make up the choro is the orange jumpsuits worn by inmates of the California State Prison in Delano.

As societies in post-apocalyptic stories go, the one envisioned by playwright Zoe Kazan in her insightful relationship drama AFTER THE BLAST, seems to have it pretty good.

Date movie would be too tepid a phrase to describe director Tom Gustafson's sizzling film adaptation of Michael John LaChiusa's tensely erotic 1993 musical drama, HELLO AGAIN. The term foreplay flick comes to mind.

The term 'alternative facts' wasn't part of the popular lexicon when Stephen Adly Guirgis' superb drama of public morality and personal convictions, JESUS HOPPED THE 'A' TRAIN premiered in 2000, but a major point of play is how, in our legal system, a lie can be regarded as truth when believed from a different angle.

It was thirty-five years ago when FORBIDDEN BROADWAY's genius creator/lyricist Gerard Alessandrini first collaborated, so to speak, with Tony-winning composer/lyricist Maury Yeston. That's when he spoofed New York theatre's then obsession with religion-themed played by twisting the lyric of NINE's Be Italian to Be a Catholic.