Michael Dale - Page 30

The term 'generation gap' first came into use during the 1960s, when sociologists and trend-watchers began noting the extreme differences in lifestyle, politics, fashion, music and language between the American parents who fought the Axis in World War II and the Baby Boom teenagers they raised.

No, you didn't fall asleep on the Q train on your way to Broadway's latest musical and accidentally wind up at the largest, and perhaps rowdiest Russian supper club in all of Brighton Beach.

The symbolic nature of Suzan-Lori Parks' 1990 free-form dramatic riff, THE DEATH OF THE LAST BLACK MAN IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD AKA THE NEGRO BOOK OF THE DEAD is made apparent to viewers as soon as they open their programs and see the characters have names like 'Black Woman With Fried Drumstick,' 'Before Columbus' and 'Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork.'

It can be safely assumed that the majority of playgoers filing into The Public's LuEsther Theater for the 7:30 opening night performance of author/director Richard Nelson's Women Of a Certain Age on Tuesday night took their seats expecting to see Hillary Clinton declared the President-Elect of The United States sometime during the party that followed.

The subject of sensitive, well-intentioned white people growing up unaware of their own privilege has been receiving more and more attention in American, but back in 1982, South African playwright Athol Fugard approached the issue as experienced in his apartheid-infested homeland.

The doorway to the neighborhood bar designed with great detail by John Lee Beatty for director Kate Whoriskey's tense and finely-acted mounting of Lynn Nottage's hard-hitting new drama, Sweat, is decorated with a neon light advertising Yuengling Beer, the Pennsylvania brew that dates back to 1829.

Placed throughout Anna Deavere Smith's revealing new theatre piece, NOTES FROM THE FIELD, are violent video clips that have become all too familiar to any American with access to YouTube.

An older man makes it clear that he intends to have his way with a young woman who trusted him. When she struggles, he assures her that she won't be believed if she says she wasn't asking for it, and she knows he's right.

Playwright Qui Nguyen is a tricky fellow. First he has an actor appear on stage, claiming to be him, welcoming the audience with the usual pre-show ritual about turning off cell phones and warning against any form of recording.

The fact that William Finn and James Lapine's 1992 Broadway musical FALSETTOS began as two separate one-act musicals - parts two and three of a trilogy - that premiered Off-Broadway nine years apart makes it unique theatre piece, especially when you consider that the heighted awareness of the AIDS epidemic that occurred during those nine years gave each one, despite being about the same characters, significantly different tones.

In Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning musical SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, the 'art of making art' can be less about applying paint to a canvas as it is about applying a signature to a check.

The tensest, most dramatic moments in director Anne Kauffman's premiere production of Adam Bock's A Life occur whenever designer Laura Jellinek's large unit set slowly rotates horizontally, like a rotisserie, to change locations. The loud extended creaking that accompanies every change sounds like something is about to snap and make the whole thing collapse.

Those who have lived through it may agree that war is hell, but for the central character of David Hare's 1978 drama, Plenty, the excitement of confusing, distracting and demoralizing the Germans in occupied France was a slice of heaven compared with living as a woman in post-war England.

Bright bursts of light imitating the effects of flash powder photography capture the opening and closing images of all three acts of director Jack O'Brien's raucously good revival of the classic 1928 comedy, THE FRONT PAGE.

While Jonathan Larson's RENT, his 1996 East Village adaptation of Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa's LA BOHEME, presents a romanticized look at bohemians living in poverty for the sake of their art, his TICK, TICK… BOOM!, now getting a superb Off-Broadway revival via Keen Company, is more of a reality check.

Despite a string of bad fortune that has kept them moving from venue to venue to venue, the genius director/choreographer Austin McCormick's Company XIV, with its distinct style mixing classical dance, burlesque, acrobatics and pop music presented in an erotic baroque fashion inspired by the courtly entertainments of France's Louis XIV, remains one of the most exciting performing arts companies New York has to offer.

Though solo performer Sarah Jones is rightfully celebrated for her exacting skills that quickly morph herself into a seemingly limitless collection of female and male characters of diverse ages, ethnicities, nationalities and personalities, she doesn't seem to get proper credit as a playwright.

'A New Version by Stephen Karam' is the way the text is described in the credits for director Simon Godwin's production of Anton Chekhov's 1904 classic THE CHERRY ORCHARD, now being presented by Roundabout. Words like 'translation' and 'adaptation' are noticeably set aside.

If you've ever sat down with a potential lover to have a serious talk about where your relationship is and how fast it's developing, you may be pursuing a lost cause, according to German physicist Werner Heisenberg's 1927 Uncertainty Principle.

Weird old people saying and doing outrageously inappropriate things have been a beloved comedy staple ever since the time Aristophanes handed a few zingers to the dirty old men and elderly activist women of LYSISTRATA.