Michael Dale - Page 5

After playing downtown's Lucille Lortel Theater last as year as part of Red Bull's season, director Erica Schmidt's psychologically intriguing Shakespeare adaptation titled MAC BETH moves north for a remounting for the Hunter Theater Project.

'Parenting is just guessing. Anyone who says different is lying and their children hate them.'

Good drama needn't call attention to itself and certainly a subtle, introspective theatre piece can provide an enormous impact, but if there's anything of intrigue lying beneath the surface of Rona Munroe's stage adaptation of novelist Elizabeth Strout's 2016 best-seller My Name is Lucy Barton (Strout is granted authorship credit), it wasn't apparent to this reviewer.

Plenty of those who weren't nodding their heads in agreement reacted with incredulousness or perhaps a big guffaw three years ago when Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on 'Meet The Press' to defend White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's statements about the size of the crowd at Donald Trump's inaugural with the phrase 'alternative facts.'

'Europe was pushing against me, so I just kept pushing back,' writes Selina Thompson in her autobiographical solo drama of cultural discovery, salt.

To this very frequent theatre-goer, the most exciting and gratifying development on New York stages since 2010 has been the growing number of productions that, before hitting it big on Broadway, graced the stages of the city's non-profit Off-Broadway companies.

Born in 1901, Austro-Hungarian playwright and novelist ?-dön von Horváth spent the latter of his 36 years warning against the growing threat of European fascist regimes before being fatally struck by a falling tree branch.

When you consider that the two best-known plays by American authors dealing with the AIDS epidemic, Larry Kramer's THE NORMAL HEART and Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA, are both decades old and set in the 1980s, it's no wonder if playgoers tend to think of the crisis as something of the past which is now primarily under control. Even Matthew Lopez's current, THE INHERITANCE, though set in the 21st Century, focuses on the loss of gay men of that preceding generation.

A world-famous director can suffer a creative block during a midlife crisis, an unsinkable ship can go under on its initial voyage and death can even take a holiday. These are just three examples of how, when penned by composer/lyricist Maury Yeston, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN THE THEATER.

As usual, the family-focused New Victory Theater was packed with kids the afternoon this reviewer took in the charms and delights of Cirque Mechanics' 42FT-A MENAGERIE OF MECHANICAL MARVELS, but you won't need the little ones around to have a great time at their display of strength, acrobatics and humor that's small in size but big on personality.

If you're like this reviewer, you're a sucker for stories about young people loudly and aggressively voicing their rebellions through art. Three years ago, screenwriter/director John Carney's indie hit 'Sing Street' told of a beaten-down 1980s Dublin teenage lad who forms a rock band initially to impress a girl, but then finds it as an outlet to write and perform songs expressing his range towards the adults who are supposed to be his role models. (Oh yeah, and he writes a song to try and make the girl like him, too.)

Since its first publication in 1843, Charles Dickens' holiday classic, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, has been adapted countless times for various stages, screens and pages, but undoubtedly the most authentic presentations of the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts who assist in his transformation into a kind and generous soul were the numerous live readings the author gave during the last 18 years of his life.

At least once a year, this reviewer feels compelled to take to his keyboard and urge any representatives of the MacArthur Foundation to bestow one of their a?oeGenius Granta?? fellowships to Company XIV's founding artistic director Austin McCormick, who throughout this young century has conceived, directed and choreographed some of the most joyfully thrilling theatre to be experienced in New York.

As played by Judith Ivey and Ken Narasaki in Samuel D. Hunter's touching and emotion-twisting drama Greater Clements, Maggie and Billy seem like the kind of couple who would have spent many happy decades together after being high school sweethearts, had Maggie's father, a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific, not forbidden her from getting further involved with the Japanese-American young man.

'Don't worry, you can laugh. Your children don't get the jokes,' the wise guy British comic Paul Dabeck, a/k/a The Trickster glibly remarks after a slightly naughty comment as he hosts THE ILLUSIONISTS: MAGIC OF THE HOLIDAYS.

Late in the second act of Jagged Little Pill, the new musical with a score derived primarily from Alanis Morissette's same-titled 1995 album, a group of young people, outraged at both the occurrence of a rape at a recent party and the existence of a culture that discourages the victim from telling her side of the story and a witness from revealing what he saw, hold a protest rally, carrying signs with slogans about believing those who say they were raped, respecting the refusal (or the incapability) of consent and how rape and rape culture effects all people, regardless of gender.

'We're going to bond, Alan, and that means you have to pay attention to everything I say,' the title character of George Eastman's HARRY TOWNSEND'S LAST STAND informs his son a minute or so into the proceedings.

Time stands still but life goes on might be one way of looking at Will Eno's charming and sweetly philosophical The Underlying Chris, receiving a fine premiere production directed by Kenny Leon at Second Stage.

Roughly two months ago American Theatre announced that for the second time in the past three seasons, Lauren Gunderson has topped their list of the most-produced playwrights in the country, her 33 professional productions among the 385 Theatre Communications Group's member theatres easily surpassing second place finisher Lauren Yee's 18, Tennessee Williams' 17 and more than doubling the totals of August Wilson and Neil Simon. She came in at #2 on last year's list after her first #1 finish the year before. (For the record, Shakespeare, who would surely rank #1 every season, is excluded.)

Six years before the world premiere of part one of his eventual Pulitzer-winning, monumental theatre epic ANGELS IN AMERICA, Tony Kushner was an inexperienced 26-year-old playwright who, as inexperienced 26-year-old playwrights are wont to do, wrote and directed an Off-Off Broadway play about young, optimistic bohemians living in Berlin during the rise of Adolf Hitler, which was regularly interrupted by a then-contemporary character offering commentary on the parallels between the emergence of the Third Reich and what was going on in America at the present time.