Michael Dale - Page 6

In 1979 a strike by the New Orleans Police Department led to the city's official cancellation of that year's public Mardi Gras celebration. The people of New Orleans had something else in mind.

'I've got a little favor to ask of you,' an American president asks the members of the Supreme Court on the night he's lost his re-election bid.

Marley is still dead to begin with, and near the end we're still reminded of Tiny Tim's observation, 'God bless Us, Every One!' But in between... Let's just say I never thought I'd have to fact-check the plot before reviewing a production of A Christmas Carol.

'In this town you're either a slut or a snob, no in-betweens,' explains the put-upon wife of a local celeb racecar driver in Abbie Spallen's tryptic of character studies, Pumpgirl, now getting a very well-acted production at the Irish Rep.

There is a firm, but understated strength that permeates the atmosphere during Broadbend, Arkansas, the beautifully realized two-person chamber musical created by composer Ted Shen and librettists Ellen Fitzhugh and Harrison David Rivers, depicting an event during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in one act and its legacy in the next.

'He thought of all the men who died in those years and what they might have become, what the world would look like today had they been allowed to end their story on their own terms. Eric wondered what his life would be like if he had not been robbed of a generation of mentors, of poets, of friends and, perhaps even lovers.'

Great comedy is often the byproduct of political scandal and those who humorously comment on the news often overshadow the newsmakers themselves.  You might say that more Americans learned about the controversies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon from watching The Smothers Brothers and Mort Saul, rather than Walter Cronkite.  For over forty years our perceptions of world leaders have been defined more by the impersonations seen on Saturday Night Live than by actual news clips.  And today there are a multitude of television hosts combining comedy with deep analysis and investigative journalism to editorialize on the goings-on of the current administration.

While there are many artistically pleasing moments to be savored on stage as the entrancingly funny Russian clown piece SLAVA'S SNOWSHOW returns to Broadway for a limited run through the holiday season, you can also have a heck of a good time if you just like having things thrown at you, dropped on you, sprayed at you or bouncing off of you.

The cleverest part of adaptor/director Erica Schmidt's new musical based on Edmond Rostand's classic CYRANO DE BERGERAC is that the two times a character makes mention of the title fellow's very large nose, there is a pause before the word, making it clear that the speaker was about to say something else, but thought better of it.

It's been a long-time point of pride among New Yorkers to be living in the most culturally and ethnically diverse spot on the planet, and given the history of the planet you can say that, comparatively, the city has done pretty well in encouraging a society of integration and acceptance.

Though her time on Broadway has been relatively brief up until now, Adrienne Warren is no stranger to dazzling theatre audiences with portrayals of legendary entertainers. She did it twice in her last outing, SHUFFLE ALONG, OR, THE MAKING OF THE MUSICAL SENSATION OF 1921 AND ALL THAT FOLLOWED, playing both the exuberant Gertrude Saunders, whose cutesy singing would be appropriated by the white mainstream as the model for the iconic Betty Boop, and Florence Mills, one of the great singing artists of the early 20th Century.

Of the many common features shared by the eight (thus far) plays that make up playwright/director Richard Nelson's 'Rhinebeck Panorama' series, perhaps the most unusual is that they all take place on the date of their opening night at the Public Theater.

After enchanting Broadway sophisticates with his fizzy entertainments of the 1920s and 30s, Cole Porter went decidedly middle-brow at the start of the next decade with a trio of musicals about average Janes and Joes, all including some swell comical characters serving in the U.S, military.

For the past couple of years, the sumptuous vocals of bluesy diva Storm Marrero has been seducing New York audiences in the erotic theatre/dance productions created at Company XIV, but the Brooklyn-born artist has found more family-friendly surroundings as the new ringmaster of The Big Apple Circus.

It's a bit of a longshot, perhaps, but given the organization's tendency to honor less-than-traditional terpsichorean achievements, don't be too shocked if Raul Esparza is named as one of this season's Chita Rivera Award nominees as Outstanding Male Dancer in an Off-Broadway show.

'When shall we three meet again?' the eight weird sisters ask each other in unison at the outset of director John Doyle's Classic Stage Company production of Shakespeare's Macbeth, shaved down to 100 minutes.

Back in 1976, when Ntozake Shange's ravishingly written celebration of survival, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENOUGH, transferred from The Public Theater to The Booth, if would have been a safe bet to say that Broadway had seen nothing like it before.

There's more than one meaning to the title of Sylvia Khoury's relevant, absorbing and quite heartbreaking drama, Power Strip, being granted an excellent premiere production by Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3.

On June 3rd, 2017, 25-year-old United States Air Force Intelligence Specialist Veteran Reality Winner was arrested due to evidence that she had leaked to online news source The Intercept a classified government report suggesting that Russian hackers had accessed a voting software supplier, enabling them to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election.

a?oeThis boy's club crap can't last. One day women will figure this out... And the whole world will change on that day when women take hold of their power.a??