Michael Dale - Page 7

For those of us who began making regular pilgrimages to Palsson's Supper Club back in the early 80s to see Gerard Alessandrini's smart new revue pack with parody lyrics and impersonations that skewered the gods and goddesses of Times Square, Broadway just isn't Broadway without FORBIDDEN BROADWAY around.

As Maira Kalman's illustrated curtain rises for David Byrne's choreographed concert, which takes its name from his 2018 album, American Utopia, the singer/songwriter is seriously contemplating the human brain. Specifically, his recently-acquired knowledge that that the abundance of neural connections in an infant's brain decreases significantly as the tyke grows into adulthood.

Bucking the current trend of rewriting and reinterpreting older musicals to suit current sensibilities, director Michael Mayer's buoyant and bouncy revival of Little Shop of Horrors, with a story involving a hero who murders and a leading lady who defends the actions of her physically abusive boyfriend, pretty much delivers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's 1982 smash hit with the same brand of beloved quirkiness that has made it a favorite for high schools, community theatres and regional productions for over three decades.

Long before Broadway's saturation with jukebox musicals and song catalog shows, Ben Bagley, a producer of modestly-financed Off-Broadway revues, added to what was then musical theatre's long title trend (HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESSWITHOUT REALLY TRYING, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM...) and created a charming revue titled THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER.

'Beyond her somewhat forgiving brown eyes,' the subject of Adam Rapp's subtly riveting character study, The Sound Inside says of herself, 'your narrator could be described as unremarkable. In that thorny subjective bureau of classification known as the Looks Department, if she's being brutally honest with herself, she'd say she's perhaps four or five degrees beyond mediocre, also known as 'sneakily attractive.' She is the equivalent of a collectible plate mounted to a wall.'

The preteens dressed in their matinee finest seemed to be having a swell time when this critic attended The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical. So really, if this review seems less than enthusiastic, it's written with the full understanding that pleasing an overly-seasoned playgoer who, until recently, thought this was going to be a jukebox musical about some songwriter named Percy Jackson, is not a priority.

A version of American, and of American musical theatre, as seen through a Chinese lens as inaccurate as Rodgers and Hammerstein's lens when focused on Siam.

The countless number of pink plastic flamingoes populating the upstage reaches is your second clue that director Tripp Cullman, that master of finding touching emotions through a quirkily altered reality, does not have naturalism on his mind for Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo.

Songwriter Ross Golan has frequently ranked high in the pop charts with hits for the likes of Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, and for his first venture into musical theatre, he's got some pretty high-ranking stars on his team as well, in director Thomas Kail, music supervisor/arranger/orchestrator Alex Lacamoire and, most valuably, powerhouse singer/actor Joshua Henry.

It may not be recognized by the U.N., or by any other nation, but ever since 1967, when squatter Paddy Roy Bates, a retired British army major, declared it so, the Principality of Sealand, located on an abandoned British fort built in international waters off the coast of Suffolk during World War II, has its claimed sovereignty.

If there ever was a demand for greater representation on Broadway stages for straight, single, cisgender white guys in their 50s who are insensitive to the women he manages to date and have sex with, Tracy Letts' Linda Vista would surely fill the void. A sort of 21st Century toxic male take on Paddy Chayefsky's classic 'Marty', Letts' new one has its funny moments, and maybe even a bit of poignancy here and there, but is it worth spending nearly three hours watching some full-of-himself average lug continually screw up his romantic opportunities?

The desire to see our current president out of office as soon as possible can be regarded as a bit of common ground between the five conservatives depicted on stage and the liberals who traditionally populate the vast majority of seats at non-profit Off-Broadway theatres.  The ground most likely collapses, however, when it comes to how they regard the prospect of a Mike Pence presidency.

As explained in his program notes, playwright Jeff Augustin moved from Miami to attend college in Boston; envisioning New England as a liberal mecca where he could pursue his American Dream while freely exploring his identity. What he found was a part of the country he describes as a?oedeeply steeped in whiteness,a?? where people of color are regarded only in terms of their race-related experiences, rather than people living the full spectrum of human existence.

Slave Play ventures into subject matter the likes of which this playgoer has never seen presented on Broadway, and does so in a bold, even outlandish manner that should be admired and welcomed. This older straight white critic won't claim to get everything the 30-year-old gay African-American playwright is saying, but if voices like his-those that have long been nurtured and developed by non-profit Off-Broadway-can be commercially successful on Broadway, the fabled boulevard can advance just a little closer to truly being the artistic center of American theatre.

Say what you will about ANYTHING GOES and KISS, ME KATE, but for this musical theatre lover, there's no finer Cole Porter score than the one he whipped up for the 1929 hit, Fifty Million Frenchmen.

You might call John Kevin Jones the 'resident author' of East 4th Street's 1832 landmark Merchant's House Museum, though not in the traditional sense.

With its moniker giving a nod to John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme,' the fast and funny improv hip-hop show created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tommy Kail and Anthony Veneziale started playing gigs around town way back during Broadway's pre-rap era, leading to an Off-Broadway production last season that has more or less transferred to the Booth Theatre.

With its title taken from our 36th president's campaign slogan, Robert Schenkkan's exciting and energetic drama ALL THE WAY won the popular vote on the 2014 Tony Award Best Play ballot. Directed at a full gallop by Bill Rauch, its twenty-member cast (many playing multiple roles) portrayed a familiar assortment of 1960s politicians, public leaders, journalists and supportive spouses, all trying to let their voices be heard above the cacophony of American politics.

Imagine if Henry Higgins had wanted Eliza to end up with Freddy all along and you'll get a sense of where George Bernard Shaw was heading with his 1898 comedy of political maneuvering, Caesar and Cleopatra, which premiered over a dozen years before his more enduring classic, PYGMALION.

Even the most jaded New York playgoers who may start feeling a bit blasé about entering a theatre and seeing a large pool of water on the stage (Jeremy O. Harris' DADDY and Lucas Hnath's RED SPEEDO are two recent examples) will undoubtedly be intrigued by the sumptuous display of aquatic symbolism greeting them at the Park Avenue Armory for director Satoshi Miyagi's entrancing staging of Shigetake Yaginuma's translation of Sophocles' Antigone.