Stage and Cinema sent Harvey Perr back to the east coast to catch up on this very busy time of the season in New York City theater, when new shows open one right after the other and Tony fever is in the air. Here’s a hearty and tasty stew of what he saw go down. [...]
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GOING NOWHERE Regarded as one of Bruce Springsteen’s best works, the 1982 album Nebraska has inspired tributes from Johnny Cash, Aimee Mann, Chris Cornell and other artists moved by its bleak look at ordinary life. Now Tympanic Theatre Company has brought its tales of murder, mortality and the unfairness of life to the stage with [...]
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A CAPTIVATING GENDER-BENDING STORY In Michael Premsrirat’s thoroughly engaging The Girl Most Likely To, an unnamed teenage Boy (a winning Tobit Raphael) is, and always has been, in the wrong body. Donning women’s clothes is so natural to him, that he puts on a wig, slips on a skimpy outfit (which shows off his comely [...]
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THE PAINT JOB ON THIS PROMISING MUSICAL NEEDS DARKER COLORS NPR’s This American Life is where I first heard about the 1997 film Hands on a Hard Body, which documented a 1995 dealership-sponsored contest in Texas. The rules were simple: whoever could keep their hand on a brand-new pickup truck the longest got the keys; [...]
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RIGHT UP HALF-BAKED ALLEY Keith Stevenson’s writing in Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd. unsteadily walks a line between high and low comedy, veering more often toward sit-comism. More skit than play, this quasi-story tells of a redneck saint who uses doe urine for cologne (Mr Stevenson) and the bottom-feeders he attempts to redeem [...]
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DEAFTRAP Writer Stephen Sachs and the Fountain Theatre have come up with what would appear to be a fresh approach to Rostand’s classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this modern-day version, Cyrano is no longer the joyful poet, soldier, and owner of a humongous proboscis, but a frustrated poet who happens to be deaf. He [...]
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THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have expected from the author of Proof: clean, articulate, measured, intelligent, carefully researched, and, finally, Saharan-dry and as dull as a persistently cloudy [...]
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THE UNEXPECTED JOYS OF CHILDREN AT PLAY It would be easy to say, given his new film, I Wish, and his other classic film about children, Nobody Knows, that Hirokazu Kore-Eda has a way with children; but given the small body of authentic masterpieces he has directed – Maborosi, After Life, Still Walking – it [...]
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PLENTY OF NOTHING Even before The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, it was fraught with controversy. A New York Times puff piece on the Boston American Repertory Theater production was pitched in such a way that director Diane Paulus, adaptor Suzan Lori-Parks, and star Audra McDonald came across as arrogant, which inspired Stephen Sondheim to [...]
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A SMALL LITTLE CREATES HUGE RESULTS For its scintillating revival of A Little Night Music, the Writers’ Theatre has condensed the Stephen Sondheim classic into a chamber musical. The action is played out on a small thrust stage enclosed by lacy floor-to-ceiling curtains. The only set is a raised two-step platform in the middle of [...]
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