In today’s suburbia—depressed, unemployed, foreclosed, lonely—it’s a short trip to hell.
Or so it is strongly suggested in Detroit, a tense, terrific, funny new play by Lisa D’Amour that kicks off the new season at Playwrights Horizons. Read More
It’s perhaps no surprise that Chaplin, a biographical musical about the great silent-film comedian, cannot find its voice.
Not surprising, but a shame. Because this ambitious new musical, polished and expensive, the first major opening of the fall season, looks fantastic, boasts a talented cast and offers a tuneful, lushly melodic score. It just can’t pull itself together for three reels of coherent, comprehensible storytelling.
And—unlike Chaplin’s films—without a voice, this play doesn’t have much of a heart. Read More
It was the giant that got me.
Into the Woods, which opened last week as the second half of the Public Theater’s 50th anniversary season at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, is Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s melancholy musical mashup of classic fairy tales, with a second act that reminds us there’s no such thing as happily ever after. Read More
NEITHER THE GIRLS from Truman High School nor those from Jackson would put it quite so prosaically, but: Let’s hear three cheers for Bring It On, the cheerleading musical about those perky kids, “inspired by,” as the Playbill says, the eponymous 2000 cheerleading movie about similarly perky kids.
Or, at least, let’s hear two-and-a-half incredibly enthusiastic cheers. Read More
It’s not news that Cate Blanchett is gorgeous—tall, poised, blonde, almost regal, with high cheekbones and delicate features. She is a bona fide, Oscar-winning movie star, and befitting that status, she’s absorbing and magnetic, hugely charismatic. Read More
We’ve known since The Merchant of Venice two summers ago that Lily Rabe is an impressive Shakespearian actor, fierce and fiery and thoroughly charismatic, enough so to hold her own against even that great kosher ham, Al Pacino as Shylock. The welcome revelation of As You Like It, this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park offering, is that Ms. Rabe isn’t just a classicist; she’s also a hell of a comedian. Read More
It becomes clear, soon enough, that “Slowgirl” is a schoolyard sobriquet, a cruel teenager’s nickname for a developmentally disabled fellow student. And it becomes clear soon thereafter that something terrible has happened to Slowgirl—Marybeth, as she’s more properly known, though her erstwhile antagonist rarely calls her that. Through the remainder of Slowgirl, which opened Monday at Lincoln Center Theater’s brand-new Claire Tow Theater, we’re left to consider what horror befell this poor girl and, more troublingly, what role was played in it by Becky Thurman, the precociously frank but cannily withholding young woman who has arrived at her Uncle Sterling’s place, a rustic refuge in Costa Rica, to get away from the swirling trouble at home. Read More
“To Phyllis Schlafly!”
It’s the start of a toast at the end of Rapture, Blister, Burn, which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons, and it’s an exhortation—admiration for the 1970s antifeminist activist, meant unironically, or at least mostly so—that you don’t hear every day in modern New York, whether at a dinner party or in a smart, clever, serious play by a talented, witty, thoughtful young playwright. Read More
Oh, Brooklyn. In Bloomberg-era New York, where the Upper West Side is for strollers, the West Village for Marc Jacobs, and the Lower East Side for pub crawls, Brooklyn is the place, we’re told time and again, for unconventional, creative young people to be unconventional and creative. It’s the borough where you’d find, for example, a sprawling, dilapidated, commune-like home shared by a novelist, a few poets, a composer, an opera singer, a European-refugee activist and a burlesque artist, all pulled together by a fiction editor and self-styled aesthete who lounges in caftans, planning parties.
February House, a splendid new musical at the Public Theater, is set in that commune-like home, and among its many achievements is to remind us that, despite what we’ve been told by innumerable New York magazine covers, Styles section features, and Lena Dunham, Brooklyn-as-bohemia is not a recent invention. This creative home was a real one—a house, granted, not an illegal loft, in Brooklyn Heights rather than Bushwick—and in 1940 and ’41 it was occupied by W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others. They wrote, sang, drank, danced, slept with each other, avoided paying rent and sniffed cocaine in back bedrooms at parties. They worked on their art, and themselves; they talked about art, and themselves; and amid all the chaos, they didn’t seem to get very much done. As the Brooklyn-frequenting if not actually Brooklynite David Byrne might note: Same as it ever was.
Their stories unfold—loves and heartbreak, artistic failures and triumphs, arguments about the artist’s political obligations in a world on the brink of war—in a haunting, minor-key production propelled by the character of George Davis (Julian Fleisher, a bald, nebbishy leading man charismatically campy and wonderfully wistful), the flamboyantly gay editor and erstwhile novelist who has assembled the house’s residents and dedicated himself to their care and feeding. February House, as 7 Middagh Street was dubbed because so many who lived there were born in that short month, is his work of art, his masterpiece. Read More
Paul Weitz, the screenwriter and movie director and producer and playwright, seems to have a perfectly happy and lucrative and well-adjusted life: wife, daughter and a string of Hollywood successes, including About a Boy, Antz and the American Pie series. And yet with his latest play, Lonely, I’m Not, he returns to the Second Stage Theatre for the second time in two years with another story about a young man whose early professional triumphs have left him in a near-catatonic state of arrested development.
Two summers ago, in Trust, the erstwhile Scrubs star Zach Braff played a nebbishy dotcom millionaire, paralyzed by his newfound wealth and increasingly loveless marriage. Now, in Lonely, I’m Not, which opened Monday night, the erstwhile That ’70s Show star Topher Grace plays Porter, a nebbishy Wall Street whiz who made a fortune, flamed out, had a breakdown, divorced his wife and now can’t work, date or even, apparently, interview for a job. Read More
