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W.M. Akers

By W.M. Akers 5/22 6:26pm

theater

Alan Cox and Jonathan Pryce in 'The Caretaker.' (Courtesy Richard Termine)

Pinter’s Laugh Track: For Jonathan Pryce, ‘The Caretaker’ Is Personal

Two brothers share a decrepit East London flat. They take in an aged tramp named Davies, who shares the space until the older brother, Aston, evicts him for making noises in his sleep. After being told again and again to leave, Davies still doesn’t listen. “If you want me to go … I’ll go,” he says. “You just say the word.” In the current revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, the audience responds to that line with either tense silence or uncomfortable laughter, depending on the whim of Jonathan Pryce.

“If I think the audience has been laughing too much, I can kill that laugh,” he said last week in the lobby of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. “I’ll even mutter it if I don’t want them to laugh any more.” Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/24 6:54pm

theater

Christina Ricci in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." (Courtesy Classic Stage Company)

Quick Bright Things: At Classic Stage Company, Bebe and Christina Take on the Bard

Like an unimaginative lover on Valentine’s Day, theater companies like to throw around rose petals. It’s always the same: a single petal drifts from the ceiling, then a second, then a flurry. At the Classic Stage Company’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the petals start when Bebe Neuwirth’s Titania asks her fairies for a lullaby. What starts as a gentle shower turns into a deluge, as though the petals were being sprayed by a leafblower, and finishes with the fairies dumping grocery bags full of them onto their queen. The solemn cliché turns to satire, and the audience chortles as Ms. Neuwirth drifts off to sleep, to spend the next few scenes buried under a six-inch pile of petals. Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/17 5:36pm

theater

Alfred Gingold as H.P. Lovecraft. (Courtesy Dan Bianchi)

Thriller on Fourth Street: Dan Bianchi’s Radiotheatre Does Poe and Lovecraft

Ghoulish youths haunt the alleys of Red Hook. The waterfront district is “a maze of hybrid squalor,” “a babel of sound and filth,” infested by “a dread crew of sentient loathsomeness.” South Brooklyn has changed somewhat since 1925, when H.P. Lovecraft wrote “The Horror at Red Hook,” but the long-dead author seems to have grasped something about the essential nature of a visit to Ikea.

But just what does “sentient loathsomeness” look like? How, precisely, might someone translate Lovecraft’s peculiar brand of weird horror to the stage? Dan Bianchi found a solution: he lets his audience do the work for him. Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/03 7:25pm

theater

Lead singer of the band in 'One Man, Two Guvnors.' (Photo by Johan Persson)

One Man, Two Guvnors, Four Musicians: How a Group of American Rockers Learned to Be Convincingly British

Grant Olding knows how to bow, and he’s willing to teach Americans. Over the past three weeks, the British composer of the West End smash One Man, Two Guvnors has been transforming a quartet of American youngsters into the Craze, a British rock group circa 1963. He has tailored their accents, poured them into purple suits and taught them that quick, self-effacing bow best known from YouTube clips of the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

As he explained last week, during a break from rehearsal, “It’s a very specific bow.” Read More

By W.M. Akers 3/13 3:40pm

theater

Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The ’20s for the 21st Century

Broadway fortunes have been forged from Abba’s Greatest Hits. Hearts and bank accounts have been broken trying to do the same with the music of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Last year, Kathleen Marshall found success directing a revival of Anything Goes, packed to the gills with Cole Porter classics. Next month, she will attempt a repeat with Nice Work If You Can Get It, an original musical built from the Gershwin songbook, which opens April 24. But despite superficial commonalities with Mamma Mia! and its descendants, Ms. Marshall has one thing to make clear.

“This is not a jukebox musical,” she said last week. Read More

By W.M. Akers 2/07 4:51pm

theater

"She Kills Monsters." (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Crowd-Source the Dragon: Qui Nguyen and His Vampire Cowboys Are Back

The dragon is called the Tiamat, and in last fall’s production of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters, this firebreather closed the show. As the terrified heroine cowered in a spotlight, smoke filled the Flea Theater’s narrow stage. When the lights rose, there was the monster: a colossal five-headed puppet whose handlers were neatly concealed behind the fog. As a practical effect, the Tiamat was convincing enough to make one swear off CGI forever. As theatrical spectacle, it was a highlight of 2011. Read More

By W.M. Akers 1/10 5:57pm

theater

TEAM in "Mission Drift." (Rachel Chavkin)

After Three Years at Sea, the TEAM Drifts Home

Apparently, actors need no longer wait until dawn for the reviews to come in. Twenty minutes after the opening of Mission Drift, a new musical developed by New York theater collective the TEAM, at August’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Guardian theater critic Lyn Gardner tweeted her verdict, calling the show “a gorgeous, gaudy parable of capitalism in the desert.” The company exhaled, basking in the last stages of a tortuous journey that stretched back to 2008. Read More

By W.M. Akers 12/06/11 5:47pm

theater

Rendering of Signature Center entrance on West 42nd Street by Daniel Black. (Signature Center)

The Signature Finds Its Center: After a Ground Zero Location Fell Through, Signature Theatre Landed on 42nd Street

Jim Houghton’s secret lair is in the back of a parking garage on 42nd Street, just east of 10th Avenue. There, in a warmly lit room behind an anonymous steel door, the Signature Theatre Company’s founder exhibits his models. His artful miniatures depict a thriving theater center, featuring four stages, a café, a bookstore and, most important, hundreds of tiny metal theatergoers. In Mr. Houghton’s models, there is not an empty seat in the house. Read More

By W.M. Akers 11/21/11 5:59pm

theater

"Priscilla Queen of the Desert."

Priscilla, Queen of the Altar: a Musical Found a New Way to Market Itself That Includes On-Stage Weddings

When the curtain fell on the June 24 performance of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, at the Palace Theater, the cast took the stage to make a special announcement: New York State had just legalized same-sex marriage. After two and a half hours of karaoke favorites like “I Will Survive” and “Material Girl,” audience members were already in a lively mood. But upon learning that marriage equality had come to New York, they went ballistic. Read More