Tag: Play

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

#KeepTheSecrets is the message delivered at the end of both parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  No worries here as will you not need any spoiler alerts.  That is a major reason I started theaterreviewsfrommyseat.  Theater, especially Broadway, is a sizable investment and too many reviews contain detailed plot summaries which I believe unnecessarily spoil the experience.  As a fan and reader of all the books, I was eagerly anticipating this full day extravaganza.

The Showbill contains a four page “Journey to the Eighth Story” which acts as a refresher and a brief primer for muggles who arrive not knowing the significance of the lightning bolt scar.  We are told that this play takes place nineteen years later.  Harry is now 37 years old.  He, Ginny, Ron and Hermoine watch their children board the Hogwarts Express.  It certainly helps to know this series though.  When the audience gasps, it’s more fun to know why.

What’s the verdict?  First and foremost, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is beautifully faithful to the tone of the series and its characters.  There’s still a young adult vibe.  The patented mixture of humor, drama, magic, friendship, adolescent angst and adventure is all there.  The play was written by Jack Thorne based on an original story he co-created with J.K. Rowling and the Director, John Tiffany.  The result is a believable continuation to the series in combination with the required theatrical magic expectations of a nostalgic, well-informed audience.

What turns this play into riveting fantasy isn’t simply our good fortune in spending more time with these characters.  The creativity is everywhere.  The set design by Christine Jones is remarkable.  The original score by Imogen Heap is cinematic and breathtaking.  Steven Hoggett’s choreography is stunning and inventive, nominated for a Tony despite this not being a musical.  The visual effects raise the bar for Broadway magic.

And the actors deliver the goods.  Jaime Parker (Harry Potter) and Noma Dumezweni (Hermoine Granger) were especially fine.  The casting of Alex Price as Draco Malfoy and Paul Thornley as Ron Weasley are ideal.  But it is Anthony Boyle’s portrayal of Scorpius Malfoy that steals the show in a bravura performance.  This epic has a forty person cast.   Mr. Tiffany’s direction paces this grand adventure’s plot to maximize the seemingly unending peaks and stunning surprises; no small achievement. 

Any problems to note?  The five hour experience does contain some story exposition here and there.  Every minute cannot be thrilling, extraordinary and astonishing.  I do have a favorite scene which blew me away.  Oh, that does not really narrow it down very well.  I was continually impressed by an avalanche of truly memorable moments.  Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a supremely creative fresh new monument to this beloved series.  You’ll have to see it for yourself to guess my favorite scene.  My pick will undoubtedly be in your top five, guaranteed.

www.harrypottertheplay.com

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/puffstheplay

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Summer and Smoke (Classic Stage Company)

Finally there is a production in the 50th anniversary year of the Classic Stage Company worth shouting about.  Thanks to Director Jack Cummings III and his Transport Theater Group’s co-production, Summer and Smoke is a triumphant reconsideration of a Tennessee Williams’ play not often listed amongst his classics.  In 1948 this drama followed A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and was later made into a film starring Geraldine Page (Oscar nominated for Best Actress).  The part of Alma Winemiller is that good and in this production Marin Ireland (reasons to be pretty, Ironbound) cements its reputation as a great role in an exceptional piece of theater.

Summer and Smoke takes place in Glorious Hill, Mississippi from the turn of the century through 1916.  Alma is a music teacher and a reverend’s daughter, impressed by the grandeur of Gothic cathedrals.  All her life she has grown up next door to John Buchanan, a doctor’s son, who is more interested in women and gambling than academic studies of human anatomy.  Naturally we are in unrequited love territory.  He accuses her of relying on that “worn out magic.”  Nathan Darrow (Richard III, House of Cards) plays John and the chemistry between he and Ms. Ireland are electric, tense and crackling.  Both performances are stellar.

When you surround these fully realized characters with an excellent supporting cast and a production this fine and focused, the result is simply extraordinary entertainment.  Transport Theater Group is known for staging re-imagined American classics such as last season’s flawless Picnic and Come Back Little Sheba.  The commonality between all of these productions is deceptively simple presentations.  Sets and scenes are suggested with as few props as possible.  The words and the characters are the central focus.  When the acting can rise to this challenge, you are rewarded with quality as high as this production of Summer and Smoke.

www.classicstage.org

www.transportgroup.org

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Saint Joan (Manhattan Theatre Club)

George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in 1923, three years after Pope Benedict XV canonized her.  Considered one of his masterworks, Shaw went on to win the Nobel Prize in literature two years later.  The Manhattan Theater Club has mounted a serious revival for Broadway starring Condola Rashad, a three time Tony nominee for Stick Fly, The Trip to Bountiful and A Doll’s House, Part 2.  I’ve been fortunate to see all of these performances (and also the Pulitzer Prize winning Ruined).  Having read this play in graduate school and never having seen it staged, I was looking forward to watching this always excellent actress bring Joan to life on stage.

Saint Joan is the well known, oft-told story of Joan of Arc, a medieval military figure who helps turn the tide of French losses on the battlefield against the English.  She is following the voices from God in her head which tell her to lead the troops to victory for France and crown the Dauphin as King.  In this interpretation of the play, Joan is neither a madwoman filled with rage nor a demur heroic wallflower.  She is clear-eyed, focused and matter-of-fact. Never for a moment do you believe Ms. Rashad’s Joan has any doubt about her mission.

What makes the play thematically rich is that Shaw wrote characters who are not simply villainous.  They are also pragmatic and calculated.  After her trial she is burned at the stake, largely due to her rising popularity which often follows when common people unite around a successful leader gaining power.  In 1429, the English and the Catholic Church found a way to bond against a common enemy named Joan.  Was she a heretic or were her visions real?  Either way, the church leaders were threatened.  The English, satirically painted as idiots by the Irish Shaw, just wanted her captured and killed.

How one sees this play largely depends on your worldview.  Do you believe in saints and miracles?  Is this a tale of politics and hypocrisy?  Centuries after Joan was sentenced to death by religious leaders, the church changed its mind.  The will of god or a guilty conscience?  This play contains a dream epilogue occurring 25 years after Joan’s death.  I think Saint Joan (the play) might be the grandmother to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.  Both use fantastical elements to make us think hard about what we believe and why.

Many aspects of this particular production are quite fine but the play rather than the staging is the meat here to devour.  My favorite performance was Jack Davenport’s Earl of Warwick, a manipulative and ruthless man.  Joan is a threat to the system.  A church trial is a means to slander her and make her go away disgraced, rather than as a martyr.  You also have to consider whether or not Joan was sane.  She lived in a world where everyone was out for themselves above all else, trying to preserve the status quo.  Sound familiar?  Saint Joan truly is an excellent play.

www.saintjoanbroadway.com

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/adollshousepart2

www.manhattantheatreclub.com

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/angelsinamerica

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Two Mile Hollow (WP Theater)

The fifth and final play presented as part of the WP Theater’s Pipeline Festival was written by Leah Nanako Winkler, “a mixed-race Asian Southerner from Japan and Kentucky.”  Two Mile Hollow is the Hampton-like residence of a wealthy white family.  The play’s inspiration came from a NYC theater company whose season consisted solely of what she and her colleagues deemed “white people by the water” plays.  What is that?  In the program notes, Ms. Winkler tells us that this familiar genre concerns rich white people sitting in big houses by the water complaining about their mundane problems while spilling family secrets over white wine.

Blythe Donnelly is the matriarch of the family and her step-daughter is Mary.  In your mind, conjure a “white people by the water” scenario and cast Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow in the parts.  You will instantly get the gist of this satire.  Two Mile Hollow is flat out hilarious.  Naturally the family is in decline.  The patriarch is a dead Oscar winner whose television actor son  brings his Asian personal assistant to the mansion.  Another son is a Yale graduate without a job or purpose in life.  Both want Daddy’s motorcycle.  Mother is a beast in the grandest tradition.  The step-daughter likes to imagine life as a bird, instead of a twice divorced failure.

Adding to this flavorful stew is the casting of all non-white actors in the roles.  Comedy this broad requires great talent to pull it off.  With only two weeks to rehearse, Director Morgan Gould has staged a solidly paced piece filled with plenty of nice touches.  As the daughter Mary, Keren Lugo was uproarious, skewering every spoiled, semi-doltish debutante gone sour ever written.  The self-loathing son and Yale graduate was played by Sathya Sridharan with screamingly hilarious awkwardness and unforgettable physicality.

This play is having a few premieres around the country this spring.  I look forward to a big full production in the future.  Two Mile Hollow is a winner.

www.wptheater.org

About This Reviewer - Posted on

The Metromaniacs (Red Bull Theater)

Based on a French comedy from 1738, David Ives has created another adaptation from this period.  This one was called La Metromanie written by Alexis Piron.  The title loosely translates to The Poetry Craze and was a Page Six scandal back in the day, apparently based on a public embarrassment for Voltaire.  None of this really matters though.  As noted by Mr. Ives in the program, “When my friends ask me what it’s about, I always say that The Metromaniacs is a comedy with five parts, none of them important.”  And that, my friends, is the problem.

In the spring of 1738, poetry is everywhere.  So much so that everyone speaks in rhymes.  We have a young poet, his uncle, a young woman in love with poetry, her father, a young man in love with the young woman in love with poetry, a maid and a valet.  The last two are of the randy variety.  The ballroom of this home in Paris is outfitted with fake trees as it is to be the scene of a play, a subplot here.  Meanwhile, identities are confused and, oh, it does not really matter.  We are here for the rhymes.  The problem is that The Metromaniacs is only occasionally funny.  It wraps itself in a blanket of cleverness that keeps the play from taking off.

Everyone in the show does nice work and the entire production design is quite good.  My favorite performer was Adam Green as Mondor the valet.  There is nothing particularly wrong with this production.  But in the end/I cannot bend.  The show was sort of lackluster/a positive review I cannot muster.  Excessive poetry dear friends is my consternation/from rhyming overload there will be no adoration.

www.redbulltheater.com

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Three Small Irish Masterpieces (Irish Repertory Theatre)

During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Celtic Revival bloomed in Ireland.  National activists began to incorporate historically Irish themes into contemporary art and life.  The Irish Literary Renaissance was one of the major facets of this movement.  Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats felt it essential to build an Irish theater with Irish actors performing Irish plays rather than imported English dramas.  Together with other playwrights, he co-founded the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 (becoming the Abbey Theatre in 1904).  Three Small Irish Masterpieces are from this period.

Irish Rep is performing these short plays which masterfully illuminate this era.  The first piece is The Pot of Broth by Yeats (in collaboration with Lady Gregory) from 1903.  In this peasant farce, a hungry trickster scamp invades a home and convinces the gullible lady of the house that a stone will make a wonderful soup.  Mythology, folklore and the gift of storytelling  infuse all of the plays presented here.

The second play, The Rising of the Moon, is a political play which examines the uneasy relationship between England and Ireland.  Lady Gregory wrote this play in 1907.  Three Irish policemen in the service of the occupying English government put up a wanted poster for an escaped political rebel.  Capture comes with a 100 pound reward.  Down by the wharf, one of the policemen and the targeted criminal meet.  Is one’s loyalty to the overseers to whom you now report or to your native lands and its peoples?

Riders to the Sea (1904) by John Millington Synge is the third and final play.  This tragedy takes place on the remote Aran Islands where the cruel, unrelenting sea brings both livelihood and danger to the people living there.  A mother and her daughters await the fate of son Michael who is now missing.  Having lost a husband and other sons to the sea, she grieves and worries and prays.  Man’s mortality and his inevitable death are themes woven throughout this piece.

Three Small Irish Masterpieces are given an excellent staging in the small basement space of the Irish Rep.  The overall impact is satisfying: full of Irish flavor, well acted, realistic set and costume designs, and historically interesting.  Are all three plays masterpieces?  Probably not.  But these playwrights and their contribution to the history of theater makes this collection very rewarding viewing.

www.irishrep.org

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Power Strip (WP Theater)

The Syrian civil war informs the fourth of five entries into this year’s Pipeline Festival.   Over five consecutive weeks, the WP Theater presents new works in varying stages of development.  Power Strip was written by Sylvia Khoury.  This piece was performed as a reading.  The producer noted that the work continues to evolve and the cast had been handed new pages up until 30 minutes before this performance.

Power Strip is set in a refugee camp in Greece in 2015.  Yasmin’s place in the center is located by a power strip on the floor.  The play opens with Yasmin collecting money from a man.  She has turned to prostitution because she needs money.  Life is hard and she and other family members are trying to escape to Germany. She meets a newcomer, Abdullah, who is looking to use the power strip to plug in his electric shaver.  Yasmin’s struggles come to life over this one hour play.  Struggles in relationships, in trying to preserve her dignity, in survival and in desperately hoping for escape and a life with her fiancé.

May Calamawy is a fine Yasmin, full of bravado and despair.  A young woman trapped in a world and a society where #metoo has no relevance.  This refugee camp is isolated.  In one interesting moment, there is a conversation about whether they would even know if war finally ended the world.  How would they find out?  The bread would no longer arrive.  Power Strip attempts to break the overwhelmingly large Syrian refugee crisis down into an intimate, heartbreaking yet hopeful story.  A nice draft of a play about a very difficult subject, focusing particularly on the plight of young women.  Eight years have now passed and sadly this humanitarian crisis remains tragic.

www.wptheater.org

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Mlima’s Tale (Public Theater)

Sahr Ngaujah plays the title character of Mlima’s Tale.  Both actor and the elephant he plays are powerfully built, commanding presences.  Nearing half a century on Earth, he is one of those now rare big tusked bull elephants who are nearing extinction due to poachers and the ivory trade.  The best part of this tale is his journey and his spirituality.  Mr. Ngaujah’s (Fela!) performance is emotionally intense with tremendously masculine yet poetic physicality.  He is a superb Mlima.

A story of the sad, rather endless butchering of these animals for their prized giant ivory tusks is one that most people find upsetting.  Another species being slaughtered to extinction so wealthy individuals can buy carvings.  Or worse, shoot animals for fun.  So why then did we leave the theater feeling little emotional involvement?  The play was written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage (Ruined, Sweat).  Mlima’s Tale is certainly not a bad play.  It may be just overly clinical while being informative with its moral teachings.

Three players act this tale with Mlima.  They are what you would expect:  corrupt officials, illegal poachers, art dealers, border guards and so on.  Three actors playing so many characters in relatively short scenes does not help the generic feeling of this fable.  Some of the scenery and lighting design is quite beautiful.  However, the highly choreographed scene changes with quotes projected to underscore themes are distracting.

All this leads to the three of us who attended this play feeling disappointedly disconnected at the end.  But we all loved Mlima:  the character, the awesome sound effects (Justin Hicks) and, most especially, the actor portraying him.  Yes, turning elephants into ghosts is an absolute tragedy.  Hard to recommend Mlima’s Tale though given our unanimous lack of enthusiasm.

www.publictheater.org

About This Reviewer - Posted on

Angels in America

My first encounter with Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, the masterwork by Tony Kushner, was the Signature Theater’s revival in 2010.  I have vivid memories of a hauntingly fragile yet regally tough Michael Urie as Prior Walter and Bill Heck’s completely realized closeted Mormon Joe Pitt.  An off-Broadway production, it was certainly more intimate than I imagine the original productions were.  Currently on Broadway is the big scale revival with Nathan Lane (The Producers, The Front Page) as Roy Cohn  and Andrew Garfield (Death of a Salesman) as Prior Walter.  On second viewing, the play is beyond grand in scope.  It is epic, bold, hilarious, aggressively theatrical, wildly overwritten, audacious, heartbreakingly tender and Shakespearean in scope.  Angels in America is a great play.

In the beginning (intentional religious symbolism inserted here), Prior Walter learns that he has AIDS and with his live in boyfriend they are facing the illness.  The year is 1985.  Thousands are dying of this disease and we are smack dab in the middle of Reagan era conservatism.  A Mormon couple from Salt Lake now live in New York; she is afraid to go outside, he is a closeted homosexual.  The famously evil lawyer Roy Cohn is a major character, dripping with venom.  The playing field of this play is immense and tackles politics, religion, love, intolerance, coping, revenge, sanity, health care, acceptance and forgiveness.

The two parts, Millenium Approaches and Perestroika, require seven and one half hours of commitment.  I did not opt to see both parts in one day but instead saw them in the same week and I was happy with that choice.  I was riveted throughout as was the audience, even through some of kookier, more overwrought sections, notably in Perestroika.  Everyone in the cast is very good.  I particularly loved  Susan Brown.  She played a rabbi, a doctor, a mother, a homeless woman, amongst other roles.  Many characters inhabit multiple roles that this “fantasia” accommodates brilliantly.  James McArdle’s Louis and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s Belize were especially fine portrayals.

Whenever I revisit something that has an indelible imprint in memory, there are inevitable comparisons.  In this version, I felt that the Mormom wife Harper, played by Denise Gough (People, Places & Things), was too intensely crazed.  That choice played beautifully in the more fantastical sections but strained credulity (and focus) during the intimate scenes.  The whole production design, directed by Marianne Elliott (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), was not my cup of tea.  There were definitely some terrific effects and scene changes.  A big “thing” (for lack of a better name) hovers over the stage throughout both parts.  When it finally is utilized, it’s a completely ho-hum moment.

Let’s not quibble too much though.  Angels in America is a classic piece of theater, standing the test of time.  It looks back at when we had oppression, intolerance, polarizing politics and religious fervor.  Maybe AIDS has been contained, but isn’t is amazing how far we have not come.  The angels and their humans, as imperfect as they may be, still require our utmost attention.  There is still more great work to be done.

www.angelsbroadway.com

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/peopleplacesthings

About This Reviewer - Posted on

The Confession of Lily Dare (Theater for the New City)

Dear Jinkx Monsoon,

Last night I attended a new play by Charles Busch called The Confession of Lily Dare.  Yes, THAT Charles Busch, the one who grew from downtown drag phenom in theater successes such as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom to movies including Die Mommie Die! before the Tony Award nomination for writing The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.  Last night I was at the Theater for the New City and caught his latest blend of imaginatively recreated classic movie magic and catnip camp.  Jinkx, I thought of you and wished you were here.

This play is right up your alley, an homage to tearjerker films of early 1930’s pre-code Hollywood such as The Sin of Madame Claudet and Madame X.  This play is set “against the gaudy tapestry of turn of the century California’s notorious Barbary Coast.”  (For the young’uns, that’s a turn at 1900 not 2000.)  Lily Dare, raised in a convent, becomes a famous chanteuse and later runs a string of brothels.  Her troublesome secret is the daughter she was forced to abandon after her husband was killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.  Melodrama primed for hilarity.

This is high octane off-off Broadway with very talented actors and fabulous costumes by Rachel Townsend.  While the set design was fairytale-like and fun, all of the steps proved to be a large distraction as Mr. Busch nervously traversed them in heels.  He appeared inconsistently committed to the character of Lily.  Of course he writes funny lines and can carry a comedy but this performance felt low on energy.  Perhaps the superb cast around him shined so brightly, it was hard to compete?

Jinkx, why am I telling you all this?  I believe Lily Dare is your next triumph.  Yes, you are a famous singing drag performer and winner of season five of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.  But it’s your performance as Kitty Witless in The Vaudevillians that came to mind here.  Along with Dr. Dan Von Dandy, you were a famous vaudevillian couple frozen in an avalanche in the 1920s but were able to thaw out thanks to global warming.  And make us laugh, a lot, you did.

The Confession of Lily Dare has some fun material and Mr. Busch knows his way around campy melodrama.  Your acerbic wit could help elevate the uneven proceedings here.  You’ve already proven you are an old-time chanteuse.  Jinkx, if you choose this assignment, and you should, please keep the rest of the cast intact.  Nancy Anderson, Christopher Borg, Howard McGillin, Kendal Sparks and Jennifer Van Dyck were all outstanding.

www.theaterforthenewcity.net

www.jinkxmonsoon.com