Pin It
Submit to Reddit
Favorite

Steeper by the Dozen 

Broadway excursion nets 12 high-end shows

Page 2 of 3

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Rating: **3/4) -- All the impulses here are praiseworthy. Smalltown small-mindedness is satirized in this lighthearted William Finn musical while American's cradle-to-grave competitiveness gets tweaked. It's nerd against nerd at Circle in the Square. The whole theater is outfitted to simulate a gymnasium, and Rachel Sheinkin's book cleverly enfolds the audience into the action. Pleasant, but rarely potent.

Off-Broadway

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead (Rating: ***1/2) -- Unfolding through a series of vignettes, Bert V. Royal's unauthorized sequel to Peanuts has a comic-strip pacing true to its source. But good grief, we're a long way from Charles Schultzville from the outset. Snoopy is dead, put down after going rabid. There's a rabid glee in the way Royal goes about puncturing other characters in the Peanuts pantheon beginning with CB, nee Charlie Brown. Grieving over his lost pooch, CB discovers an affinity with the reclusive Beethoven (Schroeder) that mushrooms into intimacy.

Barely crossing the threshold of their teens, this cavalcade of once-adorable grade-schoolers is shockingly on the skids. Drugs, homophobic bullying, pyromania and suicide pick them off one-by-one. This is one compelling, amusing and ultimately harrowing ride through the treacherous terrain of New Millennium adolescence in America.

Candida (Rating: ***1/4) -- With this beautifully staged problem play by Shaw, Jean Cocteau Repertory passed the halfway mark in a season dedicated to great heroines of the stage, ranging from Medea to Mother Courage. Handsomely mounted at the quaint Bouwerie Lane Theatre -- a converted bank! -- this thinly plotted Candida was in no hurry to grab us by the throat.

An au currant playwright would zip us directly from Act 1 to the Act 3 denouement, where idealistic artist Eugene Marchbanks and Candida's husband, the orotund Rev. Morell, face off for the lady's love.

Obviously, Mr. Shaw never heard of TV, video games, e-mail or other necessities that today's audiences must run off to. But in his antique way, he managed to write a dandy play.

Abigail's Party (Rating: **3/4) -- No doubt about it, the performances in this New Group production are outstanding, but they're lavished on a trivial script by Mike Leigh that has been wildly overpraised. If this is a savage satire on British life, why is all the music at this drunken party so American? Elvis and Feliciano in 1977, like so many other details, just don't compute.

While our suburbanites are getting liquored-up, teenage revelries are going on nearby. To dramatize the main point -- that more damage is being done here by the so-called adults -- Act 1 climaxes with one of Abigail's guests running off to the loo to vomit.

It's a steep descent from Albee's Virginia Woolf to this. Overall, I like Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title role, but one of the chief irritants in this toothless satire is her insistence on inserting a v in her husband's name. Kindly call him Laurence and look for laughs elsewhere.

Jewtopia (Rating: **1/2) -- I was pleased to find that this comedy, co-written by co-stars Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson, wasn't at all as offensive as its title threatened to be. Nor was this saga of a Jew teaching a gentile how to pass as Jewish as fresh, original and funny as I had hoped.

Hit-and-miss, almost perfectly mediocre, Jewtopia takes us through the Borscht-Belt stereotypes of the Chosen People. And with a Christian protagonist (Fogel) who wants to be Jewish, marry a good Jewish girl and never have to make another decision for himself again -- rim shot -- the question is put, nonchalantly but pointedly, to the lapsed Jew (Wolfson) who guides him. Why are you so ashamed of being Jewish?

We get a smattering of funny answers as Chris learns the primacy of hypochondria in Jewish life -- and the absolute necessity of buying wholesale.

Altar Boyz (Rating: **1/4) -- This musical is framed as the farewell concert of a Christian boy band -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan and Abraham -- whose mission, every time they perform, is to purify the souls of every member of the audience. Maybe the original cast, all gone now, put over the premise, the peccadilloes and the purposely insipid music with more gusto and bite. I found the most of 83 minutes long and tedious.

Opera

Lucia di Lammermoor (Rating: ***3/4) -- The current Metropolitan Opera production of this Donizetti safari through Sir Walter Scott's bloody melodrama reminds us of how powerful this drama can be.

Youngok Shin sang the celebrated mad scene with a purity and a light precision that added a chilling, bloodcurdling luster to her preceding murderous exploits offstage. Giuseppe Filianoti merely succeeded, as few tenors do, in elevating Edgardo's regrets and agonies safely above anticlimax in the wake of Lucia's final arias -- particularly difficult when executed with Youngok's sensitivity and bravura.

Pin It
Submit to Reddit
Favorite

Calendar

More »

Search Events


© 2019 Womack Digital, LLC
Powered by Foundation