John Doyle bids farewell to the theater that launched his international career - Berkshire’s beautiful and intimate Watermill Theatre, Newbury - with that most famously vexed of musicals about growing up if not necessarily growing wise: Merrily We Roll Along, the 1982 Broadway flop from Stephen Sondheim and George Furth that owes its resuscitation in no small measure to the UK. A Leicester production some years ago with Maria Friedman demonstrated the sheer theatrical viability of a bruising score - one of Sondheim’s very best - that was thrown under an even better spotlight at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000 in a Michael Grandage-directed staging of Merrily that, against the odds, went on to dominate the musical categories at that year’s Olivier Awards. This latest incarnation isn’t as purely touching as those previous two productions and tends to substitute anger and a pervasive sourness for the extraordinary emotional surges that marked out the Donmar version, in particular. (I, for one, shall never forget watching that production’s final performance from the Donmar balcony, the cast all but losing it in conjunction with the audience by the time they reached Sondheim’s  seminal, almost hymnal paean to life’s possibilities, Our Time.)

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Chekhov’s almost unbearably mournful play of love unrequited and lives flailing and unfulfilled is spectacularly well served in a new touring production from the venerable Peter Hall that also inaugurates a new playhouse west of London, the 900-seat Rose, built to approximate the spatial dimensions of the onetime Elizabethan venue near Bankside that long ago ceased to exist. How wonderful, then, to welcome a new building in the west London suburban community of Kingston while at the same time heralding that truly rare production of the abiding Russian master that for once reveals precisely what he meant by calling his plays, against all expectation, comedies.

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Sometimes, the title says it all. Watching Michael Grandage’s fleet and furious new production of Othello, a 3-hour-15 minute staging that positively hurtles by - I was mightily struck by something that ought to be true more often. This is that rare staging of Shakespeare’s trickiest of tragedies actually to put its title character at the center of the experience. Sure, it’s Ewan McGregor’s Shakespearean stage debut as Iago that has audiences sleeping overnight for day seats or bartering for thousands of bucks on ebay, but I defy anyone not to depart the playhouse swept away by, and celebrating, the hapless Venetian Moor of the title as played by a bearded, gloriously basso profundo Chiwetel Ejiofor (concurrently on screen in American Gangster). Miscast - and not for reasons of race - in the Grandage/Donmar revival of The Vortex several years ago, Ejiofor comes into his own with what at this late date looks like the Shakespearean performance of a busy Bardic year, though Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker’s Benedick and Beatrice, of course, are yet to come.

Grandage for some time now has looked like a logical inheritor to Trevor Nunn when it comes to lucidly expressed Shakespeare, and his Othello will be of particular interest to those who remember Grandage actually playing (and very well) Roderigo in the Nunn-directed RSC Othello nearly 20 years ago, in which Willard White’s sonorously moving Othello was nonetheless acted off the stage by a career-best Ian McKellen as the coolest, scariest Iago I shall probably ever see. It’s nonetheless something of a surprise to find McGregor cutting such a blank, inexpressive nemesis, the play’s hate-filled anti-hero fuelled not so much by motiveless malignancy - to use Coleridge’s famous phrase - as by a serious set of teeth that seem to gleam in keen anticipation of the gathering entrapments of Shakespeare’s coiled-tight narrative. (With a remarkably toothsome Roderigo from Edward Bennett, this may be the first Othello to send particular shivers down the spines of dentists.) His charm less evident here than it was in Grandage’s West End/Donmar Guys and Dolls, McGregor will no doubt improve as the run continues and as greater command of the verse allows him to deepen a take on the part that at present seems notably scattershot. Read the rest of this entry »

 Jayne Houdyshell

For about 80 percent of its 80-minute running time, Adam Bock’s The Receptionist appears to be a gently comic portrait of mundane office life. The phone keeps ringing, but that doesn’t stop the employees from engaging in more chitchat than actual work. Eventually, however, the story takes a surprisingly dark turn, and the gentle comedy morphs into a cautionary tale of how evil can exist in the most banal, bland surroundings.

Even before the plot twist, The Receptionist is watchable thanks to the actress in the title role: Jayne Houdyshell, best known for her remarkable Tony-nominated performance in Well. Here she plays Beverly Wilkins, an unexceptional middle-aged Midwesterner who answers the phones at a branch office of an unnamed firm. Beverly doesn’t know or care what the company does. Since her boss, Mr. Raymond, ( Robert Foxworth) is running late, she has plenty of time to gossip with a friend on the phone. Between calls, Beverly listens to a pretty young coworker, Lorraine (Kendra Kasselbaum), share tidbits about her dating misadventures. When the handsome, genial Mr. Dart (Josh Charles ) pays a visit, Lorraine is smitten and flirts shamelessly. Despite being married, Dart flirts right back. It all seems like a typical day at the office until the real purpose of Dart’s visit becomes clear. Read the rest of this entry »

Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre is experiencing a sudden rebound in attendance following months of half-full houses. Almost twelve years since they first appeared in Rent, (Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp) have unexpectedly returned to the roles of Roger and Mark. Interestingly, almost the entire audience looks too young to have seen them play the roles in 1996.

Long before Wicked and Spring Awakening became the favorite shows amongst the pre-teen and adolescent crowd, Rent, Jonathan Larson’s look at East Village inhabitants through the landscape of La Boheme, introduced hundreds of thousands to musical theater through its ingenious mix of early 90s hard rock music with the wit and passion of traditional musical theater writing. Not only do most of these fans still listen to the original cast album of Rent, they memorize it, line by line. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s not to love about a smartly directed, perfectly cast, energetically acted Central Park production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream? Following the watery Romeo and Juliet, the Public Theater now offers a much lighter, jollier Shakespearean romance. Thanks to director Daniel Sullivan and his terrific troupe of actors, it’s a consistently entertaining, frequently magical late-summer night’s diversion.

The ever-popular comedy begins by introducing four young Athenian would-be lovers. Hermia (Mireille Enos) loves Lysander (Austin Lysy), but her father Egeus (George Morfogen) wants her to marry Demetrius (Elliot Villar). Meanwhile, Helena (Martha Plimpton) loves Demetrius, but he pines for Hermia. Plimpton-who is quickly becoming one of New York’s most reliable stage actresses-earns plenty of laughs as the stubbornly smitten Helena. I am your Spaniel! she proclaims without a hint of embarrassment. Plimpton’s Helena is equally amusing when both Lysander and Demetrius fall for her, due to spells cast by Oberon, King of the Fairies (Keith David), and his minion Puck (Jon Michael Hill).

Sullivan’s casting of Laila Robins as the regal Titania, Queen of the Fairies, is particularly felicitous. Whether she’s forcefully berating Oberon or foolishly wooing Nick Bottom (Jay O. Sanders), who has been turned into an ass by the mischievous Oberon, Robins throws herself into the role. Her Titania often turns up in the massive tree that dominates Eugene Lee’s set. In one memorable scene Titania reclines on a branch while the fairies-played by young children wearing Ann Hould-Ward’s stylish Victorian costumes-sing below her. It’s a striking image, and Sullivan’s use of the fairies is unusual and inventive throughout the play.

The director displays his flair for comedy in the scenes featuring the rustics who stage the love story Pyramus and Thisbe for the Athenian court. Sanders makes an aptly buffoonish Bottom (who plays Pyramus with misguided confidence), and Jesse Tyler Ferguson is just right as Francis Flute (a reluctant Thisbee). Jason Antoon also has hilarious moments as Tom Snout (a.k.a. the Wall). While the climactic Pyramus and Thisbe goes on a bit too long, it’s nonetheless a comic high point.

All in all, this Midsummer has few dull moments and few disappointing performances. And it boasts delightfully uninhibited work by Robins, Plimpton, and Enos (all of whom shed bustles and petticoats along with their inhibitions), an enchanting band of pint-size fairies, and a top-notch Bottom.

As Hamlet would put it, get thee to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I like to take a Greek play, smash it to ruins, and then, atop the ruins, write a new play. The new play will often take some of the character names of the Greek piece, some of the story, even some of the ruined structure . But it will be set in the world today. ”

Such is the mantra of playwright Charles Mee, who has defined his career by defying the laws of intellectual property. Noting how the Greek dramatists and even Shakespeare would raid the plots and source materials of earlier writers, Mee’s plays are created as collages, where bits and pieces of classic plays are infused with music, dance, electronic media and loose energy. It’s Ancient Greece meets Richard Foreman meets Twyla Tharp!

Off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre Company, which dedicates each of its seasons to the exploration of a single playwright, has unexpectedly gone avant-garde with Charles Mee, following a year dedicated to the profound but dramaturgically traditional works of the late August Wilson. Upcoming seasons will focus on the similarly alternative works of Susan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner and the Negro Ensemble Company.

Iphigenia 2.0, the first of three Mee plays to be produced, marks the start of his Imperial Dreams Tetralogy, where Mee attempts to use the fall of the House of Atreus to explore the dichotomy between politics and family. Based on Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis, it follows the dilemmas of Agamemnon, who is forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia before his troops set sail for Troy, much to the protestation of his wife Clytemnestra. Read the rest of this entry »

For a short window of time, you can catch Patti LuPone injecting heaps of her distinctive brand of attitude into the role of Rose, the archetypal stage mother. NY City Center’s Summer Stars series at Encores! offers a production that solidly exhibits those more dangerous powers of a mother’s love.

LuPone, who was passed over for Bernadette Peters in the last Broadway revival of Gypsy, is at home in the role, and effortlessly surmounts one of the more challenging acting-singing parts around for a leading lady. Whether commandeering a theater manager to get her girls on stage, wooing her man, combating the pain of her star daughter June’s departure, or cushioning her own fall when she realizes it’s her own unrealized potential that she’s been fueled by the entire time, actor and character are always fully committed and never coy .

Laura Benanti , as Louise –the ignored, mousy daughter turned beauty, is affecting. Certain moments between her and her mother’s boy friend Herbie ( a less drippy, more respectable rendering of the character by Boyd Gaines),you can feel the child’s deep longing for family. Benanti successfully delivers the extremes of her character, at first self-effacing, earnest, door-matty to the core, and later coming into the fullest bloom. Of course, it’s a difficult challenge for an actress to give the character the 180 degree turn the script requires–from playing the back end of a cow to a refined queen of burlesque and making it believable that such a change could occur so quickly. She succeeds in the former, (which is more fun) if not the latter.

In the final musical number, the celebrated “Rose’s Turn,” where Rose comes clean about her hunger for the spotlight, LuPone is nearly terrifying. Just as Rose is the mother duck, the fulcrum from which the family’s every move comes, cheering from the wings, or slipping a little scenery onto the stage while the children perform their absurdly patriotic numbers, LuPone serves the same purpose. She rules the roost. LuPone is the reason we’re here-and this production trumpets, to whoever didn’t know before, her full arrival.

For Scott Siegel, the creator and proprietor of the The Broadway of the Year series at Town Hall, 1964 was “perhaps the greatest single year in Broadway history.” So much so that The Broadway Musicals of 1964, the last concert in the 2006-7 season, was the second in his series’ seven years to carry that title.

Five years ago, after his first tribute to 1964, he promised another, with completely different songs. Now he has kept that vow.
Because many of that favorite year’s top Broadway hits were part of the first concert, some of the songs you might expect to hear weren’t present this time. But in a 12-month period that included Carol Channing in Hello Dolly, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle, Bea Lillie and Tammy Grimes in High Spirits, Robert Preston in Ben Franklin in Paris, Carol Burnett in Fade Out-Fade In, Bert Lahr in Foxy, Sammy Davis Jr. in Golden Boy, Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War, Steve Lawrence in What Makes Sammy Run? and even Buddy Hackett in I Had a Ball, there was certainly a lot to choose from.

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Oh dear will they never learn? You can’t serve a Victorian melodrama as cold cuts - it needs the sauce of excess and surprise and in this otherwise slick production whilst director Peter Gill does a solid job he misses out. He shapes it well, sets it in an appropriate 19th century sitting room (design is by Hayden Griffin ) and the pace is good - but this is a hot house story, not a naturalistic play. And you do need that essential excess.
Never once does one feel, as gas lamps flicker low and shadows haunt the over-decorated room, that there is danger in the London streets. Nor that footfalls in the attic are menacing to the poor lonely little wife. In short you watch, get interested, yet not once catch your breath, let alone shudder. The bubbles of a wicked brew never pop to the surface.
Well they didn’t for me as once they had at the weekly rep in my home town when I was growing up. Great Yarmouth had lots of shows as a major seaside resort rather like Atlantic City. It also had the Little Theatre, a group of professional actors who did a play a week - that set the wicked theatre seed for this regular ticket-buyer. Gaslight was a popular solid standby play - it still is. One set, few actors, same costumes, except for the naughty housemaid Nancy - who is a slut on her nights out. Patrick Hamilton’s play is still popular (he also wrote the chilling Rope): well played it should still work well.
The story of a pretty woman with a devilish husband who controls and mentally tortures her is a good one, even more so when we discover, via Rough (Kenneth Cranham) , the detective sergeant later in the play, that a woman has been murdered  in this very sitting room.
As Bella Rosamund Pike is a light bird, flitting nervously about her cage, but she should be more vital less vapid. One gets bored with her flutterings. Husband Andrew Woodall has menace but hides it rather too well. Two servants slip in and out but it isn’t until Rough arrives that the production catches fire. He is splendid and pulls it all together, but it’s a bit late by then. It can be a most compelling evening. Some will know it from the film in which Ingrid Bergman did a lot of anguish. Unfortunately here we don’t get hard, macabre black-and-white treatment.
The play suits this splendid old theatre, which was redecorated by a superb designer Tanya Moiselwitsch and has recently been overhauled (though they miss out on things such as the tassels all round the balcony.) Kevin Spacey needs such popular plays at his Old Vic. This production isn’t the best choice however, and he has yet to prove that in selecting fare and artists he is a worthy follow-up to the doughty ladies who founded it (and Sadlers’ Wells), and such great theatre men as Tyrone Guthrie.