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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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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