Anyone searching for a rabbit-out-of-hat show in which a master magician saws a femme fatale in half or makes her disappear should look elsewhere than Jamie Allan’s Amaze. Allan’s show has some dazzling glitter and glitz, but underneath it all there is a moving story that director Jonathan Goodwin has deftly and incrementally integrated with Allan’s sleight-of-hand illusions and interactions with his audience.
In his solo show ta-da!, Josh Sharp draws on his immense charm and deft wit to navigate subjects that are far weightier than his upbeat title implies. They include pedophilia, cancer, gay-bashings of varying intensity, and a near-death experience. He does it while holding a clicker that initially projects everything he says on a screen behind him precisely: “Hi. Hello. What’s up. How are you? Hi. Hello. Hi. Welcome.” His diction is crisp and clear, so there’s really no need for the screen, except as a display of physical stamina and memory, and a source of visual variety. Eventually, though, under Sam Pinkleton’s direction, Sharp’s script and the screen projections diverge amusingly to add a layer of comic counterpoint—a practice that reaches back to Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.
Well, I’ll Let You Go is written by actor Bubba Weiler, who’s a little over 30, and directed by Jack Serio, still under 30 and seemingly ubiquitous in New York theater. It’s set in a mid-size, midwestern town that has lost its skill-based, manufacturing economy. Weiler’s characters are adjusting, in sundry ways, to coarsening influences, including the regional fulfillment facility of a gargantuan online retailer, which is the town’s sole surefire source of regular employment. Weiler and Serio bring a balance of intellect and feeling to their work, and the result is a fresh, engrossing chronicle of ordinary citizens contending with change for the worse.
Ginger Twinsies is a parody of the 1998 film The Parent Trap, itself a reboot of the 1961 film of the same name. Although the parody focuses on the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version, both films share a completely ridiculous storyline that allows a child actor to play two characters. So many coincidences and lapses in logic boggle the rational mind. Therefore, Ginger Twinsies, written and directed by Kevin Zak, has carte blanche to unmercifully mock its source material. It is 80 minutes of high-energy hijinks, slapstick, sight gags, wordplay, and enough 1990s trivia to be its own Trivial Pursuit category.
The Irish Rep is currently staging its fourth production since 2013 of Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, with several of the cast reprising roles. And yet there is nothing stale about this staging—instead, the play is brought to exhilarating life by a marvelous ensemble, under Ciarán O’Reilly’s assured direction. The Weir is essentially a collection of four ghost stories, which arise naturally out of the banter in a rural Irish pub, that ultimately reveal more about the loneliness of the people telling them than anything supernatural.
If only the romance of Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder were as straightforward as two comic icons collaborating on a professional project and eventually falling in love. For Wilder and Radner, it wasn’t nearly that simple. Cary Gitter’s Gene and Gilda provides the backstory of how these talented individuals managed a complex personal magnetism, bolstering each other’s confidence and respective on-screen personas, that morphed into a deep love.
Among the crop of summer Off-Broadway musicals, and it’s been a flavorless crop, here’s something of an anomaly. The Sabbath Girl (book by Cary Gitter, lyrics by Gitter and Neil Berg, music by Berg) isn’t overproduced like Empire, or bathetic like From Home. Whatever its deficiencies, and it does have them, The Sabbath Girl also has something we haven’t been seeing in a lot of new musicals: it has a heart.
Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl, produced by the Penguin Rep and currently at 59e59, is an attempt at a throwback romantic comedy, a story of two lonely souls from different cultural worlds who find each other in the big city and forge ahead in the name of love despite all the obstacles.
