Edward Karam

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Waiting for Lefty

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Waiting for Lefty

Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, the fiery one-act that launched his playwriting career in the depths of the Great Depression in 1935, moves through seven scenes, from a union hall to a desperate family trying to put food on the table. As critic Harold Clurman recalled in a 1963 appreciation of Odets, “though he had a thrilling gift for dialogue, he was no literary man.” Steven Pasquale’s production for Classic Stage Company, however, intersperses protest songs and dance sequences among the scenes. Although well performed, they dilute the raw intensity of the original.

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The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay.

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The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay.

Anthropomorphism is at the center of The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay., David Javerbaum’s cleverly conceived work about dogs and their views of the world. Directed by Richard Israel, it’s playing at the Triad, the original home of Celebrity Autobiography. The Dog Show adopts a similar format as that hit: actors reading from scripts, mostly at stands. But it’s no less enjoyable for that: a winning cast of four helps the unflashy production breed satisfaction for its audience.

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Copperfield! The New Musical

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Copperfield! The New Musical

The producers of Copperfield! have added the subtitle The New Musical, presumably to alert anyone who saw the notorious 1981 flop Copperfield, which ran only 39 performances, that this show is not a revival of that one, which New York Times critic Frank Rich described as “the kind of musical that sends you out of the theater humming every score other than the one you’ve just heard.” On the contrary, the new Copperfield! is an energetic and melodious delight. If Dickens at Christmastime is a tradition, and A Christmas Carol is starting to feel shopworn, Copperfield! is an ideal substitute.

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Kramer/Fauci

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Kramer/Fauci

On entering St. Ann’s Warehouse for Daniel Fish’s Kramer/Fauci, the entire expanse of the building is visible. The floor is matte black, and on the far wall a bank of lights beams intensely toward the audience, replicating a high school football stadium in Texas. Although the scenic design is credited to Jim Findlay, Joshua Higgason, and Amy Rubin, and the lighting to Scott Zielinski, the importance is the actors, who re-create a 1993 C-SPAN interview with writer (the novel Faggots; the play The Normal Heart) and ACT UP activist Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (Will Brill), then known as the premier AIDS researcher in the country.

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The Hairy Ape

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The Hairy Ape

The word belong becomes an obsession for stoker Yank (Jon Beavers) in Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The Hairy Ape. Yank has spent his life shoveling coal on a transatlantic liner, and he is the tallest and seemingly strongest of the men doing that work in Ciarán O’Reilly’s engrossing production at the Irish Rep. Yank sees himself as the solid foundation of the entire society, but when a socialite visits the stokehold, it launches him on a downward spiral. He becomes obsessed with the idea that she could look at him only as a “hairy ape.”

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Ectoplasm

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Sara Fellini’s Ectoplasm is clearly engineered for a run in October, the month when the supernatural holds sway. Following the success of Paranormal Activity on Broadway, Ectoplasm might be expected to lean into horror and jump scares, but Fellini, who also directed, structures it more like a murder mystery. Though the material is overly familiar, Ectoplasm is buoyed by good acting, interesting details, and a few surprises.

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The Holes

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The Holes

For the first two scenes of Max Wolf Friedlich’s The Holes, the intrigue builds carefully, as a bartender named Joey Alexander (Bubba Weiler) hangs around his cozy but empty establishment on a snowy night. He soon has a visitor, a man (Grantham Coleman) calling himself “Paul,” who hands him an envelope full of cash and an ID that identifies him otherwise: as someone named Wesley. The cash gains Wesley entrée into the back room of the dive bar—in spite of arriving long after his assigned time. “Next time don’t be late,” says Weiler’s stern Joey, adding, “12:24 is not the same as 11:30.” What is behind that door constitutes a mystery that drives the narrative of The Holes. Friedlich calls his play a “fairy tale,” but the gay-inflected twaddle that follows is a far cry from Hans Christian Andersen.

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Garry Starr: Classic Penguins

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Crikey! Garry Starr: Classic Penguins makes one wonder what the Aussies are consuming besides cold ones. A quarter century after Puppetry of the Penis, the lunatic 2001 production from Down Under that introduced “genital origami,” comes this brash, loopy clown show, written and performed by Garry Starr (the stage persona of Damien Warren-Smith).

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What a World! What a World!

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What a World! What a World!

Eric Marlin’s What a World! What a World! explores gender identity, drag, and gay love in a dialogue-heavy production that opens on a bare stage reminiscent of a 1970s avant-garde drama. Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg exchange overripe melodramatic dialogue while moving and posing in tandem, using gestures that recall the 19th-century Delsarte system—back of hand to forehead, arms outstretched—executed with the measured precision of tai chi. The result is alternately intriguing and irritating, but emotionally remote.

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Catch of the Day

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Catch of the Day

The pub in Irish dramas is a center not just of drinking, but also of telling tall tales. In J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a new arrival, Christy Mahon, boasts of killing his father. In Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the regulars exchange ghost stories. But the atmosphere of Catch of the Day, by Megan Jenkins and the Red Fox Theatre company, is different. There’s music already happening on stage when one enters, and the gregarious cast may be engaging the audience in conversation or offering potato chips up and down the aisle or sniping at one another. The slapdash mix of music and comedy is more goulash than ghoulish, yet the lack of structure turns out to be one of the show’s charms.

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David Copperfield

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David Copperfield

Abigail Pickard Price’s production of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield may not include all the great characters of the 800-plus pages of the novel, but her exciting adaptation (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) for the Guildford Shakespeare Company is not to be missed.

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Jerome

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Jerome

John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Jerome is a departure from the typical gay play that pops up in June, geared toward Pride month: its focus is older gay men. A chalkboard in front of the proscenium curtain charts the decline of Jerome, Ariz., a mining town, from 10,000 population (crossed out) to lesser numbers (also crossed out) to, finally, Ghost City. That’s a tipoff that this eerie, intriguing drama is going to be different.

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Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody

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Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody

Send-ups of television series have become a cottage industry in New York theater, but they usually target familiar, long-established properties. Dylan MarcAurele’s Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody arrives barely six months after HBO Max premiered Heated Rivalry, a hit drama about rival hockey players who become lovers. Under Alan Kliffer’s direction, the result is fresh and bawdy, and sung with serious voices by a talented cast, all of whom help with scene changes that boost the production’s sketch-comedy vibe.

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The Receptionist

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The Receptionist

Adam Bock’s The Receptionist is a slippery workplace comedy that starts with a seemingly innocuous monologue by an unidentified male about his love of fishing, and then shifts to the workers in an office, where a Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer, the monologuist) is unexpectedly late. Amid exchanges of personal gossip, the receptionist Beverly (Katie Finneran) and a supervisor, Lorraine (Mallori Johnson), receive a visitor from the “home office,” Martin Dart (Will Pullen), as they await Mr. Raymond’s return. Director Sarah Benson’s revival of Bock’s masterly piece sustains a sense of inconsequentiality, even as discordant notes pop up, until the play reveals itself as a chilling paradigm of what Hannah Arendt, in covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963, called “the banality of evil.”

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The Adding Machine

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The Adding Machine

Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine shows surprising vitality after more than a century. Although critic Edmund Wilson disdained the play in 1924 for its “pessimistic heresies” and “effects of ferocious ugliness,” the importance of it did not escape other critics. When Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949, Harold Clurman noted that the theme of Arthur Miller’s play was “not, strictly speaking, new to our stage,” citing Rice’s 1923 work. With Salesman now on Broadway to rehash the shortcomings of capitalism, the New Group deserves kudos for offering a chance to see its precursor.

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Heartbreak Hotel

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Heartbreak Hotel

Titling her play Heartbreak Hotel is a major bit of misdirection from New Zealand dramatist Karin McCracken. Elvis’s recording of his classic 1956 single (by Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden) is barely mentioned, and its bouncy blues are a far cry from McCracken’s gloomier deep dive into the nature of heartbreak. Directed by Eleanor Bishop, the play reaches beyond McCracken’s personal drama to examine unexpected, more clinical aspects of a breakup, such as psychological, biological, and physiological symptoms. Interspersed with those sequences are musical interludes—she took up the synthesizer to occupy herself after the end of a six-year relationship, and she has learned six “powerful” chords.

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No Singing in the Navy

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No Singing in the Navy

The poster for Milo Cramer’s No Singing in the Navy, showing three wide-eyed sailors, evokes classic military-themed musicals—not only wartime ones like On the Town (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1945), but also the nostalgia-tinted shows of a generation later: Dames at Sea (1966) and Over Here! (1974). Its “score,” however, bears little resemblance to melody-rich 1930s and ’40s musicals, and its book is awash with absurdist episodes that misfire.

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Trash

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Trash

The engaging Trash embellishes a common New York story of two roommates in conflict by adding an important twist, as well as a variety of theatrical tricks, including audience participation. The Deaf creators and lead performers, James Caverly and Andrew Morrill, hold out occasional lifelines to a hearing audience via projections, a talking jukebox, and a character who isn’t Deaf, but just as often they speak in American Sign Language (ASL). Lest anyone balk at that, a good deal of the ASL portions are no more challenging than interpreting gestures in a silent film.

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Our House

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Our House

Barry Boehm’s play Our House deals partly with family strife—a staple of American drama for a century—with the added difference that four of the six characters are gay. A long night of drinking and drug-taking puts it squarely in the vein of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a show in which one of Boehm’s characters happens to be starring, in a community theater production. More particularly, the primarily gay characters echo any number of engaging dramas, from The Boys in the Band to Love! Valour! Compassion! to My Night with Reg.

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An Ideal Husband

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An Ideal Husband

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is a quotation attributed to French novelist Honoré de Balzac, but it applies directly to the plot of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895). Written close to Wilde’s peak—it opened just a month before The Importance of Being Earnest—Husband fizzes with epigrams and uses heightened language to expose hypocrisy. The Storm Theatre is brave to tackle the work, packed both with melodrama and wit, but to succeed, as Sir Peter Hall did with his Broadway production 30 years ago, requires skills and experience that it can’t altogether muster.

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