Jeena Yi’s Jesa is both familiar and fresh. The play revolves around a family reunion where secrets, resentments and accusations are aired—that classic motif in American drama. But Yi combines it with something rarely seen on U.S. stages: an immersion in Korean cultural traditions.
Boasting a top-notch cast and a bona fide writing team, Monte Cristo, the York Theatre’s new musical, appears to be a guaranteed hit. Based on Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo and Charles Fechter's play of the same name from 1848, the work seems a natural choice for musicalization. Its depictions of romantic heroism, retribution, and redemption are the core elements of other French masterpieces turned musicals, such as Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera. Yet, for all its pedigree, Monte Cristo is a major disappointment. It lacks the sweeping grandeur, the bombast, and the unapologetic sentimentality that have transformed its predecessors into long-running, billion-dollar enterprises.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
In My Joy is Heavy, a raw yet warmly disarming musical memoir, musician-actors Abigail and Shaun Bengson open the doors of their family life and loss to the audience. Under the sensitive direction of Rachel Chavkin, the production blurs the boundary between stage and house, transforming private grief into a communal—and unexpectedly joyful—theatrical encounter.
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.
That Parenting Musical, written by real-life mom-and-dad team Graham and Kristina Fuller, is a show that whimsically explores the ups and downs of parenting. Breezily directed and choreographed by Jen Wineman, it is two hours of rib-tickling fun.
