Family relationships are universally difficult for teens, and with unpredictable outcomes. American, Italian is Anthony P. Pennino’s touching, emotionally wrenching, and sometimes humorous exploration of family dynamics in two multigenerational Italian families.
Bedlam’s stripped-to-the-bone staging of Othello proves that less can indeed be electrifyingly more, as four actors conjure a harrowing world with precision and nerve. Under the incisive direction of Eric Tucker, this revival foregrounds the play’s racial tensions with clarity, inviting audiences to lean in—and reckon—with every word.
Director Robert Hastie brings his bold and inventive production of Hamlet for the National Theatre of Great Britain to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), a fitting first outing in the new partnership between these venerable institutions—BAM first performed Hamlet in 1861, and it was the National’s inaugural production in 1963. Hiran Abeysekera portrays the moody Danish prince as sweet, neurotic, and impish, drawing out the comedy in the play without sacrificing its complexity and tragic weight. Hastie and Abeysekera seize on Hamlet’s theatricality and theatrical self-awareness, taking it to a new and provocative level.
Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s master propagandist and serial womanizer, almost always had his way with women. Nevertheless, when he challenges filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl it’s a classic case of “the unstoppable force meets the immovable object.” It’s unclear from James Clements’ Beauty Freak whether Riefenstahl is the unstoppable force or the immovable object, but regardless, she emerges the winner—or so one is led to think.
He plays dozens of characters. He bolts around the stage like a dervish, rearranging props, setting up mikes, climbing stairs and changing personas with every move. He works up as much sweat as Jonathan Groff in Just in Time. And he tells a chilling true-crime story in the process, one to leave the observer unsettled as to whether justice was done, and if so, what the price of that justice was.
Sashay away? Nah, in Little House on the Ferry the drag queen tap-dances—and it’s just one of the old-fashioned musical-theater pleasures of this exuberant production, described in promotional material as an “immersive nightclub musical.”
