Stanford Friedman

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A Sign of the Times

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A Sign of the Times

A Sign of the Times, a new jukebox romp featuring musical riffs and cultural rifts from the 1960s, is full of statements. It has something to say about civil rights, women’s liberation, Vietnam, the course of true love and the influence of Pop Art. But this York Theatre Company production also leaves behind some nagging questions. Can a musical be “woke” when its book is tired? Can stock characters find believable ways to bond? Was Petula Clark right that things will be great when you’re downtown?

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The Greatest Hits Down Route 66

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The Greatest Hits Down Route 66

Histories come in all shapes and sizes and can be chronicled in any number of fashions. Family histories, each unhappy in their own way, may reveal personal pains that turn out to be strikingly universal. A country’s history can be told in terms of its politics, its geographic landmarks, its immigrants. And a people’s history can be reflected in its folk music. Any one of these might make for an engrossing night of theater. But when attempting to combine all three, finding the right balance and weaving a cohesive tale become a tall order. Such is the case with the New Light Theater Project’s production of The Greatest Hits Down Route 66, which finds itself short on songs, long on family dysfunction, and scattered on Americana.

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Madwomen of the West

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Madwomen of the West

To paraphrase Chekhov, if a piñata is dangling from the ceiling as a show begins, should it not be swatted down in time for the final curtain? Well, in the case of Sandra Tsing Loh’s Madwomen of the West, the piñata is left intact, but the façades of its four characters are broken open to reveal some big secrets. Unfortunately, by the time these confidences are divulged, their importance has been overshadowed by the production’s self-referential gimmickry. It is the handicraft of Brecht, not Chekhov, that is at work here as the audience is constantly taken out of the world of the play with the performers speaking directly to them, or reciting stage directions aloud, or dropping character altogether.

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The Jerusalem Syndrome

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The Jerusalem Syndrome

It is not unusual for musical comedy characters to undergo transformations. The genre is filled with lonely women who find love, vindictive men who turn generous, and insecure bumblers who gain confidence. All of the above are on display in the York Theatre Company’s breezy premiere of The Jerusalem Syndrome, but the writing team of Laurence Holzman and Felicia Needleman serve up this evolution with a new twist. Well, an ancient twist, actually. By play’s end, its five leads are all better people. But they achieve this feat by spending most of the show thoroughly convinced that they are characters from the Bible. 

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Scene Partners

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Scene Partners

The line between finding fame and losing one’s mind is disturbingly blurred in the Vineyard Theatre production of Scene Partners, the latest quirky work from mind-bending playwright John J. Caswell Jr. Operating on as many as four different levels of consciousness, this messy, stratified tale is held together, barely, by director Rachel Chavkin, who utilizes the strongest of glues: a sure-handed and deeply felt performance from her lead actor, Dianne Wiest.

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Stereophonic

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Stereophonic

A huge audio console occupies center stage in the Playwrights Horizons’ unhurried and precisely observed world premiere of Stereophonic. This makes sense not only because all of the action is set within the close confines of a music studio, but also because it is an apt metaphor for what playwright David Adjmi and songwriter Will Butler have in mind. Their musical drama chronicles a year in the life of a rock band and its tech team as they go about recording a new album. Decibel levels rise and fall as tensions mount, then subside, while the chance for harmony among the bandmates is continually thwarted by their insecurities, jealousies and self-indulgences. It’s a volatile mix.

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Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

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Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

The stakes are high, and quite pointy, in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. In this jocular take on that jugular-loving creature of the night, blood is sucked, true love is tested and vanity finds a way to survive in the soul of a monster who ironically cannot cast his own reflection in a mirror. Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic tale provides the groundwork, but the spirit of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, and the ghost of Charles Ludlam, lift the evening to its batty heights.

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Doris Day: My Secret Love

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Doris Day: My Secret Love

Paul Adams, the founder and artistic director of The Emerging Artists Theatre, knows a thing or two about digging up dirt. In his 2016 NY Fringe howler, The Cleaning Guy, he recounted his quarter century of maintaining various Manhattan apartments (including Agnes de Mille’s in her last days) to make a buck. Now, as the writer behind the tell-all, Doris Day: My Secret Love, he peels back the movie star’s squeaky-clean image to reveal a rather bleak biography with bullet points that include being married thrice by age 28, suffering a philandering father, crimes against her body and her bank account, panic attacks and the unexpected deaths of those whom she counted on the most. Is it any wonder she would ultimately focus her energies on pet care and animal adoption? 

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Rock & Roll Man

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Rock & Roll Man

The last time that Constantine Maroulis trod the boards of New World Stages was in 2008. Capitalizing on his dynamic American Idol appearances, he was cast as the hard rocking Drew in the ’80s-themed jukebox musical, Rock of Ages, a part that he would parlay into a Broadway run. Now, as the title character in Rock & Roll Man, he has returned to the venue, with shorter hair, to lead another period musical that’s full of classic hits. But this time he leads from behind, supporting a sensational ensemble that steals the show and never gives it back.

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Wet Brain

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Wet Brain

Memory, when conveyed on stage, traditionally arrives in the form of a flashback, or a soliloquy. But in John J. Caswell, Jr.’s frantic and surreal family drama Wet Brain, memory is a foreign object to be cut from the stomach, or a hypersonic shared experience that blasts through outer space even as it is grounded in that most triggering of locales, the family room in the house of a decidedly dysfunctional brood. 

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The Fears

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The Fears

People can be damaged by those they love or admire. They can sometimes be repaired, too, with the help of others. And often the shared desire to be healed is a salve in itself. Such are the truths swirling beneath the meditation and mindfulness sessions on display in The Fears. It is a toss-up as to whether playwright Emma Sheanshang has crafted a strikingly sad comedy or a quite funny drama. The play’s seven characters all walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy. And because the action is set in a Buddhist center, they do so without their shoes.

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Vanities—The Musical

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Vanities—The Musical

Vanities—The Musical, featuring a book by Jack Heifner and music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum, is a reworking of their 2006 effort, Vanities, A New Musical, which itself was based on Heifner’s 1976 straight play, Vanities. With Will Pomerantz along as director, the result is a decidedly male, and unfortunately stale, exploration of the lives of three imperfect women and the thinly drawn men in their orbit. The use of a talented, racially diverse cast calls attention to the work’s less-than-inclusive perspective rather than broadening it.

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The Seagull/Woodstock, NY

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The Seagull/Woodstock, NY

Anton Chekhov’s 1895 chestnut, The Seagull, has always been a crowd pleaser. The tale of unrequited love and petty jealousy among egomaniacal adults and self-doubting youths, sown through with treatises on the craft of writing and the purpose of theater, then capped with a dead bird and a tragic ending, has spawned eight Broadway productions over the past century. 

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Sandra

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Sandra

The Vineyard Theatre opens its 40th season with Sandra, an eerie solo show that dips into the murky waters of missing persons and false identities in order to demonstrate how physical disappearance can manifest itself in many forms. A friend will take off, a business will burn down, a spouse will depart, a house will grow bare, and a lover will become unrecognizable. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, and sure enough, given this title character’s unsteady relationship with alcohol, plenty of wine and liquor will also disappear. So much emptiness, but the result is a mostly fulfilling evening of theater.

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Catch as Catch Can

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Catch as Catch Can

Riding a risky wave of experimental casting, three Asian-American actors defy gender, age, ethnicity and a law or two of physics in Mia Chung’s comedy-drama, Catch as Catch Can. Without the aid of costume change, and only occasional differences in lighting, the three performers inhabit six closely linked characters, gliding in and out of each.

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Jasper

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Jasper

It is perhaps sign of these pandemic times that several Off-Broadway plays opening in the coming weeks all deal with severe illness. Manhattan Theater Club will stage Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, featuring a character with cerebral palsy. At the Atlantic, Gracie Gardner’s I’m Revolting is set in a skin-cancer clinic, and next month the Roundabout offers a work by Noah Diaz with the on-the-nose title, You Will Get Sick. But first, the Yonder Window Theatre Company gives us Jasper, a thought-provoking drama in which a boy with a fatal illness tests the limits of his caring parents.

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Kinky Boots

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Kinky Boots

Following in the footsteps of the 2013 Tony winner for Best Musical, this polished, Off-Broadway revival of Kinky Boots shines under the direction and choreography of Jerry Mitchell, who helmed that Broadway production, and stars Callum Francis, recreating the role of the drag queen, Lola, after having previously donned the titillating titular zip-ups on Broadway as well as in London and Australia.

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The Bedwetter

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The Bedwetter

Six months ago the Atlantic Theater presented Kimberly Akimbo, the musical tale of a 15-year-old girl whose young mind is trapped in a quickly aging body. Now, with the premier of The Bedwetter, it offers up the story of Sarah (Zoe Glick), a 10-year-old girl with a troubled, adult mind trapped in a child’s body that is always letting her down. And though Kimberly is headed toward an early death while Sarah advances toward certain fame, it is the latter character who wants our sympathy. She struggles, however, to fully earn it. In this uneven production, as director Anne Kauffman has discovered, a depressed kid with a foul mouth makes for a problematic protagonist.

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Harmony

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Harmony

It is a quirk of American theater that some of its most beloved musicals involve the specter of tyranny overseas. Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret and The Sound of Music each serve up friendship and love in the face of vanishing personal freedoms. There are echoes of all three shows in Harmony, a musical by Barry Manilow, with book and lyrics by Bruce Sussman, receiving a beautifully staged New York premiere by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, after some 25 years of revision, delays and productions in La Jolla, Calif., Los Angeles and Atlanta.

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Larry & Lucy

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Larry & Lucy

A teenage, runaway heroin addict with daddy issues and a former graffiti artist long past his glory days explore the borders of friendship and codependency in Larry & Lucy, a gritty little slice-of-life one-act spinning its wheels on the intimate basement stage at Theater for the New City. Playwright Peter Welch propels his title characters forward through a whirlwind couple of days in and out of Los Angeles while simultaneously pulling them back to their unhappy pasts via brief flashbacks woven throughout the piece. If the duo’s actions are at best unusual, and at worst highly unlikely or confusing, the offbeat performances and noir atmosphere conjured up by director Joe John Batista make for a trippy ride to the West Coast.

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