Comedy

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Eleanor and Alice

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Eleanor and Alice

It’s amazing how Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, and her first cousin Eleanor, renowned wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), sustained a relationship for more than six decades, given their polar-opposite dispositions. Blood is not necessarily thicker than water, and yet these two disparate personalities—the former, a socialite and senator’s wife, and the other, a political force and humanitarian in her own right, do not sever ties. Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts, Ellen Abrams’s new play about that relationship, deals with these celebrated women’s close camaraderie from childhood through FDR’s death. 

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The Wife of Willesden

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The Wife of Willesden

The Wife of Willesden, novelist Zadie Smith’s captivating playwriting debut, is a contemporary version of The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As many an English major will attest, Alyson, the Wife of Bath, is the most colorful of the pilgrims whose verse monologues form the bulk of Chaucer’s 14th-century masterpiece. Using rhymed couplets with 10 syllables per line (as did Chaucer), Smith has transformed Alyson to Alvita, a Jamaica-born Londoner of today, in a comedy faithful to its source material yet discerning about contemporary social issues.

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I Love My Family But . . .

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I Love My Family But . . .

Parents who love their children often give them mixed messages, and children who get mixed messages often give their parents problems. Such is the case with Timmy, whose often rocky and self-centered relationship with his parents in the new musical comedy I Love My Family But… is followed from infancy through marriage, divorce—and the latter’s repercussions. This relationship most certainly qualifies as a I Love My Family But… situation.

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The Rewards of Being Frank

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The Rewards of Being Frank

A sequel to The Importance of Being Earnest? It’s a tall order, given how frequently Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece returns, and how beloved it is. Alice Scovell’s attempt, The Rewards of Being Frank, gets a few things right and several things wrong, and it’s not the strongest production that New York Classical Theatre has ever done. But if you’re curious about what happened to Ernest and Algernon and Gwendolen and Cecily, and are willing to suspend a fair amount of disbelief, you’ll have a decent time.

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Black Odyssey

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Black Odyssey

In Black Odyssey playwright Marcus Gardley has undertaken an ambitious conflation of Homer’s epic poem with the history of Black people in America. In this lively, overstuffed and often bewildering fantasia, Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) struggles to find his way back to his family in Harlem after a discharge from the war in Afghanistan. He ends up homeless and then in a mental hospital, while his journey is overseen from Olympus by his allies Deus (i.e., Zeus, played by James T. Alfred) and Athena (Harriet D. Foy), and from the ocean by his enemy Paw Sidin (i.e., Poseidon), who is determined to kill him.

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Fall River Fishing

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Fall River Fishing

Lizzie Borden, a favorite true-crime subject since long before the genre had that name, is the inspiration behind Fall River Fishing, a new play directed by Eric Tucker and written by two of its cast members, Deb Knox and Zuzanna Szadkowski. Their double duty as playwrights and performers doesn’t fully convey just how much Knox and Szadkowski, along with their three castmates (Susannah Millonzi, Jamie Smithson and Tony Torn), put into the show. It succeeds because of these five deeply invested performances, each actor playing two roles that require them to deliver absurdist, anachronistic dialogue and engage in physical gags like eating—and feeding each other—spaghetti with their hands, sitting on the toilet for an extended period of time and getting splattered with blood.

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Sugar Daddy

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Sugar Daddy

Shortly after launching into his solo show Sugar Daddy, Sam Morrison talks about being mugged. The thief, armed with a gun, demanded his cell phone, and Morrison resisted because it had pictures of his late lover Jonathan on it. “I know we just met,” Morrison tells his audience, “but I think we can all agree that was off-brand.” (It’s clear from the audience’s ebullience that they know perfectly well what his brand is. The mostly young crowd in fleeces and pullovers and trainers have been boisterously waiting for him, even drowning out the pre-show music.) “I’m an anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” explains the comedian. “We’re not known to excel in moments of crisis.”

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Colin Quinn: Small Talk

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Colin Quinn: Small Talk

Colin Quinn, the Brooklyn-born comedian and former anchor of “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live, recently explained in a radio interview that his stand-up routines are designed to satisfy his curiosity about “how people become the way they become.” In his new Off-Broadway show, Colin Quinn: Small Talk, the 63-year-old writer-performer focuses his comedic gaze on Americans bewitched by the Internet and ponders the extent to which their online activities affect society at large.

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Solo: A Show About Friendship

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Solo: A Show About Friendship

Solo: A Show about Friendship is comedian Gabe Mollica’s dramatization of wild fluctuations in his luck with friendship and sex. It’s an hour-long backward glance, from growing up on Long Island to the present, triggered by a milestone birthday: “I turned 30,” Mollica tells the audience, “and realized I had no friends.”

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Events

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Events

Bailey Williams’s Events at The Brick is a wild and woolly comedy that examines the stresses of current workplace culture. It deals with job-related themes—the high demands for productivity, the delusion that one is irreplaceable—in a style that is witty, original, and entertaining. Directed by Sarah Blush, and co-presented by The Hearth, Events doesn’t altogether succeed as a coherent narrative. Nonetheless, it uses the properties of the theater in a deeply poetic and intriguing way.

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The Rat Trap

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The Rat Trap

Noel Coward’s 1918 play The Rat Trap is a combination of a comedy of manners and a tempestuous domestic drama. Coward, was only 18 when he wrote this play, which addresses women’s rights with psychological realism. Despite various youthful gaucheries, his genius is evident, delineating the theme that was to resurface in later works: the impossibility of love in marriage when spouses are competing egoists. Directed by Alexander Lass, The Rat Trap has all the earmarks of a feminist play, even though the term had yet to be coined.

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A Man of No Importance

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A Man of No Importance

The tensions between life and art, and between experience and imagination, lie at the heart of the 2003 chamber musical A Man of No Importance. When it premiered, Roger Rees played the homosexual director of a Dublin theater company in the 1960s, suffering from period repression and bigotry. Classic Stage Company’s revival stars Jim Parsons, the Big Bang Theory actor who apparently wants to demonstrate his acting and singing abilities beyond his Sheldon character—and succeeds.

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Candida

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Candida

It’s been 128 years since George Bernard Shaw penned Candida as an ironic commentary on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. But the play is seldom staged, which is a pity because, as David Staller’s new adaptation shows, this 1895 feminist comedy is a gem. Staller has transported the play from the northeast suburbs of 19th-century London to Harlem in 1929. While some theatergoers might miss the British flavor of Shaw’s original text, Staller’s version brings New York grit to the drama.

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Chekhov’s First Play

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Chekhov’s First Play

The Irish experimental theater company Dead Centre is taking a wrecking ball to Chekhov’s unwieldy five-hour play Platonov (also known as Untitled Play) with its new metatheatrical work, Chekhov’s First Play. Devised and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, this 70-minute production is a radical reworking of the original four-act drama, playfully magnifying its follies and the overreach of its young playwright, who penned it before he was 20.

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Everything’s Fine

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Everything’s Fine

If big-city Easterners could imagine what life in Midland, Texas, is like, they might conjure up images of a remote, semirural, small city with mundane lifestyles, cowboy hats, and thick drawls. Well, most of the stereotypical descriptors don’t apply here. Other than for the Texas sand, wind, and heat that Douglas McGrath describes in his solo play Everything’s Fine, there is much in McGrath’s story about growing up there that is universal.

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Our Town . . . but Wilder

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Our Town . . . but Wilder

“The Stage Manager in Our Town must be gay. I mean, he spends all his time gossiping about everyone in town and rearranging furniture.” This is a funny line, stereotypes notwithstanding. It sounds like something you might hear from the quippy gay men in good comedies like Will & Grace or Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey.

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Indictment Excitement

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Indictment Excitement

Whether there will actually be any indictment remains highly speculative. But you might glean a modicum of excitement, and a laugh or three, from Indictment Excitement, the political standup fest now being presented at Theater 555, with a rotating roster of comics.

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Peerless

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Peerless

This young Off-Broadway season has already seen two new plays riffing on Macbeth, both written and directed by women and both having to do with college. Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches, which wrapped its run at the Chain Theatre a month ago, was set in a university theater department that’s shaken up when a freshman wins the role of Lady Macbeth instead of the star senior. And now Primary Stages has debuted Peerless, Jiehae Park’s fast-talking dark comedy about Asian American siblings hell-bent on getting into the most prestigious university.

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As You Like It

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As You Like It

Maybe it’s the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the subsequent House Committee hearings this past summer, but the idea of fleeing to the Forest of Arden has rarely been so enticing. Directors often reinvent it as a rowdy retreat, replete with music and dance, but in Lynnea Benson’s production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Arden is mellow, soft, and dappled in sylvan light (created by Dennis Parichy).

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Stranger Sings!

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Stranger Sings!

When the fourth season of the Netflix hit Stranger Things premiered this past summer, it seemed like the show’s popularity had reached its zenith. From pushing a certain decades-old Kate Bush song back onto the Billboard Hot 100 to causing fangirls to rave online about the magnetism of breakout star Jamie Campbell Bower as Stranger’s newest baddie, the show’s powerful reach could rival the telekinetic abilities of one of the series’ other iconic characters, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). So it’s only natural that a musical parody of the show about superpowered teens, demonic beings and alternate dimensions would be the next step—here called Stranger Sings!, of course.

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