Li’l Bit, the haunted protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, compares her Uncle Peck to the Flying Dutchman, the legendary figure condemned to travel the Earth until a maiden loves him of her own free will. The play, which won author Paula Vogel the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama,…
At the center of Taking Sides is a rube, a crass insurance salesman to be exact. A guy who doesn’t know Toscanini from teriyaki. A man who sleeps through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “because Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony bores me shitless,” as he explains to his secretary. Bored or just a bore,…
A movie, a novel, a Broadway musical, and a stage play. The only popular dramatic form Kiss of the Spider Woman hasn’t conquered is the TV sitcom. Given its high-concept idea (a fussy homosexual and an idealistic politico sharing a small space and becoming the best of friends), can its…
After the priest has cut out the tongue of the Marquis de Sade, he presents the meaty organ, encased in a black box, to the asylum’s caretaker. Handing it over he comments, “It was so long and serpentlike that I had to wrap it around a dowel.” Well, I bet…
This is the season during which British playwright David Hare is printing his own currency on Broadway. In April the much ballyhooed The Blue Room, starring a naked Nicole Kidman, will be joined by a New York production of Amy’s View, featuring theater luminary Judi Dench. Soon after that Hare…
A woman in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile makes this comment about the famous painter: “He says that occasionally there is a ‘Picasso’ and he is him.” You can substitute the word genius for Picasso and get the sense of what this phrase means. The comedy appears to…
Imagine you’re watching an early play by an obscure playwright — say, a farce with a plot that’s difficult to take seriously. Perhaps it contains a case of mistaken identity, at least one sharp-tongued female character, and some confusion about the proper nature of marriage. Say the conflicts are resolved,…
Add the late Tallulah Bankhead to the list of middle-age women throwing themselves into the national political fray this year. The celebrated actress, as currently portrayed in the American premiere of Tallulah by movie star Kathleen Turner, has even less bona fide political experience than either Liddy Dole or Hillary…
“First of all, when you’ve got a gun,” Stephen Sondheim points out in his musical Assassins, “everybody pays attention.” That’s for sure, as audience members experiencing the third-act explosion in a classic drama such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters can attest. But what happens when you have two guns? What if…
She’s the Medea of all stage mothers, the most frightening diva of the American musical theater. That would be Mama Rose, of course, the stardom-fixated monster at the center of Gypsy. Since 1959 audiences have clung to her poisonous apron strings, happily singing along. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, and Tyne…
When a damsel with golden ring-curls finds herself tied to railroad trestles by a mustachioed villain, or, as in Little Mary Sunshine, strapped to a tree by a vicious Indian, most audience members know that the lady in peril will be rescued momentarily, either by the entire U.S. cavalry, or…
In the second half of Steve Dietz’s new play Rocket Man, time moves backwards in an enchanting fashion. The elderly are the newest people on Earth. Teenagers, veterans by comparison, choose the parents who will care for them as they grow younger and more dependent. And on one character’s sweet-sixteen…
Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He’s playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Or rather he’s playing an actor playing Cyrano in Ken Ludwig’s 1995 Broadway hit, a comedy about a troupe of washed-up actors in 1953 who, by…
Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is bound to pop up somewhere this time of year, of course, but would you expect to find…
A tinsel-decked Christmas tree overwhelms the living room of Atlanta’s upstanding Freitag family. The ceiling-scraping spruce is about to be topped by a star until one of the characters declares that “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” How the Freitags come to have this gold ornament packed away among their…
Given the vroom-vroom of their current go-round on stage, it’s possible that, even with the theatrical equivalent of a road map, you might not be able to keep track of Kander and Ebb these days. Critically acclaimed revivals of the songwriting team’s biggest hits, Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), are…
When a play’s title is The Adjustment, chances are the playwright will be suggesting a monumental shift in attitude or perspective on the part of one or more characters. In Michael T. Folie’s new work, recently opened at the Florida Stage, tiny adjustments also occur. The play is set in…
If you had a conventional grammar school education and you don’t watch too much Nick at Nite, chances are you don’t think of Sebastian Cabot as the discoverer of the New World. According to The Complete History of America (abridged), however, it was this Englishman — and not the Italian…
From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood’s The Fly, classic American horror stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body. They’re overrun with maggoty cadavers, tell-tale hearts, and monsters that stalk us through dark alleys, graphic reflections of our fear of death. European tales, on the…
Nobody knows if Scott Joplin knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman’s well-meaning musical, however, the two composers not only meet cute (Joplin, disguised as a composer’s agent, appears in the office where Berlin works as a sheet-music publisher), they reminisce, play tunes, and dip together…
Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can’t help “endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper cars.” That’s the observation of one character in the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, an affable if not particularly insightful commentary on…
Nobody who has seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on…
