photo: T. Charles Erickson
Andrew Bovell’s dour, downbeat play, which flashes back and forward on several connections within an Anglo-Aussie family over four generations and eighty years, isn’t for passive theatregoers; its ambitious structure demands patience and concentration just to connect who is who (despite the characters’ family tree in the Playbill). While anything but formulaic, [...]
Posts under ‘Review’
When The Rain Stops Falling
All About Me
photo: Joan Marcus
Even if you are a fan of both Michael Feinstein and Dame Edna, as I am, you may feel that watching them take turns on, fight over, and share a stage in their duo show All About Me is a case where two equals less than one. The reason these unique, considerable [...]
Happy In The Poorhouse
photo: Larry Cobra
This latest show from The Amoralists (whose The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side was a breakout hit last year) stays at or near fever pitch: it combines the in-your-face exhibitionism of reality TV with the energy of slapstick farce. A lesser playwright would set these blue-collar lower-class characters up for our [...]
Valley of the Dolls
The decidedly ridiculous pleasures of Valley of the Dolls, still one of the crown jewels of camp movie trash, made their hilarious way onto the stage for this one-night-only reading to benefit Actors Fund. The casting was inspired, which says something considering the revolving door of talents announced, canceled and replaced along the way. Everybody [...]
Next Fall
Reviewed for Theatermania.
The Miracle Worker
There’s much to admire in this Broadway revival of the Anne Sullivan-Helen Keller story – above all else a riveting performance by Abigail Breslin – but, as you’ve likely already heard, the staging is a serious problem. (It pains me to say it, as I thought director Kate Whoriskey’s staging of Ruined last year was [...]
The Scottsboro Boys
photo: Carol Rosegg
Even by the vaunted standards of other Kander and Ebb musicals, The Scottsboro Boys is an especially potent mix of bitter social comment and rousing showbiz razzle-dazzle. The real-life story from the Deep South in the 30’s – of the infamously unjust arrest and prolonged imprisonment of 9 innocent black men for raping [...]
