Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
While I enjoyed In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, I don’t think I’m its audience. For various reasons, I know a bit more than your typical theatergoer about feminism and the history of sexuality, so while Ruhl’s play revealed a few salient details I wasn’t aware of, I wasn’t as [...]
Entries from December 2009
December 19, 2009
Review: In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play
December 17, 2009
Review: Fela!
Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Fela! dances, shimmies, shakes, pulses, thrusts and explodes in a way never seen on Broadway before. About Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and his tumultuous life as political activist and innovative musician, this “musical” is less a book musical and more of a wholesale reconstruction of a unique place and time.
Director/choreographer Bill T. [...]
December 17, 2009
Review: A Little Night Music
Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
This musical, set in the very earliest years of the 20th century Sweden, is as optimistically romantic as Stephen Sondheim ever got. Even here there are generous helpings of his wry cynicism, but never enough to truly darken the sweetly swooning mood. Based on Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night, [...]
December 12, 2009
Review: Race
Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Rich white man Charles (Richard Thomas) has been accused of raping a not-rich black woman, and hires a law firm led by partners Jack (James Spader) and Henry (David Alan Grier) with associate Susan (Kerry Washington). Sounds like a promising set-up for a David Mamet play, right? Think again.
The most compelling thing about [...]
December 3, 2009
Review: Our Town
Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Director David Cromer’s revival of Thornton Wilder’s haunting evocation of a small New Hampshire town at the turn of the last century is intimate, even a bit claustrophobic. Between the years of 1901 and 1913, change comes slowly to the town of Grover’s Corners, and a stage manager (originally played by Cromer [...]
December 1, 2009
Review: Ragtime
Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Ragtime dials the clock way back, looking at the emergence of ragtime in the 1900s. It doesn’t tell the story of that music’s evolution; instead, it uses it as a metaphor for the convulsive changes then happening in America. Based on E.L. Doctorow’s epic novel set in New York’s combustible melting pot, [...]
December 1, 2009
Review: The Understudy
Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Is The Understudy a love letter or a poison pen letter to the theatre? Playwright Theresa Rebeck looks at one of the most infamous positions in the theatre: the understudy. The play, Rebeck’s best and funniest in years, certainly celebrates what the theatre is capable of, but it also has piercing insight [...]
