Month: April 2023

Review: Summer, 1976

On By dramaqueennycIn Broadway, play, review, theatreLeave a comment

There could hardly be a more artistically stellar cast for a two-hander than Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht. Playwright David Auburn brings his usual subtlety and nuance to this tale of a friendship formed over the titular season, between two neighbors in Columbus, Ohio, whose daughters love playing together.

Diana (Linney) a snobbish painter, and Alice (Hecht) the kooky wife of an economics professor, start out not particularly liking each other, but as they spend time together find unexpected similarities. There are side references to the bicentennial celebrations that were everywhere that year, but that is really window dressing for this small-scale story.

Auburn has the two women convey the plot more by fourth wall-breaking storytelling than actual depiction of events, although Linney does play Alice’s husband at a couple of points. It helps a great deal that Linney and Hecht, aside from being two of our best stage actors, have a very easy chemistry with each other.

The storyline could be described a couple of ways: intimately observed, or, more negatively, somewhat thin. There’s truth to both. Auburn plumps it up a bit with misdirection, showing the two to be unreliable narrators, something they admit to when they eventually come around to the truth. A nice twist.

Both women are attracted to the graduate student who is slowly painting Alice’s house over the course of the season. There’s a twist there as well, one of the play’s best, which I refuse to spoil. Perhaps the most convincing element of the show is its delicate insight into the unexpected ways friendships evolve, and the ways in which friends grow apart. Director Daniel Sullivan as usual mostly gets out of the way of the talent he’s working with, in the most artful way. Overall, it is a decent set of parallel character studies, made richer by the amazing cast. Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Champion

On By dramaqueennycIn Opera, reviewLeave a comment

THE BEST DAMN OPERA I’VE EVER SEEN!!! I’ve been a fan of jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard since I heard his score for the 2012 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. I really liked his Met Opera premiere last season’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones. But Champion (which was actually his first opera, written about 10 years ago) is world-beating.

Champion focuses on the truly operatic real life story of boxer Emile Griffith. A closeted bisexual, his initial ambition was to be a haberdasher, but when he approaches a professional hat-maker, the man sees this muscular youth and decides that he would be a better fit in the older man’s real passion: managing boxers. The young man from the U. S. Virgin Islands takes to it so well that he is soon world champion. At one point he fights the homophobic Benny Paret – who taunts him with “maricón, maricón” in the weigh-in – and delivers a powerful KO that puts Paret in a coma, from which he never awakens.

Blanchard and librettist Michael Christofer have brilliantly crafted a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic portrait of a life. The opera is moving from its very beginning, where an old Emile, suffering from dementia, sings “This is my shoe. Where does my shoe go?” to a melancholy orchestration. Devastating. But minutes later we are at a “junkanoo” celebration in his native island of St. Thomas where we see a young Emile determined to make hats, as several dancers – and stilt walkers! – dressed in colorful costumes executing Camille A. Brown’s spectacular choreography. The percussion arrangements throughout are some the most propulsive in opera.

Champion is also incredibly sexy!! There’s a locker room sequence where several brawny fellas spend most of the time in nothing but jock straps. A later sequence at a gay bar called Hagen’s Hole features the corps de ballet in the skimpiest of tops. The same sequence features any number of drag queens in fabulous wardrobe.

The cast is uniformly great with Eric Owens (one of my favorite baritones) as older Emile, rising star Ryan Speedo Green doing the heavy lifting as young Emile, making it seem effortless but still very poignantly acted. Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe knocks it out of the park as Hagen, the owner of the abovementioned “Hole.” She gets to sing the bawdiest phrase I’ve ever heard in an opera house “Well fuck me sideways!” See for yourself:

Absolutely thrilling, and I’m not just saying that because it is so freaking gay! It’s to my mind Blanchard’s finest work to date, and he is one of the best living American composers we have. My very highest recommendation.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Colin Quinn: Small Talk

On By dramaqueennycIn Off-Broadway, play, review, theatreLeave a comment

Colin Quinn is one of the better comics doing political satire; he communicates highly complicated ideas through the most mundane and absurdly funny examples. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his previous shows – especially his stand-up “history of the world” Long Story Short which made it to Broadway – all of which which brought enormous issues wittily down to a comprehensible human scale. So I got excited when I heard about this new show about the nominally more minor titular subject of Small Talk. Even though it addresses a simple idea, Quinn still draws examples from a hugely eclectic number of sources, some of which are indeed from history modern and ancient.

Quinn advocates for the lost art of talking with strangers, and making a connection. Oddly enough, me and my husband did exactly that with the next table\when we were grabbing a quick meal before the show, Quinn hits home with his off-hand approach, sometimes speaking volumes with a simple scoffing noise.

His main point is that in this era of social media, the one-to-one human contact gets missed. Instead of trying to make a friend with the person next to you, people throw often pointless hate online. He’s right, this is definitely a wrong turn. To quote: “If you post more than 5 times a day you should be in a 72-hour psychiatric hold.” He applies the same comic logic to gun control:“When people come in to buy a gun, no waiting period but first give us three references. Then we Face Time those people and go, ‘Hey, your friend Joe Schmo wants to buy a gun,’ and if they go, ‘Really?!’ They’re not getting a gun.”

At the end there is a lovely tribute to his late friend Norm MacDonald, whom he credits as the best small talker he ever knew, reading the room and saying contradictory things to left wing and right wing people he was chatting with. A nice coda to a very entertaining and insightful show.

Quinn’s manner is engagingly off-hand – this is bigger and smarter than your usual stand-up, but it never totally leaves that sphere. He’s a sharp-eyed wise-cracker, his take decidedly coming from a working class point of view, or at least from the point of view that’s been formed by being around working class people. Small Talk is jaunty and fun with a biting edge, a thought-provoking good time that I can easily recommend.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Alan Cumming and Ari Shapiro

On By dramaqueennycIn cabaret, reviewLeave a comment

This show is probably the gayest thing to come to the Cafe Carlyle, a stage that has seen Bobby Short and Isaac Mizrahi cross its boards. The famously lewd and frisky “Emcee” of Cabaret and Club Cumming, and the deep voiced host of NPR’s All Things Considered – on the face of it they seem to be quite the odd couple. But get them onstage singing “Bosom Buddies” from Mame and it quickly all makes sense.

Alan Cumming in his own way is as politically committed as journalist Ari Shapiro, and Shapiro is one hell of a singer in his own right, and once you find out about Shapiro’s Portland clubwear from the 1990s, the similarity comes into sharp focus (embarrassingly it sounds like something I once wore; Ari probably looked better in it).

Also, as they themselves point out, they are both very much in the business (no, the art) of telling compelling stories. And so here we are in a show they call “Och & Oy! A Considered Cabaret” – and yes they do both make jokes and get very serious about their respective Scottish and Jewish heritages. Also part of the joy of the show is their spontaneous interactions which are often hilarious, and just as often thoughtful.

Cumming is easily one of the most charismatic performers in America today, his take on songs, so very fresh, his singing as bold, big and beautiful as can be. A highlight is Alan singing a song Kristin Chenoweth made famous “Tyler the Latte Boy” by way of emphasizing that being married does not preclude outside crushes and flirtation. Cumming’s patter is nothing if not frank – sometimes even filthy – and the show as a whole is very emotionally direct, which makes for an experience that is both intimate and expansive.

Shapiro, for somebody most people think of as quite earnest, turns out to be every bit as naughty as Alan, and funny, and tuneful. He sings the Bette Midler song “Laughing Matters” which details the horrors of the world, and unfortunately (as he points out) is even more topical now than it was when Bette recorded it in 1998. The other side of the song is that, with all that’s going on, indeed laughing does really matter. And as incisive as these two are about so many things, they are both masterful at making us laugh. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Pictures from Home

On By dramaqueennycIn Broadway, play, review, theatreLeave a comment

A play based on a photo memoir – Sharr White’s Pictures from Home is both utterly unique and very much in the tradition of American family drama. Professor of photography Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein) starts off analyzing photographs from his childhood in Brooklyn, and then begins visiting his parents in their San Fernando Valley home, taking pictures of them in their later years. His irascible father Irving (Nathan Lane) is a retired razor blade company executive, his mother Jean (Zoë Wanamaker) a still working real estate broker.

As you might be able to tell by the cast, Pictures from Home skews toward the comedic, with Lane in particular taking Irving’s cantankerous personality as an opportunity for laughs. Burstein’s is the most understated performance, as Larry doesn’t even know what he’s looking for through his camera lens. A better understanding of his parents’ “American Dream” perhaps? Or what that dream even means – is it at all a positive thing? Wanamaker is also terrific, especially in silent reactions to Irving and Larry’s conflicted relationship that speak volumes.

We see projections of Sultan’s pictures of the actual Irving and Jean, which gives added depth to our understanding of Larry’s search for meaning beneath these images of American family life. Director Bartlett Sher’s touch here is deft and light, mostly getting out of the way of White’s skillful writing and this magnificent cast. Pictures from Home is not a high-impact show; aside from Irving’s prickly comic outbursts, it is a very subtle piece of work, with Burstein’s layered portrayal of Larry carrying most of the thematic weight. Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.