Category: play

Review: Life of Pi

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Undeniably the most spectacular play of the Broadway season! Based on the novel by Yann Martel (which was also made into an Academy Award-winning film), adapted by Bengali-British Lolita Chakrabati, this version of Life of Pi swept the Olivier Awards in 2022. The taut Hiran Abeysekera plays Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel; it’s no surprise he’s taut, Pi is an extremely physical role.

Pi is the son of a Tamil-Indian zookeeper. In the mid-1970s a time of turmoil in India called “The Emergency” compels his family and their animals to depart for Canada on a cargo ship. The ship sinks, forcing Pi to share a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi survives at sea for 227 days after the shipwreck. The tiger, and for that matter all of the animals in the zoo, are played by incredibly lifelike puppets designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell; the puppeteers bring them to magnificent life, fully acting their emotions. As a matter of fact the puppeteers won the Olivier for Best Supporting Actor!

The weight of the show’s story is on Abeysekera’s shoulders and he carries it with vigorous enthusiasm and athleticism. The video design and animation by Andrzej Goulding effectively evokes all the settings, from India to Mexico (where Pi ends up) and most stunningly the open sea. Director Max Webster packs the production full of surprises, with great help from Tim Hatley’s endlessly clever set design. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

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

Review: Good Night, Oscar

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If Sean Hayes doesn’t get a Tony nom for this, it’s a shanda! In Good Night, Oscar Hayes plays Oscar Levant, a composer / songwriter, great friend of George Gershwin, successful concert pianist and conductor. But he was probably best known for his quick, acid wit. Throughout the 1950s he was a frequent guest on all sorts of television shows, and for two years hosted a show of his own.

He was also seriously mentally ill. He was certainly what we today call bipolar, also definitely obsessive compulsive, and after a heart attack in 1952 addicted to a panoply of painkillers, Demerol being a particular favorite. Hayes, long since established as one of the greatest comic actors of our time, predictably kills Levant’s witticisms.

The most thrilling part, however, is how he portrays Levant’s pain, the cost of his genius. Hayes proves himself to be a titanically good dramatic actor as he delves boldly into Levant’s darker side. Good Night, Oscar portrays Levant’s appearance on The Tonight Show in 1958, when Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport), a raconteur on a par (pardon me for the raconteur-ish pun) with Levant, was the host. Much of the drama is corralling the wild child Levant into a pre-show ability to simply hold it together for national television.

Playwright Doug Wright captures Levant in full multi-colored madness, in all his complex unbalanced glory. Perhaps most touchingly he shows how haunted Levant is by the memory of Gershwin (John Zdrojeski) – his biggest hit was his recording of George’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, which was requested to the exclusion of anything he himself had written. Perhaps most spectacularly, Hayes plays piano with great virtuosity, in the style of Levant himself!!! Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

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

Review: Summer, 1976

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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: 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: Pictures from Home

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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.

Review: Tennessee Rising

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

Jacob Storms’s Tennessee Rising is super-gay! From the subject, Tennessee Williams, to the director, Alan Cumming, to even the curtain announcement by none other than Drag Race champion Jinkx Monsoon! This one-man show is also very frank about Williams’s dalliances with men, in provocative detail. It follows Tennessee from 1939 through the Broadway premiere of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, also including many flashbacks to his childhood and youth. Storm is a skilled and canny writer-performer who covers this crucial time in the playwright’s life in Williams’s own voice.

In addition to tracing Williams’s career and love life, it delves into his very close relationship with his troubled older sister Rose. In a very effective moment, while Tenn talks about her mental health problems, a dark blue light illuminates another part of the stage. Williams based Laura in Glass Menagerie on Rose, and at one point Laura talks about confusing the lung disease pleurosis for “blue roses.” Nice touch. The play also delves into Williams’s worries about his own mental health, which he terms his “blue devils.”

Storms also mimics Williams southern accent more effectively than other portrayals I’ve seen. Tennessee Rising also captures the spirit of the Tennessee I know – from my extensive reading about the man – more honestly and accurately than most. Equally important, Storms’s writing mirrors Williams’s literary style with great finesse. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

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

Review: Leopoldstadt

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The titular traditionally Jewish district of Vienna is the setting for Tom Stoppard’s latest play, also among his best in my opinion. This district was Jewish long ago, in the 1600s, when it was called Im Werd. Ironically it was renamed Leopoldstadt for Emperor Leopold I, who drove the Jews out of Austria. Later rulers allowed some Jewish families back, but it took time to rebuild. None of this is the subject of Leopoldstadt. Instead it follows a wealthy Jewish family between the years 1899 and 1955. If you know European history you can see where this is going, but Stoppard rings some very interesting changes on one’s expectations.

In 1899, Jewish Vienna – and Vienna in general – was at its most vibrant. Psychology legend Sigmund Freud lived there, the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was in residence (he later was director of the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera), both of whom are referenced in this scene, to the effect “they belong to us.” And they were just the tip of the iceberg for that era of Jewish Vienna. As years pass WW I and the Russian Revolution lead to disillusionment among the family.

Then comes the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. The family hurriedly devises escape plans, but the Nazis march into their house. This, however, is not the end of this very twisty scene. In 1955, the family members who have survived the Holocaust return to the house. The genius of Stoppard here is that he communicates not only the human cost of the Holocaust – although he does that, to devastating effect – but also the loss of a whole culture of immeasurable importance to Europe’s artistic and intellectual history.

The large cast of this epic play is uniformly excellent, especially the players in the 1955 scene: Jenna Augen, Brandon Uranowitz and Arty Froushan. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Ain’t No Mo’

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I was sorely disappointed at the early closing of KPOP, a tightly structured musical that offered freshness, originality and innovative spectacle. Closed before I could even finish a rave review! Perhaps the first musical that made me say “WERQ! LIVING!” Well, I uttered those very same words the following night at the equally fresh and original play Ain’t No Mo’, which, dammit, seemed to be heading for exactly the same fate. Then, luminaries from Tyler Perry to Shonda Rimes stepped in, buying out whole performances, earning the play a week’s reprieve, and dammit, I hope for more.

The premise of the comedy is stated as “What happens if the American government offered African Americans a one-way ticket back to Africa?” Part of the innovation at play here is the structure: it’s a series of comedy sketches that nonetheless are all in service of a single story arc. The tone is also innovative: while this is mostly a wickedly satirical comedy, it can turn tragic on a dime and not be shy about staying there for minutes at a time. One of the songs I was listening to while writing this review, “Drop Dat” by Willie Thee Bawdy, rhymed “books by bell hooks” with “hip hop Mel Brooks” – yep that’s Ain’t No Mo’!

The glue holding the play together is Peaches, the gate agent for the flight taking people back to Africa. When she says the flight number out loud – 1619 (the year the first African slaves were shipped to the colony of Virginia) – it sent a chill up my spine. Mind you, Peaches is played in drag by one Jordan E. Cooper, who is also the playwright, and as such, at 27, the youngest American playwright in Broadway history (there’s a “WERQ!”). We re-visit Peaches several times with increasing urgency (never losing the comic notes) and Cooper delivers whip-smart timing, alternately combining straight up laugh lines and finely graded nuance. And often enough, rage.

The remainder of the cast is very much on Cooper’s level. The costumes are fabulous (I would expect no less from Emilio Sosa), the sets subtle but expressive (I would expect no less from Scott Pask). Run, don’t walk to see this utterly unique and fantastic masterstroke. THE VERY HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION!!

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: A Christmas Carol

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There have been a lot of stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: This holiday chestnut is an audience favorite, and – even better for theatres’ budgets – in the public domain. The best I have ever seen was a very warm and spectacular version on Broadway in 2019, which had the cast tossing and passing clementines and cookies to the audience before the show. This season’s Broadway version is second only to that one, but takes an opposite approach, leaning into the Gothic elements of what is essentially a ghost story.

In fact it’s so Gothic that in place of those clementines there are eerie sounds in the house, and a dimly lit ornate coffin on the stage. A sudden total blackout accompanied by a loud thud of a sound cue reconfirms the chilly, ominous tone. When the lights come back on, the brilliant Jefferson Mays begins narrating a version of the story closely adapted from an abridged version Dickens himself took on many a reading tour. Not for nothing Jefferson Mays is listed in the program simply as “The Mourner.”

But this is certainly not just a reading. The work of all the designers, especially Projection Designer Lucy Mackinnon, transmit the spectral atmosphere with great ingenuity – as spectacular as that 2019 production in an entirely different way.

Mays, long since known to be the master of playing multiple characters, plays no less than 50 here. Most effective: a Jacob Marley who truly appears to have cold dead eyes, a Bob Crachit who is genuinely warmly self-effacing, and of course Scrooge himself, whose arc of redemption Mays gives real heft. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: The Kite Runner

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I am one of the few people who hasn’t read Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, so I came to Matthew Spangler’s stage adaptation with fresh eyes. And to me, it is a profoundly moving story, deftly told. Many have said the novel is better – but isn’t it always? Novels have time to linger on an image or a thought, and in the compressed world of theatre, you can’t do as much of that. You tell me the novel is better, and I tell you the adaptation, taken by itself, is one of the most powerful plays I have seen in recent memory. The story remains lucidly expessed, the emotional undertow, deeply poingant.

For one thing, director Giles Croft staging is satisfyingly fluid and compelling. For another, Amir Arison (The Blacklist) gives a profoundly emotional performance as narrator and central character Amir, so good that I hope he is remembered when Tony nominations come around. Amir grew up in Kabul, back when it was peaceful and prosperous, the son of a wealthy Pashtun merchant. He becomes close to Hassan (a very expressive Eric Sirakian), the son of his father’s servant, who is Hazara, an ethnic group much discriminated against by Pashtuns.

At a vital moment, Amir betrays Hassan, and the remainder of the tale follows his guilt and eventual redemption. It also tells of the travails of the Afghan nation since Amir’s 1970s youth. He and his father Baba (Faran Tahir) become refugees when the Soviets invade, and settle into a working class life in Northern California. Events compel Amir to go to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where he is horrified by the deterioration and violence visited on his homeland.

I can’t say it enough, this is powerful, cathartic theatre, truly a must-see. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.