Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about FREUD’S LAST SESSION, SEE ROCK CITY & OTHER DESTINATIONS, FALLING FOR EVE, THE IRISH AND HOW THEY GOT THAT WAY, BACHELORETTE, WOLVES, WITH GLEE, IN GOD’S HAT and THE CAPEMAN.

Mark St. Germain’s Freud’s Last Session, currently at The Margery S. Deane Little Theatre in the West Side YMCA, imagines a meeting in London between the cancer-ridden Sigmund Freud and the Oxford don C.S. Lewis during the early days of the Blitz. This is a pretext for a debate about religion, during which the arguments pro and con for the existence of God are laid out. This sounds pretty dry, but it’s not. St. Germain knows how to create compelling conflict and his dialogue is often very witty. You won’t come away with your mind changed, but you will enjoy yourself if you go to this. Tyler Marchant’s direction is perfectly, subtly understated, and his two actors, Martin Raynor as Freud and Mark H. Dold as Lewis are terrific.

The Transport Group’s musical at the Duke Theatre, See Rock City & Other Destinations by Adam Matthias (book & lyrics) and Brad Alexander (music), AT THE Duke Theatre, is basically a series of ten-minute plays about people visiting unusual tourist destinations in the U.S. All are ultimately about loneliness.

When you enter the Duke Theatre you are confronted by an empty space, save for a huge pile of lawn chairs. Just before the show begins, the cast members come out, disassemble the lawn chair mountain and set the chairs up in rows around the periphery of the room. This reinforces the themes of impermanence we are about to experience, but it also addS extra time to the event. It seemed to me an unnecessary contrivance.

I loved the little playlets, though; and the songs are lovely. The performers are are mighty fine. This one’s definitely worth a visit.

The York Theatre Co. has on view a charming take on the Garden of Eden story, a new musical called Falling for Eve. Book writer Joe DiPietro imagines God as both male and female, and in his version only Eve is expelled from Eden for eating that apple. She wanders around the earth for many years before she persuades an angel to let her back into Eden to go fetch Adam.

The songs by Bret Simons (music) and David Howard (lyrics) are charming, and the performers are delightful. Jose Llana is a wonderfully hunky, rather dim Adam, and Krystal Joy Brown is delicious as Eve.

You might think, “Oh, no, not another anachronistic take on the Bible;” but go – you’ll have a good time.

Irish Rep has brought back Frank McCourt’s The Irish and How They Got That Way, which they have produced twice previously, as a sort of memorial to McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, who passed away last year and who was a much beloved New York character, particularly amongst the Irish in our midst.

McCourt’s script is a documentary which begins in Ireland but winds up in America. It’s the Cliff’s Notes edition of Irish/American History, made enjoyable by McCourt’s trademark wit and director Charlotte Moore’s charming cast, who sing snippets of scads of songs, from the inevitable “Danny Boy” and “The Rose of Tralee” to “No Irish Need Apply” and “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?”

It’s a darlin’ time in the theatre, even if you’ve seen it before.

Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette looks to be the biggest hit Second Stage has had with its summer uptown series at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre. It’s been extended until the end of the month, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it resurfaces later this season in a commercial venue.

Although there are men in the play, Bachelorette is basically a horrifying/hilarious portrait of 20-something women. We are in a swank hotel room. The Maid of Honor has invited over two of her friends who, it turns out, are not exactly friends of the bride. While we wait for the bride-to-be to show up at the party, these three women let their hair down. All three are terrified that life is passing them by. The play starts out as a bitch-fest, moves quickly into a cat fight, and ends up as potential tragedy – all in the course of 90 minutes.

One of my favorite directors, Trip Cullman, has worked his usual seamless directorial magic, and his cast is wonderful – particularly, Tracee Chimo, Elizabeth Waterston and Celia Keenan-Bolger as three lost girls partying on down a road to nowhere.

This one’s a don’t-miss.

Alas, the following have closed:

Delaney Britt Brewer’s Wolves, at 59 E. 59 Theatres, was a triptych of plays which also dealt with 20-somethings, a chilly scenes of winter sort of look at alienation and despair amongst the Next Generation, made watchable by excellent actors.

With Glee was my favorite of the Off Broadway musicals I’ve seen this summer. It was about a prep school for misfit boys, to which are sent kids to varying degrees too strange to make it anywhere else. One man and one woman played all the adults, but the young men in the cast were the Main Attractions, and all were excellent. John Gregor wrote the whole shebang and man, is he one to watch! Loved the music, loved the actors, loved Igor Goldin’s staging! Sorry you missed this one!

Richard Taylor’s In God’s Hat at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre was a trailer trash gothic sort of play about two brothers, one of whom is a convicted child molester who has just been released from prison. His brother picks him up at the prison gate, and on the way to Wherever they run into a couple of nasty skinheads. The play reminded me of Tracey Lett’s Killer Joe – and I mean that in a good way. The actors were wonderful – particularly the two guys playing the white supremacist skinheads, Dennis Flanagan and Gary Francis Hope, both of whom seemed like the Real Deal, instead of “just” actors.

Finally, I caught the last of the three performances at the Delacorte Theatre of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s staged concert version of Paul Simon’s The Capeman, a Broadway flop of a decade or so ago. Director Diane Paulus stripped away most of Derek Walcott’s ponderous, overly complex book. What remained were Simon’s wonderful songs. Paulus’ staging was terrific, as was Sergio Trujillo’s choreography. I wouldn’t be surprised if this resurfaces somewhere in the near future.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison,The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE WINTER’S TALE, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, THE GRAND MANNER, A QUESTION OF MERCY and LOVESONG OF THE ELECTRIC BEAR.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

This summer, for the first time the New York Shakespeare Festival is running two productions in rotating rep at the Delacorte Theatre, The Winter’s Tale directed by Michael Greif and The Merchant of Venice directed by Daniel Sullivan. A repertory company does both plays, except for four actors, two per play, who only appear in one. It’s always a pleasure to go to the Delacorte; this summer it’s Theatre Heaven.

I started off with The Winter’s Tale, which I had never much cared for. Greif’s production made me realize that I hadn’t cared for it because I had never seen a really good production of it – until now. It’s largely been dismissed by the critics; why, I cannot fathom.

The challenge when doing the play is in how to make the character of Leontes not only credible but sympathetic. In the first half of the play, with his pathological suspicion of his wife’s infidelity with his best friend, he comes off as Othello, but without Iago there to manipulate him. Ruben Santiago-Hudson does a credible job here, and almost manages to make this believable; but he shines thereafter, as he recognizes his foolishness and tries to expiate the guilt he feels for having caused the deaths of his queen and his young son.

The other actors in the show are uniformly outstanding. My faves were Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a powerful, raging Paulina; Max Wright and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as the Bohemian shepherd and his dim son who find baby Perdita, left to die on the orders of her father Leontes, Linda Emond as an extremely touching Hermione, Heather Lind as Perdita and Hamish Linklater as Autolycus. Linklater is fast emerging as one of our finest actors, particularly in comedy, and I think Lind is a Future Star. I liked just about everything in Greif’s production, from Clint Ramos’ beautiful, rather whimsical costumes to Tom Kitt’s charming music.

Don’t believe what you’re read about this production: it’s really wonderful.

As is Sullivan’s even more wonderful production of The Merchant of Venice. Al Pacino is the finest Shylock I have ever seen, and Lily Rabe the finest Portia. Sullivan brilliantly makes it crystal clear that the play takes place in a world of high stakes finance and speculation, giving it a startling contemporary relevance to our world in the here and now.

Pacino is simply astonishing in the difficult role of Shylock, making him an archetypal Little Guy screwed by The System. Nobody does rage better than Pacino; and nobody that I have ever seen in the roles breaks your heart more than he does. Truly, he is “The Jew which Shakespeare drew.” Rabe is sweetly authoritative as Portia and once again Hamish Linklater amazes in the usually ho-hum role of Bassanio, whose need for money in order to have a shot with Portia sets the ball rolling. Linklater’s is a three-dimensional, compelling creation of a somewhat callow young man who becomes a grown-up by play’s end. Bill Heck is also compelling in the usually-forgettable role of Lorenzo, the gentile who steals Shylock’s daughter Jessica and marries her right under her father’s nose. Byron Jennings, who also appears in The Winter’s Tale (as Camillo), is the best Antonio I have ever seen, and once again Heather Lind is impressive as Jessica.

There are so many small pleasures in this production that I can hardly list them all. Max Wright makes a delightfully dotty, semi deaf and semi-senile Prince of Arragon, and Nyambi Nyambi proceeds to top him as a goofily pompous Prince of Morocco. Gerry Bamman, a wonderful Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale, is even more wonderful here as the Duke; and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, as Lancelot Gobbo, is as hilarious as he was in The Winter’s Tale.

Both productions in the park this summer are Not To Be Missed. They continue through 1 August.

Also Not To Be Missed is A.R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner, at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre in Lincoln Center. Gurney has based the play on an actual incident during his youth, when he travelled from his prep school in New Hampshire down to New York to see the legendary Katharine Cornell in Antony and Cleopatra. Armed with a letter from his grandmother, who knew Miss Cornell from Buffalo, he meets her, gets his souvenir program signed, and that’s it. Well, that’s what actually happens; but Gurney then proceeds to spin a “what if” scenario: what if he stayed longer and learned the truth about Miss Cornell and her husband, Guthrie McClintick? What if during this lengthy visit Miss Cornell came to a realization about the price of fame and success, about how she has gone from a great artist to a stately battleship going through the still waters in the “grand manner” which now, at the advent of Marlon Brando, seems obsolete.

Kate Burton is wonderful as Cornell; but even more wonderful are Boyd Gaines as Guthrie McClintick and Bobby Steggert as young Pete. Beautifully directed by Mark Lamos, this is Yet Another wonderful play by one of our finest playwrights, who should have won the Pulitzer Prize long ago.

Potomac Theatre Project is in residence at Atlantic Stage 2 with three productions, also running in rotating rep. I caught two of them, a revival of David Rabe’s A Question of Mercy and Snoo Wilson’s Lovesong of the Electric Bear. Both were terrific.

A Question of Mercy, was first done in the early 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic was raging, as was Jack Kevorkian’s (“Doctor Death”) battle to legalize euthanasia. A desperate, distraught man comes to his former doctor to please with her to help his lover, who is in the final stages of dying of AIDS, to kill himself. Though the play is less immediate than it was originally, and seems (thankfully I guess) like a relic from a long-past time, Jim Petosa’s production is mighty fine. Tim Spears is heartbreaking as Anthony, whose lover is dying, and Paula Langton is very compelling as Dr. Chapman. Alex Cranmer is absolutely harrowing as the dying Thomas.

This is a fine production or a more or less forgotten play, and well worth your attention.

As is Wilson’s Lovesong of the Electric Bear, an absurdist take on the story of Alan Turing, who originally conceived the concept of the computer, whose genius led to the breaking of Germany’s Enigma Code which contributed significantly to the defeat of the Nazis and who killed himself in the early 1950’s when he was persecuted for being a homosexual.

Apparently Turing, something of a child-man, continued to sleep with his teddy bear long into adulthood. Wilson makes this bear a character, as the play’s narrator and Turing’s protector and sometime foil. It’s a rather goofy concept, but it works. There have been other plays about Turing, Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code being the most well-known, but Wilson’s is a worthy addition to the genre. It has been inventively directed by Cheryl Faraone and features terrific performances from Alex Draper as Turing and Tara Giordano as his teddy bear.

Both PTP productions are well-worth seeing.

“On the Aisle with Larry” 

Lawrence Harbison, the Playfixer, usually brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. It’s a slow time in the New York Theatre so this week, Larry reveals his theatrical pet peeves, in the style of Andy Rooney. 

I love going to the theatre. Last week excepted, I usually go about 5 times a week. I have just been chosen to be on the Nominating Committee of the Drama Desk, so I expect I’ll be going even more in the next year. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Since I took last week off (there really wasn’t anything I wanted to see), this week I have decided to write about some of my theatrical pet peeves. 

It used to be that if an audience really liked a show, or a performance therein, they would step up their applause at the curtain call, or even shout “bravo!” I am told they still do this at the opera – not that I would know. Who has time to go, when one’s at the theatre almost every night? And, anyway, it’s all in a foreign language. Now at the theatre, one hears ridiculous whooping at the curtain call. “Whoop!” Whoop!” Sometimes, just “Woo!” “Woo!” What’s with this? It just sounds idiotic to me. 

Speaking of curtain calls, it seems like every time I go to Broadway, the audience gives the actors a standing ovation. This used to be rare; now it seems to be obligatory. I think this is because people have spent so much money on their tickets, they want to believe that what they have seen is Extraordinary. Sometimes it is; usually, it’s not. I often find myself the only audience member sitting during the curtain call, curmudgeon that I am. To further add to my eccentric behavior, if I didn’t much care for the show itself I hold my applause until the actors come out, because if the show sucked it’s usually not the actors’ fault, and they deserve a hearty round of applause. Whoop-free. 

Another thing that annoys me is the inevitably tardy start of the show. If my ticket says it’s supposed to start at 8:00 pm, why does it usually not start until 8:10? Movies start on time; why can’t plays? 

Latecomers annoy me. The show starts ten minutes late (see above), but still there are people who just can’t make it even by 8:10. They usually have seats in the center section of the front of the orchestra, thus distracting everyone – the actors included, as they struggle past patrons who managed to make it on time, to get to their seats. These people should be flogged! 

I usually am fortunate enough to get a seat on the aisle; but occasionally I am seated down the row. On these occasions, inevitably the aisle seat is occupied by a movement-challenged individual who doesn’t seem to be able to get up and go. While he and his wife bask in the glow of their expensive night out, other patrons are blocked from getting out of there. Meanwhile, the aisle fills up and then it takes forever to get up it and out of the theatre. Once, at the Mint Theatre, I was seated in the third seat off the aisle. The first and second seats were occupied by an elderly couple who went catatonic after the curtain call ended. Eight of us were standing there, wondering if we’d ever get out of there. Finally, I reached over and gently tapped the old fella on the shoulder sitting on the aisle. “Excuse me,” I said. “The play’s over – you can go home now.” Immediately the geezer snapped out of his coma, and he and his wife got up and exited. Geez Louise! 

Speaking of audience exit behavior – why do so many people struggle with their coats and hats and scarves in the aisle or, worse, at the door to the street, thus making it impossible for anybody to get past them. Lord have mercy – get outta the way to put your coats on! 

At every show, from Broadway to deepest darkest Off Off, patrons are asked before the show begins to turn off their cell phones. Rarely am I at the theatre when at least one doesn’t go off. Are these people deaf??? 

Critics tend to piss me off. Many of them seem to think it’s their job to persuade as many people as they can not to go to the theatre. I can’t tell you how many times I have actually rather enjoyed a show which these cultural ayatollahs have panned. Just because you read it in a newspaper (or, these days, on the internet), doesn’t mean it’s true. And never forget; the critics don’t have you in mind when they are writing their reviews. 

Well, that’s about it. What are your pet peeves? 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York and this, week, Stratford, Canada.  This week, Larry tells you about ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST, LITTLE DOC, DIETRICH AND CHEVALIER, WHEN WE GO UPON THE SEA and my visit to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. 

The Peccadillo Theatre Company, dormant for a while, has come roaring back with a superb production of Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. I was unfamiliar with this play, as it pretty much fell into obscurity after its modest Broadway run during the 1946-1947 season, so for me this was like seeing a new play. It was a great way to end a theatrical season loaded with terrific plays by women. 

Another Part of the Forest is a prequel to Hellman’s most famous play, The Little Foxes, and deals with the dysfunctional Hubbard family, who make O’Neill’s Tyrones look like the Cleavers. The pater familias, Marcus, rules the roost with an iron hand, which extends to his frustrated wife Lavinia and his two sons, Benjamin and Oscar, who work for him in virtual indentured servitude. Regina, his daughter and the main character in The Little Foxes, is his father’s pet; but she too has her own agenda, and the seeds are sown for her titanic struggle against Benjamin and Oscar in The Little Foxes. Benjamin is continually scheming to find a way to get the old man’s money, and eventually he succeeds. 

Peccadillo’s production, beautifully directed by Dan Wackerman, makes a fine case for this play as a forgotten American classic, and the actors are just wonderful. Sherman Howard is appalling (and I mean that in a good way) as the vile Marcus, and Matthew Floyd Miller is brilliantly devious as Benjamin. 

The play runs about 3 hours but you never have the sense that it is over long. It’s a don’t-miss. 

Dan Klores’ Little Doc, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, is a fascinating though ultimately unfilled drama about drug hustlers in 1970’s Brooklyn. Ric, the only character in the play who might escape this life, may or may not have stolen $50,000 from Manny, sort of a father figure to him. He plans to run off with the wife of his best friend, who doesn’t seem to care, to start a new life. 

The play builds to a tragic ending which, unfortunately, the playwright doesn’t supply; but if you don’t mind spending time with a bunch of despicable lowlifes, Little Doc is worth seeing, particularly for the fine performances, most notably by Adam Driver, who continues to impress me, as Rick. 

Dietrich and Chevalier, at the Theatre at St. Luke’s, is a bio-musical by Jerry Mayer about two great entertainment icons, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier, who met in Hollywood in 1932 and carried on a love affair (though each was married to someone else), before parting. Both ran up against the Nazis. Dietrich managed to trump them, while Chevalier allowed himself to be blackmailed into performing in Paris during the German occupation, finding himself on trial for collaboration after the war ended.

 Interspersed with this fascinating story are songs closely identified with each, ably performed by Robert Cuccioli as Chevalier and Jodi Stevens as Dietrich. Neither looks much like his/her character, but they manage to embody their unique style of singing. 

This one is, I think, for theatergoers old enough to remember Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich. Younger people may wonder what the fuss over them was all about. 

The prolific Lee Blessing has a new one, at 59 E 59^th’s Americas Off Broadway Festival, When We Go Upon the Sea, a “what-if” play which imagines former President George W. Bush hauled before the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. The play takes place in a suite in a first-class hotel the night before Bush’s trial is to begin. The concierge does everything he can to make the former president comfortable, which extends to bringing in a mysterious woman, who may or not be his wife, to provide him with torrid sex. 

Had this play been about the imagined trial, it might have been interesting. As it is, I just found it silly and distasteful, a rare misfire for this fine playwright. The actors are good, but you could give this a miss. 

Finally, I visited the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for the first time in many years, seeing two plays, As You Like It and The Tempest, both directed by Stratford’s Artistic Director Des McAnuf. As The Tempest was in previews when I saw it, I really can’t comment on it, other than to say the production stars Christopher Plummer as Prospero. Well, heck – let me just say that Plummer is predictably amazing. 

McAnuf has set the first part of As You Like It in a 1920’s fascist state. When we move into the Forest of Arden, we enter a surreal world right out of Magritte, replete with extras standing around wearing animal and flower-bush heads. McAnuf gets a little carried away with this concept, I think, but the acting is of such a high quality that it doesn’t matter. Brent Glover makes a fine Jacques, more quizzical than misanthropic, and Andrea Runge is a delight as Rosalind. 

In my opinion, all lovers of classical theatre should make the pilgrimage to Stratford at least once. It’s a lovely town, and there you’ll find the best Shakespearean productions this side of that other Stratford, across the Big Pond. 

 “It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about RESTORATION, EVERYDAY RAPTURE, IMAGINEOCEAN, WHITE WOMAN STREET, GRACELAND and YEAR ZERO.

Restoration, Claudia Shear’s new play at NY Theatre Workshop, is about a 40-something woman who is a brilliant art restorer, hired to clean Michaelangelo’s “David” for the 500^th anniversary celebration of its creation. Giulia is more than a little obsessive/compulsive about the job, so much so that she starts referring to the statue as “him” rather than as “it.” At one point in the play she actually quasi-tries to have sex with the statue. This is hilarious, by the way.

Giulia is great when she’s dealing with stone, but impossible when she’s dealing with people. Until, that is, she strikes up a friendship with the handsome security guard at the museum where she is working. In the course of the play, Giulia finishes her restoration of the statue and, just maybe, starts to come out of her shell.

Ms. Shear is perfectly cast as Giulia, no surprise as she wrote the role for herself. There is also wonderful work here from Jonathan Cake as Max, the security guard, and from Alan Mandell as Guilia’s former professor, who helped get her the job. Mandell sounds astonishingly like John Giulgud. Well, everyone in the cast is superb.

While I wouldn’t put this one in the absolutely-don’t-miss category, it’s a very enjoyable evening and well worth checking out.

As is Everyday Rapture, Sheri Rene Scott’s autobiographical musical at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre. I saw this last season at Second Stage, and I had my doubts about how it would play in this much larger theatre. These doubts were dispelled.

Ms. Scott tells the story of a girl from Kansas, raised as a Mennonite, who fell in love with singing when she was introduced to Judy Garland records by her gay cousin. Judy became a huge influence in her life, as did Fred Rogers, of all people. Ms. Scott’s medley of Mr. Rogers songs makes a case for the children’s TV icon as a homespun philosopher/poet. Although Ms. Scott is most of the show, there is also good work here from her 2-woman backup group, whom she calls the “Mennonettes,” and a hilarious section involving a teenaged boy who has posted a video of himself lip-synching to a song his idol sang in Aida. Eamon Foley practically steals the show with this embodiment of the joy of performing, and of being a true musical comedy fan.

Go – you’ll have a great time.

You’ll have a great time, too, at John Tartaglia’s Imagineocean, at New World Stages – but only if you’re there with a little kid. This is a delightful puppet show about three fish buddies who go on a treasure hunt. It has dancing jellyfish, bubbles, and water sprays. I took a three year-old, and she was enthralled. And because she had such a good time, I did too.

Sebastian Barry’s White Woman Street, at Irish Rep, is about a gang of saddle-worn train thieves on the trail to White Woman Street, a small town where their leader, O’Hara, had an experience in his youth which marked him for life. The play is a mostly-narrated western, with little dramatic action. It is set in southern Ohio, in 1918, where apparently there are still injuns and it’s still the Wild West. Ohio? 1918? And the language sounded awfully bogus to me. I kept trying to identify the metaphor in all of this, but couldn’t. I just wound up wondering, why did an Irish playwright write this? It made no sense to me, but what ultimately held me were the superb performances, most notably by Stephen Payne as O’Hara.

Irish Rep does much better when they revive old plays. Why they can’t find better contemporary Irish plays is beyond me.

Lincoln Center Theatre has a program called LCT3, in which they produce plays by “unknown” playwrights. Plans are underway to build a space for this very worthy venture up there at Lincoln Center; but for now, LCT3 is performing at the Duke Theatre, where I saw Ellen Fairey’s wonderful Graceland, about an adult brother and sister, both themselves sort of lost souls, struggling to deal with the circumstances surrounding the suicide of their father.

Marin Hinkle is wonderful as the sister, Sara, and Matt McGrath is great as her brother, Sam. Well, everyone in the cast is delightful, with special praise going to David Gelles Hurwitz as teenaged Miles. The scene where he tries to put the moves on Sara is hilarious.

I loved this play!

I also loved Michael Golamco’s Year Zero, produced by Second Stage at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre, about a Cambodian woman and he younger brother, also struggling to deal with the death of a parent; in this case, their mother, who has just died of cancer. Ra, the sister, is dating a med student named Glenn who is hopelessly in love with her; but she holds a torch for neighborhood bad boy Han, a gang member who has just gotten out of prison and who is adored by Ra’s teenaged brother, Vuthy.

Will Frears’ production is just beautiful, and all the actors are great. Louis Ozawa Changchien is an extremely charismatic Han, and Mason Lee a wonderfully surly Vuthy.

This one is definitely a don’t-miss.

___________________________________________________-

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE FOREST, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, THE KID, LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING and WHITE’S LIES.

Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky was the most well-known and successful playwright in Russia in his day (mid-19^th Century); but nowadays he is best known, at least in this country, as a sort of precursor to Chekhov. It’s easy to see why when viewing his The Forest, currently on view at CSC.

The play takes place at a country estate, much like those in The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya. Whereas Chekhov’s characters are clearly on the cusp of social change, Ostrovsky’s are an entrenched quasi-feudal upper class, and as such are a portrait of a culture whose denizens are blissfully unaware that a tsunami is going to hit them just a few decades later.

The central character in The Forest is a wealthy land owner named Raisa, played with her usual quirky aplomb by Dianne Weist. She fancies herself a benevolent individual; but in reality she’s a skinflint. She’s taken in an impoverished young man and plans to marry him off to her niece; but in actuality she has the hots for the guy herself (I guess you could say she’s a proto-cougar), and the niece wants to marry the daughter of a wealthy neighbor but can’t because she has no dowry. Into this mix strides Raisa’s long-lost nephew who, it turns out has been reduced to being an itinerant actor, and an impoverished one at that.

The play is long on exposition, but once you get by that it is intermittently enjoyable, a light social comedy with some very fine performances.

The Screwtape Letters, at the Westside Theatre, is a stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ epistolary novel about a senior member of the Devil’s staff issuing orders to his hapless nephew, a tempter-in-training who makes one rookie mistake after another in his quest to snag his first soul. Uncle Screwtape is a devilishly delightful fellow, particularly as played here by the wonderful Max McLean, until the end, when his nephew Wormwood pays the price for incompetence in the service of Our Lord Below.

This devilish take on salvation and temptation is great fun, whether or not you believe that Evil is an objective force fighting the forces of Good.

The New Group has a new musical on view at the Acorn Theatre, The Kid, based on a book by sex advice guru Dan Savage about the struggles of a gay couple to adopt a child. Eventually, they are chosen by an unwed, homeless teenaged girl; but the tension builds when there becomes a distinct possibility that she will renege.

The songs, by Andy Monroe (music) and Jeck Lechner (lyrics) service the story well, though none of them stand out on their own. The music is light, amiable, but not particularly memorable. What carries the evening is the witty/poignant book by Michael Zam, the inventive direction by Scott Elliott and the wonderful performances by the likes of Christopher Sieber and Lucas Steele as Our Heroes, the Fairy Father wannabes, and the ensemble, all of whom pay multiple roles.

This one is not a must-see; but it’s most enjoyable if you’re into the subject matter.

The Women’s Project has concluded its season with a fascinating drama, Lascivious Something, by Sheila Callaghan. We are in the impoverished Greek island home of August, an American, and Daphne, his young Greek wife. It is 1980. August, a former student activist in California in the 60’s, has dropped way, way out; when who should arrive but his former girlfriend and political partner Liza, after all these years. What does she want, and why is she here?

Ms. Callaghan employs a most unusual device several times, wherein she provides two alternative versions of a scene – the one the characters want to play, and the one they actually do play. I found this device fascinating; but I can see how some might find it annoying.

Be that as it may, director Daniella Topol’s cast if wonderful. Rob Campbell is a delightfully dissolute August and Dana Eskelson provides the right blend of determined and enigmatic as Liza. My fave, though, was Elizabeth Waterston as Daphne – sexy, strong but just a little bit vulnerable. This is a Future Star, no doubt about it.

Finally, I caught up with Ben Andron’s White’s Lies at New World Stages. I shall preface my remarks by saying that whenever I read terrible reviews for a play, this makes me curious to see it – to find out what it was that pissed ‘em off so. More often than not, I have found that the play that got slammed deserved a lot better. Also, I have lamented that pure out-and-out comedy is inevitably panned, usually unfairly. So, I was in a very positive frame of mind when I went to see White’s Lies. That lasted about 5 minutes.

This is a godawful play about a supposed high-powered divorce lawyer who beds a different woman practically every night. His mother tells him that she has terminal cancer (she comes to his office, For Some Strange Reason, to tell him this), and that her dying wish is that she have a grand child. Who should show up but an old flame from his college days who wants to hire him to handle her divorce. She hates him, has always hated him, but she figures he’s just the scumbag she needs to help her take her husband for all he’s worth. For Some Strange Reason, she brings along her daughter. Our Hero (well…) gets an idea. If the daughter will pose as his long-lost daughter who he didn’t know he had, Mom’s dying wish will be fulfilled. The Old Flame is resistant to this brilliant idea, until the lawyer offers to handle her case for free. The daughter, on the other hand, is All For It. Dad and daughter proceed to get to know each other, which inevitably (in this playwright’s world anyway), leads to sex. That’s about the time I ran out, ranting into the night.

This play is just one terrible joke and contrived situation after another. Here’s a for- instance: We are given to understand that the lawyer has a fabulous bachelor pad. We know this because his mother (played valiantly by Betty Buckley, of all people), who has constantly expressed her dismay at his many sexual conquests, says that he has such a nice apartment, she thought he might be gay. DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO YOU??? What I wanna know is, if this guy has such a great apartment, why does he only shtup his women at his office? Could it be that they’d need another set, and then how could his nebbishy partner constantly walk in on him when he’s with his latest babe (which is an attempted running joke)?

Man, would I like to know the story of how this turkey got produced. Could it be a vanity production of some sort, or is it just that the producers – Aaron Grant, Jana Robbins, Jeremy Hackman, Craig Haffner, Karl E. Held and something called “Sneaky Pete Productions” – have Absolutely No Taste Whatsoever? And, what the heck is a class act like Betty Buckley doing in this dreck?

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about FENCES, LEND ME A TENOR, SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM, PROMISES PROMISES, COLLECTED STORIES and my annual Tony Rant.

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Because of those doggone Tony Awards, Broadway openings come at us fast and furious this time of year. The lion’s share of Broadway shows open between mid-March and 1 May, in hopes of snagging Tony nominations, which they can then use to promote ticket sales while they wait to see if they win the Tony Roulette. Expect to see many closings in June, of shows whose number did not come up. 

Anyway, I usually, write about a cross-section of productions I have seen, from those on the Great White way all the way down to deepest, darkest Off Off Broadway. This week, it’s all about Broadway. 

The revival of the late August Wilson’s Fences, at the Cort Theatre, heads my list of must-sees. The original production starred James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues baseball star who was too old when integration finally came and who now works as a garbage man. Troy is a complex character, a deeply flawed hero with a stormy relationship with his son, born of his resentment of both his youth and his athletic ability, a man who loves his wife but who just can’t resist tomcatting around with other women (Tiger Woods, anyone?). He is brilliantly embodied in this new production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play in a towering performance by Denzel Washington, one of our greatest actors. Washington’s performance is matched by that of Viola Davis as Troy’s wife, who consents to taking in a baby whom Troy has fathered with another woman (who dies in childbirth), but who informs her husband that from this moment on, he is a woman-less man. 

Kenny Leon’s production is flawless, and there is terrific supporting work from Wilson veteran Stephen McKinley Henderson as Troy’s friend Jim Bono and from Chris Chalk as the son. 

Don’t miss this great production of this great American play. 

I also recommend Stanley Tucci’s production of Ken Ludwig’s farce Lend Me A Tenor, about a Cleveland opera company which is forced to improvise when their visiting star Italian tenor drops dead (or so they think) on opening night. Lend Me a Tenor was the last of a long line of classic Broadway comedies, a genre which is now pretty much dead due to critical antipathy towards comedies which seek only to amuse. It is more than just amusing – it is hilarious. 

Tony Shalhoub is a scream as the manager of the opera company, as are Anthony LaPaglia as the tenor, Tito Morelli, and Jan Maxwell as his wife, who trusts him about as much as Elin now trusts Tiger; but all the performances are wonderful. 

Lend Me a Tenor is the best comedy on Broadway (well, it’s the only pure comedy on Broadway – thank you, cultural ayatollahs). 

Sondheim on Sondheim, Roundabout’s bio-revue about you-know-who at Studio 54 is, predictably, long on reverence and short on drama (it’s a revue, after all). It’s comprised of songs from Sondheim’s many shows, interspersed with filmed vignettes of Steve talking about his work. I love SS’s music; but for me, The Man’s talking about it and his life in general was the best part of this show. 

I found James Lapine’s staging to be rather rudimentary; but all the singers are mighty fine, though I guess I expected too much of Cabaret Legend Barbara Cook who is, I think, a few years past her expiration date. I was curious that Lapine included nothing from Pacific Overtures, nor does Sondheim talk about it during the vignettes. Strange …

 If you believe some critics (and at least one notoriously catty gossip columnist), the revival of PROMISES, PROMISES at the Broadway Theatre is a turkey. Well, it’s not. The production is a very clever send-up/pastiche of 60s dance and design, and Neil Simon’s book is still hilarious. Sure it’s gag-filled. And that’s a bad thing? 

To my mind, Sean Hayes is giving the best performance by a leading performer in a musical this season as a milquetoast of a man named Chuck Baxter who, before he knows it, finds himself practically homeless as a troupe of bosses at the insurance company where he toils away in oblivion take advantage of his eagerness to please by borrowing his apartment for trysts with their bimbos, one whom turns out to be the lady of Our Hero’s dreams. Ashford’s choreography is Just Plain Wonderful, as is Kristin Chenoweth as his Lady Love, Fran.  Katie Finneran, though, steals the show as a voracious barfly who scoops up Chuck, who has gone to a bar at the beginning of the second act to drown his sorrows when he realizes that Fran is having it off with the head of personnel, Sheldrake, in his own bed. Yuck! 

Promises, Promises is far better than Finian’s Rainbow, and deserved a Tony nomination in stead of that deservedly-departed o’turkey. 

Donald Margulies has had quite a season, what with not one but two plays appearing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Biltmore) on Broadway. Time Stands Still has been deservedly nominated for several awards, including the Tony for Best Play, and now Manhattan Theatre has brought back his Collected Stories, which appeared originally Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel (mighta been the De Lys then) about fifteen years ago, starring Uta Hagen. As I recall, Ms. Hagen gave a dark-hued performance, whereas here Linda Lavin plays it more droll, for laughs, as a creative writing professor who sees the defining moment of her personal life, her affair with the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, become fodder for a novel by her own assistant. 

At the De Lys/Lortel/Lortel/Whatever, Collected Stories packed a punch; at the Friedman, it just seems like a very attenuated one-act play, stretched to two hours. Sometimes, when plays move to Broadway, they seem magnified. Not this one. It shrunk. 

Finally, I have to say a few words about the Tony nominations. Good Lord: the incidental music in two plays was nominated for Best Original Score? And, as previously mentioned, how could Finian’s Rainbow have beaten out Promises, Promises? Overall, though, I think the nominations are fair, though like everyone else I have my list of egregious omissions, which are: 

Best Play: RACE

Best Play Revival: HAMLET and PRESENT LAUGHTER

Best Musical Revival: PROMISES, PROMISES. How could FINIAN’S    RAINBOW have beaten this out???

Best Leading Actor: Victor Garber, PRESENT LAUGHTER; Daniel Craig and Hugh  Jackman, A STEADY RAIN

Best Leading Actress: Laura Benanti, IN THE NEXT ROOM etc.

Best Featured Actor, play: Patrick Breen and Cotter Smith, NEXT FALL

Best Featured Actress, play, Connie Ray, NEXT FALL

Best Featured Actor, Musical: Quentin Earl Darrington, RAGTIME

Best Costume Design, Play: Jane Greenwood, PRESENT LAUGHTER. Can you believe  that this great designer has never won a Tony? 

In my I Agree Wholeheartedly column: kudos to the Tony nominators for not nominating Come Fly Away as “Best Musical.” You know why? It’s Not a Musical – it’s a ballet. As was Contact, which not only received a Tony Nomination but which actually won. Lord have mercy … 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about STUFFED AND UNSTRUNG, PHOENIX, THE ALIENS, AMERICAN IDIOT and BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON.

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If you like puppetry, comedy and audience participation, then Stuffed and Unstrung, at the Union Square Theatre, is for you. Created by the next generation of Henson puppeteers, it employs a puppet cast of seeming thousands, manipulated by six wonderful puppeteers, who take ideas thrown at them by their very enthusiastic audience and improvise hilarious scenes based on them. It’s Second City, done with puppets. 

A few times during the evening the intrepid cast takes a break from their improvising to recreate bits created years ago by Jim Henson. It’s amazing to see how far comic puppetry has come since then. 

If you like this sort of thing, be advised that nobody does it better. 

In a previous column, I told you about Scott Organ’s Phoenix, which I saw at this year’s Humana Festival. New York audiences have seen many plays over the past three decades which originated at Humana, but never so soon after the Festival’s conclusion. Frankly, I’m amazed that the author and his agent allowed Phoenix to be produced by the Barrow Group, where it is running through 3 May in an extremely “bare-bones” production, instead of holding out for a higher level offer. 

Although the production values are nil, Barrow Group’s production of this slight but very satisfying play is terrific. Director Seth Barish has highlighted the romantic comedy in the play and downplayed its political aspect – a wise move, as the play’s about a couple who have a one-night stand. She finds herself pregnant, so of course she is going to exercise who Right To Choose. He is incredibly supportive, even going with her to an abortion clinic; but then he changes his mind and pleads with her not to go through with it. In Louisville, the woman was a rather callous bitch; at the Barrow Group she was much more likeable. Both actors were very different from the Louisville cast, and both were excellent. 

I see this play as a very subtle anti-abortion play. Barish’s production shies away from that, making Phoenix more of a bittersweet love story. 

Annie Baker’s The Aliens has gotten some rave reviews, which is lucky for Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, whose last offering, Blind, was a bomb. The play’s about two slackers who spend all their time hanging out behind what appears to be a restaurant. When a teenaged kid who works there comes out to empty the garbage, they decide to adopt him into the slacker brotherhood. There’s not much more plot than that. Just a lot of wheel-spinning. 

The Aliens has actually been compared to Chekhov and Beckett; but it lacks a Chekhovian social context and is far too realistic for Beckett. The actors are most credible in their roles, but the play has been given an astoundingly languid touch by director Sam Gold, whose pregnant (nay, impregnable) pauses add at least an unnecessary half hour to what was for me an excruciatingly boring evening. 

American Idiot (at the St. James Theatre) and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (at the Public), two rock musicals which opened very close to each other, have been heralded as the Wave of the Future for musical theatre. Well, I doubt that; but I am delighted that both seem to be attracting a young audience. 

Of the two, I much preferred American Idiot, which is a staged version by Michael Mayer of an album by a neo-punk group called Green Day. Supposedly, it tells the story of three slackers. One flees suburbia and is sucked into the maelstrom of big city degradation. One goes off to war and gets shot up. One stays home and does nothing. Really, though, there’s about as much plot as in Movin’ Out.  But you don’t go to this show for the story. You go for the kick-ass music. Much of the lyrics are unintelligible, but I guess rock fans are used to that. And Mayer’s staging is incredibly inventive. 

As for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, this too employs a slacker sensibility to tell the story of our seventh President. Alex Timbers, who also directed the show, has made the book an odd amalgamation of Cliffs Notes history and Monty Python or SNL sketch comedy, not done particularly well. In fact, a lot of the acting is deliberately amateurish, which astounded me. Michael Friedman’s songs are I am told in the “emo” genre, whatever that is. I found both music and lyrics to be uninventive and uninteresting. 

In my opinion, both American Idiot and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson are incredibly over-praised, but if you’d rather be at a rock concert than to ever be caught dead at the theatre, maybe they’re more your kinda thing. 

 “It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about RED, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, THE COCKTAIL PARTY, I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET.

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Before I tell you about my reaction to Red, by John Logan, an import from London now playing at the Golden Theatre, I must admit my prejudice against almost all of “modern art,” and most especially abstract expressionism. I believe that hundreds of years from now, when people look back on our era, they’ll be dumbfounded that we actually thought the work created by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko was great art; indeed, art at all. So, that’s the frame of mind I had when I went in to see Red, a play about Rothko starring Alfred Molina.

 Red takes place in Rothko’s Manhattan studio in the late1950s. Rothko has received a huge commission to paint murals for a new restaurant, to be called The Four Seasons. He’s getting $35,000, which we are given to understand was a lot of money at that time.

Anyway, it’s such a big job that he needs an assistant, and the play begins on said assistant’s first day on the job, at the start of which he is informed by the imperious Rothko that he is an employee. Rothko is not his teacher, his mentor, his confidant – he’s his employer. That said, Rothko proceeds over the course of the next two years to browbeat this young man and to pontificate on a variety of subjects as they relate to the most important subject of all – Art; particularly his art. He’s particularly big on Nietsche. 

Finally, when the young assistant takes him on, assailing his boss for being a blowhard, ungenerous to the point of paranoia about any art by anyone else, Red becomes dramatically interesting. This takes place near the end of the 90-minute evening. Up until then, it’s all talk, talk, talk – much of it interesting, but little of it dramatic. 

What sustains the evening are the performances by Molina and by Eddie Redmayne as the assistant who, like Molina, has come over with the play from London. Both actors are great in their roles. Redmayne’s performance is “A star is born.” 

If you actually like “modern art,” this play might appeal to you. You’ll certainly learn a lot (maybe, more than you care to know) about one of its titans. 

Speaking of London imports, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES is back, at the Longacre Theatre, in a new production directed by Terry Johnson last season at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a hot hot hot venue in Southwark from which also sprang this season’s revival of A Little Night Music and last season’s (or was it the season before?) of Sunday in the Park with George. When it does musicals, Menier scales them down; hence, they cost much less; hence, commercial producers start salivating. 

This new version of the Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical features British classical actor Douglas Hodge as Albin, in a performance which won Hodge the Olivier Award last season. The rest of the cast is American, led by Kelsey Grammer as Georges. 

La Cage aux Folles (the club) is short on glam and long on grunge. I have to confess, I missed the glam. Grammer is charming as Georges. Reportedly, when Hodge has to go back to London in six months, Grammer is switching over to play Albin. I might go back and see this – he might be good in the role. As for Hodge, I appeare to be the lone dissenter in the chorus of praise for his performance. I found his high-pitched, nasal intonations to be more than a little annoying. What can I say? I just didn’t like him. As they say in Britain, he got on my tits. 

Critical opprobrium has made this La Cage aux Folles a hit hit hit, and the leading contenda for this year’s Tony Award for best musical revival. Frankly, I enjoyed Bye Bye Birdie more. 

There are two interesting revivals of rarely-performed plays on view at the Theatre Row multiplex. The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) has a superb revival of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, which has closed at the Beckett Theatre, and Keen Co.’s I Never Sang for My Father is at the Clurman. Of the two, I much preferred The Cocktail Party. 

Eliot straddles the world of the classic drawing room comedy and the much darker, more oblique world of Pinter. In the first act the play’s central character, Edward, is hosting a cocktail party for a bunch of his wife’s friends. His wife is off visiting a sick aunt. There is a mysterious uninvited guest, and in the second act we find out who he is. We also find out that in fact Edward’s marriage is on the rocks. What seems to be a deliberately superficial play about marriage becomes much more about salvation and redemption, with haunting overtones of Eliot’s own rocky marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. 

TACT’s Artistic Director Scott Alan Evans’ production is subtle and superb, and there are wonderful performances all around from his cast. The Cocktail Party is one of those Famous Plays more talked about than seen. I hope you had a chance to see it. It might not come this way again. 

Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father is a memory play, a la The Glass Menagerie, wherein a middle aged man tells us of his rocky relationship with his father, a crusty old coot who is not going gently into that good night. When we meet the parents, they are returning from Florida, where they winter. Mom is suffering from a range of health problems. Dad is physically fine but starting to fail mentally. Of course, he is in extreme denial about this. 

Aside from the annoying use of narrative to tell (rather than dramatize) the story, I Never Sang for My Father can be a tough sit, because we, too, are in denial about the inevitable decline of our parents. If we are geezers like the father in the play, Anderson exposes uncomfortable truths about the inevitability of The End which we’d rather not face. 

That said, Keen’s production, while extremely bare-bones, is pretty good. Marsha Mason and Keir Dullea are excellent as the parents. Ms. Mason exits the play after the first act (guess why?). I missed her. Dullea is infuriating/heartrending as he fights his son every step of the way, refusing to accept his fate, insisting that he’s fine, everything’s fine. 

Keen doesn’t make the case for I Never Sang for my Father as a Lost Classic, but it’s still worth seeing if you don’t mind being bummed out. 

By now, you must have heard all about how The Addams Family, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, is a turkey. Well, it’s not. It’s a perfectly enjoyable light entertainment which, uncannily, employs basically the same plot as does La Cage aux Folles: grown child (Wednesday, now 18) is getting married, to a nice young man whose parents are conservative, straight-laced mid-westerners (in the snobby world of New York, is there any other kind of mid-westerner?) who want to meet their future in-laws, so much of the plot concerns the Addams family’s mostly futile attempts to appear “normal.” 

Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth star as Gomez and Morticia, and they are both a hoot, as is Jackie Hoffman as a Grandma rather deranged from too many drugs in the 60s, and Kevin Chamberlin as a jolly Uncle Fester, in love with the moon. 

Critics have excoriated the show for being too cute, too sentimental. These are, by definition, bad bad bad, apparently. The Addams Family looks like it will succeed anyway. It’s selling tickets like it’s another Wicked – because of strong word of mouth. So: poo on you, Broadway critics! 

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, at the Nederlander Theatre, is an import from Chicago. It uses an actual event, a jam session in Memphis’ Sun Records’ studio which included Roy Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. The first three are already big stars; Jerry Lee is a wannabe who shows up to try and get an audition with Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records. The other three drift in. Perkins has been overshadowed by Elvis, who shot to stardom after he performed Perkin’s “Blue Suede Shoes” on the Ed Sullivan Show, and is fiercely determined to climb back on top of the charts. Elvis, in tow with his girlfriend of the week, wants Phillips to join him at RCA, to whom Phillips sold his contract in order to save his label, because he believes only Sam understands that rock and roll is not a fad. Sam, meanwhile, is anxious about Cash, whose contract is expiring. Can he re-sign him? 

Million Dollar Quartet is rather thin dramatically but wonderful musically. The actors who portray the rockers look and sound amazingly like the originals, and are kick-ass musicians to boot. Robert Britton Lyons seethes with anger and determination as the de-throned King of Rockabilly, Carl Perkins, and you might think that you are actually watching Elvis, Cash and Lewis in the superb incarnations of, respectively, Eddie Lendenning, Lance Guest and Levi Kreis. My only quibble: what the heck is Hunter Foster doing in this show? He’s a gifted musical comedy performer in his own right. Here, he has no songs. Well, that’s all right, Ma – but imagine, say, his sister Sutton in a show in which everyone sings but her. Ridiculous.

“Who is this guy?”

For over thirty years Lawrence Harbison was in charge of new play acquisition for Samuel French, Inc., during which time his work on behalf of playwrights resulted in the first publication of such subsequent luminaries as Jane Martin, Don Nigro, Tina Howe, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, William Mastrosimone, Charles Fuller, and Ken Ludwig, among many others; and the acquisition of musicals such as Smoke of the Mountain, A…My Name Is Alice, Little Shop of Horrors and Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down.  He is a now a free-lance editor, primarily for Smith and Kraus, Inc., for whom he edits annual anthologies of best plays by new playwrights and women playwrights, best ten-minute plays and best monologues and scenes for men and for women. For many years he wrote a weekly column on his adventures in the theater for two Manhattan Newspapers, the Chelsea Clinton News and The Westsider. His new column, “On the Aisle with Larry,” is a weekly feature at www.smithandkraus.com.

He works with individual playwrights to help them develop their plays (see his website, www.playfixer.com). He has also served as literary manager or literary consultant for several theatres, such as Urban Stages and American Jewish Theatre. He is a member of both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk. He has served many times over the years as a judge and commentator for various national play contests and lectures regularly at colleges and universities. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan.

He is currently working on a book, Masters of the Contemporary American Drama.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York (and Waterbury, CT). This week, Larry tells you about THE IRISH CURSE, WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL, COME FLY AWAY, LOOPED, MIRACLE ON SOUTH DIVISION STREET.

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Apparently, Irish guys are notorious for their small, uh, tackle. That’s the premise of Martin Casella’s comedy The Irish Curse, now playing at the Soho Playhouse. We are in a NYC church, at a weekly support group meeting of men with unusually small shillelaghs, all of whom are of Irish descent, conducted by an Irish American priest. Tonight, there is a new man, a young Irishman recently over from the Old Sod, whose presence provides a reason for the other guys to talk about the group and why they are there. He is understandably reluctant to open up to the other fellas; but, finally, in the end he reveals that he is getting married in a few days, has never had sex with his bride to be, and is petrified of what she will say when she discovers his terribly embarrassing deficiency. 

This play is hilarious! The women in the audience seemed to find it even funnier than the men. Matt Lenz has done a superb job of directing, and there are uniformly wonderful performances. My fave was Austin Peck as a very macho NYC cop who’s gayer than Irish eyes, and Scott Jaeck, who plays the priest/moderator, who has a dirty little secret of his own. 

This one’s a don’t-miss. 

As is Australian playwright Andrew Bovell’s WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING, at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, which couldn’t be more different than Casella’s comedy. It’s a very complex drama about two families, spanning several generations, which goes back and forth in time between 1959 and 2039. 

The play can be kinda hard to follow; but stick with it. It’s very powerful, particularly as directed by David Cromer, who has quickly developed a reputation for directorial brilliance (he directed the revival of Our Town). Cromer’s cast is tremendous; particularly Victoria Clark, Mary Beth Hurt and Will Rogers, who plays a young man in search of his identity by searching for his father, who abandoned his family years before. 

When the Rain Stops Falling is one of the best plays, and best productions, of this very strong season. 

The Diary of a Teenage Girl at 3LD Art & Technology Center, is an adaptation by Marielle Heller of a comic book novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, which appears to be a roman á clef about a disturbed teenager who is sexually initiated by her mother’s boyfriend, eventually descending into drug addiction before finally coming out the other side. Ms. Heller plays the teenager, and she is superb, as are all of the cast, under the co-direction of Sarah Cameron Sunde and Rachel Eckerling, who have configured the theatre so that the audience sits in and around the action (which used to be called “environmental theatre”), and have made wonderful use of multi-media projections to give the feel of the original novel. 

This is not a very pleasant story; but it’s a brilliantly theatrical evening in the theatre. 

As is Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away, at the Marquis Theatre, a ballet (sort of a “dancical”) homage to the music of Frank Sinatra. Ms. Tharp has set the show in a nightclub, where the onstage orchestra seems only to play Sinatra songs. Sound designer Peter McBoyle has separated Sinatra’s vocal tracks from the original recordings, and they are played in tandem with the live orchestra, which works brilliantly and seamlessly. 

The choreography is, are you would expect from Ms. Tharp, astounding, and the whole evening is just plain sublimely beautiful. 

Matthew Lombardo’s Looped, which has just closed at the Lyceum Theatre, was of interest for the astounding impersonation of Tallulah Bankhead by Valerie Harper. The play took place in a recording studio, where Bankhead is supposed to be “looping” (i.e., recording a garbled line of dialogue) from her last film. Tallulah arrives late, of course, and proceeds to drink like a fish, snort cocaine and behave abominably, much to the chagrin of Danny, the guy who has been charged with getting the line properly looped, who reveals a Dark Secret of his own at the end of the play, obviously pandering to the gay element of the audience. 

You had to be a huge Tallulah Bankhead fan to enjoy this play, willing to cut slack to an extremely unpleasant, self-destructive woman. Predictably, the Club Members in the audience went nuts. As for me, although I enjoyed and appreciated Ms. Harper’s performance, I found Tallulah Bankhead a tough sit for two hours. 

Finally, I ventured up to Waterbury, Ct, to see a new play by Tom Dudzick entitled Miracle on South Division Street, produced by Seven Angels Theatre, about a Catholic family in a declining neighborhood in Buffalo whose claim to fame is that the Virgin Mary appeared many years ago in the barbershop owned by the deceased pater familias, who commemorated this miracle by building a statue of the Blessed Mother in his backyard. 

Miracle on South Division Street is the kind of realistic, sentimental comedy which audiences love and critics loathe. It’s “kitchen-sink realism,” which seeks to persuade us that we are looking through a Fourth Wall into a world much like our own, peopled with likeable, quirky characters like people we know or would like to know. It is a well-constructed and most endearing play, wonderfully directed by Joe Brancato, who originally staged the play at Penguin Rep, where he is Artistic Director. I loved it; but then, I’m not your usual critic. I have nothing against sentimental realism – as long as it’s done well, as it is here. 

I also have to say that I was extremely impressed with Seven Angels’ facility and production values. Those of you who think that “regional theatre” is inferior to what we have in NYC don’t know what you are talking about. 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will