Month: April 2009

I’m not one of those critics who like to wail about the decline of innovative theater in New York. Sure, things are tough for arts organizations of all kinds and certainly for independent theater groups, and you have to be especially tough to make it in our beloved Big Wormy Apple. But that’s always been true. From where I sit — and I sit in a lot of hard, cramped seats — the pool of talent here is deep, wide, and well-nourished. The wonder is that so many extremely talented people do so much so well for so little reward.

To go with its jigsaw-puzzle structure and precision dialogue, Adam Szymkowicz’s fine psychological comedy-drama Pretty Theft has pathos, sharp humor, a dash of horror, dancing, and many scene changes. It’s the kind of play that demands an exceptional production, and that’s just what it gets at the Access Theatre on lower Broadway. In her first full-fledged directing job for the Flux Theatre Ensemble, Angela Astle maneuvers Szymkowicz’s expertly drawn characters and their incisive, insightful scenes with the finesse of a chess grandmaster.

As the audience files in, ballerinas are warming up in a dance studio crafted from a couple of rails, a mirrored board, a lot of space, and a lot of mauve. The dancers eventually take on multiple functions: interpretive spirits, figures of beauty and gladness, a Greek chorus. But at the start they quickly make way for what seems a graceless story. Shy Allegra (the splendid Marnie Schulenburg), just out of high school and headed for Dartmouth, is persuaded by her voluble, desperately flirtatious schoolmate Suzy (the exquisitely expressive Maria Portman Kelly) to join her in a summer job as a caregiver at a group home for troubled adults. Here Allegra bonds with Joe, a formerly high-functioning autistic man who’s been stashed in the home after the death of his doting father.

As in classic fairy tales, no one here has functional parents. Allegra’s father is dying in the hospital while her mother sits at home staring at the TV, resentful and withdrawn. It’s no wonder she suffers from the stereotypical teenage ailment of roadkill-low self-esteem, and to makes matters worse, her oafish boyfriend (an effective and funny Zach Robidas) is primed to dump her.

Joe responds to Allegra as to no other member of the staff, but their fractured friendship is no occasion for a heartwarming tale of personal growth and lessons sweetly learned; Szymkowicz is far too perceptive and subtle for such after-school-special tripe. When Allegra’s supervisor at the home calls her a natural — “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?” — the phoniness of the adult world is made plain to her; we feel her disillusionment at discovering the emptiness at the heart of things.

Thanks to the film Rain Man and various books, the autistic savant has become a fixture in popular culture. He’s an easy tragic figure because he shares so much with us “normals” yet can’t be one of us. But Szymkowicz doesn’t use Joe (ably portrayed by Brian Pracht) as a disposable needle for injecting self-awareness lessons into our heroine. Joe is a solid character, even a tragic figure in his own right. Just like Allegra and Suzy, he’s insecure and fragile, and lacks useful parental figures. Just like them, he’s treated unfairly by a world that professes to care but doesn’t understand him. And just like them he makes us laugh at unexpected moments.

While Joe’s fate darkens, the girls hit the road and fall victim to Marco, an icily charismatic thief who comes to their “rescue” when the road trip sours. Yet we’re never more than a step away from the light. Not the light of redemption, exactly, but the light that emanates from the uncomplicated power of beauty. Anything pretty, Marco philosophizes creepily, must be “wrong.” But in the end a wiser Allegra insists, albeit in a small voice, that it’s not so.

There’s a little Jack Nicholson danger in Todd d’Amour’s Marco. For the better part of the play’s 90-plus edgy minutes he’s making slithery time with a small-town waitress in a side plot that runs its own course, then converges with the main line with a click that suddenly seems inevitable. The technical sureness of Heather Cohn’s set pays big dividends, as the ballet barres become the coffee shop counter, a bed-sized platform skilfully portrays several different rooms, and cubes outfitted with handy cloth pouches and that clever mirrored platform do most of the rest of the scenery work. The lighting (Andy Fritsch) and sound (Kevin Fuller) are equally effective in creating the shifting locations and moods: a lunatic asylum, a repair shop, Marco’s date-rape lair, a dream sequence that’s a small tour-de-force.

So the play is a good deal more than the riff on theft promised by the title. Robbed of his livelihood, Joe fills his empty spaces by swiping supplies and toting them around in a box. Suzy purloins her mother’s car, her friend’s boyfriend, and entire displays of beauty supplies. Marco claims to steal for a living, though what he actually takes from people turns out to be something of a surprise. But everything taken is also needed, even if some needs are evil. Szymkowicz’s brilliant stroke is to paint the evil that men do right into the pretty rainbow of yearning that defines humanity. And all with a twinkle, a laugh, a pirouette, and a shiver.

Pretty Theft is presented by the Flux Theatre and runs through May 17 at the Access Theater Gallery, 380 Broadway.

The Management has become known for dark comedies with an element of magic realism, and Dorothy Fortenberry’s Caitlin and the Swan (at UNDER St. Marks through May 2) is no exception. Director Joshua Conkel illuminates the curious psychological world of Fortenberry’s imagination, in which the animalistic metaphors of women’s sex lives become flesh and blood. Led by her worldly friends and her own exploratory spirit, naïve Caitlin (the excellent Marguerite French) plumbs the mysteries of fulfillment with charm, if little subtlety. (This isn’t a subtle play.) Dancer Elliott T. Reiland scores as the fantastical animals, both graceful and gruff, and Jake Aron strikes a delicate balance between innocence and abandon as Bastian, a cerebral high schooler who becomes Caitlin’s confidante. Rigid questionnaires and tests play the foil to the forces of imagination — Bastian prepares for the SATs, while the women mock a sociology survey about “work-life balance.” Uneven acting and visible opening-night jitters made Thursday’s show less than all it could have been, but the performances in this enjoyable one-act should cohere to match the pointed fun of its conceits.

'80s rock, with its hair bands, codpieced lead singers, and rainbow-bright guitar heroes, was all about excess and pomp. It was hard to take seriously then; today it's experienced as gaudy kitsch. But as with all genres of pop music, catchy songs were what made bands like Journey, Poison, and Night Ranger popular in the first place, so these bands are as ripe for the Broadway treatment as popsters of any other era.

After successful runs in Los Angeles and off-Broadway, Rock of Ages has crash-landed at the Brooks Atkinson — noisy, flashy, and most of all, funny. The creators of the show smartly decided to play it entirely for laughs, and the result is an evening of pure escapist fun, exactly what a city weary of bad news needs.

The book, by Chris D'Arienzo, tells a story so self-consciously cliched it can't help bursting out of its boy-meets-girl envelope and turning on itself with in-jokes and outrageous mugging. Mitchell Jarvis, in a Jack Black-like turn, plays Lonny, a sound man at a rock club on the Sunset Strip who also functions as the narrator. "I wanted to explore deep and thoughtful theater," he complains late in the proceedings, but instead was hired for a show with "poop jokes and Whitesnake songs."

When aspiring rock star Drew (Constantine Maroulis), the taller, masculine member of the show's star-crossed pair, denies having referred to ingenue Sherrie (Amy Spanger) as a mere "friend," Lonny pops out of a side doorway to remind him, "Actually, you did." The show is loaded with self-reference and toilet humor; there's really nothing going on beneath the music and dancing and horsing around. But the action and the fun never stop, and they're all we need. This show is pure visceral experience. What it's about is the music.

The cast sings extremely well, and the band is kickass. This was undoubtedly the first and only time I'll ever actually enjoy hearing Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Never has REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling" been so perfectly apropos as here, dramatizing a new-found gay love. Vocally, the show's finest musical moment is a duet by Drew and Sherrie of Damn Yankees' "Can You Take Me High Enough."

But the biggest applause was for a showstopping number built around Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," sung by Wesley Taylor as Franz. Franz is the flouncy son of a German developer who wants to replace the Strip's trashy but vibrant clubs with sterile strip malls. Defying his humorless, fun-crushing dad, Franz represents — nothing, actually, except a breakout role for the delightful Mr. Taylor. There's no depth here. It is what it is: surface sheen, happy noise, and songs with pounding hooks that you just can't get out of your head. Need a break from it all? Hop in your Speedwagon and Journey across the river Styx to 47th Street.

Rock of Ages plays until the final countdown at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47 St., NYC.

Patrick Stewart is a tough act to follow, but Hipgnosis isn't afraid: they've plunged into the roughened seas of the Lower East Side with one of New York's first Macbeths since Rupert Goold brought Mr. Stewart and Kate Fleetwood to our fair city for a brief reign of terror, first at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then on Broadway.

This is also probably the first Manhattan Macbeth since another foul, bloody reign ended and a new, unusually dark-skinned thane became the hopeful leader of a violent nation. This color-neutral Macbeth, with the great Julian Rozzell in the title role, seems especially appropriate today. We tend to think of the play as being about lust for and corruption of power, about tyranny, cruelty and comeuppance, but this production seems to stress the fate of Scotland as much as it does those of its individual characters.

"I think our country sinks beneath the yoke," cries Malcolm as he and Macduff hatch their plan to take down the freshly minted tyrant; "It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds." The two vengeful warriors shout through this crucial scene — too much so — as if to pound home the message that their mission is infinitely larger than themselves.

A good Macbeth must have, at minimum, a good Macbeth. The Hipgnosis team has tapped Mr. Rozzell, a founding member of the group and an actor of great range, magnetism, and subtlety. Lanky and sinewy, he prowls and arches over the stage, which is actually a brightly lit pit like a wrestling ring. As Macbeth battles conscience and guilt, sometimes reduced to crawling like a bug on the scuffed and bloodied white floor, the lights never dim. It's meant to suggest the broad-daylight productions of Shakespeare's time, with all atmosphere and suspense generated purely by the words and action.

Mostly, it works. The able cast is co-anchored by Elizabeth Mirarchi as a diminutive, highly focused Lady Macbeth and Richard Ugino as Banquo, both Hipgnosis regulars who shone in very different lights in The Caucasian Chalk Circle last year. Under John Castro's straightforward direction the characters march simply from scene to scene, stolidly pushing Shakespeare's inexorable story towards its fated conclusion.

The gauzy witches are a little scary and a little funny, their white wrappings vaguely resembling the nurses' outfits of the Stewart production; the banquet scene with Banquo's ghost is played partially (and I think intentionally) for laughs, a choice which ironically pays off by deepening our feeling for Macbeth's pain. Only occasionally, as in the build-up to Macbeth's downfall, when scenes fly by in quick succession, does the lack of scenery and lighting seem to strand the actors in an uncomfortable, Beckettian limbo.

This production can't help but labor in the shadow of its titanic predecessor. But, avoiding any temptation to bend Shakespeare out of shape for the sake of originality, the Hipgnosis group has realized a stirring, straight-up Macbeth. Mr. Rozzell's performance, with its youthful, blazing, and animalistic intensity, alone makes this production worth seeing, and there's a good deal more as well.

Macbeth runs through April 19th at the Flamboyan Theatre, Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St., NYC. Tickets at Smarttix or call 212-868-4444. Photo courtesy of David Gibbs/DARR Publicity.

Written in 1893, Mrs. Warren's Profession wasn't publicly staged in England until over 30 years later. Its frank (though euphemistically phrased) treatment of prostitution was the obvious reason for the play's suppression, but its truly modern subject was the newly developing role and rights of working women. It's a testament to both Shaw's brilliance, and to the slow, fitful progress of societal change, that the play still feels pretty current.

The present production by BOO-Arts at Manhattan Theatre Source does very well by Shaw. Director Kathleen O'Neill, founder and director of the company, creates a pleasing, almost earthy sense of intimacy by placing the audience on two sides of the action. Shaw's dialogue is supremely fluent and expertly whittled, but also somewhat heightened; staging the play so that we're practically embracing the cast pulls a modern American audience into the action and helps make everything seem quite natural. Ms. O'Neill has grasped both the essential characteristics and the depths of Shaw's characters: not only the pivots of the story — the middle-aged madam of the title and her independent-minded daughter Vivie — but the four class-conscious men orbiting the women.

All the roles are very well cast, though some of the British accents are more successful than others; the excellent James Dutton, who plays Vivie's young, ne'er-do-well boyfriend/boy toy, has an advantage here, being British-born. His lounging, lunging, cynical Frank Gardner is like a prancing Wodehouse fop made suddenly self-aware. Broadway veteran Joy Franz is a magnificent Mrs. Warren, commanding the stage, revealing her history to her daughter with power and grace and pathos. Ashton Crosby is a delightfully humorous Rev. Gardner. Joseph Francini is an effective Praed, the aesthete of the group, and David Palmer Brown has a grand time with the meatier role of Sir George Crofts, who initially appears to be a cad and blowhard but turns out to be rather more, and less.

Caralyn Kozlowski is a wonder as Vivie, completely disappearing into her complex character, biting down on emotions, then opening up just enough for us to read her precisely, controlling herself and controlling the men with the only real power she has: her determination. She makes us laugh even as she faces the serious conundrum of woman's lot.

Including intermission, the play runs two and a half hours, but it zips by. It's actually one of Shaw's shorter plays, and as such it's done more often than some; still, this is a fairly unusual opportunity to see a top-notch staging with an excellent cast in an intimate setting. Mrs. Warren's Profession runs through April 18 at Manhattan Theatre Source.