(Lyn Gardner’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/31.)
“The isle is full of noises,” says Caliban, and it certainly is in Flute Theatre’s groundbreaking version of the play, created for children and young people with autism and their families.
That noise is often laughter as the cast and audience create the story together sharing the same space – a circle on the floor with a splash of blue to suggest the sea and a patch of yellow to evoke sand.
It’s a unique theatrical experience – part performance and part workshop – which genuinely puts the sense of play back into Shakespeare’s late work and that is truly interactive: any child can get the chance to play out the scenes initiated by the actors. The massed versions of Ferdinand and Miranda meeting for the first time are a comic delight, the teenagers revelling in creating the sense of two people whose eyes are out on stalks.
As Glenda Jackson returns to the West End stage, Mark Coles profiles the Oscar-winning actor and former Labour MP, with contributions from her son Dan Hodges, Hollywood actor George Segal and legendary theatre director Peter Brook.
Robert De Niro and Jerry Zaks co-direct a musical adaptation of Chazz Palminteri’s semiautobiographical one-man show, set in his native borough in the sixties and featuring a doo-wop…
Jason Sudeikis plays a nonconformist teacher at an all-boys school, in Tom Schulman’s adaptation of his screenplay for the 1989 film, directed by John Doyle.
SoHo Rep presents a new piece—part vaudeville, part gospel show—created by the performance artist Daniel Alexander Jones and featuring his soul-singing alter ego, Jomama Jones.
James Lapine directs a revival of the 1992 musical, with a score by William Finn, in which an unconventional family navigates gay life, AIDS, and bar mitzvahs in Koch-era Manhattan.…
Melissa Errico stars in the 1947 musical, about an Irish father and daughter who escape to the Jim Crow South after stealing a pot of gold from a leprechaun.
Nathan Lane, John Slattery, John Goodman, Jefferson Mays, Sherie Rene Scott, Holland Taylor, and Robert Morse star in Jack O’Brien’s revival of the 1928 comedy, about Chicago newspapermen…
Robin De Jesús and Michael Urie portray a couple whose life is complicated by a violent crime in Jordan Seavey’s play, directed by Mike Donahue for Labyrinth Theatre…
In Jenny Rachel Weiner’s play, directed by Kip Fagan for Roundabout Underground, two women venture under false identities into the world of Internet dating.
Janet McTeer, Liev Schreiber, and Birgitte Hjort Sørensen star in Josie Rourke’s revival of the Christopher Hampton drama, depicting the seductive games of aristocrats in pre-Revolutionary France.
In Adam Bock’s play, directed by Anne Kauffman, David Hyde Pierce plays a man who recovers from a breakup by looking for answers in astrological charts.
Josh Groban and Denée Benton star in Dave Malloy’s electro-pop adaptation of a section of “War and Peace.” Rachel Chavkin directs the immersive production, which originated at Ars Nova.…
Anna Deavere Smith’s new solo work, based on more than two hundred and fifty interviews, examines issues of education, inequality, and criminal justice.
The National Asian American Theatre Company presents MJ Kaufman’s play, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, in which a transgender man returns home to central Oregon as his father’s…
Theatre for a New Audience presents the 1745 Carlo Goldoni comedy, directed by Christopher Bayes and featuring Steven Epp as Truffaldino, the double-dipping servant.
Kate Whoriskey directs a new play by Lynn Nottage, about a group of friends from an assembly line who find themselves at odds amid layoffs and pickets.
Sutton Foster stars as a dance-hall hostess in the New Group’s revival of the 1966 musical, by Neil Simon, Cy Coleman, and Dorothy Fields. Leigh Silverman directs.
Molly Ringwald stars in Dan Gordon’s play, based on the Larry McMurtry novel and the 1983 film, which follows a mother and daughter coping with love and tragedy over…
Richard Nelson’s three-part cycle “The Gabriels,” which charts the current political year in the life of a Rhinebeck family, concludes with a play opening on and set on Election…
Andy Bragen (Playwright) is a graduate of Brown University’s MFA Program in Literary Arts, and is the recipient of Workspace and Process Space Residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Other honors include the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission, a Tennessee Williams Fellowship from Sewanee: The University of the South, a Jerome Fellowship, a New Voices Fellowship from Ensemble Studio Theatre, a Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and residencies at Millay Colony and Blue Mountain Center. Produced plays include: The Hairy Dutchman;Spuyten Duyvil;Greater Messapia;Game, Set, Match; and This Is My Office, which was produced off-Broadway by The Play Company, and received a Drama Desk Nomination for Best Solo Performance. His co-translation from the Japanese of Yukiko Motoya’s Vengeance Can Wait was produced at Performance Space 122, and has been published by Samuel French. A member of New Dramatists, Andy teaches playwriting at Barnard College. www.andybragen.com.
Andy Bragen Theatre Projects and Rachel Sussman will present the World Premiere of Andy Bragen’s Don’t You F**king Say a Word, directed by Lee Sunday Evans at 59E59 Theaters, November 4-December 4 with performances Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:15pm, Fridays 8:15pm, Saturdays at 2:15pm & 8:15pm, and Sundays at 3:15pm. Tickets ($35) are available online at www.59e59.org or by calling 212-279-4200. 59E59 Theaters is located at 59 East 59th Street (between Park and Madison Avenues). The performance will run approximately 80 minutes, with no intermission.
Andy Bragen aces his interview with SV’s Bob Shuman
McEnroe or Borg?
When I was a kid it was Borg, but these days, I’m such a fan of Johnny Mac–both for the beauty of the serve and volley game he had, and for his amazing, incisive commentary today.
Samuel Beckett or Bertolt Brecht?
Beckett for sure–I find that he digs beneath the political into something deeper, more existential. Also, he’s an absurdist, and I’m drawn to that. I like Brecht, but for me there’s no comparison.
Who are you in the world of Tennessee Williams?
My mother, from Mississippi, has more than a little Amanda in her. I’m not sure where that leaves me.
Don’t You F**king Say a Word: Tell us about the new play.
DYFSAW starts with two guys who have an argument during the third set tiebreaker of a tennis match. The story is told from the perspective of the women they’re with, who examine the incident, and in the process reckon with questions of love, aging, and the nature of friendship and competition. It’s a fast-moving, fun, and explosive comedy that uses tennis as a lens to get at some deeper questions.
Who are your collaborators and how did they become involved in the project? Tell us about the production history of Don’t You F**king Say a Word.
This is the first production of this play. When I saw Lee’s work on A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes I reached out to her, and sent her a couple of my plays. We did a workshop of DYFSAW back in June 2015, and I knew then that she was perfect, so I set up the production.
(Dominic Cavendish’s article appeared in The Telegraph, 10/27.)
Back in 1979, rehearsing Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus for its premiere run at the National Theatre, Felicity Kendal just knew that it “was going to be a classic… we could smell it.” And so Shaffer’s accomplished and daring fictionalised account of the (mutually fatal, he suggested) relationship between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and fellow composer (the Austrian imperial Kapellmeister) Antonio Salieri proved – leaping to the West End, then to Broadway, and then onto the big screen, to Oscar-winning effect.
Now it has returned to its home, the National, in a note-perfect production by rising director Michael Longhurst that gives it a fresh, vital and musically inventive new reading, one which fully confirms its classic status.
(Charles Isherwood’s article appeared in The New York Times, 10/26.)
For positive proof that in certain realms of theater, we have moved firmly beyond political correctness, see “Vietgone,” a raucous comedy by Qui Nguyen that strafes just about every subject it tackles and every character it presents. Sure, sometimes it wobbles uncertainly between satire and sentiment, but Mr. Nguyen’s fresh and impish voice rarely lets up as he thumbs his nose at our expectations.
As the character of the playwright (Paco Tolson) explains at the top of the show, the principals are Vietnamese who become refugees in America. The show is set in 1975, but these characters, he says, won’t sound the way you might expect them to. Scanning the audience at City Center, where the play opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, Tong (Jennifer Ikeda), a 30-year-old Vietnamese woman, observes, “Damn, there’s a lotta white people up in here.”
In 1943 two African American brothers from Philadelphia performed a dance routine in the film Stormy Weather, which Fred Astaire would come to refer to as the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen. For Fayard and Harold Nicholas – otherwise known as The Nicholas Brothers – this was no small feat in 1940s Hollywood, when racial prejudice was commonplace. Entirely self-taught the brothers had been regular performers at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club – working with the orchestras of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington – and became known for their highly acrobatic and artistic technique – with one of the brothers later going on to teach Michael Jackson. Dancer and choreographer Stuart Thomas explains why The Nicholas Brothers have been such an inspiration.
(Alfred Hickling’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/26.)
The wildly disparate halves of The Winter’s Tale conclude with two of the most notoriously implausible stage directions in the canon: “Exit, pursued by a bear” and “Hermione comes down” – signifying that the character who has been standing like a statue throughout the scene should come to life. It’s almost as if Shakespeare, in his last single-handed work, decided to issue the ultimate challenge to an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.
David Thacker has been grappling with the problem of The Winter’s Tale for most of his professional career. He first directed it as a student and returned to the piece 16 years later – the passage of time that elapses throughout the drama – during his tenure as artistic director of the Young Vic. Now his production asemeritus director of the Octagon appears to be the summation of a lifetime’s contemplation of the play’s theme of loss and reconciliation.
(Ben Brantley article appeared in The New York Times, 10/25.)
Jake Gyllenhaal, you’ll be delighted to hear, can speak pointillism. Even more to the, uh, point, he can sing pointillism, which isn’t easy at all. It involves concentration and balance and order, not to mention being able to summon all those radiant flecks of color and light.
But when Mr. Gyllenhaal intones, “blue, blue, blue, blue,” in a bristling succession of notes, you could swear you hear dabs of paint turning into shimmer. With that moment, we’ve stepped with Mr. Gyllenhaal through the doorway of one man’s vision and into the empyrean summoned by his character, the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. It’s going to be a long and happy time before we have to return to our dimmer daily worldviews.
