Despite early old fashion drawing room structure laced with comedy, Greenberg develops unique characters centering on the two strong ladies–Julie as the charming graceful matriarch and Faye as the cynical realist with bittersweet life views. He weaves an engaging family saga that echos change and loss over time. The dialogue is smart, often cynically funny, the characters interesting and the work effectively presents a family over time coping challenges.
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Set in a tiny found space converted to look and feel like a real record shop (wonderfully realized by Michelle Manni), and accompanied by an impressive live band, Refuge Theatre Project’s immersive remount of High Fidelity lives up to its last-year’s acclaim: it is infectiously catchy, cleverly comedic, and distractingly entertaining. Those more interested in heart than spectacle, however, will find themselves bored by intermission and disappointed by the end. The biggest joke, though, is that High Fidelity was made into a musical at all—a genre derided by the spirit of the film. But too few will mind this irony amidst the rollicking pop-rock and belly laughs of its musical successor.
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Utilizing a futuristic set (design by John Musical) with creepy lighting (by Mike Durist), The Nether becomes a haunting drama that questions responsibility, both individuality and governmental, as to the limits of entertainment in the new tech realities. The Hideaway goes farther than our present violence-oriented virtual games that many are playing too much.
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Saturday Night Fever – The Musical has mediocre disco dancing that was both uninspiring a tad mechanical. Usually Drury Lance Theatre’s musicals contain more creative and spirited choreography with stronger dancers. I also had a problem with the female singers who seemed flat or so unlike The Bee Gees that it hurt the production.
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A Disappearing Number uses mathematics as a framing devise for storytelling. Told in a series of face-paced vignettes that move around in time and place, this love letter to numbers blends math mysticism with personal relationships as well as a story about two giants of math in the 20th century.
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Continuing its 29th season, the now itinerant Strawdog Theatre Company takes up its own existential theme of “exile” with Shakespeare’s complexly beautiful Cymbeline. A tragicomedy containing pastoral, fantastic, romantic, and historical elements—many of them concise allusions to his earlier plays—Shakespeare’s Cymbeline finds a coherent, quirky, and imaginative translation to the stage under the direction of Robert Kauzlaric.
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While playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has much smartly biting dialogue that satirizes the millennial’s he overs writes several long monologues. The long speeches quickly turn into “playwright-speak”since individuals simply don’t talk in long rages, especially when others patiently listen awaiting their chance to respond. What is said is a blustering attack their office atmosphere that these privileged find boring. The negativity suppressed the rage that they feel.
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Diamond Dogs is set in the 26th century with a team of human scientists and soldiers as they investigate a mysterious alien tower that seems to brutally punish all intruders. These characters must uncover clues and solve puzzles in order to solve the mystery. Each character will make dangerous sacrifices to get to the top of the tower.
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Played on the fabulous two apartment set (designed by Linda Buchanon). Pearl Cleage’s wonderful script, Blues for an Alabama Sky, is staged with dramatic panache by director Ron OJ Parson. We meet the creatives in Harlem as they struggle during the start of the Great Depression as the Black Renaissance erodes the accumulated affluence of the 1920’s.
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Filled with low-key committed political activists with roots in the American Communist Party, the Mattachine Society emerged as a group of gay men lead by the intense Harry Hay and his loyal lover Rudi Gernreich. Hay’s recruitment initially for the Communist Party became la rights forum for the four gay men. These activists realized that their movement was more about protecting the rights of’ oppressed minorities, i.e. homosexuals than a political movement
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