King A is that rarity—a play created for children that is just as resonant and rewarding for adults. The Dutch theatre company Het Laagland has adapted the classic tale of King Arthur and the Round Table with inventiveness, wit, and thoughtfulness: they've found some simple, universal truths in the story and devised compelling ways to communicate them to their audience. They've also created a delightful, ingenious entertainment full of warmth, humor, and surprises. This is terrific theatre that folks of all ages should see and enjoy.

The play begins, disarmingly, with its youthful five-member cast bounding onto the stage, each holding a banner of the kind you'd see in a jousting tournament. They're dressed in casual clothes that suggest the medieval period in subtle ways—their manner and their look reminds us of kids at play. Soon they start to sing—of all things—Queen's "We Will Rock You."

And rock us they do. They start to build towers at the edge of the stage out of the forty wooden chairs that are stacked behind them. They build and they climb and some even indulge in some slightly-dangerous looking acrobatics, all the while shouting out slogans that define a knight: "A real knight accepts any challenge, no matter what"; "A real knight never has to be home for dinner"; "A real knight fights battles with his mind." One of the performers holds himself high above the stage, balancing himself on just one hand. Another jumps off the chairs and utters a new watchcry: "A real knight doesn't have to prove anything to anyone."

With this, the story proper begins. It's the legend of Arthur more or less as you remember it, with some of the limiting details importantly removed—there's no particular time or place to this tale: it's anytime and right now, anywhere and right here. The chairs are quickly piled into a heap that we're told is a stone, into which a great sword has been thrust. It's announced that whoever can pull the sword from the stone will be King. A young adventurer called Kay happens upon the place and calls to his younger brother Arthur for a sword; Arthur, unaware of the implications, reaches into the stone and easily pulls the sword out. Instantly, the assemblage proclaims him king; but he's not sure he wants the responsibility, let alone the trappings, of leadership. But his brother Kay and his mentor Merlin urge him to accept, and in short order, he takes over the mantle of rule.

He quickly makes it clear that he will be his own kind of king. He conceives an audacious and noble scheme—to create a council of knights to help him govern the land in democratic fashion. They will sit, as befits democracy, at a great round table, so that no one is at the head, himself included. And then Arthur does indeed create the round table, out of the 40 chairs, in a dazzling coup de theatre that's beautiful and breathtaking.

The story continues with the arrival of Arthur's consort Guinevere and his best knight Lancelot. These two fall in love, threatening the stability and values that Arthur has tried to establish. The love story is handled straightforwardly—the folks at Het Laagland give kids credit for being able to understand it in a reasonably mature way—but the resolution is different from other versions of the Camelot legend that I'm familiar with. In the end, Arthur's vision falters and then falls away; but immediately he's reminded that he can always try again. The company bounds back on stage, banners in hand, as they were at the beginning, ready for a new and better attempt. Not just the stuff of youthful ideals, this is blazing truth: we can grab control when our world starts to go awry. In America in 2005 it feels good to be reminded of this.

But King A hasn't just one pat moral: it's filled with lots of complicated ideas, judiciously considered and discussed by the characters on stage. How does democracy function? Is it fair for those in the minority to have to go along with the majority? What should a successful government do after it's defeated all its enemies? What's truly noble: how does a REAL KNIGHT behave? Plenty of food for thought in this remarkable show, and not just for the youngsters (though they're going to engage in it too). Near the beginning, one of the performers compares the chivalric code to the rules of a team sports event, pointing out that those who don't play by the rules are shunned by their peers. Talk about words to live by.

It would feel heavy-handed if it weren't presented with such elegant theatricality. The play balances traditional scenes with bits of acrobatics, several extremely exciting fight sequences (the sword fight between Lancelot and a disguised Arthur is spectacularly good, and significantly it's a demonstration of skill, not a violent battle), songs and dances (including a blissful clog routine at Arthur and Guinevere's wedding), and the occasional flight of fancy (like the transformation of a few chairs into Lancelot's horse). It's a show designed to engage and enlarge—to exercise the imaginations of everyone in the room, offstage and on. In this way, King A's central theme—that we must be active participants in our world—is demonstrated by every moment of the play: the more we let ourselves get involved in what's happening on stage, the richer is our experience.

The potency of the message is underscored by its sheer simplicity. Just five actors conjure this extraordinary tale, all talented, versatile, and bursting with energy and jubilant good spirits—their names are Vincent Rietveld, Hylke Van Sprundel, Maarten Smit, Thomas Boer, and Anke Engels, and I hope they have as grand a time here in New York as they're giving their audiences. Director Inez Derksen, who also conceived the piece, is similarly to be lauded, as are designers Paul Jonker and Roger Foxius (sound and lighting), Sanne Reichert and Marja Pulles (costumes), Hideo Maramatsu and Christel Salaets (choreography), and Bas Zuyderland (the ingenious set design, created almost entirely from those chairs I've been telling you about).

All in all, it's the best kind of theatre, where a sense of purpose and a sense of wonder exist hand in hand.

Is storytelling theatre, in and of itself? If you sit at a bar on a Friday night and a stranger next to you starts telling war stories, are you at a theatrical event? Now remove the bar, sit the stranger on a stage, pay him fifteen dollars, sit yourself in the house, and listen to the same stories facing him. Is it now theatre? Does separating talker from listener by the edge of a stage automatically vault the story to a higher level of sharing? I’m not so sure, after seeing Samuel Calderon’s autobiographical recollection of his Israeli army service during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, called Knock On Wood, now in its American premiere at 13th Street Repertory.

Calderon’s wartime experiences are inherently powerful, and what he went through deserves nothing short of respect. Likewise, respect should be bestowed no less generously upon his 30+ year career in Israeli theatre, where he has done Knock On Wood over 1,000 times. He is extremely comfortable drifting through his tales—perhaps too comfortable. He stands up from his chair exactly once, and this act manages to qualify as quite an event; it shouldn’t. He broke from his train of thought to compliment a chuckler in the front row for “getting it. It is a comedy. I like you.” We were too serious, he chided us—the Yom Kippur War was over 30 years ago. Perhaps as Calderon continues to search for connection with American audiences, he will realize that war isn’t the quickest way to ha-has in a country trapped in one that was supposed to be over two years ago.

On a more global level, a key element to levity no matter what country you’re in is pace. Calderon must drive the stories forward, instead of letting details hang in the air above us like chandeliers for our admiration. Calderon could have taken a timing lesson from another audience member, who broke the actor’s digression about his jolly friend in the front row with an exasperated shout, “So…what happened?!” Certainly, any good storyteller knows that some details are simply too good to rocket through, but any good listener knows that such decelerations only signify if they contrast with the overall pace of the story. Spencer Tracy gave sage acting advice when he said “Know what to throw away.” This is not being disrespectful or advocating the deletion of text, it merely acknowledges that stories have layers, and the really important stuff at the core has to be distinguished from the rest of it somehow—this is the actor’s job. If Calderon could find a tighter rhythm to Knock On Wood, the fine line distinguishing “guy telling war stories on a stage” from “one-man play” would dissolve.

Still, Calderon passionately seizes his emotional connection with the material in a way that is immediate and courageous. When recalling emotional moments—particularly his wounded friend screaming “I’M ALIVE!” to battlefield medics preparing him for corpse removal—his face settles into a riveted stare across time, as if he is deliberately seeing it all again in order to translate every exact detail down to the number of hairs on each soldier’s head. Other moments that he attempts to recreate literally, such as dialogue between two people, seem much more opaque and un-theatrical. He does not distinguish between the speakers with posture, location on stage, voice differentiation, lighting, or any other choice from the myriad of options available to a stage piece. The tiniest bit of spectacle can go a long way in a show featuring four things to look at for an hour-and-a-half: one casually-dressed man, one chair, one table, one coffee mug. Spalding Gray, the great monologist, armed himself with little more than these physical elements, plus a microphone, to describe events infinitely more mundane than being shot at, but he also incorporated light, sound, and voice changes to avoid the greatest peril in solo work—stagnancy. It is regrettable that Calderon is not so deft.

Near the end of the play, Calderon describes his story as “every man’s”. It is true. The themes he dwells on—friendship, mercy, memory, death—are known to all who have conscience and a heart. He does not waste time with an arid recitation of the affairs that led Egypt and Syria to invade Israel on Yom Kippur 1973. What he describes could happen to the emotions of any soldier stationed today in Baghdad, Kabul, or anywhere where young men and women are ordered to kill, shoulder-to-shoulder with those they’ve grown close to. But universality does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with captivation. Other fundamental tools must be used to keep hold of an audience; vigorous delivery is a big one that is missing here. In these desensitizing days of constant body counts from the Middle East, Calderon’s is a story that needs telling another 1,000 times, but doing so in a theatre requires more than he is giving at 13th Street Repertory.

As the 2004 election approaches, I receive and forward on to others an exorbitant amount of emails each day that detail the almost dullingly absurd corruptions of the Bush administration and ask me to e-sign a petition or call Hilary Clinton. When I go to the theatre, I am excited to see explicitly political theatre, but I wish to have an experience that has more dimensions than the virtual memos in my AOL inbox.

During the first twenty minutes of Randy Anderson’s play, KtP (an acronym for “Kill the President”), the hopeful assassin, Seth, fervently recites reasons for why we should be enraged at our rube of a leader. A former boy genius, Seth had dreams of becoming president, but now he sees that the most useful thing he can do for the country is to “take care of” the current one. Jonathan Kowalski delivers these diatribes in a way that is less heavy-handed than they might be if handled by another, but it is unclear what specifically Anderson wishes us to learn; chances are, anyone who is going to see a play with this title (and being presented as part of the UnConvention Festival) will be convinced of the obvious dangers of the current administration.

But what has compelled him to write a play about it? If, at the theatre, I am to be educated, then I want that done properly—to have truths pulled forth from within me, not facts shoved down my throat.

The UnConvention Festival may be a good opportunity to vent some theatrical rage at the first administration in a long time (if ever) that has made a significant amount of the population embarrassed to be Americans, but with such a carte blanche an artist has to be very clear about what he wishes to communicate and the effect he desires. Neither Anderson’s script (in which the boy genius, a suicidal stewardess, and a man who is blackmailing the president’s son team up to "KtP"), nor Benjamin Branson’s direction help me understand anything beyond what I already believe to be true of our former-cocaine-dealing, election-stealing, dishonest-war-waging leader for whom English is a seventeenth language.

In fact, I do not wish to see KtP’s President get popped, because Rob Grace’s spot-on imitation of George W. Bush is one of a precious few moments of genuine funniness in this evening. The other moments of pleasure come from Fletcher Liegerot, who shape-shifts with greater confidence and competence than his castmates (his ten-year-old girl-bully and good ole boy lahyah are particularly grotesque). But this is comic relief in this overly serious play of ideas that only seems to play with one idea.

Also KtP bills itself as a “choose-your-own-adventure” style show, and before curtain audience members are polled on certain hot topics including assassination and capital punishment. If the resulting information was used to influence the outcome of the show, I have no idea how. A piece of poster board on display after the performance with the audience’s tallied opinions was all that I noticed.

Preaching to the converted is a hard thing to avoid in the theatre, wherein most of the time your audience is composed of like-minded individuals. But pure didacticism, which is what Anderson and Branson proffer, is already old news, cudgeled into our heads with a condescension that stymies when it means to stimulate.

It's been a long and exhausting year, friends. We deserve a gift, and Broadway's got a bright and blissful one for us: La Cage aux Folles.

There's not a show on the Great White Way that can touch La Cage when it comes to good old-fashioned musical comedy values—hummable Jerry Herman tunes, gorgeous William Ivey Long costumes,  a giddy and witty Harvey Fierstein book, and exciting and breathless dance numbers choreographed by Jerry Mitchell and performed by a dozen terrific male dancers in drag. Good old-fashioned family values, too, I add,  inevitably: La Cage, about a homosexual couple preparing for the wedding of their straight son, provides perhaps the most traditional and loving defense of marriage and monogamy anywhere in this wicked Big Apple of ours. It is, first and foremost, spectacularly delightful theatre—a show that you can't help but leave with a big smile on your face and a warm, fuzzy glow in your heart. If anybody asks me what's the most entertaining musical in town, I will say: La Cage aux Folles.

The story has been told many times by now, originally in Jean Poiret's farce of the same name and most recently in the Mike Nichols's film The Birdcage. Georges and Albin are a happily "married" couple living and working together in St. Tropez. Georges, the more grounded of the pair, is the owner and master of ceremonies of a notoriously popular drag cabaret theatre called La Cage aux Folles, where the flightier, wackier Albin is the reigning queen of the stage as his alter ego Zaza. (Shorthand for their relationship: Albin is Lucy to Georges' Ricky Ricardo.) They have a butler, Jacob, who claims to be a maid and whose only goal seems to be to land a part in the show at the nightclub. They also have a son, Jean-Michel, a handsome 20-year-old who was the result of a youthful caprice of Georges's; the boy's mother, Sybil, has remained an absentee parent and Albin has stood in as de facto mama.

The plot hinges on Jean-Michel's sudden announcement that he is about to get married—to a woman. As if that's not cataclysmic enough news for Georges and Albin, it turns out that this young lady, Anne, is the daughter of a rabidly conservative, anti-gay politician, Edouard Dindon. And guess what: the entire Dindon clan—père, mère, et fille—are coming to dinner tomorrow.

Jean-Michel wants to hide Albin in, well, the closet; he can't risk having his future in-laws learn that he was raised by a famous drag queen. He convinces an initially reluctant Georges to invite Sybil and pretend they're still married; he does a quick overhaul of his parents' flamboyantly decorated house, transforming it into something along the lines of a monk's quarters. Albin, unsteady in a man's suit and wingtips, is "Uncle Al." All's proceeding on a steady if rocky course when word comes that Sybil can't make it. "Uncle Al" disappears, only to return, a few minutes later, as Jean-Michel's loving mom. And then the fun really begins.

It's outlandishly silly, of course—not to be taken seriously at all, except for the (understated) morals about tolerance and appreciation of those who love us. (Herman makes sure we don't lose sight of this later idea, ending the play proper with "Look Over There," a paean to parental devotion.) But it makes for delicious farce, and with director Jerry Zaks on hand to make sure that every laugh line gets the proper punch and every metaphorical door gets slammed just the right way, it works splendiferously.

Albin gets the score's most famous song, in which he asserts an unexpected pride in, as he puts it, loving "each feather and each spangle:" "I am my own special creation," he declares; later he sings: "I bang my own drum / Some think it's noise / I think it's pretty." Brave words in 1983 and still in 2004; we need to hear them.

The best parts of La Cage, though, are the magnificent dance sequences that frame its first act. Glitzy and glittery and waaaay larger than life, they're also authentically artful: sexy, edgy, over-the-top, thrilling, glamorous, and more than a little dangerous. They're the result of one of the most fortuitous collaborations I've seen in the theatre, between costume designer William Ivey Long and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who seem to be entirely simpatico as they spin out their exotic and imaginative creations here. These include a parade of apparently nude show"girls" (discreetly covered in fur; our introduction to Les Cagelles, as they are known) and an unforgettable bird in a gilded cage sequence in which the astonishing dancer Andy Pellick stops the proceedings cold. The other eleven Cagelles—remarkable dancers, to a man—are: T. Oliver Reid, Christopher Freeman, Eric Otte, Nathan Peck, Brad Musgrove, Josh Walden, Joey Dudding, Jermaine R. Rembert, Charlie Sutton, Will Taylor, and Paul Canaan. (Bravo, by the way, to whoever decided that this time around, unlike the original production, audiences could handle an all-male line-up of Cagelles.)

Scott Pask's sets are not so showy as Long's glorious costumes, but they're elegant and pretty and serve the piece well; ditto Donald Holder's lighting. Paul Huntley's wig and hair designs are, of course, invaluable: I particularly love the looks Huntley has created for Albin, who's a dead ringer for the middle-aged Alice Faye in his first number and seems to have appropriated Sybil Fawlty's middlebrow chic 'do when he's pretending to be Jean-Michel's mother.

The cast is fine. Daniel Davis brings an easy suavity to Georges that's very easy to like, and he sings some of Herman's loveliest songs ("Song on the Sand," "With You on My Arm") in a strong and attractive baritone. Gary Beach seems to take a while to find his bearings as Albin, but by the time he got to "I Am What I Am" at the end of Act One he'd won me over; for the farcical second act he was home free. Gavin Creel does nicely by the difficult role of the son, who can't help but seem a heel in these circumstances. Michael Mulheren and Linda Balgord are sporting as the Dindons, while Angela Gaylor, as their daughter Anne, has little to do but look pretty, which she does. As the flamboyant Jacob, Michael Benjamin Washington makes perhaps the strongest impression among the non-Cagelle cast members, carrying off the comedy of this outsized character with grand aplomb.

The big climax of La Cage aux Folles comes in a St. Tropez restaurant where Georges and Albin have brought the Dindons for dinner. The cafe's owner asks Albin to sing, and he obliges with "The Best of Times," a song that has been known to feel cloying or sappy but happily here only radiates charm and good cheer. By the end of the number, everyone on stage is singing and clapping along, and so is the audience:

So hold this moment fast
And live and love as hard as you know how
And make this moment last

Something to hold onto—among many luscious memories—as we merrily depart the theatre and return to a world that we wish could be as rosy as the one we've just visited.

Last Easter is a muddled mix of talent, wit, and sentimentality—which should make for an intriguing night of theatre, but doesn’t. Written by Bryony Lavery, known for last year’s hit Frozen (and the plagiarism suit against it), the play deals with what happens to a small circle of friends when one of them faces death. In this case, the doomed friend is June, an English lighting designer with a dry sense of humor and a stoic take on mortality. Her three friends are archetypal theater folk—a flaming female impersonator with the charming name of Gash; Leah the lesbian prop-maker; and Joy, the alcoholic actress with the recently deceased lover. At the top of the play, we are informed by June—who along with all the other characters speaks directly to the audience—that she has breast cancer which has spread to her liver. In other words, she is very likely going to die soon. The first act deals with how she tells her friends about her imminent demise and their mad-cap scheme to cure her by tricking her into going on a trip to Lourdes, where they hope a miracle will take place. The second act deals with euthanasia—specifically, how June convinces her best friends to assist in her suicide.

I found the writing, especially in the second act, to come across a tad too trite—as if the playwright had researched the material, but never taken it from dry research to exciting drama. For example, when June realizes that it is no longer a matter of if, but a matter of when, she decides to kill herself, with what seems like little or no trouble. I would have liked to have seen a little more inner debate before such a huge decision is made by any character. Also, I found it odd that, in a play where a great deal is made about there not being any afterlife, after June dies she keeps talking to the audience. If it was the author’s intent to show that there is no God in the religious sense, but that there is a type of spirituality that connects all things—she failed.

The actors are all superb, and do well with what they are given. As the cancer-stricken June, Veanne Cox is captivating- honest, intelligent, and vulnerable. As the obligatory gay friend, Jeffrey Carlson is best when telling the audience a series of stupid jokes meant to ease the tension. As Leah, Clea Lewis is successful at making such a stereotype come across as true. And Florencia Lozano is excellent as Joy, the drunken actress— although here again, I found it odd that her character, who is traumatized in the extreme by her lover’s recent suicide, could so casually decide to assist in another friend's death.

Doug Hughes directs the show at a crisp pace, but I doubt whether any amount of directorial genius could make this play anything other than so-so. What a shame that such a talented group of people couldn’t create a better play.

Laughter is the best, and sometimes only, medicine for a weak and weary world. That is made strikingly clear in Mario Cantone’s one man show, Laugh Whore, at the Cort Theatre. How else are we to react to a world that seems to be run by idiots? Cantone, probably best known for the recurring role of Anthony Marentino on Sex and the City, is a cross between the constantly angry comic Lewis Black and Cher—and I mean that as a huge compliment. Cantone seamlessly blends biting commentary with fabulousness, and the end result is a little over two hours of non-stop laughter, with just a touch of introspection.

There is no plot to describe, really. The show is basically a glorified stand-up routine—but what a routine! Cantone covers a wide range of subjects, from his early days as a local TV celebrity on the kids' show Steam Pipe Alley to watching re-runs of old variety shows—including a hilarious re-enactment of Cher, Tina Turner, and Kate Smith doing an Elton John medley—to several anecdotes about his family. Cantone is a fantastic impersonator of cultural icons, from Judy to Liza to Bette Davis, and there are plenty of moments with all of them, and more. And did I mention he sings? Well, he does, and the show is peppered with original songs written by Cantone, Jerry Dixon, and Harold Lubin. The songs act as bookends to the show, segueways, and as sheer entertainment—they are exuberant, quick-witted, and fun. The set, by Robert Brill, is great—an homage of sorts to the great variety shows of Sonny & Cher, Flip Wilson, and the like.

What makes the show work, in my opinion, is the way Cantone gives his uncensored opinions—he talks about the current president, the death of his mother, and Michael Jackson with equal candor. He doesn’t seem to want to change the audience's opinion about the world so much as express his own feelings, in dramatic fashion. Some may say that one-man shows aren’t really theatre at all, and that may be. But this one, at least, is certainly entertaining, thought-provoking, and laugh-inducing.

Laura’s Bush is the latest material to be revealed by the mysterious Jane Martin; it is, she says, "my form of campaign contribution." It is a very stylized 60-minute  vocal expression of Martin’s democratic opinions. But despite the talent of the company and the commitment of the actors in the show, I didn’t feel that the show made any new contribution to the either campaign.

As stated in the program, Laura’s Bush follows an absurdly prudish librarian, Dody Dotson, as she enlists the help of a small town dominatrix, Desiree Jones, to free Laura Bush from “life” in the White House. There’s a pretty straightforward exposition of the action in this play: "Laura Bush is in trouble! Let’s get her out of there!" Random sexual and political hijinx ensue, involving a few random pit-stop characters as they uncover a plot “so evil and over-the-top that it just might be true.” Once uncovered, Laura reveals the innermost secrets of the White House and their most secret asset. Unfortunately, there is not much more to tell about the story as it all unfolds in front of you.

The play seems to be mainly a vehicle for Martin to express her opinions about the injustices that are being perpetrated by the government, some perhaps that even the First Lady might disagree with. But there is really nothing new or profound within these political rantings that separate this play from so many others. The inciting action of the story does not have any backbone and is not strong enough to hold the attention of an audience for more than twenty minutes. And when the "plot so evil and over-the-top" is revealed, I felt it was a bit flaccid. The overall journey of the story does not seem strong enough to hold a pen to the page, let alone the attention of thirty people. One character, the Ghost of Clinton, does not further the plot or even have a right to be in the play other than to take up time and add one more clasp to remove. And Condi Rice’s involvement at the end of the play made me a little uncomfortable as I was not sure how to interpret her hidden identity.

In a very stylized show like Laura’s Bush, I feel it is the director’s job to utilize this choice of style to further emphasize the mission of the text. The director and sound designer here, Jack Daniel Stanley, does not set up a clear set of rules for the audience to follow—thus he is unable to keep our attention as he brings this story of absurd comedy to life. The director seems to be using sex and nudity as a way to hold the interest of the audience.

The actors certainly appear to be energetically committed to whatever the director might have expressed to them in rehearsal. However, only a couple of them seem to have done their homework in terms of characters. Hilda Guttormsen, who plays Dody, does a fine job of making definitive decisions about the personality traits of the submissive librarian. Jane Aquilina undoubtedly puts herself out there as Desiree, submitting herself to the story and donning a full dominatrix outfit for the duration of the show. Laura LeBleu, who plays Laura Bush, has a more tasteful role, but nevertheless ends up serving as yet another sexual catalyst for the others. Damion Luaiye plays the pointless Ghost of Clinton and a Colin Powell whose only function seems to be to end the story quite abruptly, while Kristin Price plays Condi Rice, another questionable personality.

The atmosphere of this campy tale is illuminated by Steve O’Shea. John Ficarra designed the sets for the show, which basically include a table and a very colorful "wall" of streamers in the back, creating a surreal atmosphere. Karl A. Rucksdeschel, in costuming all the characters, has certainly gone all out to find the sexiest outfits possible. I sincerely credit Karl’s sinful taste.

It occurs to me that there is another way to look at Laura's Bush. Maybe Martin has given all of her characters roles that she feels mirrors their roles in our government. So in the grander sense of this project, each character is as pointless as their counterpoint in reality and their involvement in history is supposed to make us feel disoriented and deceived. If that’s so, then it makes more sense as a political commentary; but as it stands Laura’s Bush, though energetic and uninhibited, left me with no feeling of connection or pleasure.

Learning Curve, a new play by Rogelio Martinez, takes place on the campus of an Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. (We're told this much; why Martinez doesn't just take the leap and identify it as Cornell is a puzzlement.) Here, in the present-day, a middle-aged black man named David Jackson has enrolled in an African American studies class; he's befriended by a much younger white student named Jeff who shrewdly decides that Jackson will make an excellent study partner. And here, in 1968-69, an 18-year-old black youth named David Jackson comes to college—the first member of his family to do so—on a scholarship, as part of an early, rudimentary affirmative action program. Young David, who hails from Florida, has never before seen snow, not to mention the other, more immediate wonders that surround him when he arrives on campus. Most noticeable among these is Sally, a pretty, very aggressive white girl who pounces on him at freshman orientation and manages to talk her way into his bed by evening.

While David sleeps, after they've made love, Sally—who is a photography major—snaps a few candid shots, some of which feature her bra covering his face. Their relationship continues, and then comes to a critical juncture when Sally displays some of the photos at a campus exhibition. Sally has let her professor believe that the subject of her provocative pictures is an anonymous homeless black man from the "ghetto"; but David's new friend Henry, a militant black student with whom he works in the school cafeteria, recognizes David in the photo and berates him for allowing the white Sally to "tell his story."

Events escalate until, during the spring semester, Henry, David, and several other black students take over one of the college buildings, threatening violence unless their demands are met. (The only demands we really hear about are for a Black Studies curriculum and more black professors.)

Meanwhile, the present-day story continues to unfold alongside this historical one. The campus takeover that young David participated in turns out to be one of the centerpieces of the African-American studies class that older David is taking. And, as the play slides toward its conclusion, David eventually has a confrontation with one of the key personalities from his past who is still working at the college.

Learning Curve tries to cover lots of interesting and worthy ground, but fails to do so in a really satisfying way. I never really bought into or believed the 1960s plot—Martinez recounts it fantastically, as if it happened a million years ago, without much empathy for what that era was actually like, and without much regard to how his characters might actually have behaved.

The characters whom I found most compelling were the older David Jackson and his young friend Jeff. Their friendship—the most interesting and unusual relationship in the play—is barely explored; and the fascinating question of what it would be like to take a class about a historical event in which you personally participated is similarly hardly touched upon. I would have loved for Martinez to take more advantage of these really promising dramatic opportunities.

The production is fine. Michael Sexton's staging is fluid and sensitive, with Narelle Sissons's slightly abstract setting—an impressionistic rendering of school rooms, dorm rooms, offices, and public areas, amid a sea of classroom chairs—proving most effective. The cast is uneven, ranging from Mike Hodge as the older Jackson, Graeme Malcolm as a bigoted professor, John McAdams as a succession of thoughtless bureaucrats, and Daniel Talbott as Jeff and two other similar students, all of whom do terrific work; to Natalia Payne as Sally, Demond Richardson as young David, and especially Chadwick Boseman as Henry and two other characters, who tend to flounder in their roles. I was bothered by the triple-casting of Boseman: McAdams and Talbott play several roles each that are variations on a theme; but Boseman plays three entirely different characters, apparently because they are all black. Such a choice feels particularly jarring in a play that means to examine vividly the implications of race bigotry.

The bizarre phenomenon of metamorphosis is a common strategy in nature. It is this sort of transformation that describes the overall style of master puppeteer Noriyuki Sawa’s Legend of the Forest. His fusion of the Japanese and Czech approaches to puppet theatre creates a unique creature that slowly emerges, spreads its wings, and flies away.

Legend of the Forest is actually a series of short pieces. The first is the show’s namesake, inspired by a Japanese legend of a great warrior who is injured in battle. He escapes his enemies by hiding in the forest. As he lies on the forest floor, a beautiful spirit woman comes to him and draws his spirit out of him. They float around the forest, make love, and generally look like they’re having a good time. However, when he sees his injured body he decides that he’s not ready to give up his mortal coil and returns to it.

The music for the piece was composed and performed by Czech and various other European musicians. It's like chamber music played by stop-action mannequins. I can’t say that I really liked the harpsichord but most of the music fit the piece well. Noriyuki’s breath of life is absolutely absorbing; his puppets come alive the moment he touches them. The detail in their tiny faces is exquisite, as well as their costumes; but I was not truly engaged until Noriyuki finished this first piece and spoke to us. He is a charming man and I enjoying hearing him introduce and explain the inspiration behind each of the short plays that followed.

The first one was inspired by a rainy day in Prague. He performs an enchanting dance with two umbrellas that he has converted into birds. The next piece is about his relationship with a fish that morphs into a butterfly. Almost all of Noriyuki’s puppets go through a metamorphosis. They turn inside out to create something completely different or new puppets emerge from the mouths of old ones. I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what turned into what. One of the last pieces is called "The Nightmare of Lady Macbeth." The transformations in this one are stunning. I won’t give them away here, but it was my favorite part of the show.

Noriyuki is so amiable that I felt like I was a member of a small community and he was our village’s favorite entertainer. As if his shows were something that we eagerly anticipated each month. This performance marked his New York debut. I hope he returns soon to our little village. His extraordinary talent and smiling face will be welcomed here.

I am glad to have been introduced to Woman Seeking..., a critically-acclaimed company with a great mission statement, which I will excerpt from here: “To provide an arena free from stereotypes, for productions that explore issues relevant to women... They do not agree that they cannot age, or have to be a size 4 to play the love interest.” Their current show has great production values and a talented, large group of artists—things not to be taken for granted off-off Broadway, especially the former. Unfortunately, the choice of play—a revival of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs—and the decision to transplant this late 1960s French-Canadian play from a working class section of Quebec to a “small New England town” seems to be a misstep in Woman Seeking...’s production history.

Tremblay’s play caused a great stir when it premiered in Quebec in 1968 by bringing to the rather conservative French Canadian stage characters that had not been given a voice there before. Here were working class women frankly discussing marriage, sex, and the Catholic Church and speaking about these issues in joual—the “working class dialect” of French in Quebec—a vernacular that many at the time believed was too low for the stage. Like Eugene O’Neill’s seamen and bar patrons, Tremblay’s characters were familiar and accessible to audiences and by writing this play and writing in joual, Tremblay was validating their drama and their language was worthy of the same stages that had been dominated by Shakespeare and Moliére.

Ostensibly, Les Belles Soeurs is the story of Germaine, a wife and mother who has won a million Gold Stamps in a contest—like those that used to be given out by grocery stores, that can to be pasted into books and traded in for home goods. Germaine invites her two sisters and other friends from her parish to come and help her paste stamps into their booklets so that she may claim a catalog's worth of prizes. Perhaps it is because everyone who arrives is jealous of Germaine’s good fortune (and Germaine further provokes these feelings by being neither humble nor a good hostess), but soon this large gathering of family and neighbors start exchanging jabs and then fighting outright. The pasting soon gives way to stealing what each feels is her proper share of her winnings. In the course of the brawling, there are secrets revealed and an estranged sister returns, but Tremblay seems less concerned about the story at hand than he is about letting these characters speak directly about their troubles—very directly. The present action frequently stops for characters to give soliloquies and there are several choral sequences—with the ensemble speaking simultaneously or in a rapid cacophony of lines—on subjects such as the misery of their weekly routine or their love of the game of bingo.

Tremblay’s original was praised for making lyrical a dialect that many had looked down upon. Unfortunately, the English of this version sounds like a literal translation—it is very matter-of-fact and makes the characters seem overly simple. (A translator is not credited in the program and there have been several English translations, none by Tremblay.)

I also feel that the play—though revelatory in its time—has not aged well. Tremblay’s characterizations are painted with broad strokes and there is little room for subtext or subtlety amongst all the sound and fury. We are now several generations removed from being shocked by any of the ideas presented in the play and as a result what was once groundbreaking social satire is now being played as low comedy. I was amazed at how much of the bile and cruelty these characters showed to each other are served up here as if they were sitcom antics. This is particularly disturbing in the case of one character, Theresa, who has become a caregiver to her wheelchair-bound mother-in-law who seems to be in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. Theresa beats her defenseless mother-in-law in front of us, once even knocking her unconscious, the only way she has found to ‘get her to be quiet’. A number of people in the audience laughed at this as if it were a slapstick routine. Perhaps this is because the play no longer has the resonance as satire to shake people’s sensibilities so the audience simply laughs the whole thing off.

The play’s impact has also been hurt by what I suppose you could call “Culture-Blind Casting.” The setting has been moved from Quebec to ‘a small town in New England’ and the transposition doesn’t make the world of the play feel genuine.

Though I did not enjoy the play itself, I do want to say that Woman Seeking... did impress me with the talented, well-cast ensemble and professional production design. Melanie Blythe and Lauren Casgren-Tindall have not only costumed 15 actresses in 1960s period dress (no small feat), they have delivered a design in which we get a visual insight into each character as she arrives. The set by Dan Jacoby and Heidi B. Andersson and wonderful period props also look great and ground the production solidly in its period. Though the play often has 15 people onstage at once, the most striking moments come during the play’s soliloquies—especially in the stark loneliness Stephanie Hepburn conveys in her story of being in love with the salesman who comes only once a month, as well as the grace and complete openness to the audience that Vivian Meisner has as she shares her character’s dilemma of deciding between the virtues she has been taught and her desires. I hope that in their next production, Woman Seeking... sets its excellent company of artists on material that has more to say to us now, rather than putting some much energy behind a play whose time has passed.

Of the many things that may be said about Let's Put On a Show!, the new musical revue at Irish Rep starring Jan and Mickey Rooney, the most important is that it's a privilege to spend a little time with one of American entertainment's very few living legends. Mickey Rooney has been on this planet for 82 years, and he's been performing on stage and screen for 82 of them; during this show, we see film clips from the '20s, when he was still called Mickey McGuire, and from the '80s, when he won an Emmy for the TV film Bill, and from each decade in between. Rooney worked with the likes of Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, and Audrey Hepburn—all of them are showcased here. He was Puck in Max Reinhardt's film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, for goodness sake—linking him and us to a theatre tradition more than a century old. He was the typical American teenager in all those Andy Hardy movies, and he was the buoyant, can-do singer/dancer/comic/director/composer/producer in a string of musicals that began with Babes In Arms. He was, in short, as quintessential an American entertainer as anybody ever was. For this, he deserves much more respect than he's actually gotten in his life—where is his Kennedy Center Honor?—and also our attention and indulgence as he does the thing he has always done in this scrappy variety show.

That thing, of course, is perform in front of an audience. When the task is to recreate one of the routines or numbers that he originated umpteen dozen years ago, be it the charming "How About You?" (which he introduced in 1941 in Babes On Broadway) or some rapid-fire Vegas-style one-liners about his famous multiple marriages, he is flawless, even if sometimes slow or forgetful. Reminiscing about his beloved co-star Judy Garland, he's particularly moving (it's also affecting to see him interacting with her in clips from 40 or more years ago). And his impressions of golden age Hollywood stars are delightful—his take on Clark Gable is shown to hilarious effect in a scene from Babes In Arms and his Lionel Barrymore, done live, is better than ever.

Special material that he's created over the years for himself, much of it playing on the supposed romantic side of his nature that has led him so often into matrimony, is less effective. Patter with his current wife Jan, who shares the stage with him in Act Two, is sadly lame. Jan, by the way, offers several musical numbers during her segment, including a medley of Patsy Cline tunes (the highlight of her set) as well as diverse standards such as "Making Whoopee" and "Taking a Chance on Love."

The Rooneys are backed by a three-man jazz combo, with the excellent and invaluable musical director Sam Kriger on piano.

Let's Put On a Show! manages to be both exhilarating and melancholy: Rooney is an old man—he introduces himself jauntily as "what's left of Mickey Rooney"—and it's sometimes hard to watch this grandfatherly fellow next to the explosive bundle of energy that was his younger self. And yet, at the end of the evening, past moments both sweet and maudlin and past a distressing little debacle involving a bow tie that wouldn't stay on, Rooney seats himself at the piano and plays a couple of minutes of lively jazz that melt away the years and remind us of what a spectacularly talented artist he was, is, and always will be. Time has not always been kind to Rooney—we don't treasure our senior entertainers the way they do in, say, Japan—but whether you've been a fan since the Andy Hardy days or you're just now discovering him, there's a magic about this man that's very special indeed.

Lilia Skala was an actress many came to know through her Academy Award nominated performance as a nun in Lillies of the Field, opposite Sidney Poitier. The play Lilia! brings her life to the stage in a solo work, written and performed by her granddaughter, Libby.

That life is nothing short of miraculous. At the top of the play, Lilia Skala appears first alone to the audience—speaking directly to them of her early life, a mother-to-be living in Austria; sharing her excitement as she is invited to perform as leading lady in a Shaw play called On the Rocks. She accepts the part, but the year in 1934 and the place is Munich, Germany. Skala, married to a Jew, soon finds herself, and her family, in a very precarious position.

And this is just the beginning of her story. Lilia Skala follows her husband’s escape, travels to New York, and though trained in Vienna as an architect, is forced to accept a job in a zipper factory. Two years later, through marvelous circumstance, she lands a huge part in a Broadway play, and so begins her prestigious career as an actress in America.

It is somewhere around this point in Lilia’s telling of the story of her life, that her granddaughter makes her first appearance onstage. Up to that point, actress Libby Skala has been playing her grandmother (as well as, briefly, many characters in her grandmother’s tale). But at this juncture she makes an appearance as herself, age four, in conversation with her Grandma. From that point on, the character Libby continues to share the stage with Lilia, aging throughout the course of the play. It becomes not only Lilia’s story, but Libby’s as well.

Lilia! is a huge undertaking, and Libby Skala takes on Lilia! entirely alone. The fact that only one woman has taken on all of the roles and responsibilities in the telling of this massive tale is daunting. It is also perilous. She appears completely unassisted by any amount of design. At the top of show, there is a sound cue of an actual taped interview of Lilia Skala around the time of her Academy Award nomination. It’s completely thrilling, and very effective, but it is also the last sound cue of the show. The story moves through so many times and places, from 1930s Austria to 1970s New York, and each new location requires the audience take more than a few moments to muddle through, paying extra attention to the text, with no clues given by sound or lighting design. The set is equally unattended to—nearly completely bare, with only matching two chairs; it gives very little sense of the play itself, and almost no information to the audience. Libby Skala is doing this play alone, and that is not always to her detriment, but it is not always to her benefit either.

As Libby continues to appear in and out of her grandmother’s life, the seeds are sown for a truly complicated relationship. The elder Skala, so often devoted to her granddaughter, is also fiercely critical of Libby’s life—everything from picking her nose as a child to contract negotiations as a young actress. Lilia can also be astoundingly solipsistic, at one point demanding that her granddaughter give up her favorite sweater “if you love me,” insisting it would look much better on her. In the end, the younger almost always defers to the elder. Their complex relationship is one fraught with dramatic potential, but the tensions are all too quickly diffused, dissipated, and forgotten.

True fans of Lilia Skala, who remember her from her plays, movies, and television appearances, will find much in this play to sink their teeth into. The biographical details are as fascinating as they are exhaustive. One could not ask for better, or more loving, research. And it is precisely this love that makes Libby Skala’s writing and performance a singular experience to those viewing this production, and what sets this play apart from other works. Skala does a pitch perfect impression of her grandmother’s voice, the taped interview at the top of show standing as testament to her exactitude. She also possesses a rare knowledge and intimacy of her grandmother that no one else can lay claim to. But, whether she is the best person to play the part she has written is unclear. It is virtuosic and demanding, ready-made for a grand dame of the stage, not unlike Lilia Skala herself, and at times Libby Skala does not seem up to the task. She is, unsurprisingly, much more consistently convincing in the role of herself.

In a life of miracles, of a woman known best for her roles as the workers of miracles, there is much to learn and be inspired by in Lilia! The story is told with a rare kind of reverence and care. It is ultimately Lilia Skala’s life that makes this play interesting, and Libby Skala’s interest in that life that makes it unique. It is however, in the end, a greater success as a biography than as a play.

The York Theatre Company’s current musical offering is a Smokey Joe’s Café-like revue showcasing the less ubiquitous songs and poems of poet-lyricist-playwright-etc. Kenward Elmslie (with music by a number of composers including Ned Rorem, Claibe Richardson, and Elmslie himself) interrupted by poems and monologues, also by Elmslie. There is a cast of six—three women, two men and one Elmslie. The former five sing and kinda-dance up and down the multi-platformed stage while the latter one sits at a desk stage left and sociably delivers his poems and songs from there. Throughout the show, slides by different visual artists (including Elmslie) are projected against the back of the stage, occasionally bearing the name of the song we’re hearing and what show, if any, it was featured in / cut from. The set has phrases painted all over it such as unusual word combinations like “Dinghy Attitude Estuary” and “Higglety-Piggelty Asteroid.”

Lingo is unintelligible, unfamiliar, or specialized language; the selections of Elmslie’s work on display might more accurately fall under the title “Semi-Unusual-Word-Combination-Land.” Now S.U.W.C.’s work well on the page, because the reader can breeze over them, occasionally chuckling at their silliness. Onstage, punctuated by the voices of performers in song or speech, they receive too much attention and seem quite unremarkable because of it.

Elmslie’s lyrics do put unexpected words next to one another, but they do not reveal character or evoke specific emotion. Like his monologues, they are one-joke with the punchline repeated ad infinitum. His one foray into overtly political territory comes at the end of the first act with “Brazil,” which is about the entire Bush administration shirking responsibility and taking off to spend an indefinite amount of time in said eponymous country. (The animation in the background by Julio Soler is what gets all the laughs, but even that is innocuous compared to certain sequences in, say, Fahrenheit 9/11, or the scathing political cartoons and commercials that played during the election season last year.)

Many of his poems are “wan-humorous” (lingo mine) elegies for dead lovers and friends. However, the words did not personalize these individuals for me nor did the pictures of them, projected onto the back of the stage. I did not understand why the loss of them should seem extraordinary to me; I was fundamentally sad, but not in the least entertained or moved, and I felt as though I was at a memorial service for someone I don’t know.

The other performers, I think, felt something similar. Across the board, they delivered their songs with muscle and good technique, but for the most part without mind and heart. “Chain of Love” from The Grass Harp as performed by Jeanne Lehman is the closest thing to a showstopper the evening offers, and the credit is due to her charisma and gorgeous voice.

I do not deny that Elmslie’s oeuvre may deserve to be celebrated, but I do not believe this is the best way of going about it. Perhaps a cd, a one-night-only concert, a book of poems and lyrics, I don’t know. An evening in Lingoland is light, but so are W-2’s. I found myself uninvolved and preoccupied with my own worries. There is theatre out there that is engaging enough to distract you from your everyday problems and substantive enough to help you with those more existential ones. Go to our homepage, click on “nytheatre picks” and have a look.

I can't help it; I notice details.

Little Women's show curtain is a scrim decorated with pictures that are supposed to look like handwritten pages from the original manuscript from Louisa May Alcott's famous novel. I was close enough to actually read some of them—one seemed to be about John Brooke's proposal of marriage to Meg, who rebuffed her suitor gently, saying that she was too young to get engaged (I paraphrase, though the curtain, I am sure, does not).

Yet, when John Brooke proposes to Meg in Act One, Scene Five of this musical Little Women, she instantly says yes. Now, I'm not saying that book writer Allan Knee, composer Jason Howland, and lyricist Mindi Dickstein are required to be 100% faithful to their source material. But shouldn't somebody involved with this show, whose budget is said to be six million dollars, have noticed the disparity between what's on the curtain and what's on the stage?

Alas, I don't think anyone on the creative or business teams thinks audiences are paying much attention. If they did, they wouldn't let Maureen McGovern cross her legs when she sings her first act solo "Here Alone" (would any self-respecting Yankee woman in 1863 have done such a thing?). They wouldn't put their Jo, Sutton Foster, in an ugly pair of tweed trousers for much of the first half of the show (where, one wonders, did she get them?). They wouldn't have accepted Derek McLane's set design, which is an ugly raggedy wooden structure that's supposed to be a staircase and attic but which looks like the supporting beams of a dank old barn.

They wouldn't have distracted the audience from their star's one and only opportunity to earn a few laughs by upstaging her recitation of one of Jo's terrible early stories with a "fantasy staging" played out right behind her.

And they wouldn't have squandered the opportunity for a framing device that makes sense: they would have had Professor Bhaer, after Jo reads him this story, tell Jo to write about what she knows, thus offering a smooth segue into the reminiscence that the rest of the show appears to be.

At this point, you will probably not be surprised when I tell you that in this Little Women no one ever says "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." Didn't somebody think we'd kind of look forward to hearing that?

I'm getting very bored with the indifferent mediocrities that pass for Broadway musicals much of the time these days. (I'll bet you are, too; and of having to read these strident reviews that such shows compel me to write.) Hardly an adaptation, this Little Women is a pureed mishmosh of plot elements and dialogue from the novel, indifferently parsed and indistinctly rendered. It lacks warmth, context, characterization, imagination, and, most damagingly, point of view. It's also cheaply produced (come on, a cast of ten?!?), insincerely played, and indefensibly directed (why is Laurie standing in the March girls' living room at the end of his big number at Annie Moffat's ball?).

The score lacks any sort of consistency in terms of period or style. Even game trouper McGovern can't make much out of what she's been given (and she's been given very little); would-be star Foster proves that she's not the budding super-diva some have believed her to be, fading into the woodwork and defeated by solos that are at once ardent and colorless.

I'll conclude by saying something that I've said before: if audiences allow producers to feed them junk food at banquet prices, producers will keep on doing so. Little Women is just about the worst thing that a Broadway show can be: it's dull. For $100, or even for half that if you got a discount, you deserve MUCH more. Vote with your pocketbook on this one, friends; eventually producers will get the message.

I never thought I’d live to see a show actually give away free beer to the audience. I was wrong. At the top of Lone Star Love, the countrified adaptation of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor set in post-Civil War Texas, there’s a sort of barbeque on the stage—with chili, hot dogs, beer, and for those who don’t imbibe, lemonade. The cast serves up the chow, and interacts with the audience, and once the good feelings have been spread, the show begins. This is a smart move on the part of the show’s creators, making the audience relax, and setting the tone for an evening of light-hearted fun.

The plot, for those unfamiliar with Merry Wives, is fairly simple. Falstaff, a lascivious coward and deserter, arrives in Windsor, Texas impersonating a Confederate officer—and immediately tries to get into the bedrooms of Margaret Anne Page and Aggie Ford, who are two of the wives of Windsor. How they deal with him, and also how jealousy affects Frank Ford, Aggie's husband, makes up the main action of the show. There is also a subplot involving the Pages' daughter, Miss Anne, who is being courted by three suitors—two buffoons and one yodeling cowboy by the name of Fenton.

The performances are all excellent. In the role of Falstaff, Jay O. Sanders is terrific—at once likable and offensive. Beth Leavel, as Aggie Ford, is funny and strong, and made me wish she had more to do in the show. Gary Sandy, of WKRP fame, is great as the jealous husband, Frank Ford. He brings to mind some of the comic antics of the better Bugs Bunny cartoons. And Clarke Thorell, as Fenton, the yodeling cowboy, practically steals the show with his deadpan deliveries. My favorite performance comes from Drew McVety as Doctor Caius, one of the suitors of Miss Anne. McVety plays Caius as a French fop with an ease and charm that is hilarious. I for one am sick of all the French-bashing that seems rampant in the good old USA—but McVety brings nothing but joy and laughter to his part, and none of the rancor that a lesser actor could have done.

The direction, by Michael Bogdanov, is fast and furious, as a good farce should be. He gets the actors to walk that fine line between character and caricature, so that even when something broad and bawdy is called for, it’s as palatable to the audience as a bowl of Texas chili. For example, when Ford disguises himself as a bandito to get information from Falstaff about his wife, while the disguise is comic and over-the-top, it’s delivered with hilarious conviction that makes the scene work; Ford comes off as absurd, pathetic, and funny.

The choreography by Randy Skinner is fine—nothing mind blowing or enlightening, just good country-style dancing performed with gusto by the enthusiastic cast.

The score by Jack Herrick, is excellent, if a little confused as to which way to go. There are several moments when the entire mood of the play shifts from farce to serious musical drama. “Carry Me Home,” at the top of the show, is a slow, dirge-like number about the horrors of the Civil War. The number itself is fine, but seemed to come from a different show. “Texas Cattlemen”, a silly Gilbert & Sullivan-like tune about the joys of being a cowboy in the Lone Star State, works much better; capturing the mood and comedy of the play. The band, which includes Herrick, Clay Buckner, and Chris Frank—The Red Clay Ramblers—is fantastic.

The show's only significant problem is its book, which doesn’t quite know what it wants to do. Right after "Carry Me Home," which is sung by a group of mourners, ends, Falstaff is given a monologue from Henry IV about honor—which led me to believe this was going to be a serious comedy about life and death and war. But, as soon as the first ten minutes or so of the play go by, and the setting moves to Windsor, Texas, the tone changes completely—and the Falstaff of Henry IV is banished, replaced with the Falstaff of Merry Wives, a totally different person. This lack of overriding cohesion results in is a certain amount of dissatisfaction by the time the curtain falls.

Looking4sex, the latest installment in Wings Theatre Company’s Gay Play Series, is the kind of harmless and silly sex farce that, like so many others, could easily be a hit or a miss. Thanks to a tight cast, smooth direction, and a script that doesn’t skimp on laughs, Looking4sex rises to the top of the crowded genre. It’s two hours of mindless, sexy fun, a perfect way to end your workweek.

The play is composed of six short scenes dealing with the world of sexual encounters made possible for gay men by Internet access. In one scene a hustler discovers that his trick of the evening just happens to be his day-job boss. In another, a couple who met on line are having their first face-to-face. Despite the fact that one of them has made it clear there will be no sex on this date, the other seems intent on seducing him. The most outrageous scene involves a man who comes home from work to a spotlessly clean home, only to discover that his roommate has enlisted the services of a “submissive” who gets off on being forced to clean in his jock strap. In the most serious, a couple who have had occasional three-ways during their twenty-year relationship face an unexpected crisis when one of them breaks their “no kissing” rule.

Four of the actors play characters that reappear in different scenes. Three others play the various hookups and side characters. There is also one woman who appears in two scenes. The play is crisply directed by the author, Jonathan Kronenberger. The energy level changes in each scene just enough to keep it interesting, but the sweeter moments (the boss revealing his human side to his hustler/employee, for instance) are just as funny as the more frantic ones (like the house-cleaning scene). Scene changes are quick and unobtrusive, and the energy stays light and high throughout the evening.

The actors all do fine jobs with Kronenberger’s quick and witty script. Andrew Shoffner is too much fun as the lazy roommate slapping around the submissive cleaning boy, and Jason Alan Griffin as the cleaning boy in a jock strap is adorable and deftly comic. Dan Salyer finds every awkward laugh as the boss who has mistakenly booked an evening of paid sex with one of his disgruntled employees, and also quite touching as the long-time companion who is okay about sharing sex with other men, but doesn’t want to share the kissing. No need to explain: Salyer’s face makes it clear: There’s just something about kissing. Karen Stanion as “the woman who knows them all” is a tidal wave of energy and laughter. In her second scene she walks in on her friend’s blind date, exposing his “no sex” pose as a fraud, and referring to the date as “du jour,” rather than bothering to learn his name. She decisively steals this scene, along with the other moments she is on stage (I’ve seen her do this many times before at Wings and other venues.).

There is some brief nudity, a small amount of PG-13 simulated sex, and lots of frank sexual language, all played for laughs.

With Sex and the City off the air, single New York women are at a loss for entertainment directly addressing the metropolitan dating scene. What better time, then, for Fool's Pearls Productions to revive Theresa Rebeck’s Loose Knit, a play following the love lives of five 30-something women? Though first performed in the early '90s, well before SATC debuted, the tone and issues discussed are surprisingly similar, and still very contemporary.

The play centers on sisters Liz and Lily and the women in their knitting circle. They complain about their careers, knitting, and of course, men, in their regular meetings. Though Lily (played by Helen Kim) is the only married woman in the group, we quickly learn that she is no happier than the unhappy single women that surround her. In an attempt to help them, Lily arranges for the other women to go on blind dates with the same awful man; their different reactions highlight the differences and similarities between them. The funniest moments in the play come from these blind dates, especially the first one with Margie, played skillfully by Gia Rhodes. Other standouts in the play include Valerie Donaldson as therapist Paula and Don Fowler as Lily’s husband Bob, who perfects the art of simply being the character.

Much of the cast seems about five years too young for their parts; the desperation of the characters seems to stem from the ticking of their biological clocks, but the actresses in the cast didn’t look quite old enough to share this pressing concern. Director Kevin Molesworth keeps the pacing up, and set designer Oliver Söhngen does a fantastic job given the limited resources, reusing set pieces while managing to create different environments for the changing scenes.

At the end of the show, one of the characters concludes that the sweaters she’s made, wrapped around the other women in the group, is like having her arms wrapped around each of them, and that they don’t need men to get by. Though the message is a bit simplistic, it is a sweet one, worthy of hearing. This production, both funny and poignant, may be a makeshift solution for those Sex and the City fans who are, like me, experiencing severe withdrawal.

At first glance, BAM Park seems like a somewhat unlikely spot to find a play: small, almost lacking in seating and lights, and surrounded by major, loud, Brooklyn bus routes and trucking thoroughfares. But when, upon entering the park, I saw two parties of what appeared to be fairly well-dressed picnickers (ties on the men, fetching sundresses on the women), I thought, "Well, they've got the right idea." As it turns out, both picnic parties, as well as a band of minstrels playing near the entrance, are the cast members, who return to their blankets when not onstage, thus elegantly solving one of the site's other dilemmas—no place for actors to enter and exit. And round about Act 4, when the fireflies began to come out and the streetlamps flickered on, and the ladies have put on glittery masks to deceive the gentlemen (also, for the record, disguised, as "Muscovites" in truly silly false facial hair), I began to think this was rather a lovely spot for Shakespeare after all.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the less intricately plotted Shakespeare comedies, and therefore ideally suited for a summer evening’s entertainment for those who, like me, did not stop to reread the play before attending (the program also gives a helpful plot summary; and there's a brief synopsis above as well). It’s also very, very funny—and not just in the physical business, though director Don Jordan has a nice touch for simple physical comedy, but also in the jokes themselves. Often the jokes of Shakespearean comedy depend on Elizabethan wordplay, the sense of which is lost to the modern ear. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the puns and the quips seem to have survived the test of time relatively intact. Credit of course is also due to the actors, especially Catherine McNelis’s wry Rosaline, Chad Smith’s impassioned Berowne, and K. Loquesto Pierson’s Zorro-esque muddled Spaniard, Don Adriano de Amado.

Jordan integrates contemporary music (played minstrel-style) in a way that I found a bit too easy of a joke—though I confess it does pay off, late in the play, when he sets Shakespearean lyrics to a Rolling Stones medley.

A word to the wise: the best seating is on the grass. Bring a blanket! The restroom facilities are also a bit primitive, and there’s no intermission (in an almost two-hour piece), so probably best to take care of any needs before leaving home.

Lucky Stiff, currently on stage at Astoria Performing Arts Center (APAC) in Queens, is quite silly and quite fun. This first show by the team that would go on to write Ragtime, Seussical, and Once on This Island is a madcap musical murder mystery farce, filled with outsized, eccentric characters and centered around a pair of unlikely lovers who, against the odds and perhaps even our better judgment, we wind up really liking and rooting for. At once good-naturedly and old-fashionedly convoluted, hiply post-modern, and darkly comic, it's a zany cross of fluff and mayhem, brought to life with zest and high spirits by director Brian Swasey and an energetic cast at this pleasant outer borough venue.

Originally produced at Playwrights Horizons in 1988, Lucky Stiff tells the story of Harry Witherspoon, an unassuming young English shoe salesman. Just as he is realizing that he is stuck in a rut, an amazing and improbable opportunity lands in his lap: he learns that he is the beneficiary of his Uncle Anthony's will. He will receive the entire estate of $6 million if he just completes one little task—he must take his uncle's corpse (which has been preserved by a taxidermist) on a trip to Monte Carlo. If he follows all of the detailed instructions laid out for this unorthodox holiday, he gets the money. If he doesn't, the legacy reverts to a Brooklyn home for dogs.

Book writer Lynn Ahrens, whose inspiration for this goofy story came from the caper novel The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, pauses long enough in unfurling her exposition to make us question the plausibility of this very odd conceit; but soon enough Harry and dead Uncle Anthony arrive at the Monaco resort and the pace picks up. Harry goes through the preposterous motions of the will, shadowed by nerdly female Annabel Glick, a representative from the Brooklyn dog charity who has been dispatched to report any deviations that will cause the fortune to be forfeited. It's obvious from the first moment that these two will fall in love, by the way; the song where they realize this—"Nice"—is one of the score's highlights.

Both Harry and Annabel are being pursued by Rita, wife of the owner of the Atlantic City casino where Uncle Anthony worked. She was Anthony's lover, it seems, and the $6 million dollars belonged to her husband—she embezzled it and and put it into diamonds, which Anthony has now apparently "brought" to Europe. Rita enlists her optometrist brother Vinnie to help her wrest the diamonds from Harry, who of course doesn't even know they exist.

There's also a mysterious mustachioed fellow named Luigi who keeps turning up everywhere in Monte Carlo that Harry and Uncle Anthony go. Some of these places include a casino where Uncle Anthony's infallible "system" nets Harry some nice pocket change at the roulette table; a nightclub where a chanteuse named Dominique du Monaco sings a show-stopping number called "Speaking French"; and, eventually, all over the resort when Uncle Anthony's body is inadvertently carted away by an alcoholic hotel maid.

Incidents pile upon incident, guns are drawn, secrets are revealed. I'm not giving anything away except that by the show's end, Harry and Annabel emerge from their shells and appear to be on their way to happily ever after: very satisfying.

I'll also tell you that the comic high point is a wacky, surreal dream sequence in which all of Harry's experiences are re-enacted by cast members wearing dog masks (very cunningly crafted by Holly Lehmann).

Ron DeStefano and Amanda Ryan Paige are the ingratiating romantic leads—his singing voice (everyone is, happily, unamplified) is a bit thin but his portrayal of Harry is otherwise engaging; her singing is just lovely, especially on the witty first act ballad "Times Like This." T.J. D'Angelo (Vinnie), Greg Horton (Luigi), Tommy Labanaris (various roles, including numerous waiters and bellhops), and especially Laura Daniel (Rita) lend expert support. Special mention must be made of Howard Brewer, Jr., a retired member of the NYPD starting, most fortuitously, a second career as an actor; he plays the Dead Body.

The ambiance at APAC suits this intimate musical perfectly; there's a community theatre feel here that doesn't usually happen at comparably sized Manhattan venues. Yet this is an Equity showcase with the level of professionalism that that implies. The neighborhood, if you're not familiar, is most welcoming, too. So don't think of this as off-off-off-Broadway (as I heard a fellow audience member pronounce it); think of it as just another great NYC choice. There's theatre in every nook and cranny of our town; that's why we love it here.

Dennis, the restless little boy seated behind me at the New Victory Theater's presentation of Luna/Penguin, hit the nail on the head when the show was over: "Is that it?"

After a 25-minute first act, a 20-minute intermission, and a 25-minute second act—only ten minutes of which features the animated penguin that is the show's clear drawing card—it was hard not to feel disappointed by this dour, spare show. Filip Bral, the composer/musician who is the artistic director and founder of Pantalone, the company responsible for this show, brings minimalism to an extreme with his plodding, anti-melodic scores for the three tales comprising the bill. The children who made up at least half of the audience at the performance I attended were pretty patient during the first one; but after intermission, they were noisy and listless, and I couldn't say that I blamed them.

"Luna of the Tree," the first piece, is a fairy tale about a magic tree that grows golden apples. When the youngest of the King's three sons plays his flute beneath the tree, he brings forth Luna, the ephemeral sprite who picks the apples each day. He falls in love with her and eventually embarks on a quest to find her. It's a sweet, moral story, but on the rambling side; it's narrated enthusiastically by Davis Freeman, who sits center stage before a nine-piece chamber orchestra that plays Bral's dull accompaniment. Behind, on two screens, are animated projections of illustrations by Gerda Dendoven. There's nothing wrong with any of this, but nothing terribly interesting or theatrical about it, either: my impression was of a great deal of fuss for a very minor story.

The second part of the show consists of two tales. The first, "Small Story About Love" by Marit Tornqvist, is a rather bleak fable about a girl who lives alone on a pole in the middle of the sea, and what happens to her after a passing sailor suddenly smiles at her (it's not happy). For this piece, Freeman and four of the musicians are on hand, seated around a shallow pool of water that covers most of the stage—they're all barefoot, but they otherwise don't interact in any way with their surroundings. Bral plays percussion on a host of instruments including chimes, a gong, and, at one point, a water goblet; I was more engaged watching him make the various sounds required by this story, but was disappointed that he didn't make all of them—recorded or otherwise offstage sound effects supply a lot of the bigger and louder noises here.

"My Heart is a Penguin" concludes the program. Written and illustrated by Chihara Sakazaki and "arranged" by Bart Moeyaert (the author of "Luna and the Tree"), this very slight tale is about a boy who says that his heart is a penguin. And that's pretty much all there is to it. I was ready to go wherever this unusual metaphor wanted to take me (the program notes promise a "minimalist philosophical poem... steeped in Asian philosophy")—but the piece goes absolutely nowhere. After about ten minutes of this spare verse, accompanied by meagerly animated line drawings of a penguin and another of Bral's uninspiring compositions, the thing is over. Ergo Dennis.

A company representative cautioned me before the show that some of the sets and materials had gotten lost trans-Atlantic, and so what we were seeing was not exactly the show Pantalone intended. (I'm not aware that a similar caveat was issued to general audience members.) One number was cut. Presumably, if the missing parcel surfaces, Luna/Penguin will be restored to its longer and slightly niftier original form. However, I doubt that this will make much difference in terms of the show becoming more engaging or entertaining. The New Victory, generally so reliable a source of excellent theatre for families, has unfortunately come a cropper with this one.

It's an ambitious, audacious idea for a theatre work: A contemporary, serious examination of the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. is interrupted by a 19th century minstrel, of the sort that was once a staple of American popular entertainment, made up in blackface with big painted red-orange lips, white gloves, and wide innocent eyes. This unwelcome visitor takes over the proceedings, and leads the actors and audience toward an honest, authentic account of our history, unfettered by concerns for political correctness.

Such is the goal of Firebrand Theory Theater Company's latest show, Lynch PLAY. They don't quite get there—Michael Scott-Price's script doesn't show us as much of the play the minstrel interrupted in order for the conceit to fully gel, and after a riveting hour about the ante-bellum period, the thing accelerates and ratchets forward to the present somewhat abruptly. But they are to be applauded for treating a serious subject with intelligence and curiosity and for understanding that audiences want to be challenged and will follow theatre artists on a path that's unusual, risky, or even a little bit dangerous as long as they're treated with respect. So bravo to the Firebrands!

And there is much in Lynch PLAY that's well-realized, and a great deal that's of interest. The show is organized as a series of vignettes, most of them based on historical artifacts/documents related to the history of slavery in the United States. There is a sameness to some of the presentation here, but when the creators' imaginations really kick in, the show soars. A slave auction is recreated with chilling potency, for example, with a replica of an early 19th century handbill advertising same prominently displayed on one of the pillars framing the rear of the playing area. "Progressive" statesmen of the revolutionary period such as Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are revealed to be noxious racists in monologues based on their own writings.

In one of the show's most arresting scenes, the early history of the Ku Klux Klan is narrated by an African American actor dressed up as a klansman in white sheets and pointy wizard hat. In another, much more contemporary sequence, the famous theme song from the TV show The Jeffersons ("We're moving on up to the East Side / To a deluxe apartment in the sky") is appropriated by a group of ex-slaves heading north after the Civil War, to sharply devastating effect.

The overall impact of Lynch PLAY is to remind the audience of historical truths that are often forgotten and to inform us of facts that are usually omitted or swept under the table; as a kind of epilogue, there's a consideration of how blacks and whites see each other in today's America (there's a dialogue, presented as being among the actors themselves, about why, for example, white people aren't supposed to use the "N" word).  It makes for a valuable evening, and for often invigorating, adventurous theatre.

Director Jaime Robert Carrillo has his company play gender- and race- blind, so that Rebecca Lovett turns up as Tom Jefferson, while Keith Blaser and Brian Weaver, both white, often play black slaves. Blaser is probably the strongest actor here, but everyone gets a least one moment to shine. Jumaane Ford and B Young are the other ensemble members. Scott-Price himself plays the minstrel Willie D, which is perhaps not the best choice—he comes across as too young and lacking in versatility to embody this ambitious, much-larger-than-life role.

Carrillo keeps the show moving briskly and, despite lots of theatre of cruelty/fourth-wall-destroying elements, he keeps the audience engaged and focused without ever allowing us to feel alienated. The design—sets by Michael Brancato, costumes by Amy J. Pedigo, lighting by Danielle Baisden—is simple, spare, and very effective.

Pop quiz. How much do you know about Bulgaria in the 1920s? Not very much? Then you might find yourself a bit baffled by Chris Green’s puppet and dance theatre piece, Lyubo. Its conceit is that it is an archeological piece; constructed out of images and words from Philip Sweetbriar, a railroad prospector, who sent letters to his daughter Regina in Arkansas between 1925 and 1928. He then vanished from the public record, leaving his fate essentially a mystery.

If you fail to read much of the program notes beforehand, much of Lyubo is also a mystery. Why is there a red horse on stage? What does the white dove mean? Why is Green talking with a Southern accent? It is a dreamlike experience, rife with a sense of enigma, inherently self-reflecting, both beautiful and inexplicable.

Told primarily through the actual text of Sweetbriar’s letters, Lyubo recreates his own images with inventive puppetry, shadow plays, and music. While some of it left me a bit cold (dancing with pendulums seemed a bit trite), the music and puppetry are expert and whimsical. Some of the most stunning work is with shadows: a house reflected in the water, a man looking out at the audience from nearby a church. Breathtaking by themselves, these images are a testament to what visual arts and a little human touch can bring to live performance.

Green himself performs as Sweetbriar, and is as remote a presence as is his subject. His tone is laconic, distant. He’s as much an active storyteller as an actor. It works, though, for that reason. The play itself is acting, the performers are puppeteers more than anything, and Green’s puppet is almost himself.

The original music definitely adds to the success of the proceedings. Rima Fand and Megan Wyler’s voices and the tuba (yes, tuba) performances of Joe Exley, Jay Rozen and Christopher Meeder underscore perfectly even the most seemingly mundane moments. Just watching Green walk over tables, reading from a little green Bible would have little flavor if not for the potent spell of "The Walking Song."

In the end, Lyubo’s success and failure with an audience depends on their own investment in the material. There are certainly moments that seem almost a parody of the avant-garde. When the giant white sasquatch began stroking a puppet and singing about the sacraments, I must admit I rolled my eyes. But trumping this was the earnestness and overall skill with which Green attacks this obscure material.

The way that director Michael Hagins begins his Sopranos-inflected production of Macbeth is pretty cool. Three "Weird Sisters"—a prostitute, a drug addict, and a homeless woman—roam around the theatre and then alight in front of the stage near a trash can. Almost immediately, a small but important-looking procession marches past them—Duncan, "King" (or, in this context, kingpin) of Scotland, a magisterial bejeweled man who seems very much the Godfather; accompanying him are bodyguards and a messenger who brings word of the recent victories of his henchmen Macbeth and Banquo, and also of the treachery of another underling, the Thane of Cawdor. Duncan tells the gathering—which includes the three eavesdropping Sisters—that he will reward Macbeth by awarding Cawdor's dominions to him.

What I loved about this, besides the fairly canny contemporary contextualizing of the story that Hagins provides with the mafia metaphor, is the way that it makes the Sisters a little more accessible to a wary modern audience. How do they know about Macbeth's sudden good fortune (which they will relate to him as prophesy in the next scene)? Because they overheard it!

Hagins finds ways throughout, both more and less successful than this, to frame Shakespeare's famous play as a story of mobsters gone awry. Overall, the production is entertaining and effective.

Another of Hagins's inspired ideas is to put all the members of his ensemble into identical ghoulish masks, allowing them to serve as a massively frightful apparition when Macbeth seeks the advice of the Weird Sisters for a second time. But double-casting of roles is less successful elsewhere, as when the actor playing the assassin hired by Macbeth to ambush Banquo immediately seats himself, without changing his appearance in any way, at Macbeth's table as the nobleman Seyton—a confusing moment, even for those familiar with the play.

The climactic fight sequence is played with baseball bats—not a great choice, especially in a venue as intimate as the Impact Theatre (I feared for the actors' safety throughout the battle, and my companion told me afterward that he feared for his own as well). I was hoping that Hagins would have his Macbeth and Macduff engage in a shootout, using the pistols perpetually tucked into their waistbands as their weapons of choice.

The acting skills of the ensemble cover a very wide range; some of the ensemble members are clearly less sure of themselves than others when it comes to tackling Shakespeare's language or showing, rather than telling, the emotional state of their characters. Nevertheless there's not a moment that's unwatchable and indeed, thanks to Hagins's brisk pacing and shrewd, liberal editing of the play, this Macbeth moves nice and fast.  It  should prove a great learning experience for all on stage.

As Macbeth, Michael Criscuolo does an outstanding job, delivering the verse (especially the soliloquies and monologues) with real verve; he gives us a man governed by entitlement more than ambition—it's only as things start to go terribly wrong near the end of the play that he begins to understand that it is this tragedy, rather than unchecked power over his fellows, that is his actual due.

Gyda Arber is a youthful, sensual Lady Macbeth—seducing rather than dominating her mate into committing murder to acquire and then solidify his kingdom. Arber's vocal technique is less assured than Criscuolo's,  but she's got just as much of a fix on her character as he does; her reading of the famous sleepwalking sequence near the end of the play is eerily convincing.

Others in the company whose work stands out include Robyn Berg as Lady Macduff and one of the Weird Sisters, Synge Maher as the Porter, Clark Main as Seyton/First Assassin, Christopher L. McAllister as Duncan, and Jamie Effros as Malcolm.

I enjoyed myself at this production, and not just because it offered the chance to see two of nytheatre.com's own (see disclaimer just above this review) trodding the boards. Hagins is a young director with smart, interesting ideas about how to make Shakespeare resonate with a contemporary urban audience. I will be interested in seeing what he comes up with next.

There are many things to like about Madame Killer, the second of three plays in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival. Among them are the historic story behind the drama, the structure of the script, most of the performances, the ambitious costumes, and the simple yet effective sets. The rapid pace, alone, might be the most ambitious part of the whole production, as director Wier Harmon presses the cast to keep the story moving at lightning pace and the sets moving seamlessly between scenes.

The story tracks four characters whose paths cross with a notorious New York abortionist, popularly known as Madame Killer. Hannah, a poor African American, and Nuala, a poverty stricken Irish immigrant, earn their pittance from one of Madame Killer’s gambling sidelines, female boxing. With the help of Madame Killer, Hannah discards all traces of poverty and sets up a profitable dressmaker’s shop for the smart set. In return, Hannah refers a steady stream of rich clientele to Madame Killer. One of these clients is Vicky, a one-time prostitute who fights her way in to respectability by marrying Wolver, a slippery man whose unchecked ambitions will fit nicely into Tammany Hall once he acquires the necessary accoutrements—wife, children, and a fancy apartment on the Vanderbilts' block of Fifth Avenue. He desperately wants children, mostly out of jealousy for his brother and his brood. But Vicky, irreparably harmed by Madame Killer’s stitchery, cannot bear children. Of course, Wolver doesn’t know this. Vicky employs Hannah to design a garment that expands monthly, and strikes a deal with Madame Killer to adopt one of the babies that would otherwise be aborted. The opportunity comes swiftly after the poor Irish girl Nuala is raped. Nuala refuses to carry her baby to term, but changes her mind when Madame Killer offers her what Nuala thinks is an enormous amount of money. The story packs a punch, and while it takes place in 1878, the drama seems very relevant to today’s heated pro-life/choice political debate, demonstrating how the legal system does nothing for the abstinence argument, rather it forces both rich and poor to seek back alleys.

Maria Porter as Madame Killer grabs the stage with the calm and authority of someone who knows exactly what her character is about. The other characters never sail far from her pier in pursuing their ambitions, and by the end of the play they are securely tethered to her dock. Her little black book assures that.

Aedin Moloney distinguishes herself as Nuala, filling the stage with energy and fight. Assuming a nearly indecipherable Irish brogue, she makes her intentions quite clear. In one emotional tirade, she accuses Madame Killer, who is helping her learn proper English, of taking everything she has. Pointing to her mouth, she says “Dublin lives in here” and she refuses further English lessons. It is one of the most poignant moments of the play. Moloney’s thin frame and shaggy hair give her the necessary impoverished look, particularly next to Porter’s healthy, solid frame.

Mark Shanahan delivers a salacious Wolver. He adds complexity to the role with a final rage so authentic that the audience actually gasps. Marsha Stephanie Blake transitions nicely into the dressmaker from a female boxer. Her beautiful costume, by Katherine Hampton Noland, contributes considerably. Melinda Wade also gains her footing as Vicky after a weak opening scene.

The play opens with Vicky and Wolver striking a marriage deal. However, before we know this, questions arise. Wade speaks with a Southern drawl, a bad one. Does she mean to dupe Wolver? Let the audience in on her plot? Soon we learn that they are both ambitious and without scruples. This should be clear up front. Also, certain details don’t add up. If Vicky hopes to reach the top, she will, at least minimally, have to stand up straight and brush her hair. After all, this is 1878, and the women wear sweeping gowns with corsets, stays, and plenty of crinolines. Wade becomes more credible in her role once her character acquires riches. While the story gets off to a slow start, the play quickly redeems itself.

The parallel structure of the play, written by Honour Kane with Diana Kane, contributes to the complexity of the story. Two characters appear, and then two more until the lives of the characters are inextricably interwoven. The scenes are an exercise in efficiency. Susan Barras creates the needed ambience for a parlor, a backroom, and an outdoor carriage ride, each with a single prop: a bed, a desk, and two connecting chairs. It works beautifully, because each one slides on and off the stage before the audience is aware of it, and because Paul Whitaker’s lighting is precise and right on cue. Noland’s costumes add depth and keep the story grounded in the 19th century. There is an extravagant mix of colors and textures in the full, floor-length day dresses. They contrast nicely with the restraint used in Madame Killer’s attire and in the worn sweater favored by Nuala. Paul Loesel’s piano compositions reinforce time and place and add emotional intensity to the scenes. Jonathan Rose is at piano.

Director Wier Harman delivers this unusual drama with impeccable pace. There is no time for yawning—not that you would want to. He delivers a vivid period piece that holds the audience until the actors take their bows.

As I write these words, we are just 33 days away from the start of the Republican National Convention; New Yorkers are having all kinds of feelings about this imminent event. Vital Theatre Company, in the true spirit of collegiality, has mounted a weekly variety show, late nights every Thursday through the end of August, that they're calling "The Republican Convention Welcome Wagon."

Oh yes: the title is Make Nice? My Ass! This kind of gives you a hint as to its political bent. Topical satire is not dead, thank goodness; the folks at Vital are serving up happy, healthy doses of the stuff at its funniest and smartest. Democracy in action.

It's a delightfully classy affair—glittery sequined tablecloths with candles are within reach of just about every seat, providing a place to park your drinks while you enjoy the show. And the seats are not packed together so tightly as if the audience were so many sardines: this is cabaret in comfort and style (many of New York's other venues, starting with Roundabout's Studio 54, could learn a lesson from these folks).

But the material is what we're here for, not the ambience. Master of ceremonies Ron McClary is easy and quick-witted, a Carson-esque presence to anchor the evening. (He also gets to demonstrate his versatility at the top of Act II, accompanying himself on "The GOP Has Lost Its Mind," sung to the tune of a famous Billy Joel song and containing the deathless sentiment "I've switched from Texas Barbecue to Heinz 57 Sauce.")

The acts are different every week, but if they're of the caliber of what I saw, then you can expect to be amused, aroused, and sometimes challenged by a variety of politically-themed sketches, songs, and rants. Among the highlights the night I attended: two clever monologues by Negin Farsad, who is half of the comedy duo Madame Funnypants; Mike Teele's impersonation of a foul-mouthed Dick Chaney letting his Senate colleagues know how he really feels (written by Mark Loewenstern); a hilarious running gag, performed by Gary Littman and written by Loewenstern and Teele, in which a Republican delegate from Texas attempts to find an appropriate Broadway show for which to buy tickets; and a very strange comic bit by Craig Fitzpatrick, mangling the history of Christopher Columbus (he returned later on for the, shall we say, least sophisticated travesty—"The Top 11 Movies That George W. Bush Masturbates To"). Producer Aimée Hayes did an amusing segment reading what seemed like authentic letters from audience members and/or friends.

By far the most affecting piece—the one that really got us thinking as well as laughing—was Rob Sheridan's lecture/rant called "Thoughts and Conundrums." In it, he ranged from the meanings of the words "conservative" and "liberal" to the media coverage, or lack thereof, of the just-released 9/11 Commission Report. Like a present-day Will Rogers, but with Tom Smothers' sense of the absurd, Sheridan mined the bitter humor of these current events without a trace of irony. If he's on the bill when you see Make Nice? My Ass!, you will be in for a thought-provoking treat.

Will Republicans enjoy this as much as the choir-being-preached-to Democrats?  Probably not: this show is unabashedly partisan, I'm afraid. Which is to say, it's as American as apple pie—more filling though, and with none of the calories.