The tag line is "Masterpiece Theatre meets American Idol." I was actually afraid it would be more like Actors Studio Auditions meets the Gong Show, but happily, friends, that's not the case, not one bit. Manhattan Monologue Slam is, first and foremost, a great deal of fun: a high-energy networking event held once a month at the Bowery Poetry Club where aspiring actors (along with a few who have already proven themselves) can showcase their talents for 30 seconds or three minutes in front of five industry insiders who are judges and a passel of insiders/insider-wannabes/outsiders who pack the house. The work is waaaay better than you might expect. And the love in the room is palpable and nurturing and wonderful—it turns out to be the secret ingredient of MMSlam, the reason why this terrific new concept, blending traditional theatre blood-sweat-'n'-tears with up-tempo Reality TV savvy, is one to be savored and supported and turned into a bona fide NYC institution.

The masterminds behind MMSlam are the Galinsky Brothers, Robert and Philip, who among them boast credits in virtually every aspect of the entertainment business, on- and offstage, and who host this two-hour extravaganza with serious pizzazz, keeping the event well on the organized side of anarchy despite the mammoth challenge of doing so. The Galinskys are firmly in control throughout, with one of them always centerstage emceeing and the other nearby keeping score and keeping watch. They're both very funny and clearly dedicated to the importance of what they're doing—i.e., giving new performers a moment in the spotlight and an authentic chance to take their budding careers to the next level. The grand prize of MMSlam is a $100 check from NYCastings.com plus consultations with each of the contest's five judges, who on the night I attended included master acting teacher/director Terry Schreiber, magazine scribe/publicist Michael Martinez, and casting agents Brette Goldstein, Maria Haut, and Stacy Siedel. The judges take their job seriously and so do the Galinskys and so do the contestants, which means that the work we see at the Slam is always earnest and often very good. No goofing in sight.

Act One of the Slam is a competition among eight invited contestants (one of them is the returning champ, one is the winner of the previous month's 30-second contest (see below)). Each gets three minutes to do a piece of their choosing. It has to be theatre—it can't be poetry or spoken word or standup or storytelling. Most of the actors at the show I attended did monologues they'd written themselves, which occasionally proved dicey. There was also a familiar speech from Death of a Salesman, a showy speech from Swing Blade, and an unexpected and very effective excerpt from A Raisin in the Sun. Costumes and the occasional prop are apparently encouraged (though they don't seem to ultimately help much in the scoring). Characters evoked—all with passion and conviction—ranged from a pimp to a killer to England's Queen Mary I.

The judges provide Idol-style pithy commentary following each performance, some of which will actually help the contestants in their future endeavors. Robert Galinsky, host of this half of the evening, keeps the audience's adrenalin flowing to provide consistent and friendly support for everyone on stage.

The second half of the evening features 30 contestants each doing a 30-second monologue. Philip Galinsky helms this segment; he's the sillier and more exhibitionistic of the brothers, punctuating his stint with eccentric dancing, goofy jokes, and lots of banter with the DJ in the booth to keep the energy up. The actors sign up to perform either before the show or at intermission (and one volunteered at the last minute). I was surprised how prepared and competent every single of them was. They did everything from Shakespeare to a portion of a monologue featured in one of this month's FringeNYC shows. 30 performers turns out to be a lot—this part of the show lasts about 20 minutes or so longer than it probably should. At the end, the judges help select finalists who are voted on by the audience; the winner gets $30 plus a slot in next month's three-minute slam.

That I fully expect to encounter at least a few of the performers I saw at MMSlam on stage somewhere else in NYC during the next several months speaks to the high quality of the work on view here. Bravo to the Galinskys for finding a genuinely fun and innovative way to turn the spotlight on a few dozen of NYC's best and bravest actors once a month.

If you search the animal kingdom you will find very few species that mate for life. Which raises the question, are we meant to be with the same person for our entire lives? The thought of it seems so absurd and yet so comforting. By considering this harsh paradox, The Marriage of Bette and Boo is one of the darkest of Christopher Durang’s bleak, bizarre comedies.

True to Durang form, the two families in this play are ridiculously dysfunctional. Bette’s family is ruled by her overbearing mother who refuses to acknowledge anything that even resembles a problem. Her father lives with his tail tucked between his legs and no one can understand a word he says. Her sisters are personifications of blame and guilt. Boo’s family, meanwhile, is dominated by his drunk and insulting father. His mother only laughs with joy and suppressed rage when her husband calls her “the stupidest white woman in the world.”

Bette and Boo’s marriage starts out like most do. But their hopes and dreams are soon dashed upon the rocks of Boo’s scotch, followed by the tragedy of oh so many dead babies. Bette wants kids. And lots of them! But she’s doomed to miscarriage after miscarriage. She does manage to have one survive, her first one—though they think he’s dead at first too. He serves as the narrator for the show, occasionally flashing forward to show us how things turn out.

Bette keeps trying to have babies even though she knows they won’t live because she thinks it will save her marriage. She thinks she can change Boo but he’s a drunk and always will be. She tries to place blame and then tries to accept guilt but finally realizes that neither of these can replace just being honest with herself.

This play is brutally funny, and yet there are moments of bittersweetness that remind me of why Durang is produced so much. He is a master of brutal comedy but he never forgets to deliver us from that with moments of deep truth. Director Heather Siobhan Curran molds a smooth and even style with her actors, creating a world where the occasionally awkward dialogue seems natural.

A particularly sweet moment comes from Erin Kate Howard’s Bette in a scene where she tries to reconnect with an old friend. Howard is utterly endearing in this role. Laura Livingston is dead-on in her portrayal of Bette’s controlling mother, and Mike Durkin is a scream as her impossible-to-understand father. Matt Jared made me feel at ease in his role as the narrator. Truly, the whole cast is superb.

Ultimately, we should all think before we jump into marriage. We can’t change people. We can’t hope that feelings we have as we enter a marriage will dissolve with time. There is no one to blame but yourself if you’re in a bad marriage. This depressing subject may seem unfit for comedy, but Chris Durang has a knack for turning these sort of subjects on their heads and the Gallery Players does his work a great justice with this production.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to feel sympathy for Halvard Solness, Henrik Ibsen’s Master Builder. He fears he is about to be ousted by the younger generation, his greatness forgotten, leaving him to the grim reality of a frigid, frightened wife, two dead infant sons, and the stinking trail of trampled dreams (his, his wife’s, and those of so many others) that he blazed to get to where he is at this moment.

Indeed, The Master Builder begins with an old and infirm architect, Knut Brovik (once Solness’s mentor, unseated by him and rehired as a staff member), whose dying wish is for Solness to evaluate his son Ragnar’s renderings—is he gifted enough to take off on his own, or would he do better to stay with Solness’s firm as a decently-paid underling? As if it were company policy, the Master Builder says he cannot honor the request; he pushes the drawings to the side and states that Ragnar should stay put.

Solness later muses on the fire that destroyed his wife’s family home, which incidentally (if indirectly) resulted in their son’s deaths. He had even observed a fault in the craftsmanship that would make the house particularly vulnerable to flame. Yet he correctly intuited that that particular disaster would be his big break: he was then able to convert the grounds into a set of villas.

His selfishness is so astounding that my capacity for indignation is shut down—the wind is taken out of my critical sails and I have to float, rather unheroically, in the calmer waters of curiosity. This is, I’m sorry to report, not a new sensation for me: I am finding it more and more difficult to read about the actions of our president—his heartless-but-holy opportunistic ruthlessness—and still sustain a rage at him. Not unlike our protagonist, our president seems to view national and international tragedies as alternately nuisances and vanity projects.

Thusly, Ibsen’s The Master Builder could not be more relevant than it is today. And I applaud the Pearl Theatre Company both for tackling the piece and resisting the urge to tie it to this morning’s newspaper. Director Shepard Sobel’s approach is, I guess, conservative: the play as the playwright wrote it. But this “traditional” approach is hardly traditional anymore. It is, in fact, brave to assume that contemporary audiences will be able to see the urgency in the play, will freely associate to people and dynamics on a personal and global level.

Sobel is served by an ensemble of actors who have a similar commitment to illuminating the play from within. Notably: Dan Daily’s earnest take on Halvard Solness is that of a man who has plopped his butt down where he expects is the center of the universe; despite growing discomfort, he holds his ground, resolute and wary. As Aline, Solness’s damaged wife, Robin Leslie Brown has something unknown inside which she can just barely control; even as she sits relaxing in the sun, her eyes dart, her hands tremble, her voice breaks. Michele Vazquez’s Hilde, on the other hand, could not seem more at home. She is a young woman whom Solness met ten years ago when he built a church in her mountain village; he basked in the girl’s sunny admiration and, during a moment of passionate indiscretion, promised that in ten years they would meet and he would build her a “castle in the sky.” Right on time, she has come to collect, ultimately inspiring in him the hubristic act that results in his downfall.

That last relationship—Solness and Hilde—is central to The Master Builder. Her awe inspires in him a certain vainglorious poetry of Ambition which, after a good bit of indignant incredulity, is what softened me to him (this is indeed a credit to Daily’s performance). He is deluded yet retains a certain dignity; a man who goes to sleep with blood on his hands, assuming his bedding to be white with red polka dots.

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.
    — The Melting Pot (1908) , Act I

[H]ow else shall I calm myself save by forgetting all that nightmare of religions and races, save by holding out my hands with prayer and music toward the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God! The Past I cannot mend—its evil outlines are stamped in immortal rigidity. Take away the hope that I can mend the Future, and you make me mad....I keep faith with America. I have faith America will keep faith with us.
    — The Melting Pot (1908), Act II

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal"....I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character....When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
    — Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)

[H]ow we struggled, how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendents of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists.
    — Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1993)

Above, behold: the evolution of a powerful idea. Israel Zangwill may not have coined the term "melting pot" to describe the romantic ideal that he understood (willed?) for the still-young U.S.A. (Zangwill was English); but his play gave it currency, and the words stuck. Now the eminently invaluable Metropolitan Playhouse has staged a revival of Zangwill's work, providing us a look at The Melting Pot, on its own terms.

It's entirely worth seeing.

As drama, it is very much of its time, which is to say that the dialogue can sometimes feel dense to our 21st century ear and that the plotting relies all too extremely on melodramatic conventions rather than psychology. (The third act concerns itself almost entirely with a dastardly scheme on the part of the play's villains to reclaim the ingenue from the hero; they would tie her to train tracks or a saw mill if Zangwill could figure out how to get either one into his New York City setting.)

But the story is as timely and resonant as ever. David is a young, recent Jewish immigrant from Russia. He's a musical prodigy—would be a virtuoso violinist if not for an injury to his left shoulder, inflicted on him by soldiers in the pogrom in which the rest of his family was brutally murdered. He's also a gifted composer, and the symphony he's working on is an ode to his new home, the America that has fired his romantic imagination (see the two quotes at the top of this piece).

David is "discovered" by Vera Revendal, a Russian emigre (the daughter of a Baron, we eventually learn) who fled her homeland after serving time in jail for trying to overthrow the Czar's regime. Vera now works at a settlement house in New York City, where she first heard David play. She wants him to return, and although she's taken aback to find out that he's a Jew, she rises above her prejudice and arranges for the wealthy American dillettante Quincy Davenport to hear David's music. Davenport brings along the great German conductor Herr Pappelmeister, who immediately recognizes David's genius. The young immigrant composer suddenly finds himself handed an immense career opportunity and—perhaps even more importantly—in love with Vera, a gentile.

David's twin journeys away from his roots and toward assimilation in his new country, one professional, one personal, mark the rest of The Melting Pot. David's uncle reacts violently to the notion of intermarriage (as does Vera's father the Baron, who turns up in the second half of the play). And David himself, haunted by the ghosts of his past (the "angels" that playwright Tony Kushner would suggest, nearly a century later, don't exist in America), is torn apart inside as he tries to embrace the success offered him in his new land.

It's potent stuff, food for thought whether you're the great-grandson of immigrants as I am, or can trace your lineage back to the Mayflower, or you just arrived on these shores yourself. The ideals that America once represented to the world and itself have shifted so seismically that the re-examination that Zangwill's play forces us to make of them can only be fruitful.

Metropolitan's production of The Melting Pot features direction by Robert Kalfin, an extremely effective design (Andrew C. Boyce did the set, Douglas Filomena the lights, and Gail Cooper-Hecht the costumes), and a sterling, anchoring central performance by Daniel Shevlin as David. Offering solid support among the nine-person cast are Kendall Rileigh as the incongruous Irish maid, Ronnie Newman as the expansive Herr Pappelmeister, Suzanne Toren as the Yiddish-speaking Frau Quixano (David's great-aunt), and Steve Sterner as David's uncle Mendel (who gets some quality time on the piano to match Shevlin's on the violin).

Metropolitan Playhouse has staked out as its mission the production of plays from America's past. This is noble work that illuminates and fosters understanding, and their current selection of The Melting Pot may be the most significant single piece they've mounted yet.

Harpagon, the title character in The Miser, is meant to be mocked—he buries his gold in the garden but is so stingy that he orders his cook to select foods his dinner guests are not to like (they’ll eat less that way). He’s crotchety and smells of mothballs and yet hopes to marry a lovely young girl who sobs at the very sight of him (and who is secretly having a love affair with his foppish son Cléante). To save the cost of a dowry, he plans to marry his daughter Elise to a rich, elderly widower (while she secretly is engaged to his manservant Valere). Of course, all these potential marriages are complicated by the scheming of everyone involved on how to get their hands on Harpagon’s fortune, whether through trickery, theft, or his untimely demise.

And yet, in the enormously skilled hands of Angus Hepburn, Harpagon is also the heart and soul of Jean Cocteau Rep’s elegant but deeply flawed production of this Molière classic. The production separately credits the translation (by Charles Heron Wall) and the adaptation (by the Company), but there’s something of a disjunction between the two, which presents an almost insurmountable challenge for the performers. Many of them seem caught between the clashing imperatives of acting the 17th-century language and winking at it.

But Hepburn finds a way to motivate even his most bombastic and farcical moments, partly by adroit use of Harpagon’s tendency to directly address the audience. Hepburn’s Harpagon is appropriately crusty and often downright cruel, to be sure, but there’s a genuine-ness to his performance that made me empathize with the most ridiculous of his emotions and decisions. His attempts to make himself desirable to Mariane, his young potential bride, have a genuine pathos instead of merely seeming foolish.

Director Dan Zisson seems to be trying to have it both ways here—he wants to use the distance of history to comment on the present (per the press release), but also seems to want to infuse the text and the performances with modern attitudes—somewhat to the detriment of both. The translation isn’t in modern language, but it’s sprinkled with modern jokes (for example, turning some lines into lyrics from '80s pop songs)—which get laughs, but felt to me like cheap shots rather than honest comedy. The actors are speaking in period language, but reacting to 21st century innuendo and with modern sensibilities. The costumes are period, but the characters are not.

The best example I can give of this culture clash is the character of Cléante, Harpagon’s son. Cléante is a fop; he’s gotten himself terribly into debt trying to keep up his wardrobe and his image as a young man about town. His father thinks his clothing and his hairstyle are ridiculous, not to mention the money he’s spent on them, and Harpagon’s disapproval of the outer trappings of Cléante’s identity only adds to Cléante’s frustration, fear of his father, and inability to talk to his father. Now, there isn’t really a 21st century analogue to the 17th century fop; a modern translation might have a father complaining about his son’s copious tattoos and body piercings, or the money he spends on iTunes. Here, though, Cléante comes off merely as someone who’s vain and fusses over his hair—sort of a sitcom stereotype of a gay hairdresser or a metrosexual, which doesn’t allow him to give vent (or weight) to the relationships and issues underlying the jokes. It feels as if he’s been told to play the outer trappings of the character—rather than the character itself—with a modern consciousness.

I hasten to add that this isn’t a criticism of actor Seth Duerr, who comes beautifully and subtly to life when he’s allowed to drop the archness and speak lovingly to Mariane. But the production can’t seem to make up its mind whether to perform a farce, or comment farcically on the play, and thus doesn’t entirely succeed at either.

It’s a shame, because it’s a physically lovely production, especially Roman Tatarowicz’s simple set and Rich Dunham’s lighting, that uses the space in creative ways. And many of the actors have moments that shine through the confusion and really engage both the play’s humor and its cynicism—especially Duerr, Melanie Hopkins as Mariane, and Mickey Ryan as cook/coachman Maître Jacques.

Tartuffe is running in repertory with two other Molière plays as part of The Molière Cycle at Classic Stage Company, featuring the work of Columbia graduate students that form The Young Company. Their tongues nimbly fence with the text’s mannered cadences, the offspring of the alarmingly verbose marriage of a Molière play and a Christopher Hampton translation. Legendary voice-training guru Kristin Linklater, on staff for this production and a full-time instructor at Columbia, has seen to it that each actor’s lines are crystal-clear, inflected, and prodded along at a vigorous pace. Like a team of muscular Clydesdales, the resulting production is stoic, bumpily moving us along from plot point to plot point with proud competence. It is quite apparent that each actor understands exactly what all their heightened speeches mean. The trouble is, Molière wrote comedies. And comedies, be they mannered or vulgar, are not measured by the yardsticks of running time, diction, or clarity. They are measured in laughs, and this production provides a meager ration indeed.

We certainly do not leave with a lack of understanding, academic though it may be, as to what Molière is satirizing. Tartuffe (Luis Moreno) is a poverty-stricken hypocrite of piety who wins his way into free housing and the good graces of the aristocratic Orgon (Walker Lewis), who hangs on to his every sanctimonious word. We see quickly that Tartuffe is merely using religion to puppeteer his way into luxury and ease, withholding from himself none of the indulgent niceties of Orgon’s household, including his shocked wife Elmire (Laura Heidinger), who rebuffs his advances. We are not alone in our perception: the other members of the household are revolted by the true nature of Tartuffe, and try to reason with Orgon. However, Orgon remains oblivious to the flaws of his guest, and spites his doubting household by drawing up documents to make Tartuffe his heir and betroth him to his already-engaged daughter. Tartuffe gets caught in a clever scheme that reveals his designs on Elmire in the presence of Orgon, but when Orgon tries to kick him out, Tartuffe asserts his ownership of the house through the aforementioned documents, evicts his host, and betrays him to the king. The king is shrewd, Tartuffe is foiled, and the lives of the maligned are restored.

Tried-and-true stock characters of commedia dell’arte, Molière’s background, are here: the dim-witted master, the clever and resourceful servant, the love-stricken ingénue, the hypocritical zealot. Even a neo-classical novice could discern how these characters are going to interact and solve the problems they create well before the actual wrap-up, so the actors must create spontaneity through a subversive, percolating inner-life, better known as fun. It allows the audience to feel joy: joy at the obtuseness of Orgon, joy at the sheer gall of Tartuffe, joy that the follies of the powerful are perceived only by uneducated servants doing all the work. These archetypes are written in the extreme, and, if played to the hilt, the stakes of each situation—however mundane, however predictable—go through the roof. The forced, wooden timing that lays heavily on every scene of this production makes it seem like an intelligent classroom reading in a Theatre History course—enough to get the audience ready for the exam, if only any of us were interested in being back in school.

Director Brian Kulick, the artistic director of Classic Stage and never one to shy away from an offbeat choice, has Tartuffe and the household under his influence adhering to a sort of Hindu mysticism, rather than the arch Christianity that Molière was undoubtedly targeting. Tartuffe is costumed by Oana Botez-Ban in the manner of a yogi, with a white turban and kurta. When the entire household is forced by Orgon to wear such garments, it is reminiscent of the Transcendental Meditation hype of the sixties and seventies, when Mia Farrow, The Beatles, Shirley MacLaine and many others all went to India to see the Maharishi and cleanse themselves with the inner peace that so eludes us in the West. It is an intriguing concept, but ultimately feels arbitrary, if for no other reason than Western audiences will more quickly recognize arch Christianity than its Hindu counterpart, and will have a stronger reaction when a Christian Tartuffe demonstrates his fraudulence. The Hinduism choice leaves the audience curious about Tartuffe’s attitudes, and a curious audience is a quiet one, making the task of getting laughs more Sisyphusian than it needs to be.

Two actors are notably successful, however, in eliciting a guffaw from the audience from time to time: Laura Heidinger and Luis Moreno. As Elmire, Heidinger’s fury with the slow uptake of her husband during the plot to reveal the lecherous intentions of Tartuffe is fever-pitched and hilarious. Moreno’s Tartuffe is highly enjoyable when he lets his piety slip, in such moments as his true enjoyment of an opulent meal, or his excitement for sex with Elmire driving him into a frenzy of religious garment-stripping and justifications. But even these performances leave a yearning for the further delight that might have resulted if the all the actors’ engines were driven with as much playfulness as eloquence.

In almost every way, New York City Opera's new revival of Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella is a sad disappointment.

The sole department in which it does not let its audience down is the music, here in Don Walker's original orchestration, gloriously played by the lush and large (by contemporary Broadway standards) orchestra, under the baton of conductor George Manahan. Songs like "Fresno Beauties," "Young People," and "Song of a Summer Night" sound enchanting, and the key choral numbers—"Abbondanza," "Benvenuta," and "Standing on the Corner"—come off beautifully, too. It's a pleasure to hear the score played as it should be, and it's only the score that keeps this production from being an utter failure.

The Most Happy Fella, first produced on Broadway in 1956, tells the story of a shy, middle-aged Italian immigrant named Tony Esposito who owns a grape ranch in the Napa Valley and who falls in love with a pretty waitress but is too nervous to tell her himself. (He's afraid even to ask her name; he calls her "Rosabella" instead.) So he leaves her a note on the menu, along with an expensive tiepin, and asks her to write to him. A romance by mail ensues, and eventually he asks her to marry him. But when Tony's possessive sister, Marie, reminds him that he's not the young, handsome man that Rosabella is probably hoping for, he decides to send a photo of his virile foreman Joe instead.

When Rosabella arrives for the wedding, Joe—who was supposed to have left the ranch by now—is still there. Tony gets scared again and has a terrible car accident. The rest of the musical depicts the ways that Tony and Rosabella mend their relationship and, eventually, genuinely fall in love with one another. A subplot features Rosabella's pal Cleo and her romance with one of the workers at the ranch, a friendly fellow named Herman.

Director Philip Wm. McKinley seems not to have a clue as to how to stage this show. Loesser argued over and over again (this is in the program, but I've read it elsewhere) that The Most Happy Fella is not an opera, but simply a musical comedy with a great deal of music in it. But McKinley seems determined to prove that an opera house is where this sweetly romantic tale belongs. He's restored two "arias" sung by Marie; though interesting as trivia, these cut songs demonstrate nothing but the efficacy of their excision 50 years ago, stopping the story dead in its tracks both times and, to the extent that they reveal anything about the woman that sings them, succeeding only in making her seem creepy.

McKinley has, at the same time, found himself apparently defeated by the width of the opera house stage. Intimate actions—girlfriends engaging in small talk or confiding in one another; a wife sharing a tender or romantic moment with her husband—are violated with alarming consistency, with the affected parties standing ten or more feet away from one another; there's no closeness and practically no contact, physical or otherwise.

This is a very straightforward show, but McKinley chooses to ignore most of what Loesser's script instructs him and his actors to do. In the first scene, a restaurant cashier hits on our heroine telling her smugly that lots of waitresses are "just begging to date a guy in my position." Her reply is, "A guy in your position is just begging for something"—which makes sense (and is funny) because he's just bent over to pick something up from the floor. Except here, the cashier doesn't bend over until she's almost finished with the line, spoiling the sense (and the joke). This kind of thing happens over and over again in this Most Happy Fella.

With casting consultant Mark Simon, McKinley has populated the show pretty much exclusively with performers from the world of the Broadway musical (only two of the principals, Andrew Drost and Matthew Surapine, have opera credits, and they're both quite good here, actually). This strategy ought to work, but it doesn't: although several of these folks have the chops to do their roles well and sing them nicely (Lisa Vroman as Rosabella, Karen Murphy as Marie, John Scherer as Herman), without the strong guiding hand that will establish relationships among the characters, their work flounders. Leah Hocking is entirely out of her depth as Cleo, Rosabella's earthy best friend, and Ivan Hernandez can't manage either of Joe's main songs. Meanwhile, the NYCO chorus plays the "neighbors and the neighbors' neighbors" but they never convince us that they're people who might live or work in a Napa Valley vineyard; in the misconceived second act opener "Fresno Beauties" (which should be sung by a male chorus, but here is sung by members of both sexes) they seem like nothing so much as refugees from a street scene in a bad Italian opera.

Most problematic, though, is Paul Sorvino's disastrous attempt at the play's leading role of Tony. Sorvino, a good actor, seems unable to create any sort of effective characterization here, and his singing voice is thin and reedy. Instead of delivering a vigorous but insecure romantic he musters only a snivelling, dottering old man.

Peggy Hickey's choreography is unimaginative and, in at least one case, unsuited to the characters and story (she has an impromptu spring dance among the vineyard workers feature complicated ballet choreography; ridiculous). I thought I recognized Michael Anania's sets from the last NYCO Most Happy Fella (I was right); they're as ugly now as they were then, and out of place in McKinley's off-kilter conception of the piece, to boot. Ann Hould Ward's costumes are garish and inappropriate.

It's hard to understand how a revival of something as tried-and-true as this piece could go so far and badly off course. It's nice to have a lot of people on stage, and it's truly gratifying to hear this score played beautifully and without amplification. But I'd trade all of that for authentic heart and emotion; a recent revival of The Most Happy Fella by the modest Brooklyn theatre company Gallery Players, with just piano accompaniment, outclassed this production in every other way.

In his new solo show The Mother of All Enemies, Paul Zaloom takes on Homeland Security, "Don't Ask/Don't Tell," Al Qaeda, the "Ex-Gay" movement, intolerant Conservatives, the wars of the Middle East, the United States Marine Corps, the deterioration of privacy and compassion—in short, more or less everything that characterizes our increasingly distressing and insecure way of life here in the USA in 2006: all that, plus the impossibility of trying to survive as an artist in a world that seems less and less to value art. (That final point is already proven when we walk in the door—not of a well-funded and well-fed mainstream venue, but of scrappy Collective: Unconscious in Tribeca. Zaloom, one of the most important figures of alternative theatre of the past three decades (and a TV star, in Beakman's World), is touring in tiny venues like this one? Something is broken.)

Zaloom launches his attack on the System from two fronts. Most of The Mother of All Enemies takes the form of a shadow puppet play, in which Zaloom works all the controls and does all the voices and sound effects. The star of this show is Karagoz, a character from traditional Middle Eastern puppet theatre whom Zaloom describes as a knavish, clownish hero in the style of Punch or Pulcinella. His Karagoz, a chunky bearded felow in a fez, has simple goals: to live a peaceful life with his boyfriend Harry, raise some kids, and make a living as an artist. But everywhere he goes, his desires are foiled. Police (literally pigs in cop cars) harrass Karagoz and Harry when it looks like they're making a public display of affection. Eventually, Karagoz gets arrested for being so careless, and winds up in prison, where he meets a genie who grants him "seven or nine" wishes.

Karagoz uses these wishes to turn himself into a variety of forms of transportation (airplane, boat, etc.) which carry him around the world. He finds himself first in Israel, where his swarthy Arab looks make him pretty unpopular; and then in Pakistan, in an Al Qaeda training camp (depicted here hilariously as a kids' summer camp, with a counselor promising a day trip to New York, where the activities will be attending the musical Spamalot, getting knishes at Yonah Shimmel's, and blowing up a famous landmark). Karagoz's Rocky-and-Bullwinkle-like adventures eventually take him to the U.S., where he encounters a disco-queen Statue of Liberty, lands in jail, journeys to an "Ex-Gay" dude ranch, and (having turned himself into a woman) almost becomes the paramour of one of the most virulent "Ex-Gays." It's coarse, goofy, broad satire, its anger diffused by the fanciful, silly ambience. Lots of it scores a bulls eye.

Around the puppet show, Zaloom delivers comic monologues, all based on true experiences and illustrating how cockeyed our society's values have become. There's a Tonight Show-style riff on bumper stickers for secular humanists that's pretty funny; and there's a bit about Zaloom's email correspondence with a USMC recruiter that is, by turns, hilarious and chilling.

The show's blissful humor is subverted at almost every point by its urgency: Zaloom is too genuinely concerned about the subjects he's talking about to surrender them completely to pure comedy (and with good reason). So The Mother of All Enemies is as likely to make you angry as to make you laugh, which is certainly its whole reason for being. Authentically political satire is hard to come by these days, and as Zaloom's own career illustrates, it's not something our culture is currently rewarding appropriately. See what you've been missing and get yourself fired up: The Mother of All Enemies is the real thing, and it's so necessary right now.

At the top of the show, a menagerie of critter/musicians take the stage while a “clever monkey” introduces the story we’re about to watch, saying in part, “As you can see we’re all animals.” But they aren’t dressed as animals. All they have to indicate that they are animals are hats with bunny ears or fox ears or monkey ears attached to them. Yet that’s all we need to stir our imaginations for the rest of the night.

The Mouse Queen is a story of big dreams, big egos, and the big city. A tiny mouse named Tilly wanders a little too far into the jungle one day and meets Leonard the Lion, The King of the Beasts. Leonard decides that Tilly will make for a yummy dessert but she suggests that if he were to let her go she will one day return the favor. “But what can a tiny mouse do for a mighty lion?” he asks. As he is about to eat her, he discovers a gold coin that Tilly had found earlier and notices a picture of another “King” on it. He becomes very jealous and decides to find this king, challenge him to a fight, and bring back his head.

Meanwhile, Leonard having forgot about her, Tilly decides that she wants to be big and the best way to do that is to go to the big city. There she meets a city mouse named Russell who helps her to (mostly) avoid all the dangers found in a big city. Leonard, in the meantime, finds a café owner named Bernie King, whom he mistakes for the king on the coin. Eventually, Leonard learns that while a lion may be stronger than a man he is not quite as clever, and Tilly succumbs to the trappings of the big city (literally and figuratively). Tilly and Leonard meet again, each in an unfortunate position, and as it turns out a tiny mouse can help a mighty lion.

I think what makes The Mouse Queen so much fun, apart from its highly imaginative and minimalist format, is its synthesis of so many different styles. The story is told sometimes using live actors while at other times puppets play the same characters. The puppets vary from shadow puppets to marionette to rod to Bunraku. All the actors are also musicians who form a delightful Klezmer band, but even the band mixes in some less traditional Klezmer instruments such as a ukulele and even a juice harp. The Mouse Queen works because it appeals to us, especially the youngsters, on so many different levels. It’s like a movie of an illustrated storybook on stage with music. It’s good times.

The ensemble is a sight to see, working as musicians, actors, and puppeteers. I was particularly impressed with Mandy Travis, who plays/operates the Italian-accented Bernie King puppet. She also plays the clever monkey, the baritone sax, and the spoons. Tim Kane is very funny as Leonard the lion. He also provides the book with some help from Ben Glasstone, who gives us the music and lyrics. Glasstone is also the city mouse Russell and plays guitar in the band. The rest of the cast is just as versatile.

Peter O’Rouke’s set and puppet designs are quite remarkable in their combination of simplicity and extraordinary detail. The set is covered with so many written words that it’s impossible to take them all in. The puppets have detailed faces but most of their bodies are left to the imagination. Director Steve Tiplady’s staging is charming. He never forgets who his audience is.

The producing company, The Little Angel Theatre, offers us the wonderful message that one good turn deserves another, which is great—but it’s the fun and energetic way they present the message that makes it feel so fulfilling.

Desire and passion thwarted can be destructive things indeed, and the first to be destroyed is he who thwarts their proper outlets: consummation, shared love, and tenderness. The sexual energies engendered by this passion and desire must be dissipated, and if not dissipated in love they are dissipated in seedy encounters that render passion and desire themselves ugly and undesirable. It’s only worse if the lovers try to idealize their attraction to each other in a work of art. Reality can never hope to match artistic creation, however imperfect; this is the final twist of the knife.

This is the tragic message of The Music Teacher, the fine, sensually textured, and haunting play/opera by brothers Wallace Shawn (play and libretto) and Allen Shawn (music) and directed by the accomplished Irish theatre, opera, and film director Tom Cairns. The production at the Minetta Lane Theatre is the world premiere of the show, originally written in 1983 and then rejected by every theatre to which the creators submitted it. It opens here under the aegis of The New Group, which produced a fine revival of Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon three years ago.

The play opens with Jack Smith, an aging music professor in a small town, a loving husband and father of several children, who admits that his life is conventional, peaceful, passionless, and unimportant. He likes it that way. He does have a hobby, though: collecting images and memories from his past and going through them in his mind every once in a while. He begins to tell a story from his early adulthood as an unmarried music instructor at a small private school and his collaboration with Jane, a bright teenaged student. They compose an opera together: she the libretto, a romantic fantasy about a forbidden love set in ancient Greece, he the music, a delicate atonal score (excellently rendered here by an acoustic, unamplified five-piece chamber ensemble under the baton of music director Timothy Long). The collaboration heightens their attraction for each other, and, in one of the beautiful, lyrical monologues for which the playwright is renowned, Jane describes how, hidden behind a tree, she watches Jack as he tenderly masturbates next to a lake in the moonlight the night before the opera’s premiere. The premiere itself sets off an erotic crisis in the older man, which he tries to escape by fleeing the school and indulging in various sexual encounters in a nearby city. But Jane follows him; by the time she finds her teacher, he is beyond her own redemptive desire for him.

Several of the roles are doubled between singing and speaking parts; Allen Shawn’s score requires highly trained musical voices, but Wallace Shawn’s words require unusually compassionate and talented actors. (In addition, older and younger versions of the same character often appear on stage simultaneously, as maturity considers the immature self.) Mark Blum brings a painful fear and trembling to the role of the older Smith, his humble demeanor masking an ill-concealed vulnerability; Kellie Overbey as the grown-up and married Jane maintains a mysterious reserve of sexual potency under a seemingly contented exterior. The singing roles of Young Smith, Young Jane, and Jim (Jane’s schoolmate and future husband) were excellently performed by tenor Jeffrey Picón, soprano Sarah Wolfson, and Jason Forbach at the performance reviewed (they alternate with Wayne Hobbs, Kathryn Skemp, and Ross Benoliel, respectively).

This is a very dark evening, as might be expected, but it’s got its light moments as well. The production of the opera itself is an intentional demonstration of endearing stage ineptitude that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a high school or college opera production (the heroine of Jane’s opera offers a visitor coffee from a French press, which you won’t see in any ancient Greek frescoes; a male character wears hiking boots and a trenchcoat over his toga), and Shawn’s play and libretto exhibit a dry and easy wit. He also has an ear for the anachronisms that may appear in an ambitious, romantic teenage girl’s first attempt at an opera.

The Music Teacher brings a new dimension to Wallace Shawn’s reputation. Shawn’s more celebrated plays have been quite minimalist in their production needs (The Designated Mourner consists largely of three interwoven monologues delivered without décor, movement or costumes; The Fever is delivered by an individual sitting in a chair). One wouldn’t have expected his name to be associated with such a thing as an opera. But in a way, it’s of a piece with all of his work: Shawn’s idiosyncratic, lyrical language lends itself to his brother’s atonal music startlingly well. The Music Teacher illuminates the musicality of Shawn’s language in his other plays, which demand close listening.

The sets, designed by director Cairns, and the video design by Greg Emetaz bring an imaginative eye to this unusual, provocative evening; my only quibble would be with the acoustics of the Minetta Lane Theatre: the song that opens the show, performed by offstage voices, is barely comprehensible, and the structure of the theatre tends to flatten the individual singing voice. But there’s scarcely anything that Cairns and the brothers Shawn can do about that.

The Necklace is a serial mystery in eight episodes (which are performed in pairs), with four writers, two directors, and what seems like a limitless multitude of characters (though if I’m counting the program correctly, it’s actually only 18, not all of whom appear in the two episodes I saw), including a mysterious monster-under-the-stairs who takes the form of a towering mound of laundry. I’m not entirely sure I have any idea what’s going on by the end of episode two (which is probably completely intentional), but the crackerjack design team, witty directing, and a pack of terrific performances make for a delightful, if confounding, evening of theatre.

The series is set in a mysterious mansion on a mysterious moor that seems to be somewhere in the Northeastern United States, a mansion that is both a “house of the house” and a “house of the mind.” Inhabiting this mansion are Fanny, an elderly widow; John (aka Nazim), the butler who has served her family and her home for more than 40 years; Fanny’s twin nieces, Iris and Ruby, adolescents who are running a secret business from the basement under the guise of homework; and Donald, a recently orphaned great-nephew (I think) of Fanny’s who’s lately joined them. Also making appearances are a mysterious child, Theo, who may be a figment of Fanny’s imagination; Donald’s deceased parents, Marvin and Judith, who are most likely imaginary; Donna Monitor, an angry neighbor who is also a real-estate agent with designs on the mansion; the aforementioned Mound; and a vaguely Russian, distinctly sinister salesman who’s probably really either a cop or a criminal. And this is to say nothing of the person or persons John is almost certainly hiding in the attic, Ruby and Iris’s potential co-conspirators in the basement, the voice of Larry King, or several key players in several secrets that are alluded to throughout—like the girl in the grey sweater. And, oh yes, there’s a necklace—which has already disappeared, reappeared, and vanished again by the end of episode two.

As you can imagine, it’s a bit of a wild ride, punctuated by musical numbers in a variety of styles, from John’s opening Weimar cabaret-esque ballad to the twins’ Bollywood/ belly dancing number in episode two. The writing (Lisa D’Amour wrote episode 1 and Paul Zimet episode 2) is a little florid, but it suits the atmospherics. And the tightly choreographed, cleverly constructed recap of part one that opens part two might in itself be worth the price of admission.

The ensemble as a whole, adroitly directed by Melissa Kievman and Anne Kauffman, has a marvelous uniformity of tone, striking just the right formula of one part tongue-in-cheek to two parts sincerity, with a dash of camp, a sprinkle of razzle-dazzle, and the occasional completely over-the-top portentous utterance thrown in for good measure. Suli Holum and Katie Pearl, as the twins, are especially good with the physical business, matching each other’s stylized crispness adroitly. Andy Paris is terrific as the overly mysterious Russian, both comic and menacing.

Peter Gordon’s music (and, I assume overall soundscape, though it ’s not credited as such) is important enough to almost be a character. The scoring and sound effects add immeasurably to mood and tone at every turn, as well as reinforcing the old-time radio themes. I was impressed by Anna Kiraly’s clever and flexible set, which uses simple materials—mostly movable flats with different architectural elements painted on them—to create a maze of disappearing stairwells and rambling corridors.

I can’t claim to fully understand episodes one and two of The Necklace. Maybe it would all be made clear if I saw episodes three through eight, and maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it needs to be a little murky so that audience members seeing only episodes five and six remain no more at sea than the rest of us. But even if I wouldn’t want to take a pop quiz on the plot, I enjoyed this stylish, entertaining evening of theatre.

Faas is a grown man trapped under his parents' roof. In the name of love and safety, his parents obstruct Faas’s desire for a world greater than their own. Before The Northern Quarter begins, he sits onstage staring longingly at a photograph of the universe on an easel. As the action starts, an actor in black removes photo after photo from the stand, revealing different locations, each more specific than the last. The final picture is of Faas, trapped behind a window, screaming.

Alex van Warmerdam’s script and Erwin Maas’s direction both emphasize that Faas’s parents do truly love him. Heather Hollingsworth as Martha and Vincent van der Valk as Kloos look significantly younger than Dave Gueriera’s Faas, which is effective because Faas’s parents have essentially never aged. They see themselves and he sees them as the same parents they were 40 years ago. They argue over giving Faas a censored dictionary the way most parents debate about appropriate television shows. Martha spends the play manically knitting a red scarf, and in one crucial scene wraps and wraps and wraps Faas up before she lets him go out in the backyard (with herself and Kloos standing watch, of course). And if Faas was 40 years younger, their behavior would be entirely appropriate, in fact, unnoticeable. But he is 43, and what is normal, loving behavior for parents of a three-year-old is instead strange, restricting, irritating, infuriating, absurd.

All the design elements of the play are beautifully executed. The house where Faas lives with his parents is just a glowing rectangle on the stage, but it’s all you need to feel their limited world. Lucrecia Briceno and Tim Cryan use light to define space and confront the audience, Andrea Gastlelum’s masks and props add detail, and Paul Lomax and Andy Keech’s graphics are very appropriate. Oana Botez-Ban’s costumes are especially apt and luscious. Kloos and Martha are entirely china figurine white, down to their hair, and their cute little folk costumes and the red circles on their cheeks set the stylized tone of the play right away. Faas’s costume is the same white, but his naked face makes him older and more vulnerable than they are. And the people the family meets outside the house explode with color. The broad and simple visual world lets the complexity of the story come through.

There is more than a suggestion that the play is a metaphor for society. And while the metaphor is apt and the stylization of the staging encourages the broad interpretation, what is so interesting about this script is that it can be read on the literal level as well. Despite the absurdity, the story of a grown man whose parents can’t live without him and can’t let him grow up and can’t face the truth about themselves is one that many people will be able to identify with. The Northern Quarter may be about the prisons we are born into, but it’s also very much about the prison of the mind and our addiction to the known and the safe. In one particularly telling scene, Faas manages to convince his parents that he should take a trip with a painter. After much convincing, they finally agree, and come with him. The painter says his parents can’t come along, and laughs at him. And what does Faas do? Spit at the painter and leave with his parents in a huff.

At another point, Faas begins to paint with a palette of colors that talk back to him in the voices of his parents. Not abusive, not even directly negative, but constantly undermining, until he’s so caught in his head he can’t make a move. When Faas does finally physically break free from his parents, there is something unsettling, unfinished, because escaping from the exterior prison is really the easy part. Escape from the interior prison of over 40 years of life is going to be a different matter entirely.

The first and most important thing I have to say about The Odd Couple is something you probably already know: this is a very funny play. The first act, in particular, is a breezy, happy hour of rapid-fire one-liners and well-wrought gags, rooted in familiar and richly human terrain; Neil Simon at his very, very best. If the second half is somewhat less satisfying in this Broadway revival—if the emotional resonance of the relationship between its two main characters is somehow insufficiently realized here by stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick and director Joe Mantello—well, that's got a lot to do with how life and fashions have changed in the 40 years since this play was written. It doesn't keep the evening as a whole from being pleasantly entertaining.

The Odd Couple is about, of course, best pals Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar. Oscar's a slovenly sportswriter, Felix is a buttoned-up neatnik; both have been thrown out of marriages of reasonably longstanding by (unseen) wives, for reasons that will become apparent as the play progresses. Oscar's been divorced for a while, and now occupies an eight-room apartment on Riverside Drive by himself. When Felix is late for the Friday night poker game that he's never missed in years, Oscar and their other buddies—Murray the Cop, Roy the Accountant, Vinnie the Hen-pecked Husband, and Speed the Curmudgeon—all begin to worry; and when Felix's wife Frances calls looking for him, announcing that they've broken up and that Felix said he was going to kill himself, well, everybody gets more than a little panicky.

Felix turns up, of course, right on cue at this very moment, obviously perturbed but putting on as brave a face as someone as hypochondriacal and self-absorbed as he is can under these circumstances. Oscar, fiercely loyal, suggests that Felix move in with him, and a great comic idea—and comedy—is born. As the long-running TV sitcom based on this play succinctly put it: "Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?"

What's best about this new production is the supporting cast. Brad Garrett (Murray), Peter Frechette (Roy), Lee Wilkof (Vinnie), and especially Rob Bartlett (Speed) fit as comfortably into Neil Simon's smoky poker games as they would into old, worn slippers—they're terrific bouncing the zippy and sarcastic New York patter off one another, anchoring the entire play thematically and stylistically in precisely the same way that all of the miscellaneous reporters anchor Hecht & MacArthur's The Front Page. To watch Garrett's Murray take an inordinate amount of time to deal a hand of poker, or to track the numerous annoyed double takes on Bartlett's expressive puss as he suffers through same, is to experience the essence of classic Simon comedy.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, this show's Oscar and Felix respectively, have plenty of Simon credits among them (especially Broderick, whose creation of Eugene Jerome in Brighton Beach Memoirs two decades ago helped fuel Simon's rebirth as a major American theatre writer in the 1980s and '90s). So they have a handle on what to do here, and for the most part they deliver the goods. Lane's Oscar is a carefree pussycat whose bark (to mix animal metaphors) is far worse than his bite. Broderick's Felix is a sentimental eccentric who craves order and attention. The duo's chemistry, honed in the hit The Producers, is absolutely genuine: they give off a clear and unassailable sense of being lifelong best friends, as the script demands. Their comic skills and timing are superb, naturally; a particular highlight is the moment when Lane gives Broderick the clumsiest massage you've probably ever seen attempted—a tribute to the generosity and trust these two clearly share for one another's talents.

Unfortunately, what Lane and Broderick never quite do is convince us that they're Oscar and Felix. I thought a lot about why, and tried hard to get past the obvious answer (which is that Lane is not Walter Matthau and Matthew Broderick is not Tony Randall), and what I eventually came up with is that these two actors, talented though they are, just don't have rumpled, careworn, middle-aged married men in them, at least not yet. Some of this has to do with the times we live in: I think we expect a successful journalist with a fancy Upper East Side address and a 12-year-marriage to a non-working wife and two children to be a good deal older than the ever youthful Broderick appears to be. Our contemporary cult of youth adds to the trouble—Matthau, several years younger in 1965 than Lane is now, always seemed middle-aged, didn't he? Whatever the reason, I never really believed that this Felix and Oscar were as intractably set in their ways as they seem to be, and without that, a lot of The Odd Couple's bite dissipates into toothlessness. Lane's kinder, gentler Oscar proves problematic in the explosive climax of the play: the inevitable confrontation between Oscar and Felix fails to ignite, and the resultant resolution has little kick.

Director Joe Mantello is probably also responsible for some of what's lacking here. He never puts his two heroes nose to nose the way they need to be for that big showdown, and it hurts the play; he's also restructured a perfect three-act comedy into an imperfectly balanced two-act piece, compressing Oscar and Felix's disastrous double-date with the English Pigeon sisters and its aftermath into just the second half of the play, eliminating breathing room for Oscar and the audience to take that classic scene in. (I should mention here that Jessica Stone and Olivia d'Abo are competent as the Pigeons, but only that; their characters have the potential to steal the play, at least temporarily, right out from under its stars, but neither manages anything close to that. My attention was riveted on Broderick, deservedly, throughout that segment.)

Ann Roth's costumes and John Lee Beatty's sets reflect the mid-60s period nicely, though one might question Beatty's use of space—the poker/dining room table, where much of the action takes place, is way off stage right, while Oscar's spacious but underutilized living room and entrance foyer occupy the majority of the playing area. I liked Marc Shaiman's nifty background music, a blend of vaguely jazzy, vaguely rock-n-rolly music that conjures the time and place deftly.

Only in its very final moments does Shaiman's score dip into the famous Neal Hefti theme that we associate with the movie and TV series. That's smart, but ultimately I found it impossible to not remember earlier incarnations of The Odd Couple while I was watching this one. Matthau, in particular, seems particularly indelible—his Oscar is as definitive a performance as I can name. And so, the final question begged by this revival has to be this: Why?

Charles Ross’s charming new show, One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, is exactly what it says it is: author and actor Ross performs the entire Star Wars trilogy, sans sets, props, or costumes. He plays all the characters, does all the sound effects, and even hums John Williams’s famous music. If this sounds like the ultimate party trick… well, it is. It’s also impressive how well the whole enterprise is pulled off. Die-hard Star Wars fans will obviously get a kick out of it, as will kids and families (of which there were a large number in attendance on the night I went). Casual fans of the films may wonder what the fuss is all about, but they will surely be impressed by Ross’s gusto, conviction, and ingenuity.

Ross and director TJ Dawe have crafted a loving and speedy homage to one of the most beloved franchises in movie history: slightly abridged re-tellings of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi in an hour. His renderings of R2D2, C3PO, Chewbacca, Jabba the Hutt (who sounds notoriously like the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show here), The Emperor, and Darth Vader’s breathing are all right on target. But Ross isn’t content to just pay his faithful respects to the trilogy. He pokes fun at them, too, milking Luke Skywalker’s trademark whine for maximum comic effect, and giving the swaggering Han Solo a crotch grab just for fun. When Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that a young Jedi named Darth Vader killed Luke’s father, Ross mimes a Pinocchio-type nose growing on him; he voices Chewbacca’s disbelief over not receiving a medal at the end of Star Wars; and the “Schwing!” he gives Luke as a reaction to every kiss he receives from Princess Leia—even after he learns that they’re brother and sister!—is priceless (those who are unfamiliar with this reference should rent Wayne’s World immediately).

Ross also gives equal time to the trilogy’s endless array of technology and supporting characters, with equally hilarious results. Highlights include the destruction of an Imperial walker from Empire; Admiral Ackbar’s declaration that “It’s a trap!” as the rebel fleet is about to attack the fully operational Death Star in Jedi (a bit that struck the audience as so riotous on the night I attended that Ross had to repeat it about six more times before he could continue the show); and the revelation of the only character in the entire trilogy who mispronounces Princess Leia’s name. There are, of course, tons more surprises than those, and to spoil them here would just be rude.

“The Force is strong with this one,” Darth Vader says of Luke late in Star Wars. The same can be said of Ross and his One-Man Star Wars Trilogy. It is good, clean fun that will leave one with a smile on their face and a bounce in their step. May The Force continue to be with him, and with all of you, too—always.

Ariel Dorfman's new play The Other Side is a rather bleak and unsparing look at the banal futility of war. It takes place in a remote cabin near the boundary between two countries that have been fighting each other for decades. Here, Atom Roma and Levana Julak—he a citizen of one country, she of the other—have lived for a very long time. They are waiting for their son Joseph to return home—he ran away some twenty years ago, after a particularly blistering disagreement with his father. While they wait, they work for the two warring nations as a kind of ghostly cleanup crew, finding and burying the bodies of young men and women who are killed by the constant bombings in the region, keeping meticulous records of each casualty (more than 5,700 so far) so that when the war finally comes to an end, parents and relatives of the dead will be able to find them and take them back to their homes. It is nothing more, Levana says, than she hopes some other mother would do for her son.

Shortly after the play begins, the unthinkable occurs: peace is declared. Now Atom and Levana must decide whether to stay out here in the wilderness or return to the city where he used to live; he wants to do the latter, but she is adamant that they remain where they are until Joseph comes back. Before they can resolve this impasse, however, they are interrupted by an intruder: a young Border Guard, who unceremoniously breaks through one of the walls of their house and begins to erect markers—antecedents to a wall—delineating the new boundary between the two countries. It runs right through the middle of their home; down the center of their bed, in fact. But the Guard is determined not to let anything keep him from his job: borders, when respected, he says, maintain the peace by separating the adversaries. And after what he's seen in the war, he's ready to do absolutely whatever he can to keep the peace.

Levana looks beyond the surface absurdity of the Guard's position and actions and sees: her son. Is this young man Joseph? Has he returned home on purpose, or does he—as he professes—not recognize Atom and Levana as his parents? The Other Side follows this development to a conclusion that feels to me entirely inevitable, one that echoes the sentiments of Arthur Miller ("But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were.") and, more broadly, the words of John Donne: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

It's hard to take, this play; deliberately unhurried and spare and pensive. Dorfman shifts back and forth between a kind of magic reality and a very stark recognizable one, suspending his characters between a daily existence so macabre as to nearly be absurd (the parents waiting for victims to bury and document, the son erecting barbed wire across a bedspread) and an utterly futile hope (for in Dorfman's world—and, one fears, our own—lasting peace is as likely to turn up as Godot in a Beckett play).

Manhattan Theatre Club's production, which is the New York premiere (the play debuted in 2004 in Japan), is exquisite. The most impressive design element is Beowulf Boritt's superbly detailed set, which reveals itself as the play goes on and more and more light (courtesy of Russell H. Champa's expert design) is literally shed on its subjects, until at last an endless array of modest grave markers extends in all directions as far as we can see.

Equally invaluable are the three actors who perform this piece. One of them, Gene Farber, is a relative newcomer to the NYC stage, and he acquits himself beautifully in the complicated role of the Guard. The other two are pretty much legendary in my book, and here remind us why: John Cullum, as Atom, mines the many layers of a man who has long valued pragmatic survival over more expensive ideals with piercing acuity; and Rosemary Harris, radiant as ever, glows from within as the matriarch Levana. Her refusal to give up on the promise of her son's return home fuels just about every moment of this play with a fierce power that very precisely illuminates Dorfman's central ideas.

It all makes for a theatre experience that's as compelling and searing as it is harsh. Art is supposed, sometimes, to tear at our hearts and souls. The Other Side is a visceral, sad reminder that the atrocities of war that we take for granted when we see them on TV newscasts can still authentically touch us.

Director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall’s excellent revival of The Pajama Game is an unapologetically enthusiastic and entertaining production. I suppose I should not have been surprised by the straightforward approach, but at a time when the American musical has become increasingly self-aware and ironic, I am glad this revival chooses to enjoy this vintage 1954 musical rather than send it up. And what would be gained by poking holes in an easy target? Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s score contains memorable songs and dance numbers, but the book, by George Abbott and Richard Bissell, based on Bissell’s novel 7 ½ Cents is light fare. As a workplace romantic comedy set in a pajama factory in which lovers are briefly star-crossed by a labor dispute over a 7 ½ cent raise, The Pajama Game never aspires to be anything more revelatory than a great night’s entertainment. And this production—infused with star power and supported by the solid craft of comedic character actors—delivers just that.

Enjoying this production is also largely due to the theatrical stage debut of Harry Connick, Jr. in the lead role of Sid Sorokin. Back in the 1950s when this musical premiered, crooners could cherry pick a standard like “Hey There” and give it a life of its own as popular music, leaving the context of the musical behind. So it seems a proper payback for a pop star like Connick, with 20 million record sales to his name, to come and perform the whole role. Drawing on his experience with genres of music both close and distant from the Adler & Ross score, Connick brings a wonderful mix of a crooner's craft and a jazz singer’s playfulness. His solo performances of “Hey There” and “A New Town Is a Blue Town” have a soulful intimacy that makes you feel like you’ve been invited to a concert at a small venue, while his barnstorming duet of “There Once Was a Man”, with co-star Kelli O’Hara, is so loose and fun as to seem against the rules. There is even a point during one of the show’s bigger numbers, “Hernando’s Hideaway,” in which a piano appears, as if summoned by the collective will of the audience, allowing Connick to lead the orchestra in bringing the song home. While it may have been a stretch for the character of Sorokin—even in the world of singing and dancing factory workers—my reaction was, “Why not?”

The production has other assets as well. The Pajama Game is somewhat unusual as it has not one but two comedic couple subplots. So many antics could easily overshadow the romantic main plot, but fortunately this production fills these roles with performers who have very distinct comedic styles. As the tightly wound efficiency expert Hines, Michael McKean cannot get past his jealousy to trust his on-again/off-again girlfriend, the boss’s secretary Gladys. McKean, best known from mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap and Best in Show, here has been given some of the weakest musical numbers in the show and a character who—as written—could come off as creepy and dangerous. But the same bottomless sincerity that McKean brings to his film roles serves him well here and makes this character endearing as a harmless eccentric.

Megan Lawrence, as Gladys, calls to mind a young Lucille Ball. She is also given a chance to shine in her drunken, lusty advances towards Connick’s superintendent. As the nerds who were born for each other, Peter Benson and Joyce Chittick are clowns who are also amongst the most talented dancers in the show, allowing them to create very large and precise bits of physical comedy. Commenting on all this from the sidelines is Roz Ryan as Mabel, the other secretary who has seen it all before. Mining big laughs out of a small part, Ryan’s expert comic timing lands every aside with deadly accuracy.

Director-choreographer Marshall ties all of this romance and comedy together with a consistent storytelling voice, showing the value of having such a multitalented auteur at the helm. The rest of the behind-the-scenes team keeps things light and bright, with the exception of a too oppressive set by Derek McLane. His smaller moving pieces are in keeping with the technicolor tone of the story, but they are overshadowed by a gray steel monster that looks more like a prison camp than a pajama factory. This set frames the whole stage picture from beginning to end and looks very out of place in the picnic number “Once-a-Year-Day.”

My companion at the performance says that Harry Connick Jr. with his shirt off would have been worth the price of admission for her, but fortunately there is more going for this production than its beefcake ending. It is a revival that aims to please and does so with energy and style to spare.

Jon Robin Baitz's new play, The Paris Letter, is about a man named Sandy (short for Sanford) Sonnenberg, the last in the line of a family of Jewish financiers whose refusal to confront his own sexuality in an honest way results in tragedy for himself and everybody around him. Sandy is aware of his proclivity (he would hardly call it an orientation or even a preference) at a fairly tender age; in his final year of college he takes to frequenting a Bohemian/artsy (read "homosexual") restaurant owned by the effete artist-turned-entrepreneur Anton Kilgallen, and after only a few visits he winds up in Anton's bed, and then Anton's lover for three months in the winter of 1962-63.

But Sandy is deeply ashamed of what he sees as behavior that's both immoral and enormously inconvenient. So he seeks the help of notorious/renowned psychiatrist Dr. Moritz Schiffman, who specializes in reassigning gay men to a "normal" heterosexual lifestyle. Schiffman counsels Sandy to end his affair with Anton immediately, which he does.

Nearly 40 years later, Sandy—now married, for two decades, to Katie Arlen, the wildly successful owner/chef of a trendy NYC bistro and a dear friend and former employee of Anton's—becomes involved with a young gay Wall Street wizard named Burt Sarris. The nature of this involvement is not disclosed all at once, and should not be presumed to be sexual; its initial and most important aspect is rooted in business, for Sandy has decided to retire and has chosen Burt to be his successor, transferring his clients over to the younger man. But Burt gets in over his head and loses all of the clients' money—to the tune of 100 million dollars. Sandy tells Burt (in the very first of the play; the bulk of The Paris Letter is told in flashbacks) that the only honorable thing for him to do is to commit suicide, which Burt promptly does. Sandy then heads off to Europe, presumably to make good on Burt's debts (the precise legal nature of that obligation is very fuzzy). From Paris, he sends a letter home to his wife, but the play's title notwithstanding, the main point that Baitz seems to want to make is that Sandy has screwed up royally, although what Sandy's repressed homosexuality has to do with Burt's irresponsibility eluded me completely. Sandy's repression and the bad acts resulting from it are not linked convincingly to Sandy's downfall. If the tragic flaw doesn't cause the tragedy, then what's the play about?

The details of the thing—script and production—only make comprehensibility more allusive. We're supposed to believe that Anton has stood by as Sandy's faithful friend for some 40 years; that Sandy is comfortable with but never tempted by the omnipresence of the onetime lover who led him "astray"; that self-loathing homophobe Sandy has a great relationship with Katie's grown and openly gay son Sam; that Sam, a teacher who works in Brooklyn at a public school, spends his Monday evenings chatting amiably with his mother, step-father, godfather (Anton, of course), and Burt Sarris; that the remnants of the great Sonnenberg fortune—five diamonds worth half a million dollars—are stowed in a safe deposit box in a city in Europe (I guess) that I've never heard of and can be readily converted to cash (half a million dollars!) in post-9/11 New York.

Even vaunted director Doug Hughes pulls boners here, notably in staging the Obligatory Gratuitous Frontal Male Nudity Scene, in which young Sandy—about to break up with Anton—stalks naked from Anton's (offstage) bedroom into the living room, where all of his clothes (but none of Anton's) are strewn about, followed by young Anton, carrying a bathrobe that he will put on after he's flashed the audience for a few seconds.

Where Baitz finally and irredeemably loses his way in the play, however, is in his mangling of the (presumed) moral of the story. Sandy's a nasty piece of work, no doubt about it—selfish and craven—but he's presented as being genuinely loved and respected by everyone in the play. (Okay, Anton chides him for not being "true" to his nature, but not in a meaningful way.)  Anton, meanwhile—the openly gay guy—is a character out of late Tennessee Williams: a vitriolic, unhappy queen who lives alone and unloved, finding only occasional relief in the company of strangers (or something). Hardly a potent voice for gay pride, this; neither is Sandy's ingenuous declaration that if he were a young gay man today he wouldn't have denied his sexuality—"Everyone's gay today," he proclaims, apparently unaware of the current administration's attitudes toward same-sex coupling. I suspect that a great many scared, repressed young people living in America in 2005—in red states, sure; and blue ones too—would take issue with that statement.

A cast of five talented actors can't make sense of the morass that Baitz has handed them. John Glover scores laughs doing an arch-but-vigorous Quentin Crisp thing as Anton, narrating the tale and occasionally interacting with the other characters. Ron Rifkin gets the mean self-centeredness of Sandy, but we can't see the younger man (who is embodied charmingly in the flashbacks by Daniel Eric Gold) in him; Rifkin is terrific, however, as Dr. Schiffman. Jason Butler Harner is convincing as Burt Sarris but not as the younger Anton. Michele Pawk has fun playing Sandy's mom in one of the flashback scenes, and is fine otherwise in the entirely thankless role of Katie.

If you could go back in time and change a decision you made, would things actually change? The fact is, even if you went back and changed your decision, you can’t change who you were at that time. Change can only happen with time. The same goes for forgiveness. Craig Wright’s 2000 play The Pavilion is a beautiful reflection on forgiveness, change, and the nature of destiny. This play is highly deserving of its Pulitzer nomination and many regional productions. This raises the question, why has it taken five years for its New York premiere?

“This is a play about time,” the narrator tells us at the top of the show after a poetic musing of the creation of the universe; a universe that swirls around each of us individually at any given moment. The universe of this play is a small town called Pine City, Minnesota. The pavilion of the title is a 100-year-old lakeside dance hall that holds countless memories for the locals and is the venue for the 20-year reunion of the class of 1985.

At the center of this universe are “the senior class’s cutest couple” Kari and Peter. There are dozens of other classmates in attendance, all played by the narrator, but their stories are merely supplemental. The issue at the densely packed center of this story is an unchangeable and almost unforgivable event that distorted Kari and Peter’s lives. 20 years ago, Kari became pregnant with Peter’s child and Peter made the cowardly and tragic mistake of running away. Naturally she has never forgiven him, and so when she sees him at this reunion she is understandably cold toward him. As the story unfolds we see how unhappy they are with their lives and we begin to root for reconciliation between the two.

The question is, is that even possible? Are we given only one chance in life to do things right? Are we given only one person or one true love with whom to make things right? I’m not sure, and neither is Wright, but he makes a good point when he contends that the universe is constantly beginning again. So even if we mess things up the first time we may still have a chance to start over.

Craig Wright is an absolutely brilliant playwright. I was enthralled by every word. The Pavilion is funny, moving, poetic, and poignant. Wright is following the trend that marks a return to Theatricalism, led by playwrights such as Tony Kushner and initiated by greats such as Thornton Wilder. His structuring of this play sucks you into his world while at the same time never letting you forget that you’re in the theatre. Wright’s two main characters are as real as your neighbors, while the narrator character walks the line between reality and make-believe.

The narrator, played with multifaceted subtlety by Stephen Bogardus, is in and out of the action at any given moment. He takes on multiple characters, speaks to the audience, or asks the light board operator for mood lights. Bogardus’s stage presence here is relentless. He is the universe that spins around Kari and Peter. Brian D’Arcy James plays Peter with the honesty and tragedy of a man seeking absolution but somewhere deep inside expects none. Jennifer Mudge as Kari is sly and exceedingly sincere. It is easy to believe that Peter fell in love with her the moment he saw her. Her monologue in the second act brought audible sniffles from the house (including her own). All the acting is truly second to none.

Director Lucie Tiberghien does a fabulous job guiding the flow of this play. In some moments she creates spaces between lines, allowing us to see the actors drifting off in thought, while at other times the pace is like a championship game of ping-pong. I particularly liked the way she had the narrator slide props into the actors’ hands. Christophe Tiberghien provides the show with some live and very enchanting original piano music that sounds like a tinkling always somewhere in the background. Matt Richards’s lighting design is quite nice-looking and versatile enough to provide the narrator anything he asks for.

The Pavilion is a well-rounded and balanced theatrical experience. It’s funny, it’s touching, it’s real and not real, and it’s smart. It should not be missed.

Kevin Doyle's play The Position—second entry in this summer's Ice Factory festival at Soho Think Tank—is an absurdist tragicomedy about the alienation and despair of the modern urban worker. Or maybe it's an allegorical farce about how silly the rituals of corporate employment—in this case, the cattle call/job interview—are nowadays. Either way, it's kind of a Modern Times for our time: it's very funny, very pointed, and provides still more evidence (after last year's excellent Styrofoam) of Doyle's promise as one of the smart new playwrights on the New York theatre scene.

It takes place in a big anonymous corporate office where six anonymous men have shown up, at 9:00 a.m. sharp, for a job interview. Five of the men are dressed identically in regulation blue wool suits, light blue oxford cotton shirts, black shoes, and red power ties; each carries a leather portfolio. Inside each portfolio is a time-waster to get through the minutes while they wait to be called in by the secretary: a notebook and pencil, a PDA, an iPod, a magazine, a copy of today's Times. These accoutrements peg the men simultaneously as individuals and part of the crowd; and when we find out that though all seem to have the same name (Woppinger) they each insist their names are different, we understand that they're crying out for some kind of rescue from the anonymity that their very presence here, in this place, at this moment, doing this thing, more or less guarantees.

The Sixth Man does not look like the other five. His suit is rumpled; his shoes are sneakers; his socks are bright yellow; his striped orange tie looks appropriate for, as one of the others points out, the circus. His beat-up briefcase contains—nothing. He has forgotten his watch and his cell phone because he was in such a hurry to get here on time.

As the Fifth Man discovers, during what starts out as small talk while waiting to be called in, this Sixth Man is not here for quite the same reason as the others either. Yes, he needs a job; but he didn't search out this position in the usual way. Instead, he says, he gets phone calls—has gotten them for months now—in which a woman tells him to locate a particular classified ad in a particular newspaper and report for the interview. He's done this many many times now; he just hasn't actually made it in to the actual interview. And one more thing: he's working on a gigantic conspiracy theory involving geologic terms—words that the woman who calls him tells him to write down.

Is this guy nuts? Well, yes, at least a little. But maybe the other guys are, too: though they're not afraid to venture beyond the outer office and face the interviewer(s)—and some are even cocky about their chances—they are performing bizarre and meaningless rituals of their own. Doyle turns some of the rituals of waiting—checking that the cell phone is off, smoothing out the suit, finding that "just right" professional pose—into a fugue-like ballet that occupies five minutes or so of the first section of the play. It's hilarious because it's so foolishly recognizable. Maybe it's also a little bit scary.

Speaking of scary: what's up with the secretary? She seems to know our Sixth Man, and every time she comes out of her office she looks a little bit different. (Sometimes a lot different: she turns up in a gorilla suit at one point.) Is she crazy? Is the Sixth Man hallucinating?

In the end, Doyle provides us with no simple, compact answers. The Position captures the palpable angst of men vainly fighting the tide of events before they get washed away into corporate conformity. There appears to be little hope for them, ultimately; and when the Sixth Man finally gets his turn to walk into the office he's so frightened of, there's a genuine sense of something tragic having occurred.

Doyle has directed the play himself and, aided by choreographer Nicole Colbert, he has devised lots of interesting movement and business to illustrate the absurdity of the situation being dramatized. The cast is headed by Paul Newport, who is enormously affecting as the Sixth Man; Newport delivers a long monologue in the final section of the play that qualifies as tour de force, as our hero/anti-hero considers his options and his fate while he waits, alone, to be called in. The other five men are portrayed by Peter Moses, Jonny Cigar, Sean O'Hagan, Chris Gentile, and Scott Miller; they're all fine, especially working in tandem doing their little waiting room "dance." Calder Corey plays the secretary.

A suitably spare design for the piece is provided by Sarah Martin (set consultant) and Peter Hoerburger (lighting).

The Position strikes a blow for non-conformity and for independent thinking, two concepts that need boosters in 21st century America, I think. For all our multitude of choices, individuality seems sometimes to be in danger of disappearing. Smart, quirky, provocative work like this helps to ensure that that doesn't happen.

Whose idea was it to dress Adrienne Barbeau like one of the Pink Ladies? Before The Property Known as Garland even begins, Barbeau has a tough challenge in creating a real, well-rounded character against larger-than-life images of Judy Garland codified by decades of drag performances (not to mention Judy Davis’s inimitable television portrayal). But 30 years after her last appearance on a New York stage (a Tony-nominated turn in Grease), Barbeau has to stand up to another (considerably less) legendary persona: herself. Clad in a hot pink button down shirt and black pedal pushers, she spends the first half of the show looking (thanks to the costume) and sounding (thanks to Billy Van Zandt’s clunker of a script) unsettlingly like a middle-aged Betty Rizzo, the-tough-gal-with-a-heart-of-gold who made Barbeau—for a brief time, anyway—a Broadway star.

The good news, though, is that she somehow manages to overcome these challenges, giving a compelling enough performance that’s tough to look away from. Of course, that’s not necessarily a compliment, but while Garland isn’t quite the wreck that it could have been, it veers into camp (and poorly-written camp, at that) enough times that it’s hardly an unmitigated success, either.

Set backstage in a Copenhagen dressing room on the evening of Judy Garland’s final concert, The Property Known as Garland begins as a dialogue between the legendary actress and Ed (Kerby Joe Grubb), a theatre employee charged with getting the notoriously unreliable Garland to actually make it on to the stage. (It’s a fairly thankless role, especially when Ed is repeatedly reduced to bickering with Garland over mashed potatoes, but he milks it for laughs and makes the most of it.) His exit leaves the self-proclaimed “living legend” alone in her dressing room—except, of course, for the audience, whom she regales with 47 years’ worth of showbiz gossip while she decides whether or not to go on stage. That’s pretty much it in terms of plot; the rest of this 80-minute performance is about character—oh, yes, and that gossip.

Some of the gossip is fun (tales of Marlene Dietrich’s lack of talent manage to delight the audience), some of it is familiar (yes, we know, Judy married gay guys, and so did her mother and her daughter), and some of it is utter crap (whenever President Kennedy had a bad day at the White House, he called Judy to sing “Over the Rainbow” to him?). And here lies one of the critical problems with The Property Known as Garland: in some sections, Van Zandt’s script sounds like a parlor game wherein players must recite as many facts as possible about a celebrity—in this case, Ms. Garland. Other sections evoke encyclopedia entries or biography chapters hastily changed from third person to first person, resulting in inauthentic-sounding language. Would anyone—never mind Judy Garland—really say some of this? And although Judy’s haze of pills and booze makes for an easy excuse, the script is rife with continuity problems; why does she ask Ed directly if he’s gay in one scene, only to profess mild ignorance of a particular type of man who seems to follow her and other legendary ladies around, only moments later?

Director Glenn Casale uses every corner of the stage, and manages to keep things moving. This is no small feat, given the script’s awkwardness—but it’s a whole other story when Garland engages in bizarre, reflective conversations with disembodied voices. (My companion noted that her plaintive cries of “Mama!” sound eerily like an old Saturday Night Live sketch parodying Liza Minnelli.) Here, both Casale and Van Zandt get into trouble, but somehow, Barbeau manages to hold the audience at least somewhat rapt. Charlie Smith’s sharp set and Richard Winkler’s clean lighting help—though Cynthia Nordstrom’s familiar-looking costumes deserve at least as much credit for setting the tone and mood, both on Barbeau and hanging around as set decoration.

Still, by the end of The Property Known as Garland, it’s clear that any success that the show musters is due almost entirely to Barbeau’s intense spirit, effort, and skill, rather than the particular quality of the piece. It’s unfortunate that the evening’s greatest excitement results from strains of the actual Ms. Garland’s concert overture, which end the show—a harsh reminder that competing with an icon is a dangerous business, even for a hard-working, tough-talking, almost-legend with a heart of gold.

I can’t say honestly that I enjoyed, or even entirely understood, Normand Chaurette’s The Queens. At the same time, I’m not sure if comprehensibility was one of the playwright’s priorities in creating this lyrical exercise in the avant-garde. There were aspects of Juxtaposed Theatre Company’s production, now at the Gene Frankel Theatre, that I found interesting and frustrating in equal measure, but, undoubtedly, director Gretchen M. Michelfeld’s courage to mount such an unusual play is to be commended. And it’s a very nice show to look at.

Chaurette is French Canadian, and the The Queens was initially written in French, later translated into English by Linda Gaboriau. The English version feels overwrought, but what I took away from Juxtaposed’s production was a wild blend of Shakespeare-style verse and Steel Magnolias, James Joyce stream-of-consciousness, a la Finnegan's Wake, and some good, old-fashioned trashy Dynasty. More than a few times during the course of the evening, I was reminded of Krystle and Alexis about to slug it out—which would have (had that actually happened on stage) been a nice change from all that bloody talking and posing going on. But I was sufficiently able to keep focus as long as I stopped trying to think or interpret and just watched, detached and sponge-like, as one would in a dream.

The speculative story revolves around Richard III’s legendary blood-stained accession to the throne during a heavy snowfall under which the London of 1483 virtually disappears. Meanwhile, back at the castle, another deadly power struggle is going on among six women—“Queens” of the royal families of York, Lancaster, and Plantagenet who are under one roof. I dare not try to get more specific about who’s done what to whom—or when—since I would only get more confused than I already am. (By the way, a time line and family tree are provided in the program.) If I understood correctly, the play is supposed to entirely take place on “Elevation Day,” yet the various actions the Queens refer to as if they have just occurred have taken place across decades. I finally concluded that maybe the play was supposed to be the ancient, dying Duchess of York’s final stream-of-consciousness, although that did not always seem to jibe with Michelfeld’s direction.

The six women who make up the cast are all quite beautiful, feminine, and interesting to watch. Anna Fitzwater as Cecily, the Duchess of York (Richard’s mother), however, is jarringly thin and, with the ultra-pale makeup, appears ghostly and macabre. The lovely costumes were designed by Nicole Provoncil; all Queens are barefoot and dressed in long, corseted, nearly diaphanous gowns of white and off-white. The small sparse set is made up of three white backdrops, a couple of stage blocks, and an altar far upstage center.

This is a good cast with good voices and intelligent acting, especially given the genre. One of my favorite performances comes from Katelyn Clark as Anne Warwick, the doomed but not so sweetly innocent bride-to-be of the monstrous Richard. This Lady Anne gleefully aids and abets him in whatever dastardly deed necessary, including murders within her own family, to get herself to the throne faster. All the while she tries to absolve herself by insisting she was/is only a child of twelve. I also very much liked Sarah Lemp as haughty, petulant, fish-out-of-water Margaret of Anjou who loathes her fellow Queens (it’s mutual), and who tries to escape Richard’s tyranny by trying in vain to run off to, of all places, China. Fitzwater’s grande dame turn as the 99-year-old Duchess of York is sometimes a little over-the-top but also appropriate to her pathetic character.

If you are an audience member who likes straightforward theatre with all loose ends neatly tied up at the end, this play will drive you up the wall. If, however, you are an audience member who is willing to embrace 80 minutes without intermission of the truly unusual, The Queens is well worth checking out. You will definitely have something to discuss later.

There is not much I can say about The Race, at least not much that will give you a feeling of what you are actually in for. That is because there is not much to compare this kind of work to. It could be said that it is a kind of modern dance piece, which is problematic because it feels particularly un-dancey. It is tempting to compare it to non-linear physical theatre, not unlike De La Guarda, but this too is unsatisfying as a definition, mainly because there is a fairly clear narrative arc in the piece. What I can say safely and unequivocally about this production, directed by Amit Lahav and Al Nedjari, is that it is great deal of fun, and that if it is not perfection, then its nearness to it is too small to quibble over.

The Race deals with a first-time father dealing with the range of emotions that he is faced with awaiting the birth of his child. That is the cut-and-dried storyline, but what really distinguishes this play is the tactics it uses to illustrate the father's true life experiences and the corresponding emotional landscape. Words are scarce, but not non-existent. They are used, to great effect, sputtered and sparingly, but are not the most essential means of expression here. The life and essence of the story are mainly conveyed through the performers' extremely engaged physicality, which borders on the acrobatic, and a highly useful (and ever-evolving) set.

The strength of this work is based around a wildly creative and yet emotionally relatable stage reality. The play is littered with moments of recognizable realism, as when the protagonist's father congratulates his son effusively, only to stop dead and ask pointedly, "How are you gonna cope?!" Other sequences are highly dreamlike; like the moment the man reaches into a phone booth only to find his hands not a phone, but on the mother-to-be's abdomen.

The play owes a great debt to talent and enthusiasm of its cast, and an equally adept design team. The set is often as interesting as the performances, and as it shifts, proves incredibly useful in orienting the audience's eye while propelling the story along. The lights are impressive in the surprising amount of aid they give to the emotional landscape of the play. The costumes are highly believable as somewhat corporate wear, yet seamlessly manage being moved in like leotards. To describe the action of the play in detail only would serve to spoil some of the surprises that would await the prospective audience member; suffice to say, the father confronts fears regarding his inadequacy, an onslaught of overly interested (but ultimately unhelpful) family and friends, and the wide assortment of anxieties one has when standing at the precipice to the absolutely unknown.

As a work which was devised by the directors and the actors of the group Gecko, The Race has the feeling of an improvisation gone very, very right. The only issue that might be taken with it is the improvised feel does occasionally interfere with the storyline, and overall meaning, which could be made tighter and clearer. For instance, it is difficult to be sure when the hero's child is actually being born, since there are many "false ends," i.e., hallucinations of the event preceding the actual birth. However, this seems a moot point when compared to unusual amount of fun possible for an audience attending this hour-long show. As part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, it is only in the country for a limited time, and it should not be put off by any audiences looking for an extremely enjoyable night out.

The Real Inspector Hound can be a tricky thing to review—since one of its main subjects is the faddishness, clichés, infighting, and petty jealousies of theatre reviewing. Nominally a spoof of the British country-house murder mystery, the play’s real action takes place in the “audience,” where critics Moon and Birdboot critique the onstage play, snipe at each other, and philosophize about the place of critics in the universe. Birdboot’s critiques of the women in the play are thoroughly colored by his habit of pursuing affairs with young actresses; Moon, the second-string critic, is consumed by his envy of the first-string critic, Higgs. Both spout reams of critical jargon, drafting their reviews on the fly from their box seats—and so the reviewer trying to review them necessarily becomes a little self-conscious about neither mimicking their clichés nor replicating their insights, such as they are.

The doubling of realities gets even more complex toward the end of the play, as the critics get drawn into the onstage action, and the onstage characters begin to stand in for the critics—with widely diverging opinions from the professionals.

The mission of the producing company adds another level of doubled reality. Performers Access Studio was established to address the needs of actors with disabilities, and to give disabled performers the chance to portray roles not “written as disabled.” The Real Inspector Hound is an interesting choice for them, as one of the characters is in fact written as disabled—he’s in a wheelchair. However, like everyone else in the play, he may not be what he seems. So the production encompasses the paradox of a character written with a visible disability, who may or may not be played by an actor with that disability—or with a different, less visible one. Then, other roles, not written with visible disabilities, are played by actors whose disabilities may or may not be visible. It’s a level of interplay between the theatrical and the real that I imagine Stoppard himself would relish.

Director Ron Jones lets his actors ham it up, clearly encouraging them to relish the language, the hokiness of the play-within-the-play, and the parody of melodramatic conventions—the madman on the loose in the deserted moors, the love triangle, the glamorous widow. Jones also stages sight gags and physical comedy well, adding to the giggles.

The cast is solid throughout, all showing excellent comic timing. There are a few standouts. Laurel Sanborn as Mrs. Drudge, the housekeeper and often the voice of exposition, does a terrific, morosely funny deadpan. Erin Clancy as Cynthia Muldoon, the widowed lady of the country house in question, is a charming physical comedian, with probably the evening’s best sight gag to her credit. Frank Senger as Birdboot combines wounded dignity with lechery, while still remaining likeable.

I’m a big Tom Stoppard fan, and I welcomed the chance to see this rarely revived early play of his (first produced in New York in 1972). This production is thoroughly enjoyable, showing off both the script’s essential silliness, and its thought-provoking questions about the nature of theatre, criticism, and reality.

There’s an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold, but director Jesse Berger and the cast of Red Bull Theater’s production of The Revenger’s Tragedy never heard it. This staging of the Jacobean revenge play, the authorship of which was originally credited to Cyril Tourneur but is now in some question, is a heated, passionate, red-blooded (in just about all the ways you can think of) satire of the darkest realms of human experience: the ways in which revenge, lust, and ambition can drive individuals and entire societies mad. The irony, for us as well as for the original audiences for the play in the early 17th century, is that they’re just so damn fun.

Vindice, a gentleman of Venice, seeks revenge against a debauched Duke for the death of his betrothed several years in the past, and with the help of his brother Hippolito manages to insinuate himself into the good graces of Lussurioso, the Duke’s heir, a shameless libertine who himself has designs on Vindice’s seemingly virtuous mother and sister. The Duke, who’s being cuckolded by his wife with his own bastard son, hires Vindice as a pimp, which gives Vindice and Hippolito the chance to kill the Duke in a Venetian back alley. Maybe “kill” is too soft a word. More accurately, this gives Vindice and Hippolito the chance to serve the Duke a poison which burns his lips off, to stab him through the tongue and impale it in the street, and to tear his eyes from his head with their bare hands.

And that’s just the act one curtain.

Red Bull’s production is a fast-paced, frenetic farce which all but winks at an audience invited to be complicit in the on-stage scheming and bloodlust: a directorial decision that serves the play, the plot and machinations of which are beyond believability, quite well. Berger, who has been developing this text and production in various workshop incarnations for the past several years, infuses the play with a timeless quality, ably abetted by the anachronistic collection of costumes designed by Clint Ramos and a deep, bare, but seemingly timeworn stage design (it’s that stage floor, painted and aged like the stones of a Venetian street) by Evan O’Brient, cut across with a variety of curtains and lit by Peter West, who finds opportunities to evoke the painters of the Renaissance (and occasionally offers an appropriate nod to Vermeer).

The 19-member cast is packed into the small 45 Below space at the Culture Project, and an excellent cast it is; their long familiarity with the rich language of the 17th-century stage and their close work together over a long period of time have knit the performers into a tight, efficient ensemble. To single out any two or three performances would do a disservice to the rest of the company, but Matthew Rauch as the gleeful, increasingly insane Vindice and Marc Vietor as the dissipated libertine Lussurioso set the tone and lead the rest of the cast with an energetic, first-among-equals authority (especially Rauch, who is onstage with an unflagging energy and imagination for 90 percent of the play’s two-hour running time).

This production is only the second from Red Bull Theater, named after one of the leading London theaters of the Jacobean stage and, says a program note, “dedicated to the presentation of vital and imaginative productions of heightened language plays and to the development of new plays written in a similar vein, with a special focus on the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.” The time is right to revive these plays, which, staged by sensitive and imaginative directors like Jesse Berger, may provide the inspiration for contemporary playwrights to rediscover the sensual qualities of the spoken word on the stage.

So far as contemporary relevance goes, this production opened almost simultaneously with the 1,000th execution of a death row inmate since the resumption of the death penalty in 1977—a form of society’s revenge against one of its criminals. As The Revenger’s Tragedy demonstrates, once bloodthirsty revenge sets human actors into motion, we are all driven mad, enthralled by its attraction and destroyed by its violence.

The most arresting thing about The Ride is where it's being staged: in a hallway (honest!) connecting an outside door with some kind of storage area in the backroom behind Jimmy's No. 43. Ten comfortable chairs are arrayed along one wall, where audience members quite literally eavedsrop on a conversation between Will (Denis Butkus), an electrician who has arrived here to restore the power following a vicious thunderstorm the night before, and Linn (Julie Kline), a woman who shouldn't be here but, inexplicably, is.

Daniel Talbott's staging of this site-specific show puts the two characters at opposite ends of the hall, which means that even though the space is shockingly intimate we usually can't get both characters in our line of vision at the same time. This makes Crystal Skillman's spare and enigmatic play as much about perspective as anything else. Linn, as we'll discover soon enough, could well be a ghost, or an apparition. How it is that Will can see and hear her is just one of the little mysteries that audience members are left to ponder when this miniature drama is concluded.

At just 20 minutes long, The Ride hardly constitutes an "evening of theatre" as we've come to understand it; it's part of an emerging aesthetic that wants to place a live play in the middle of a fuller evening of drinks, dinner, and socializing. Stop into Jimmy's or another East Village hangout for a drink, see The Ride (or the next Rising Phoenix show that comes along), then head out for dinner or to meet friends somewhere. The play will give you plenty of conversation for whatever the next stop turns out to be.

The Ride is also the second part of a proposed trilogy of ghost stories that Skillman is working on. I missed its predecessor, The Telling, but I have just read it; the two pieces in tandem are a grand, unsettling pair, and I can't wait to see how Skillman wraps the thing up with play #3. Together they should make for an intriguing and tantalizing evening of more traditional length.