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Review: A MODEST SUGGESTION by Martin Denton

Apple Core Theatre Company makes a significant contribution to the current season with their presentation of Ken Kaissar's absurdist satire A Modest Suggestion. Kaissar, born in Israel, educated at Carnegie-Mellon and Columbia and currently making his home here in New York, has written a play that is both clever and smart: it's sharp, witty, and enormously provocative, in the tradition of Ionesco and (early) Woody Allen.

Review: SOUTHERN BAPTIST SISSIES by Ed Malin

Self-hatred has greatly influenced the four male lead characters in Del Shores' play Southern Baptists Sissies. They may very well have remained where they grew up, in Dallas ("the buckle of the Bible belt"), were it not for their sexuality. In later life, they sometimes miss the church that offered them so much hope when they were young.

Review: THE PERIPHERALS by Martin Denton

The Peripherals, The Talking Band's new musical/rock concert/performance art work, written and composed by company co-founder Ellen Maddow, is a celebration of the impulse to make art on your own terms, an exploration of an eclectic mix of forms and ideas, and a dizzyingly satisfying showcase of the astoundingly varied talents of its seven onstage performers. It is a delightful good time, more rewarding and nourishing than pretty much any mainstream music theatre event I've seen in quite some time--proof, if it's needed, that the work being done on the periphery of NYC's theatre world is almost always the most interesting and stimulating.

Review: TAKE WHAT IS YOURS by Ed Malin

It is 1917. Alice Paul has been arrested for leading her group of women in picketing the White House. Two generations after Susan B. Anthony's efforts, they still want the vote. They carry signs with quotes from President Woodrow Wilson about the need to spread democracy around the world. They question why he does not spread democracy at home. Meanwhile, Alice is on a hunger strike and is politely harassed by a psychiatrist ("The Man") for making such demands on the government during wartime. After all, if the suffragettes are given special status as political prisoners, it would create a precedent that pacifists and other objectors could use.

Review: THE RUNNER STUMBLES by Paul Hufker

The Runner Stumbles is at its essence a story of forbidden love encased in a murder mystery. Loosely based on real events (the details of which sound fascinating), a priest is accused of killing a nun in his parish and we follow him through a sequence of trial scenes, present-day jailhouse visits, and flashbacks. The idea is of course to piece the story together for us, bit-by-bit. And while I've been informed that Milan Stitt's drama appeared successfully on Broadway in 1976 (running for about six months), I'm not certain the play has aged very well.

Review: NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT by Avi Glickstein

Early in the first act of Nice Work If You Can Get It, a new Broadway musical written around the songs of George and Ira Gershwin currently playing at the Imperial Theater, there's a number hinging on a woman's elaborate self-pampering ritual. We find her chest-deep in a bath surrounded by bubbles (they even cover the wall behind her), and, as the number progresses, dancers emerge from the bathtub and fill the room with a sort of airy, bubbly glee before promptly disappearing. For the most part, this is what you can expect from Nice Work as a whole--an evening spent indulging in mindless, gleeful, bubbly fun.

Review: THE SECRET GARDEN by Matt Roberson

Perhaps the only event more devastating than one person losing his or her soulmate is that of a child losing their parents. In The Secret Garden, both tragedies occur, resulting in the play's two main characters finding one another beneath the roof of a sad English mansion.

Review: LEAP OF FAITH by Julie Congress

Leap of Faith, based on a 1992 "dramedy" film with Steve Martin, is a feel-good musical highly reminiscent of The Music Man (with a splash of Sister Act and The Rainmaker). Energetic and with a good heart, it features a charming performance by Raúl Esparza and some terrific dancing, making for a formulaic but enjoyable evening of theatre.

Review: EVOLUTION by Loren Noveck

Patricia Buckley's Evolution is a pleasure to watch: a well-executed, elegant piece of theatrical craft in all its production elements, from Buckley's performance to director Michele Chivu's staging, from Jim Findlay's clever set and stunning video projections to composer Marc Mellits's score. Nonetheless, the script doesn’t entirely reach the level of the production. There's something undeniably evocative, even haunting, in the themes and ideas at the core of the piece--it's about transformation and loss, about evolution as both science and metaphor--but I didn't feel like the ideas were fully expressed in character and story. All the piece's performance and design elements are lovely, but the writing didn't entirely come together for me.

Review: THE PRESIDENT by Martin Denton

Where has The President been all my life? Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar wrote Egy, kettö, három in the late 1920s; Sidney Howard's translation One, Two, Three was presented on Broadway in 1930, and Billy Wilder's 1961 film of that title is in part inspired by it. But otherwise, as far as I know, this glittering diamond of a play has been buried, forgotten treasure for all these many decades. So thank goodness for alert artistic director Peter Dobbins of The Storm Theatre Company, who has brought us Molnar's brilliant work--in a new adaptation with a new title by Morwyn Brebner, which premiered at the Shaw Festival in 2008--in a splendid production that may be the finest one ever mounted by this exemplary troupe. Indeed, The President feels like a pinnacle of this current season, representing indie theater at its absolute finest.

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