The Starry Messenger

GRADE: C+

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan. At Theater Row. (CLOSED)

Whenever the Times gives a show a bad review but everyone else likes it, we here at Critic-O-Meter tend to get an appreciative e-mail. This will not be one of those days. Despite numerous highly-positive-to-ecstatic reviews of Kenneth Lonergan's new, rumor-of-disaster-besotted play about a nebbishy academic beginning a half-hearted affair during a midlife crisis, naysayers bring the score down considerably. This is one of those crop of reviews where you begin to wonder if everyone saw the same play. Elegantly staged on Derek Lane's beautiful set or flatly staged on Derek Lane's overly-cluttered and awkward set? Matthew Broderick redeems himself with a nuanced, graceful performance or shows himself to be in a career rut with another identical sad sack? Lonergan as director brings out hidden nuances in his script or is self-indulgent and slows the pace down to a crawl? It depends on which reviewers you trust.

Time Out New York A+
(David Cote) Because The Starry Messenger is a Kenneth Lonergan play (which he also directs with a uniformly excellent cast), his characters don’t follow the typical build-and-release emotional arc, nor does he mechanically twist his plot. Sure, there are moments of crisis and gentle revelation, and a tragic event takes place (offstage), but the genius of Lonergan’s approach is to achieve breathtakingly specific and genuine epiphanies through finely tuned dialogue that flows organically from each situation. He evinces a wry sympathy for his creations, balancing glimmers of kindness against a vaster expanse of gloomy resignation.

New York Times A+
(Ben Brantley) The gentle, compassionate comic drama that opened on Monday night at the Acorn Theater has the sweet taste of redemption. It re-establishes Mr. Lonergan, who hasn’t had a new play on the boards since 2001, as a possessor of all the crucial parts of a good dramatist’s anatomy: a critical mind, an empathetic heart and a musical ear that hears whole lives in sentences. And Mr. Broderick delivers his finest, most affecting performance in years. This kindly reversal of fortune for two beleaguered talents feels of a piece with The Starry Messenger, a work that asks for a little patience in considering fallible, contradictory, lonely souls who can never quite articulate what’s missing in their lives but always feel the void. Placing human desires in the overwhelming and indifferent context of the cosmos, this portrait of a dangerously passive astronomy professor is about — not forgiving, which is too grand a word — but accepting the built-in limitations that come with being mortal.

Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) The Starry Messenger is an engrossing study of the toll that prolonged disappointment exacts on the human spirit, performed with consummate skill by an ensemble cast led by Matthew Broderick and staged with unassuming finesse by Mr. Lonergan himself...It says much about the nature of Mr. Lonergan's gifts that for all the seeming obviousness of the plot of The Starry Messenger, you'll never be able to guess what happens next. He is a theatrical alchemist who transforms the commonplace by portraying it with quiet honesty and charging it with moral complexity.

Newday A+
(Linda Winer) The Starry Messenger is a quietly marvelous play - rambling, perhaps, but engrossing, thoughtful and richly believable. Lonergan...returns to the theater after eight movie years with a sprawling, mature, leisurely profound serious comedy about everyday desperation and cosmic mysteries. Broderick gives an exquisitely detailed portrayal of yet another of his passive characters, a disappointed middle-aged astronomer named Mark who has almost disappeared inside the discomfort in his own skin. Instead of doing "real" astronomy, he teaches the beginning adult-education course at the Hayden Planetarium - the old building, about to be replaced by the modern one in 1995.

TalkinBroadway A-
(Matthew Murray) Is the final product perfect? By no means. Preview articles spun horror stories of Lonergan’s almost constant cutting and rewriting, and his three-hour play still feels unbalanced, with noticeable stretches of dead air. And no honest assessment of Broderick - who’s better here than he’s been in years - is possible without admitting that, likely because of those constant changes, he’s still somewhat shaky on his lines in almost every scene. But to grant undue attention to these problems is to overlook a legitimately lovely piece of writing that entertains, enlightens, and engages throughout. Mark’s saga is a pointed and sobering one that highlights the debilitating malaise that can overcome all of us when we discover that our adulthood is neither what we’ve planned nor what we’ve tried to make it. And as this milquetoast professor tries to balance a career looking at the stars with being too timid to rise to walk among them, Lonergan even points the path to a solution.

NYPost A-
(Frank Scheck) It's sluggishly paced, overflowing with sub plots and nearly three hours long. So why is "The Starry Messenger" so moving? Maybe it's because there's so much empathy for its characters that all of them, even the unseen ones, seem to possess a deep inner life. Kenneth Lonergan's tale of the unlikely affair between a morose, middle-aged astronomy teacher and a vibrant younger woman may be a rambling one, but its messiness is the messiness of life.

Variety B
(David Rooney) "Nobody knows anything," says a character who has spent time staring into the abyss in The Starry Messenger. "We're all just guessing." That may be true, but playwright-director Kenneth Lonergan sure knows how to enrich the process of fumbling reflection, lacing questions large and small, about ourselves and the cosmos, with characteristic sensitivity, compassion and humor. While it's frustrating at times and too unhurried, this melancholy, resolutely non-judgmental mid-life crisis drama creeps up on you. It smartly refuses forced epiphanies in favor of quiet contemplation, with an intimacy that reverberates across the night sky blanketing the walls of Derek McLane's set.

Lighting and Sound America B-
(David Barbour) Even with its lively cast and multitude of amusing lines, there's no getting around the fact that, at three hours, The Starry Messenger is desperately in need of cutting. (It doesn't help that, after all that time, the play ends on an unresolved note.) It plays like an extremely promising first draft. The script, by all accounts, has been around for a long time, and had a difficult time during previews. Is it too late to take a second look, prune away the excess details, and find the touching, melancholy comedy inside?

The Faster Times C-
(Jonathan Mandell) This, I hope, is a fair summary of The Starry Messenger and it probably took you two minutes to read. The play itself, which has opened on Theater Row, runs three hours. If there is much to admire in it, from some fine acting to a number of witty exchanges, “The Starry Messenger” as a whole seemed less than the sum of its parts, promising me a far more rewarding experience than it delivered.

TheaterMania D+
(Dan Balcalzo) There are several poignant and compelling moments scattered throughout Kenneth Lonergan's overstuffed new play, The Starry Messenger, currently being presented by The New Group at Theatre Row. Unfortunately, lackluster lead performances from Matthew Broderick and Catalina Sandino Moreno work against the subtle layering of emotion within the playwright's script. And with a running time of nearly three hours, the production -- directed by Lonergan -- tends to drag.

Associated Press D
(Michael Kuchwara) There's enough material for several plays in The Starry Messenger, Kenneth Lonergan's sluggish, soggy, mid-life-crisis tale starring Matthew Broderick as an ineffectual astronomy instructor, husband, father and lover. The drama, which The New Group opened Monday at off-Broadway's Acorn Theatre, is awash in meandering talk, conversations that push toward the three-hour mark without much resolution — or relief. And Lonergan has directed his own play, set in 1995, at such a dawdling pace that its actors might be accused of loitering.

NY Daily News D-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Matthew Broderick needs to call a moratorium on middle-aged mopes. His doormat du jour, Mark, an astronomy teacher in The Starry Messenger, blurs with the ones he played in The Philanthropist and The Odd Couple. Broderick is a likable actor, but these inert performances are depleting the goodwill he's banked from better stage and film work. Kenneth Lonergan...is the brains behind this three-hour misfire. Lonergan also directs, and the pace is dialed to "snail."

New Jersey Newsroom F+
(Michael Sommers) Boosted to Off Broadway prominence in part by premiering This Is Our Youth back in 1996, The New Group apparently repays the author by permitting Lonergan to produce this show exactly as he pleased. Had Lonergan been convinced to edit down his often repetitive text — by like an hour or so — a better play might emerge from under the excessive weight. Although it's nice in theory to see a theater company give an established artist the room to fail creatively, it's a pity audiences still have to watch the unfortunate results.

New York Magazine F+
(Scott Brown) With no gravitational center, The Starry Messenger drifts, character orbits loosen and unmoor themselves, and the best moments (most of which involve the superb supporting cast, notably J. Smith-Cameron as Mark’s fussy, fixating wife) spiral off into the dark. Large swaths of dialogue become mere talk. I’ve never heard theatrical speech sound so dispiritingly, stupefyingly mimetic of actual human conversation, in all of its droning tedium. It’s too bad Lonergan doesn’t trust his own silences. Instead, he nervously fills the space (bounded by a pitiless black-walled star-chamber set that instantly suffocates what little light and heat the play gives off) with maundering yammer, false starts, and, deep in the second act, a shockingly miscalculated Hail Mary of melodrama. When he gets stuck—and he gets stuck a lot—Lonergan shows us the stars, but what little we can actually see, through all that writerly debris, is nebulous.

Backstage F
(David Sheward) This script meanders, and the crises faced by its characters come across as either mundane or forced. In addition, Lonergan should have turned the staging reins over to another director. The pacing is glacial, and there are several blocking problems on Derek McLane's cluttered set. Broderick repeats his hangdog, lifeless limning from The Philanthropist, only this time his character's subject is astronomy rather than the history of words.

NorthJersey F-
(Robert Feldberg) One-quarter of the scenes could have been eliminated, and the rest severely pruned, and the core story would have remained intact. The play might not have been better, but at least the audience could have gone home earlier...Broderick and Lonergan have been friends since boyhood, and Smith-Cameron is Lonergan's wife, which explains their involvement. Why the respected New Group chose to produce the play is something their subscribers might want to know.

NYT A+ 14; TONY A+ 14; ND A+ 14; WSJ A+ 14; TB A- 12; NYP A- 12; V B 10; LSA B 9; TFT C-6; TM D+ 5; AP D 4; NYDN D- 3; NYM F+ 2; NJNR F+ 2; BS F 1; NJ F- 0; 122 /16 = 7.63(C+)

Read On »

Zero Hour

GRADE: B+


By Jim Brochu. Directed by Piper Laurie. St. Clement's Theatre. Through Jan. 31.

Jim Brochu's spot-on impersonation of Zero Mostel in Zero Hour wins over most critics, but a few say that the writing suffers from cheesy jokes and a weak conceit--an interview with an offstage reporter. Edit: a few more positive reviews have come in, praising Brochu for revealing multiple sides of Mostel.

The New Yorker A
(Unsigned) The artifice of theatre is especially fragile when it comes to one-person shows, but the writer-actor Jim Brochu and the director Piper Laurie have navigated all the potential hazards in this production.

Theatermania A
(David Finkle) In the entertaining Zero Hour, now at St. Clement's Church, writer-performer Jim Brochu impersonates girthful, mirthful actor Zero Mostel so accurately that his performance is tantamount to a reincarnation. From head to toe, he's got it right; he has Mostel's ludicrous yet somehow distinguished pushed-forward hair-do; he moves with Mostel's light-footedness; he has the facial expressions that include eyebrows traveling far up the forehead; and he has those famed busy-busy hands and booming voice.

Time Out New York A
(Adam Feldman) From the moment that Brochu spins around to face the audience, he is a Hirschfeld drawing come to pulsing life: the paradoxical lightness of his bulk, the bulging eyes beneath rolling brows, the garish comb-forward of hair. There is a good deal of aggression built into Mostel’s humor; he rim-shots many of his Borscht Belt one-liners by snapping into a comic mask of mischievous challenge, somewhere between a grin and a snarl. In Brochu’s account, he has many grapes of wrath to stomp, stemming from two traumatic rejections: by his parents, after his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, and by much of the entertainment world when he was blacklisted for his Marxist sympathies. Brochu limns these episodes nimbly in his script, but under Piper Laurie’s sharp directorial eye, his performance never grows maudlin.

New York Post A
(Frank Scheck) By most accounts, the actor was an outrageous and often surly individual, traits Brochu certainly doesn't ignore in his mostly admiring portrait. In fact, "Zero Hour" does an excellent job of resisting caricatures and conveying Mostel's hidden depths. Especially strong are the sections detailing his blacklisting in the '50s and his friendship with actor Philip Loeb (TV's "The Goldbergs"), who committed suicide when his career was destroyed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

CurtainUp A
(Simon Saltzman) It would be easy to forget perhaps that Brochu's play and his perceptive performance owe much to the precisely paced direction of Piper Laurie. Although Laurie is known to many of us of a certain age as a lovely B-films star in the 1950s, it is her subsequent theater and TV career that brought her accolades and a long overdue appreciation of her talent. She has been a guiding force for Zero Hour from its inception in 2005, through its development stage and its initial runs in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. There is no question that the force was with her as it is with Brochu's portrayal.

Backstage A
(Erik Haagensen) The centerpiece of "Zero Hour" is the McCarthy era and the blacklist, of which Mostel was a target and which led a dear friend, actor Phillip Loeb, to suicide. Brochu delivers this part of the evening with caustic wit and striking passion, making us understand in the most visceral way the price Mostel and many others paid for their convictions. It also provides an effective first-act curtain, something generally hard to come by in one-person shows. Brochu's writing is necessarily bold considering his subject, but there's also a welcome subtlety. After Mostel has related the tale of Loeb's suicide, the reporter questions the means of the actor's death, having found differently in his research. Mostel's response: "You're asking an actor for truth?" Later, we see Mostel inventing his legacy when he discusses "Forum" and says that Harold Prince hired authors Larry Gelbart, Burt Shevelove, and Stephen Sondheim only after Mostel deemed the script submitted to him "god-awful." Not true, of course.

Associated Press A
(Jennifer Farrar) Whether sitting at a table or hurling himself around a re-creation of Mostel's beloved watercolor-painting studio, Brochu gives an enthusiastic, unrestrained performance as the outsize, opinionated, triple Tony Award-winning actor. He looks uncannily like Mostel, complete with weirdly forward-combed hair, bulging eyes and a wide range of expressive stares and wild gesticulation. With wonderful comedic timing, Brochu covers highlights of Mostel's life by having his character give an often intense, occasionally true interview to an unseen, unheard newspaper reporter. Brochu repeats the question, then launches into his version of the answer.

NY1 A
(David Cote) What a shame "The Producers" closed back in 2007. I’ve found the perfect actor to play Max Bialystock: Jim Brochu. He’s chubby, funny, and has killer comic timing. Okay, I admit this casting idea is a no-brainer. In "Zero Hour," Brochu does an uncanny impersonation of legendary comedian Zero Mostel, the original Max Bialystock. In this solo bioplay directed by Hollywood veteran Piper Laurie, writer and performer Brochu is freakishly convincing as the blustery, brilliant Mostel.

Variety A-
(Sam Thielman) The screechy, bellowing cadence Brochu uses to blast the audience with this punchline gives us pretty much everything we need to know about the show's version of Mostel in less than a second: willfully obnoxious, obscene whenever it suits him, but oddly anxious to please people even if -- maybe especially if -- it makes him look like a buffoon. Brochu's knack for characterizing Mostel is somewhat more interesting than his avatar's hand-wringing over the blacklist, which comes off as a little sanctimonious, discussing it in the same breath as the Holocaust. Which is not to say that section of the play lacks interesting, eerie moments. When Feds walk into Mostel's apartment and stand there looking around, saying nothing, Brochu evokes the kind of prickle on the back of the neck usually delivered by David Lynch movies.

The New York Times B-
(Jason Zinoman) I don’t know how many hours Mr. Brochu, who also wrote the script, has spent in front of a mirror practicing his eye rolls and bellowing quips, but it has paid off. He’s the spitting image of the bearish Mostel, down to the strands of hair barely covering his head. His wildly expressive gestures are particularly spot on. Of course this is not a performance designed really to get at the private life of the actor so much as it’s a cranky version of the Mostel we know. It brings him back to life, just the way his fans want him.

Talkin' Broadway D
(Matthew Murray) Whether Mostel is sawing through the air with his hands, raging against those who’ve done him wrong or the infelicities of fate, or warmly rhapsodizing about his marriage or painting pursuits, Brochu fully embodies his character’s irrepressible and unpredictable spirit in his portrayal. If only there were some in his writing. Brochu has loaded his play with one-liners that seem intended to identify Mostel as the ultimate always-on comedian, but they hardly portray him as a dynamically original comic genius. Examples include “Close the door behind you, you’re letting the flies out”; referring to London: “God, that’s going to be a beautiful city when it’s finished”; “My life is an open zipper”; and, when answering the phone, “Palestinian Anti-Defamation League, this is Yasser speaking.” And that’s just the first half of the first act! Are you laughing yet? Timing, as they say, is everything, and Zero Hour doesn’t have it.

Lighting & Sound America D-
(David Barbour) First of all, there are the lame jokes -- bushels of them-- that come thick and fast. "My life is an open zipper," he reassures his interrogator. Answering the phone, he coos, "Palestinian Anti-Defamation League....Yasir speaking." Dismissing his first wife, he says, "Clara had the sense of humor of a grapefruit." Comparing her to his second wife, he adds, "Katie had the face of a Rockette. Clara had the face of a rock." Brochu hurls these would-be zingers with remarkable force, a strategy that only further exposes the poverty of the gags. Which brings us to the second problem: Mostel was, by all accounts, a bizarre personality -- bitterly contentious one moment, seductively charming the next. His moods came a mile a minute, which, I suppose, was part of his fascination. But Brochu plays him on a single note of accusatory rage, a strategy that becomes increasingly wearying.

The New Yorker A 13; Theatermania A 13; TONY A 13; New York Post A 13; CurtainUp A 13; Backstage A 13; AP A 13; NY1 A 13; Variety A- 12; The New York Times B- 9; Talkin' Broadway D 4; Lighting & Sound America D- 3; TOTAL: 132/12 = 11 (B+)

Read On »

Fela!

GRADE: A-


Photo by Monique Carboni
Book by Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones. Music and lyrics by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Choreographed and directed by Jones. Eugene O'Neill Theatre.

The wallflowers are few at Bill T. Jones' exuberant Afrobeat dance party, transferred triumpantly from last year's Off-Broadway run at 37 Arts. Critics go wild for the choreography, music, costumes and the charismatic lead performance of Sahr Nguajah (with some props for his alternate, Kevin Mambo), and most don't mind the nonlinear book or the show's political and spiritual digressions. A few naysayers, though, are left cold, and even many cheerleaders voice a big caveat: Will Broadway audiences take this blunt-smoking 1970s African revolutionary to their hearts?

The New York Times A+
(Ben Brantley) The hot (and seriously cool) energy that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of “Fela!”...feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. Anyone who worried that Bill T. Jones’s singular, sensational show might lose its mojo in transferring to Broadway can relax...It has...acquired greater focus, clarity and intensity...There has never been anything on Broadway like this production...Doesn’t so much tell a story as soak an audience to and through the skin with the musical style and sensibility practiced by its leading man...Irresistible music is always more than its individual parts, though. The sum of them here captures the spirit of rebellion — against repression, inhibition and conformity — that dwells within all of us, but which most of us have repressed by early middle age...The astonishment of “Fela!” is that it transmits the force of this musical language in ways that let us feel what it came out of and how it traveled through a population...By the end of this transporting production, you feel you have been dancing with the stars. And I mean astral bodies, not dime-a-dozen celebrities.

Time Out NY A
(David Cote) Although Jones proved in 2006’s Spring Awakening that he could play the Broadway game, adapting his modern-dance aesthetic to musical storytelling (and garnering a Tony), who knew he was this much of a showman? Working with book cowriter Jim Lewis, a fierce dancing corps and the sexy, commanding Ngaujah, Jones has orchestrated a soul-scorching mash-up of pounding African dance, political protest and intoxicating Afrobeat...Fela! is more than a musical; it’s an ecstatic phenomenon. The piece is also more than the sum of its overlapping genres: dance party, musical bioplay, agitprop rally, tribute concert.

The Faster Times A
(Jonathan Mandell) Now Fela! has opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, giving to those who had only heard about Fela a chance to learn as if first-hand the life of this extraordinary man and a chance to see a musical that is unlike any that has been on Broadway.Theater people like to say things like that, and of course some of the best musicals in Broadway history were unlike any that preceded them in some ways. “Fela!” is so awesomely different that even to attempt to describe it in Broadway terms risks being laughed off the Internet –“Lion King” meets “Rent”? That doesn’t contain it.

The Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) As rowdy as it is rousing...Blends irresistibly catchy music, explosive dance and a dramatic personal journey to tell the story of a songwriter and political activist who died at age 58 in 1997. Since its run at 37 Arts, writers Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones, who also directed and choreographed, trimmed about 15 minutes but have kept its ferociously infectious spirit intact. And, wisely, the same dazzling actor Sahr Ngaujah, who makes a big, bold and ridiculously sexy Broadway debut as Fela (as he came to be called)..."Fela!" doesn't unfold in a neat, linear narrative. It's more freeform, like Afrobeat itself..."Fela!" is one of the most original and exciting shows to come around in a long while. It deserves its berth on Broadway — and that exclamation point.

New York Magazine A
(Dan Kois) As an evening’s entertainment, Fela! is without peer: two and a half hours of electrifying music, astonishing dancing, and virtuosic stagecraft, anchored by a star turn as charismatic, and as taxing, as I’ve ever seen on Broadway. How charismatic? Fela’s a ringmaster, a bandleader, and the cult guru of the Shrine. And how taxing? He rarely leaves the stage, singing and dancing and joking like a demon—oh, and visiting his dead mother in the underworld. It’s draining enough that two actors alternate the role.

Bloomberg News A
(John Simon) A great humane and transcendent fable come to life, with everything “fable” implies: mythic, fabulous and a supreme lesson in living, here supplied magisterially by choreographer Bill T. Jones and his star, Sahr Ngaujah...Less structured than your typical Broadway musical but surely more encompassing than most...As perfect a concert as it is a show. Then there is the dance recital. Jones, who also directed, has devised spectacular African-inspired dances that fill every centimeter of the two-tiered set, repeatedly spill into the auditorium and seem barely containable by the theater’s walls. They are performed by 20 dynamic, amazingly athletic dancers, among whom I found Nicole Chantal de Weever outstanding for innate talent, ample ballet training and sheer beauty...But the great overarching and overwhelming performance is that of Ngaujah...He transmutes a 1,200- seat house into an intimate cabaret as he elicits vocal and kinetic involvement from the audience.

Los Angeles Times A
(Charles McNulty) The most exuberant new musical I’ve seen this fall...Teaches the American musical new moves. And I’m not just referring to what happens onstage. Like the current Broadway revival of “Hair,” directed by Diane Paulus and choreographed by the cutting-edge Karole Armitage, “Fela!” doesn’t permit theatergoers to sit by passively...As much a concert and a dance piece as it is a musical, “Fela!” is perhaps best described as a work of total theater. More visually and aurally mesmerizing than dramatically stirring, the work achieves a unique build by focusing on the emotion that galvanized this iconic performer to battle political oppression in his African homeland, no matter the colonial or post-colonial source...Jones’ choreography never lets us lose sight of a fundamental source of our shared humanity, a locus of reliable ecstasy and inevitable suffering: the body.

CurtainUp A-
(Simon Saltzman) It looks sensational...The musical still plays a bit confusingly with time. It remains, however, a testament to the visceral energy of all the performers as they appear to revel in the imaginative Nigerian-based dances created by the Tony award-winning Jones...Although Jones’s gift as a dance modernist is visible, it is his instinctual grasp of Fela’s unique music — a fusion of African rhythms, jazz, and funky harmonies — that makes the dances so exciting. I still find the nightmarish ballet, in which Fela dreams of going to the land of dead spirits to be comforted by his dead mother, a bit too grotesque and pretentious...The earnest passion that drove this show a year ago has been feverishly re-activated.

Theatermania A-
(Dan Balcazo) There's no better dancing on Broadway...The sheer exuberance of the performers makes this bio-musical about Nigerian activist, composer, and performer Fela Anikulapo Kuti an exciting and richly rewarding theatrical experience...The move to Broadway has resulted in a tighter show, with its unwieldy three-hour Off-Broadway running time shortened to a more manageable two and a half hours. However, all the main narrative beats remain intact, and sometimes seem even clearer than before. Portions of Fela's life still come off as overly romanticized (particularly his wedding to multiple women, here played more for comic effect), but overall the character of Fela appears to be more fleshed out. Much of the credit for this should be shared with Ngaujah, whose already energetic and charismatic performance has gotten even better...Marina Draghici's eye-popping African-influenced costumes are as effective as ever, but her still vibrant and colorful scenic design that extends into the house of the theater doesn't work as well with the O'Neill's architecture as it did at 37 Arts. The larger venue has also resulted in a loss of intimacy, and the interactive moments within Fela! now seem forced.

Bergen Record A-
(Robert Feldberg) Infectious...The show's setting is a club in Lagos, Nigeria, and this is the greatest floor show you'll ever see...Even in a show that's a tribute to Fela, Ngaujah, in a rich portrayal, suggests the considerable egotism that was also a part of his personality...While soaring on its musical numbers, the show's chief problem off-Broadway was a rambling book. For Broadway, the story's been trimmed and is more tightly focused, but it remains the lesser part of the evening. It's understandable that much book time is devoted to Fela's politics. That's who he was and what many of his songs, such as the hit "Zombie," were vibrantly about. After a while, though, the generalized condemnations of oppression and exploitation become repetitious. We feel the heat, but there's not much light...All of that, though, is Broadway-musical trimmings. Go to "Fela!" anticipating a super-stimulating, world-class song-and-dance concert, led by a remarkable performer, and you won't be disappointed.

Variety A-
(David Rooney) Breaks bold new ground in musical theater...Rather than a straight-up chronicle of the life of late Nigerian musician-activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the show is about vividly conjuring a specific atmosphere. It provides a full-immersion experiential ride through the artist's heady, hermetic world, from his formation as a musician to his spiritual and political awakening. Crafting a show that's more impressionistic than informational has its limitations as well as rewards. Despite minor tightening since it premiered Off Broadway last fall, "Fela!" remains undershaped; at times, it's repetitive and self-indulgent. It leans more toward celebratory tribute than warts-and-all portrait. However, Fela's egomania and retrograde attitude toward women, which ran contrary to the example of his feminist mother, are by no means glossed over...Such reservations are secondary to the tremendous raw authenticity and electric energy of this dance-heavy bio-musical, and the dangerous sensuality of Sahr Ngaujah (alternating performances with Kevin Mambo), who inhabits the title role with a cool command that never loses intensity...As much as the hit Broadway revival of "Hair," this is a show that defies an audience to remain outside the experience, particularly as the dancers and musicians shimmy and weave through the aisles.

Wall Street Journal A-
(Terry Teachout) The music and dancing are so good that if Fela! had been a half-hour shorter, I wouldn't have been overly troubled by its shapelessness. Alas, it plays for 2½ hours, and by the time the festivities draw to a close, you'll feel as though you'd lingered too long at a Thanksgiving table piled high with goodies. Even so, Fela! is tremendous fun, and anyone with curious ears and an eye for first-class dancing won't want to miss it. Warning: Fela! is loud. Bring earplugs—and use them.

New York Post A-
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) There's enough energy in the first act of "Fela!" to short-circuit Con Ed. It spills over from the stage and into the orchestra seats, boundless and joyous: This is as close as Broadway gets to fully immersive theater...Directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, the biography is at its most thrilling when it blurs the line between life and art, performers and viewers. A pedagogical deconstruction of Afrobeat's musical components turns into a party, and the show is so cocky that it doesn't even save a big audience-participation number for the finale: It comes half an hour in. It's a tough act to keep up, and "Fela!" does struggle after intermission. In the second act, the pretense of being at a concert falls by the wayside, and a dream sequence involving Fela's mother, Funmilayo (Lillias White), drags on forever...For such a boundary-busting project, it's oddly conventional in the way it glosses over the cause of Fela's death (of AIDS) and smoothes out his misogyny -- his embrace of polygamy wasn't nearly as endearing as it's portrayed. But then, the intensely charismatic Ngaujah played the lead when I saw the show. Whipping his band and followers into a frenzy, he's fully aware of his power -- and you finally understand how an entertainer can be a human weapon.

New York Observer A-
(Jesse Oxfeld) Raucously fun...[Jones] creates a dizzying party onstage, giving his performers athletic, frenzied, propulsive and suggestively butt-centric dances...The show’s weakness is its book, by Mr. Jones and Jim Lewis. It’s a straightforward recounting of Fela’s life, integrated around his songs, but it never develops any characters other than Fela himself, not even his apparently sainted mother...It also seems to lack an ending, cutting off the story of Fela’s life for no real reason except that two and a half hours are up...But if the story isn’t entirely satisfying, the evening is. With its ’60s kids singing of revolution, its general Be-In feeling, even its dancers coming down the aisles, Fela! is sort of a funked-up, African Hair. And if it didn’t quite make me want to read up on my Nigerian history—I know, I know, I should—it did make me go home and download a few of Fela’s albums.

New Jersey Newsroom B+
(Michael Sommers) While its unique charms certainly are powerful, one frankly wonders whether this unusual show will catch on with the mainstream public...This tumultuous production staged and choreographed by Jones conjures up a vivid impression of a runaway country and an outlaw musician who tried to make sense of it. The non-traditional nature of this musical's format and score certainly reflects Fela's revolutionary ways. For all of such artful chaos churning onstage, the story is relatively easy to follow thanks to occasionally projected supertitles and a fierce, transfixing performance by Sahr Ngaujah as Fela...Backed by that rowdy band, a 20-member ensemble shakes their rumps and the rafters as they madly perform amid the sweaty atmospherics of Jones' production. Garbed and treated like a goddess, Lillias White provides a mighty voice and an impressive presence as Fela's ill-fated activist mama. The show will prove a stretch for conservative Broadway tastes, but anybody desiring something more adventurous than the same old musical stuff should check out "Fela!"

NY1 B+
(Roma Torre) It remains a unique art piece. Or is it a dance concert, or perhaps story theater set to music? Whatever it is, "Fela!," much like its late namesake and subject, Nigerian performer Fela Kuti, defies definition...Set in The Shrine, Kuti’s famed club, on a summer night in 1978, the action is seemingly spontaneous. The amazing dancers, though clearly disciplined, are rarely synchronized and when Fela’s not performing a number, he talks to the audience in what comes off as stream of consciousness...The magnificent Sahr Ngaujah, who alternates with Kevin Mambo in the lead role, embodies Fela Kuti’s passion as if possessed...Jones works wonders on that stage alongside the musicians of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, crafting a new dramatic language. Melding music, story and dance, he’s enabled Kuti’s unique artistry to live on. Despite a bigger budget and some reshaping, the show is still too long and challenging for many of those with more traditional tastes. But "Fela!" speaks to Broadway’s next generation, whose embrace of the work gives hope for the theater’s future.

The New Yorker B
(Joan Acocella) There are two great things in it. One is Sahr Ngaujah, the man who, for most of the week, plays Fela. How did the producers find a performer who matched Fela in charm, wit, and insolence?...In some respects, Ngaujah may actually be better than Fela...The second glory of “Fela!” is the dancing, created by Bill T. Jones. It’s hard to make West African dance look bad—this is one of the great dance cultures of the world—but oh, how good Jones and the dancers, more than half of them American-born (the others are African or Caribbean), have made it look...I should add that the costumes, by Marina Draghici, could not be more perfect...Like most Broadway musicals these days, “Fela!” is assaultive. The music is loud; lights are beamed in your eyes. The show’s Fela insists on audience participation, as did the real Fela, in keeping with the African tradition of call-and-response. We were supposed to shout “Yeah! Yeah!” when he told us to...As the show moves along, the dance peters out a bit. After the opening section, the dancers often wear shoes—jazz shoes, with a little heel. This is a terrible idea. You can’t do proper West African dance without the foot’s contact, artistic and symbolic, with the ground...In “Fela!” the obligation to tell another man’s story prevents Jones from putting his own story in our face. I hope this happens to him more often.

Talkin' Broadway B
(Matthew Murray) Off-Broadway, Fela! played like a protest rally that didn’t want to pretend to be a musical; now it plays more like a musical that barely wants to be a protest rally...Take the fierceness out of the man, and there’s not much left except a marathon of a role - Fela is hardly ever offstage - that’s now denied its deepest emotional payoff. Tone down the rabble-rousing specter of his mother and inspiration, Funmilayo, and you have a one-two punch of deflation. That’s also happened, due to some questionable recasting: Talented as she is, Lillias White is too mainstream and predictable a voice to convince as the otherworldly woman behind this world-changing man...The same philosophy has also seeped into the rest of the production, making safe, slick, and smooth what used to be coarser and densely realistic...Marina Draghici’s sexy costumes burst with tribal and reverential color (almost Techni, at some points), but her set feels like a hodgepodge collection of junkyard items designed to both suggest danger and reassure you there’s no chance of harm...You’re more aware than ever that you’re in a theater that’s trying not to look like one...Luckily, there’s no similar problem to be found with the performances, which aside from White are hard-core theatrical fusion.

Village Voice B-
(Michael Feingold) White, woefully underused, gives the show such elegance and star wattage as it has; Ngaujah's authority and nonstop energy supply the motor that keeps it running. Matching him in the energy department when required, the dancers are spectacular in their flamboyant acrobatic feats. And the band, asked to play almost constantly throughout, is sublime. What was wrong with the Off-Broadway edition, however, is still wrong here: For all the fierce enthusiasm that Ngaujah brings to the evening (presumably equaled by Kevin Mambo, who plays the strenuous role at selected performances), the end result still seems scattershot and disconnected, a scrapbook with high points rather than a theatrical event.

Newsday B-
(Linda Winer) I know I should feel hard-wired to enjoy - no, to love - "Fela!"...The show - a multicultural hipster magnet during its celebrated tryout Off-Broadway last year - would seem to push some of my most closely held buttons. The nonlinear form and music are meant to take Broadway into unconventional places. The worldview is humanist, anti-colonial and, despite the setting - 1978 in Lagos, Nigeria - brutally timely. And the ersatz-African dances, which snake down the aisles and up a side runway, are electric. But I am untouched...The songs, with Fela's potent pidgin-poetry in subtitles, are a jubilant, subtle mixture of Afro-Caribbean rhythm, jazz brass, Yoruban chant and R&B. But they were never meant to carry a story on their back, and they do not. Director-choreographer Bill T. Jones, the modern-dance master who won a Tony for his snaky, enchanting movement for "Spring Awakening," creates an ebullient party atmosphere for the mass-market mythmaking of Fela...Sahr Ngaujah has the oversized presence to overcome the more incoherent parts of his story.

On Off Broadway B-
(Matt Windman) It's hard to imagine any place more lively than Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre, where the new musical "Fela!" just opened...Director-choreographer Bill T. Jones has staged seemingly untamed, vibrant choreography that perfectly matches the percussive music. Sahr Ngaujah, who plays Fela along with Kevin Mambo on alternating nights, almost never leaves the stage...But in spite of so much to admire visually, "Fela!" has absolutely no storyline besides some vague biographical details and quickly turns into a repetitive bore. It plays like a one-man show with backup dancers and singers giving off explosive energy. Some more intriguing moments later in the show include a hallucinatory experience with his mother and the graphic details of a 1977 attack on his home. The show's producers took a huge risk bringing a show with a relatively narrow niche appeal to Broadway. But in spite of its overflowing theatricality, "Fela!" falls short of providing a solid night of drama.

The New York Times A+ 14; Time Out NY A 13; TFT A 13; The Daily News A 13; Bloomberg News A 13; NYMag A 13; LAT A 13; CurtainUp A- 12; Theatermania A- 12; Bergen Record A- 12; Variety A- 12; New York Post A- 12; NYO A- 12; New Jersey Newsroom B+ 11; NY1 B+ 11; NYer B 10; Talkin' Broadway B 10; Newsday B- 9; On Off Broadway B- 9; VV B- 9; TOTAL: 232/20=11.6 (A-)

Read On »

Dreamgirls

GRADE:B

Book and Lyrics by Tom Eyen, Music by Henry Krieger, Additional Material by William Reale Directed by Robert Longbottom at the Apollo Theater. (CLOSED)

I'll admit it, dear reader, I'm quite flummoxed by this crop of reviews of Dreamgirls, the new touring version of the musical that just opened at The Apollo. The majority of the reviews damn with faint praise at best (except in regards to Chester Gregory's performance as Early, which gets universal raves), and yet enthusiastically recommend the show. You get a real whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts from this crop of reviews. Either that, or the standards of our criterati are slipping mightily. The New York Post's Elisabeth Vincentelli struggles to find anything positive to say about the show, and yet finds it thoroughly entertaining. Ditto Joe Dziemianowicz at the Daily News and Linda Winer at Newsday, who writes that Longbottom's choreography is lackluster but also calls his work "capable" and says it almost makes you forget Bye Bye Birdie, his recently-staged disaster at Roundabout. Part of the key to this revival's success is that it performs in the Apollo, where the musical's opening and closing are set, which adds a layer of meaning and resonance usually reserved for experimental site-specific work. Or perhaps the key lies in this sentence from the Variety review: " as a road property, it's top-tier," raising the question... does this Dreamgirls benefit from low expectations as its not performing on Broadway, despite having a Broadway design team and director?

Backstage A
(David Sheward) National tours are often viewed as knockoffs of Broadway originals. The limited run of Dreamgirls at the Apollo Theatre may be the first stop of a national tour, but this electric revival is anything but second-rate. The location alone provides an added zing, as many of the crucial moments take place at the Harlem landmark. But real estate only goes so far. Director-choreographer Robert Longbottom has rebounded from his misfired staging of the Roundabout Bye Bye Birdie with a dazzling and energetic production. In no way beholden to the 1981 premiere edition by Michael Bennett or Bill Condon's 2006 Oscar-winning film version, this "Dreamgirls" is fresh, alive, and bursting with talent.

Newsday B+
(Linda Winer) Most important, this Dreamgirls has the young singing actors it needs to deliver both the music and the meaning of the Tom Eyen-Henry Krieger score. Moya Angela, as the most talented but overweight Effie, takes hold of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" with such power and subtle phrasing that we're forced to stop comparing her with Jennifer Holliday and Jennifer Hudson, who made their names on this role and this song.

Time Out New York B+
(Adam Feldman)
Much of the recitative is not first-rate, and although this revival is well designed—from Robin Wagner’s mobile metallic panels, often swathed in video, to William Ivey Long’s droll period costumes—it is not always well directed; Robert Longbottom adeptly handles the many cinematic fades between onstage and backstage drama, but the more intimate scenes lack finesse. The weaknesses melt away, however, under the heat of the show’s standout songs, especially as performed by Angela and the extraordinary Chester Gregory, a walking lighting bolt as the irrepressible James “Thunder” Early. The show may not always be dreamy, but I am telling you: Go.

Bloomberg B
(Jeremy Gerard) Bennett invented a staging vocabulary that advanced the form while still paying tribute to his predecessors. Robert Longbottom, the revival’s director and choreographer, is a hack; every dance sequence is a cliche, every dramatic scene soap- operatic and lacking imagination. Yet what Angela, Gregory and their colleagues (especially the other Dreamettes, Adrienne Warren and Syesha Mercado) supply for the ear via Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s expansive score, Ivey Long supplies for the eye: a dizzying succession of ever more spectacular gowns (can there be any sequins left in the Western hemisphere?). So yes, this Dreamgirls is a show with killer looks, music to spare and a couple of new stars in its pocket.

Hollywood Reporter B
(Frank Scheck) Although Longbottom's staging and choreography pales next to the original, he's done a fine job with several numbers, especially Steppin' to the Dark Side, which employs those LED screens with imaginative flair. And the nifty quick costume changes produce the desired dazzling effect. Henry Krieger (music) and Tom Eyen's (lyrics) score remains an effective pastiche of '60s styles. It has here been augmented with two additions: What Love Can Do, the second-act opener, and the Effie/Deena duet "Listen," written for the film, which serves as a strong 11:00 number. The production also gains immeasurable resonance from its being presented at this intimate and historic venue, where the opening and (for this version) closing numbers are actually set.

TalkinBroadway B
(Matthew Murray) The mere fact that Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s 1981 musical has been given an 85-percent production after the heavier stumbles of the 2006 film adaptation is almost gift enough. Granted, given the original’s four-year run, its almost immediate revival on Broadway, and the starry 2001 Actors’ Fund concert, the show has never really gone away, but Longbottom, despite a few lapses in judgment, has taken significant steps to ensure that it stays at the forefront of our consciousness for the foreseeable future.

TheaterMania B
(Brian Scott Lipton) There's no doubt that the role of Effie White in the Henry Krieger-Tom Eyen musical Dreamgirls, now launching its national tour at the Apollo Theatre, is a star-making one. Just ask Jennifer Holliday, Lillias White, and Jennifer Hudson! But there's no guarantee that whoever portrays the fiery singer will end up as a lasting luminary in the firmament. Still, my money's on relative newcomer Moya Angela, whose intense, deeply-felt performance as Effie is the red-hot center of Robert Longbottom's enjoyable if slightly too cool revival of this timeless backstage musical.

New York Post B
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) A touring production hatched in South Korea, it feels spare not by design but by necessity. William Ivey Long designed hundreds of costumes, but the wigs look kinda cheap, the orchestra is too small and the basic set consists of five floor-to-ceiling rotating panels that double as LED screens...And yet, this Dreamgirls is incredibly entertaining, even when the seams are showing...Despite some missteps -- using the ensemble as fake orchestra members is cheesy, and the projections evoking a tour are somehow garish and banal -- the show plows through with gusto, grit and guts. Perfect for Dreamgirls.

New York Daily News B
(Joe Dziemianowicz) If you've never seen Dreamgirls on stage, it's worthwhile. And though it doesn't hit euphoric heights, there's an exciting vibe that the hit film can't capture. Plus, you can't beat the added you-are-there bonus since the Apollo is where the show's plot begins and ends.

Variety B-
(David Rooney) There's bad news and good about the much-anticipated revival of "Dreamgirls," kicking off, like the action of the show itself, on the storied stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater before a national tour. Cultists of the 1981 musical about an African-American girl group's rise to success might have been hoping for a Broadway-caliber production that would demand a midtown New York return. In most ways that count, this staging falls short of that wish. But as a road property, it's top-tier, packaged to travel and stuffed with vocal talent that does justice to Henry Krieger's sensational songs and helps compensate for stiff acting and a shortage of emotional clout.

NYTimes C-
(Ben Brantley) The show’s opening scene, Amateur Night at the Apollo, pulses with the plethora of talent onstage, of raw and enthusiastic performers who may well acquire polish and star shine. The people playing those amateurs are much more advanced than that. But their characterizations cry out for greater texture and variety. This show’s greatest asset and deficit is its momentum, which is too relentless for comfort. To feel fully — and Dreamgirls is a show that can make you cry real tears — you have to be able to breathe.

Village Voice D+
(Michael Feingold) Robert Longbottom's new production, sadly, won't erase any memories of Bennett's. Visually ineffective despite its fancy digital displays, and featuring loud, one-dimensional performances, the new Dreamgirls loosens the show's grip till it might seem to be just another extravaganza, though the writing still grabs you. Only Chester Gregory, spectacularly effective as an egocentric r&b star, breaks through the production's built-for-touring torpor.

BS A 13; ND B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; TM B 10; BB B 10; HWR B 10; NYP B 10;TB B 10; NYDN B 10; Variety B- 9; NYTimes C- 6; VV D+ 5; TOTAL: 115/12=9.58 (B)

Read On »

The Orphans' Home Cycle (Part 1)

GRADE: A-

(photo by Gregory Constanzo)

By Horton Foote. Directed by Michael Wilson. Signature Theatre. Through Mar. 28.

In a bittersweet irony worthy of the playwright himself, Horton Foote is receiving possibly his warmest embrace less than a year after he died at 92, with the first installment (subtitled "The Story of a Childhood") in a nine-play epic of small-town Texas life. Most critics echo Ben Brantley's observation that Foote's plays, which individually can seem like well-turned miniatures, take on gratifying heft and scope when stacked together. Though a few critics knock the first play, Roots in a Parched Ground for being mostly expositional, and some others see the second play, Convicts, as an outlier (for better or worse), all but the Bergen Record's Robert Feldberg are thrilled with anticipation for the journey ahead, when Parts II and III open (Dec. 13 and Jan. 24, respectively). Most-used adjective for Michael Wilson's direction: cinematic.

Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) It will, I suspect, be remembered as the most significant theatrical event of the season, the kind of show you tell your grandchildren you saw...Nothing much happens in "The Story of a Childhood"...nor do the characters have anything especially memorable to say. In place of studied eloquence, Foote offers us a Chekhov-like poetry of place and atmosphere, as homespun as a hand-me-down quilt. Yet this group portrait of small-town life, like "The Trip to Bountiful" before it, is neither comfortably nostalgic nor tiresomely bitter. Instead Foote shows us the world as it really is, subtly heightened by lyricism but always true to experience..."The Story of a Childhood" has the narrative sweep that you look for in major novels, coupled with the electric immediacy that only live theater can supply...Mr. Wilson, who also directed "Dividing the Estate," has staged "The Story of a Childhood" with supple, near-cinematic fluidity, moving from scene to scene so easily that you almost forget you're watching a play.

Backstage A+
(Erik Haagensen) By the time director Michael Wilson's bone-deep production of the first part of Horton Foote's "The Orphans' Home Cycle" is over, nearly three hours have passed in the blink of an eye. I wanted the second part to begin immediately...Foote based his work on the life of his father, which he learned of through numerous family stories told repeatedly to him in his youth. He certainly listened well: The writing is wise, deeply observant, and impressively detailed. Deceptively small-scaled and naturalistic, the work is really epic in scope, placing the lives of these modest people against the sweeping forces of social change and the vagaries of time. There is more genuine myth evoked in a single moment of Foote's simplicity than in all the self-consciously poetic strivings of the Public Theater's current "The Brother/Sister Plays." There's not a weak link in the 22-member company, which serves the writing beautifully under Wilson's piercingly clear-eyed direction...What we are being served here is nothing less than an American masterwork.

The New York Times A
(Ben Brantley) Promises to be the great adventure of this theater season...Directed with cinematic fluidity and novelistic detail by Michael Wilson, “The Story of a Childhood” leaves you as eager as a kid who has just started his first fat work of fiction by Charles Dickens, say, or Mark Twain, when putting down the book, even for an hour, feels like punishment...It’s a thrilling demonstration of an artist long regarded only as a miniaturist soaring into the realm of the epic...The exposition-heavy “Roots” is, on its own, the least interesting of the plays, but a necessary (and painless) initiation into the family trees that shade the cycle. “Convicts,” on the other hand, is a juicy slice of Lone Star gothic...The basis for a 1991 film starring Robert Duvall, “Convicts,” here acted by a uniformly excellent supporting cast, is the evening’s glorious and pathetic ghost story, in which people are doomed to haunt themselves...Anchored by geography and genealogy, Foote’s characters are nonetheless unmoored travelers in forever uncharted lands. That their creator has shaped them with such warm compassion and cold clarity makes us eager to accompany them on every step of an odyssey that is somehow as surprising as it is familiar.

Associated Press A
(Michael Kuchwara) An impressive introduction to Foote's three-part, nine-play marathon...Foote has a particular gift for time and place, expertly capturing the era and that area of southeast Texas where he grew up...While it may not seem as if there is an abundance of plot, Foote is quietly building a collection of finely etched characters. And director Michael Wilson has marshaled a fine cast to portray these people. There is an innate melancholy to Heck's performance, a sadness that suggests there will be enough material for several more evenings of drama...If Part 1 of "The Orphans' Home Cycle" is any indication, we are in for a remarkable journey.

Time Out NY A
(David Cote) Yes, these three one-act plays include leisurely strolls down memory lane, but there is so much life compressed here: greed, disease, murder, cruelty to children, the bitter legacy of slavery and a sad, ambivalent hero—Horace Robedaux, alienated observer of a family that abandoned him...As in most Foote plays, the terse, quietly suffering characters are caught between the past and the future, hoping to reinvent themselves but also ensnared by a dimly remembered past. Director Michael Wilson and his versatile, highly talented ensemble (including the radiant Hallie Foote, the late author’s daughter) wrestle their material into shape, delivering three hours of episodic narrative spanning 1902 to 1910 without a dull moment...Foote’s understated epic is an authentic American classic about the birth pangs of the 20th century. It’s told with humor, deep sadness and great writerly craft. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The Faster Times A
(Jonathan Mandell) On the evidence of the three plays of Part I, I am already hooked...These first three hour-long plays, presented together under the title “The Story of A Childhood,” offer a committed cast of 21 actors in a splendidly fluid production that promises to turn Foote’s character studies (most of which had been produced previously) into a theatrical epic that recalls such past stage marathons as the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s Life and Adventure of Nicholas Nickleby or Robert Shenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle–-all at a cost of just $20 per ticket.

Entertainment Weekly A-
(Melissa Rose Bernardo) There's much melancholy beauty to be found in The Story of a Childhood...No one is better equipped than director Michael Wilson to handle the delicate rhythms of this writer's work...The pace is appropriately, achingly languorous. Anyone not familiar with Foote's light-on-plot, heavy-on-character storytelling style — if it's important, it happens off stage, and we hear about it 10 different ways — might find themselves getting anxious. Foote's particular brand of poetry can seem old-fashioned, even simplistic. But with its tales of harsh times, social and economic change, Reconstruction, education, and industry in small-town America, The Story of a Childhood heralds the beginning of something extraordinary. And you'll be waiting with baited breath for Foote's next chapter.

Talkin' Broadway A-
(Matthew Murray) This could be the event of the season. But more than that, it could well become another grand theatrical epic, in line with O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra or Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, but based on places, people, and feelings that don’t draw their inspiration from Greek tragedy or 19th-century European politics, but instead from the very fabric of America...As Horace’s story unfolds, the depth and insight of Foote’s milieu - and its potential when spread across the better part of three decades - reveal and distinguish themselves. The problems of Horace and his family, though small in the grand scheme of things, read large for the reason similar trials in Foote plays so often do: they intimately treat the experiences and fears with which we all grapple...“The Story of a Childhood” can often seem more like a promise than a delivery, background information for the more probing visions of the past to come. The first and third plays are captivating because of their devotion to family drama, but the second is a rocky digression that - at least at this point - seems necessary more for thematic than plot reasons...But don’t let that deter you...If the rest of The Orphans’ Home Cycle lives up to this first installment, it will be a true joy discovering the answer over the next few months.

Edge Boston A-
(Jonathan Leaf) I’d be very surprised if a hundred years hence it isn’t more and more fondly recalled than the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s torpid and pretentious epic, Strange Interlude, for instance - or even than Tony Kushner’s Angels in America...The faults of Foote’s vastly broad but utterly intimate study of life in rural Texas in the first decades of the last century are many, and they are abundantly on display...The performances of the actors, working under Hartford Stage director Michael Wilson, also vary widely in quality. But the strengths of both presentation and of the plays are very considerable. Foote has the humanity and the knowledge of people that lie at the essence of the important artist, and the comparisons made between Foote and Chekhov are hardly unjustified...In bringing the cycle to the stage, both Signature and Hartford Stage, as the joint producers, deserve our praise. For the production is both handsome and immense...Is this great theater? It is at least very, very good.

New York Post B+
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Rarely has something so epic been so unassuming. A lot happens in Horton Foote's three-hour-long "The Story of a Childhood," set in the rough and tumble world of early 20th-century Texas. The tone never wavers from a certain humble plainness, even when scenes deal with jealousy and alcoholism or allude to tragic deaths...Few authors write pettiness as well as Foote does, and few actors play it as well as his own daughter Hallie, brilliant as always in relatively short parts. Granted, there are times when you wish the plays could be pricklier, messier. Doesn't anyone ever scream in this world? But then you realize that by not raising his voice, Foote gives his melancholy a subversive edge.

Bloomberg News B+
(John Simon) A magnificent cross-section of a great playwright’s career...Michael Wilson’s fluid staging helps to tie together three somewhat disparate acts. But what most justifies the three-hour duration, which includes two brief intermissions, is Foote’s uncanny ability to empathize with his characters, regardless of how marginal or unsympathetic they are.

Theatermania B+
(Dan Balcazo) An excellent start to this epic undertaking...The first piece on the bill, Roots in a Parched Ground, is the weakest, primarily because it is overladen with exposition...Things pick up considerably in the second play, Convicts, set on Christmas Eve, 1904. The teenage Horace has entered the workforce, clerking at a plantation store and occasionally watching over the African-American prison laborers who work the fields...The piece is also full of macabre humor and terrific supporting performances...The third play of the evening, Lily Dale, is set in Houston in 1910...The entire cast delivers nuanced performances, but the clear stand-out in this section is [Annalee] Jefferies...Wilson has directed the evening with a cinematic eye, aided by Jan Hartley's projections, the lush original music and sound design by John Gromada, and the sliding units from scenic designers Jeff Cowie and David M. Barber.

Village Voice B
(Michael Feingold) Remarkably bleak. Far from exploiting period nostalgia or sentimentality, Foote's account of Horace's childhood is an epic of negativity, in which expected kindness or decency constantly get withheld...In decades past, Foote's longer plays used to infuriate me: They seemed nothing but wall-to-wall recitation of family connections. His new distillation juxtaposes these thick blocks of chatter with the deadly silences of despair and isolation, making the family tree seem less a source of inheritors' pride than a set of mental handgrips to cling to against the void. Powerful as Foote's material is, it still contains static sections, particularly in the second half of "Convicts," where the expository motor seems to hum without moving anything forward; director Michael Wilson's cast sometimes adds to the hum by simply passing the data along rather than stamping it with any individual character. Many in the large cast do better than that, however, and Foote's legacy to his daughter, Hallie, now includes another of the showy, sharp-tongued roles she seizes with such vigor, as the skinflint plantation owner's nasty, drunken niece.

Bergen Record B
(Robert Feldberg) Anyone who's seen Foote's work knows that nothing terribly dramatic is said or done...The second play, "Convicts," the evening's weakest link, has 14-year-old Horace working at a plantation store in order to earn money for his father's headstone. It focuses, however, on the plantation's owner, Soll Gautier, a demented, violent, alcoholic old man who runs his spread with the aid of indentured convicts. Gautier, who takes a liking to Horace, is a nasty piece of work, and it's hard to figure out why he gets so much face time. Feeling and nuance return with "Lily Dale," as Horace, now 20, accepts his mother's invitation to visit her and Lily Dale in Houston for a week...You might anticipate that the succession of the three plays – or, at least, the first and third – would deepen our involvement with the earnest young hero. But that doesn't really happen. The main reason, I think, is that Horace is essentially an unchanging victim, a passive figure – it's hard to get a handle on his inner life — to whom bad things happen. The production has been nicely designed, and efficiently staged by Michael Wilson, but few of the performers – most of them playing multiple roles – give their characters much oomph.

Wall Street Journal A+ 14; Backstage A+ 14; The New York Times A 13; Associated Press A 13; Time Out NY A 13; Faster Times A 13; Entertainment Weekly A- 12; Talkin' Broadway A- 12; Edge Boston A- 12; NYPost B+ 11; BN B+ 11; Theatermania B+ 11; VV B 10; Bergen Record B 10; TOTAL: 169/14=12.07 (A-)

Read On »

In The Next Room or the vibrator play

GRADE: B-

By Sarah Ruhl, Directed by Les Waters. At the Lyceum Theater. (CLOSED)

It's odd that a playwright as good natured as Sarah Ruhl would end up being so controversial, but perhaps this is what happens when you're given a MacArthur "Genius" Award before making your New York Debut. In The Next Room or the vibrator play is Ruhl's first play written post-MacArthur (both Passion Play and Dead Man's Cell Phone were written just prior) and this time she's on the Great White Way with a comedy about the medicinal uses of the vibrator in the 19th Century. The play earns generally high marks, with critics admiring the way she and director Les Waters have simultaneously pulled off a hilarious comedy and a probing look into female sexuality and our relationships with our bodies. John Simon, who normally hates Ruhl, is shocked (shocked!) to find himself thoroughly charmed by the play. Not everyone is so content... Matthew Murray finds the play overstuffed, Linda Winer finds it overly slight and Terry Teachout hates it so much, he impugns the taste of anyone who likes it (leaving out his F- grade, the score jumps to B+).

Hollywood Reporter A
(Frank Scheck) The playwright, responsible for such works as The Clean House and Dead Man's Cell Phone, mines her subject for suitably bawdy humor without resorting to vulgarity. But what really gives the work its distinction is its sensitive exploration of the physical and emotional repression suffered by the women of the era, which has yet to disappear entirely. Nor does Ruhl neglect the male side of things, as evidenced by the beautifully staged final scene in which Mrs. Givings provides her husband with a lesson about the beauty of his own body. The play, seen at the Berkeley Rep, has been given a pitch-perfect Broadway staging that beautifully balances its humor and pathos. Under the sensitive direction of Les Waters, the ensemble delivers sterling performances, with Benanti a particular delight as the woman for whom electricity turns out to be a marriage saver.

New York Times A
(Charles Isherwood) In the Next Room, a Lincoln Center Theater production, is directed by Les Waters with a fine sensitivity to its varied textures. Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling. It is also Ms. Ruhl’s most traditional work, taking place as it does in a single setting (realized with warmth by the set designer Annie Smart) and hewing closely to naturalism. Nonetheless, admirers of Ms. Ruhl’s fanciful imagination and flair for surreal imagery, given free rein in plays like The Clean House and Eurydice, will be gratified to know that she imbues her heroine, Mrs. Givings, with a penchant for flights of lyric fantasy and a tendency to speak her thoughts almost before she has formulated them.

NY Post A
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Ruhl presents something a lot more intimate and a lot more daring: women's discovery of their own bodies and their own pleasure. It may be the first time we've seen characters repeatedly reach orgasm on a mainstream stage -- in a Lincoln Center Theater production, no less -- and it happens in a play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny...As well written as the play is, it could easily have gone astray in the wrong hands. But director Les Waters and his cast proceed with great sensitivity. Cerveris' earnest, slightly stiff physicality is put to good use here, while Benanti and Dizzia brim with a contagious glee in their shared scenes. Excited and curious, they giggle, whisper and intrigue. After all, their characters are on the cusp of a marvelous discovery: They were already adults. Now they can become women.

TheaterMania A
(David Finkle) If Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde had decided to collaborate on a post-modern drawing-room comedy, the hotsy-totsy twosome surely would have turned out something very much like Sarah Ruhl's genuinely hysterical new work In the Next Room or the vibrator play, now being presented by Lincoln Center Theatre at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre... Handed material that theatergoers stuck in a bygone age might find unsavory, director Les Waters has honed it to a fare-thee-well. (He also helmed the piece for its Berkeley Repertory Theatre debut.) And his actors are certainly a game lot. Dizzia, Benanti, and Williams are obliged to present several approaches to orgasms, a requirement that may have evoked second thoughts on initial readings of the lubricious script. But they leap in. Cerveris, as a detached man of science, is adept at stripping his emotions bare and then some. Bernstine gets to deliver the play's longest speech -- a confession of her resentment at wet-nursing an infant after her own son died at 12 weeks -- and she breaks hearts with it. Ryan's thick-skulled Mr. Daldry and Stetson's secretly unhappy and longing Annie are additional assets.

Bloomberg A
(John Simon) Wonders will never cease. Sarah Ruhl, whose previous work I execrated, has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel, In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play...As Ruhl traces it with wit and insight, and without the slightest prurience, the birth of this new era gives rise to colorful events, astute psychological revelations and endearingly apt dialogue. A parallel plot line centers on the black wet nurse, Elizabeth: Catherine is as jealous of her success with Lotty as her husband is of his male patient Leo Irving, a bohemian, Paris-based painter with whom Catherine is unrequitedly smitten.

Time Out New York A-
(David Cote) This premise could easily devolve into a silly sex farce or a strident feminist critique; in fact, Ruhl samples from both without becoming indebted to either. In a way, In the Next Room is unabashedly antiscience; Ruhl has noted in interviews that she’s not impressed by psychological realism or rationality in contemporary plays. In the battle between reason and wonder, she comes down firmly on the side of dreamy awe. By restricting her genre to aphorism-peppered 19th-century drawing-room comedy, Ruhl tempers her tendency toward twee whimsy and delivers a compelling yarn with engaging characters who evolve. And director Les Waters doesn’t gild the lily of Ruhl’s heightened but period-respectful dialogue, setting a comical but grounded tone.

Associated Press B+
(Michael Kuchwara) This provocative, often quite funny play, which Lincoln Center Theater opened Thursday at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, is Ruhl's most entertaining work to date. Not only because of its sexual subject matter but because she has created a parade of appealing, fully drawn characters, starting with the husband and wife at the center of her play. And Ruhl is dealing with some serious issues, too, most prominently the often difficult relationships between men and women and their misreadings of each other

Variety B
(David Rooney) Victorian repression gets a rude poke in Sarah Ruhl's typically idiosyncratic rumination on women's struggle to understand and explore their sexual selves, In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play. While the signature 19th century ailment being treated is "hysteria," the chief weakness is the bipolar disorder of the inconsistent second act, which shifts uncertainly between serious developments and the more farcical business of romantic cross-currents. But there are so many lingering moments of emotional truth, and even more of daring comedy, that the play amuses and charms even if it doesn't quite satisfy.

NY Daily News C+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) In the Next Room clicks, or hums, when it's at its silliest and most titillating. As characters shed corsets and knickers for some good vibrations, the play surges with laughter. The merriment ceases in the second half, larded down by so many themes concerning life, light, love, lactation, lesbianism - and that's just the L words.

Newsday C-
(Linda Winer) In the Next Room or the vibrator play is a great big idea with a mildly amusing play tacked onto it. The comedy is more substantial and less self-consciously whimsical than the three previous Sarah Ruhl plays that also have been luxuriously produced in New York in the past three years. But I still wish I understood the appeal.

TalkinBroadway C-
(Matthew Murray) Unfortunately, even these added layers of context and depth make the story difficult to sustain over two and a half hours. Sight gags about the stimulating devices - including the horrific “Chattanooga vibrator” to which Leo is subjected - and Catherine’s borderline conspiring to treat herself when her husband refuses may satisfy in the short term. But because the side plots and subsidiary characters aren’t especially compelling, you focus on the play’s coarser aspects more than they’re capable of bearing - and ultimately, they’re not much more than the sort of lame sex jokes most people get tired of after middle school. Counting adultery, classism, lesbianism, racism, artistic inspiration, the disintegration of social prudishness, the landscape of scientific progress, and a modern history of wet nursing in addition the dual-headed main story of vibrator theory and the accidental collapse of a marriage, Ruhl has loaded In the Next Room with too many expansive topics to do any of them justice. Neither she nor her director, Les Waters, is capable of drawing your attention to the threads of greatest importance, which instead of elevating everything only increases the insignificance of each individual portion.

The Faster Times D+
(Jonathan Mandell) All this is so clearly put forth that we get it within the first 15 minutes of the play — a half hour, tops. The problem is that the play is two and a half hours long. In that time, we watch nearly a dozen sessions with a vibrator (or maybe the better verb is hear, since they are conducted under discreet covering.) There are variations to be sure — one time it’s a man, a couple of times it’s two women. There are also tiny subplots, frustrated little efforts among various of the characters to make connection, and a fanciful ending that is at odds with the tone of the rest of the play, intentionally so. But much time is taken with the smug little joke that these naifs did not even understand that what they were experiencing was sexual pleasure, which might have been better-told as a 12-minute skit; allow the two musically-talented leads the chance to sing, and it would have been firmly in Monty Python territory. Instead, In The Next Room, or the vibrator play is a tease without titillation; it has the rhythm of pornography without the pleasures of pornography; most theatergoers would probably not find it very shocking, but for all the expressed intention to offer insights into attitudes towards sex and electricity, it is also not all that stimulating.

Wall Street Journal F-
(Terry Teachout) Believe it or not, this is actually a pretty good idea for a play, one that might have been both smart and provocative had it been treated in the astringent manner of "Topsy-Turvy," the 1999 film in which Mike Leigh showed us Victorian England through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan. "In the Next Room," by contrast, is a sentimental wallow studded with sniggering jokes that too often appear to be made at the expense of Ms. Ruhl's innocent characters, none of whom is believably Victorian in speech or carriage. The result is the theatrical equivalent of a jelly doughnut with vinegar-flavored frosting, a dish fit only for the tasteless.

HR A 13; TM A 13; NYT A 13; NYP A 13; BB A 13; TONY A- 12; AP B+ 11; V B 10; NYDN C+ 8; TB C- 6; ND C- 6; TFT D+ 5; WSJ F- 0; TOTAL: 123/13=9.46 (B-)

Read On »

My Wonderful Day

GRADE: A-

Written and Directed by Alan Ayckbourn. At 59E59. (CLOSED)

Alan Ayckbourn directs his own dark farce in this Brits off Broadway Production, and the reaction is overwhelmingly positive, with a couple of quibbles. Both Elisabeth Vincentelli and Ben Brantley find the goings-on a bit too familiar and a bit too formulaic, having seen plenty of Ayckbourn's farces over the years (perhaps this formula helps explain the scribe's terrifying prolificness--he's written 73 plays!). Terry Teachout--on record as a huge fan of Ayckbourn as a writer and a director--can't sing the praises of the show highly enough. Everyone gets a big kick out of the premise--a middle-class sex farce watched over by a nearly silent-year-old played convincingly by 28-year-old Ayesha Antoine. (For a bonus Q+A wiht Sir Alan, point your browsers to this interview conducted by David Cote)

Wall St. Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) Not only is My Wonderful Day one of the wittiest and most pristinely crafted of Mr. Ayckbourn's dark farces, but the Brits Off Broadway festival has wisely imported his own production, which was first seen in October at Mr. Ayckbourn's home base, Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre. Like the play, it's a gem, a textbook example of how to stage a comedy effectively, and anyone fortunate enough to see it will wonder why Mr. Ayckbourn's parallel career as a director is largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.

TheaterMania A+
(David Finkle) Alan Ayckbourn's new bittersweet comedy My Wonderful Day, now at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is among his best and most touching works -- which really says something considering it is his 73rd play...Ayckbourn wants to show the world of adults as seen through a child's innocent eyes. He's not the first to take the approach, but he's one of the funniest. Character-based laughs keep coming even as anxiety accumulates about the burdens children are asked to bear by the supposedly mature. For instance, Winnie knows that eager Kevin and willing Tiffany have gone off alone to the bedroom, but how should she respond when Paula, returning unexpectedly, asks about her husband's whereabouts?

NYTimes A-
(Ben Brantley) All of this is per usual for Mr. Ayckbourn, whose comedies have always held more than a trace of melancholy. I can’t say I cared very much about the fates of these selfish adults, though they are portrayed with enjoyable wit and style. What makes My Wonderful Day so moving is your awareness of the grim spectacle of the life to come that they present to Winnie. She already knows that promises are inevitably broken and that stability of any kind is an illusion. No wonder Winnie worries that her mother could die any minute, though of course Laverne, as an Ayckbourn adult, fails to grasp the depths of her child’s fear.

Associated Press B+
(Jennifer Farrar) Some adults still believe that children should be seen and not heard. But what if that quiet child is writing down every foolish thing the adults are saying and doing? That's the delightful premise of Alan Ayckbourn's latest comedy, My Wonderful Day, making its New York debut as part of BritsOffBroadway 2009 at 59E59 Theaters. Ayckbourn wrote and directs this witty, thoughtful farce, which includes the original British cast from the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Yorkshire, England.

NYPost B
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Ayckbourn's written more than 70 plays' worth of this stuff, and he knows what he's doing. But this one also feels by-the-numbers...just as we seem to be cruising toward an uneventful finish to an uneventful play, Ayckbourn introduces a new character in the final stretch. When brisk, acerbic Paula (Alexandra Mathie) enters, it's as if someone had opened a window and let a bracing wind blow in. Paula helps end the show in a delicious high note -- but also makes you wish she'd come in much, much earlier.


TM A+ 14; WSJ A+ 14; NYT A- 12; AP B+ 11; NYP B 10. TOTAL: 61/5 = 12.2 (A-)

Read On »

The Late Christopher Bean

GRADE: A-

By Sidney Howard. Directed by Jenn Thompson. At The Beckett Theatre, Theatre Row. (CLOSED)

The Actors Company Theater makes good on its quest to present "neglected or rarely produced plays of literary merit" with this revival of Sidney Howard's farce The Late Christopher Bean, last seen 'round these parts in 1932. Most critics score the play according to TACT's stated goals, and most report a well-produced night of comedy, with company member Cynthia Darlow receiving multiple praises for her acting work. The action takes place in the Boston home of a doctor and his wife who discover that their long-dead starving-artist lodger has been declared a genius, posthumously. A New York art critic and others descend on the house to find his now-priceless early work and hilarity ensues as the different players battle for a piece of the pie. Every theatre has a Mission Statement (usually containing the phrase "human condition"), but few have a mission that is at once comprehensible and consistently fulfilled. Critics seem gratified that a story about forgotten art has been revived by a company devoted to finding forgotten art. The critics also appreciate the prescience and merit of this particular revival because Bean's plot is animated by the farcical force of Greed.

The New Yorker A
(Unattributed) Sidney Howard’s 1932 comedy, which has been unjustly gathering dust, gets a first-rate outing by the Actors Company Theatre. Dr. Haggett (the terrific James Murtaugh), a country physician living outside of Boston, becomes the sudden focus of the art-world élite when he turns out to be the unknowing owner of a stash of priceless paintings. As collectors and scammers gather at his doorstep, his simple life is upended and his family descends into a collective frenzy of greed. (Cynthia Darlow, a company veteran, is particularly scrumptious as the devil-eyed matriarch.) The relevance of Depression-era avarice is not the only reason to revive the play: Jenn Thompson’s production proves it to be a gem in any era, and catnip for a comedic ensemble.

Backstage A
(Lisa Jo Sagolla) The comic antics are directed with controlled velocity by Jenn Thompson, who never lets the riotous proceedings get so wild as to undermine the elegance of Howard's efficient language, which is where the bulk of the show's sharp humor lies. The production resides comfortably within Charlie Corcoran's handsomely homey 1930s farmhouse set and is smartly cast with outstanding comedic actors, who all manage to mark their characters with a singular, appealing peculiarity.

Theatre Mania A
(David Finkle) Under Jenn Thompson's warm and tidy direction, it's loaded with laughs; it has nine carefully articulated parts for the accomplished actors assembled here to enliven; and it contains genuine plot surprises right up to the deeply satisfying curtain line. What more do you need? ... Howard's portrait of greed is worthy of a Moliere satire, and Murtaugh grabs the role of Dr. Haggett and makes hay with it. By the time Haggett understands that tens of thousands of dollars are available to him if he can locate the missing paintings, Murtaugh's entire body is vibrating.

Lighting & Sound America A
(David Barbour) [S]uffice to say that, except for one or two moments when the action briefly drifts into expositional cul-de-sacs, this is an expertly plotted farce, filled with exquisitely timed bombshells that continue dropping up until the very last minute. And, under Jenn Thompson's smartly paced direction, a fine cast expertly underplays this genteel tale of cutthroat negotiations. Leading the way is James Murtaugh, as Dr. Haggett, whose laconic Yankee propriety crumbles into bits as his greed subjects him to a barrage of comic humiliations ... All of this double-dealing takes place on Charlie Corcoran's setting, which, with its dowdy furniture, homely paintings, and hooked rugs, is a fine study in respectable middle-class bad taste. Ben Stanton's lighting bathes the action in a warm, sunshiny glow that contrasts nicely with the dirty doings at hand. Martha Hally's costumes include some nicely tailored men's suits and a sufficiently august day dress for Mrs. Haggett. Stephen Kunken's sound design provides crisp reinforcement for the piano tunes, composed by Mark Berman, that bridge each scene.

Variety B+
(Steven Suskin) Much of the brightness of this production comes from the Yankee doctor, whose character is described as a gargoyle and who, when overcome with greed, jerks about like a puppet on hopelessly tangled strings. Murtaugh (a memorably dour McComber in the 1998 Lincoln Center Theater revival of O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness!") also supplies an inspired bit of mime in the final scene when he tabulates the spoils of swindling like a deranged abacus. Darlow contributes numerous laughs as a harridan who goes in for occasional-but-inauthentic lunges at civility; this pair deserves each other, and the audience is the beneficiary. Bacon does an admirable job as the woman at the center of the affair, but she is at something of a disadvantage. Howard wrote the play as a vehicle for Pauline Lord, star of "They Knew What They Wanted" and a living legend for her 1921 performance as O'Neill's "Anna Christie." Abby has also been played by Marie Dressler, Edith Evans and Lillian Gish. That's not to say you need a star in the role, but Howard clearly intended us to focus on the housemaid from the earliest scenes, which we don't do with Bacon ... In the company's hands, the play proves intelligent, well crafted and laugh-out-loud funny.

New York Times B+
(Ken Jawarowski) It’s a play that has remained fresh and funny, proving once again that a strong script is rarely tarnished by time ... Along with its commendable mission to restage forgotten plays, the Actors Company has put an impressive amount of work into its production. The set, by Charlie Corcoran, shows a sharp eye for detail, as do Martha Hally’s costumes and Ben Stanton’s lighting. The cast of nine is often as skilled. Though the actors’ timing occasionally misfires — a number of the jokes elicit wide smiles rather than the big laughs that such writing deserves — the ensemble, directed by Jenn Thompson, is nevertheless engaging. James Murtaugh as Dr. Haggett and Jessiee Datino as his daughter Susan are particularly effective.

New York Post C
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Unfortunately, the proceedings never switch to the necessary higher comic gear. As the increasingly frenzied Haggett patriarch, James Murtaugh -- looking like Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons" -- comes closest to the right sense of exaggeration. Overall, the production sticks to an amiable canter when a full gallop's required.

The New Yorker A 13; Backstage A 13; Theatre Mania A 13; Lighting & Sound America A 13; Variety B+ 11; New York Times B+ 11; New York Post C 7. TOTAL: 81/7 = 11.6 (A-)

Read On »