So, for those of you in the Greater Metropolitan Area or lucky enough to travel to NYC frequently, the Sunday Times published its preview of upcoming shows. And for theater lovers, there's a LOT to love...assuming the shows are well-acted and -directed. Most are still in previews.
In big (really huge) letters above the fold: "Can Broadway Be Funny Again?" Larry David has a play opening, and there's another one about a guy and his sock hand puppet. I don't know: I skimmed that one. Puppets are not my thing, on or off Bway. And it was mostly an interview with Larry David who, I think, isn't that funny anyway: so who can guess anything about his show?
No, you have to go inside the Arts section to find the interesting stuff.
Here's a bit of it:
The lyricist Lorenz Hart, a star-struck cynic on the subject of human coupling, regularly itemized the painful symptoms that accompany affairs of the heart, like “the sleepless nights, the daily fights/The quick toboggan when you reach the heights.” And as most of us can testify, love isn’t easy under the best of circumstances.
But few lovers-in-waiting (and waiting and waiting) encounter the kind of obstacles with which an assortment of knotty dramas, comedies and even musicals are blocking the path to happily bedded bliss this season. In recent months, we have encountered the problems posed to enduring love by immortality (as in the vampire-girl-meets-bullied-boy play “Let the Right One In” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn), mortal illness (in the wrenching two-character “Constellations”) and being part of a set of conjoined twins (in the musical “Side Show”).
This spring, playwrights are throwing class, economics and politics into the mix as a further means of demonstrating how bad romance makes for good drama. The characters demonstrating this theory include star-crossed royals of the Tudor era (in the stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” novels from the Royal Shakespeare Company) and a 19th-century English governess and an Asian monarch (in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of the classic musical “The King and I.”
http://www.nytimes.com/...
That was Ben Brantley, the chief Times theater critic. His colleague Charles Isherwood has another take on the spring offerings:
The British are coming! The British are coming! Yawn.
Season in and season out, a steady tide of London imports swamps Broadway, and the haul is as heavy as ever this spring. It’s Off Broadway where new American playwriting flourishes. And no, while that’s not breaking news either, I can confirm that this spring’s lineup boasts an unusually promising slate of shows from writers whose work I’ve admired in the past. For theatergoers more interested in new currents than the trials of British royals, here’s my version of a cheat sheet suggesting where your dollars might be profitably spent.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Go read the whole thing b/c I can't quote it without violating fair use doctrine (and he writes WAY better than I do anyway).
Heroes, Sidekicks, Cartoonists:
Quotes to follow. But cartoonists refers to Alison Bechtel, whose autobiographical graphic novel/bio "Fun Home" has been adapted for the stage.
Small Alison is a far cry from Annie or Matilda. After all, little-girl roles on Broadway don’t typically call for dancing in a coffin or singing about your attraction to a delivery woman.
But “Fun Home” is no typical musical, given that it brings to life Alison Bechdel’s memoir about a budding lesbian cartoonist and her closeted gay father who teaches English, restores old houses, runs a funeral home and commits suicide.
“I think Alison is my dream role,” the 11-year-old Sydney Lucas said in a recent interview. “Roles don’t come this deep.”
Born in Georgia, Ms. Lucas moved to New York City when she was 2 and has always wanted to be an actress. “My role model is actually Meryl Streep,” she said. “I will strive to be as good as she is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/...
June, the central character in Christina Masciotti’s “Social Security,” which begins performances on Feb. 25 at the Bushwick Starr, has gone deaf after 40 years of working the machines in a pretzel factory. “I shouldn’t talk,” her neighbor Sissy says, resignedly. “You can’t hear me.”
It’s both entirely plausible and wholly surprising that Ms. Masciotti would shape a play around someone like June. In plays like “Vision Disturbance” and “Adult,” she has similarly given voice to working- and middle-class characters inspired by real people. But June is deaf, and Ms. Masciotti is compulsively attuned to the “original poetry in everyday speech,” as Ben Brantley put it in his New York Times review of “Adult” last year. Ms. Masciotti, who is in her 30s, grew up in Reading, Pa., with a Greek mother and an American father. It was their conversations, full of malapropism and misconstrual, that aroused her interest in the possibilities and frustrations of language. She went on to study play-writing at Brown University and earned an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University.
(Also from the link Heroes, Sidekicks, Cartoonists...along with two more new productions this season.)
Enjoy!