By Wendy Rosenfield
for the Inquirer
In two days, Philly opened two musicals about angsty, horny teenagers of yore, but there’s a world of difference between them. Walnut Street Theatre presents an upbeat Grease, but Theatre Horizon gets a lot closer to the blackboard jungle with Spring Awakening. Here, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s celebrated adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s oft-banned 1891 drama becomes an intimate hothouse for the blossoming of young lust.
The genius of Spring Awakening lies in its blend of teens in Victorian suits and dresses who furtively slip microphones from their pockets and belt out that which will not be repressed, not now, not back then. With chest-tighteningly painful lyrics sung through brash rock and mournful ballads, brilliant Melchior, naive Vendla, underachieving Moritz, cunning Hanschen, wayward Ilse, and the rest, slip from the grasp of adults who would see them in lockstep. And, as occasionally happens to rebellious kids (i.e., all kids), some end up dead. The price of freedom can be steep.
By Wendy Rosenfield
for the Inquirer
Let’s pretend for a moment Grease, receiving a mainstage airing-out at Walnut Street Theatre, isn’t about slut-shaming and prude-shaming or the days when bullies were the cool kids. We can celebrate an era when we had the freedom to mock “polacks” “japs” and “pansies” at will, but didn’t have to acknowledge African-Americans because they were still invisible. We might even be okay with all that if director Bruce Lumpkin allowed this 1971 musical to take its original form: a hand jive at America’s best-beloved 1950s myths presented by a bunch of working-class teenage scrappers all grappling for the bottom rungs of the same (gender-specific) ladders.
Instead, we’re presented with Cliff Simon’s set, featuring enormous flats painted with Liz Taylor’s face--all hair, lips and half-opened eyes--looming large on the left, James Dean famously pouting on the right, “Rydell,” the name of the kids’ high school, on scaffolding between them like a local version of the iconic Hollywood sign. The Walnut’s production is an homage, a blend of songs from Grease’s Broadway debut and the 1978 film, featuring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John (to which, for the record, I’m still hopelessly devoted), and as such, rings untrue nearly throughout, albeit with some great dance numbers.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Some smart person once said, “If Life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.” Anybody who has fallen in love with Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace, knows how true this is, making it unlikely that an adaptation of the enormous novel for the stage—a musical adaptation at that—would measure up. And yet, somehow, this does. David Malloy’s show, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is gorgeous, preserving Tolstoy’s magnificent prose in a sung-though musical opera. You don’t have to know the novel to enjoy the show, but knowing it makes it all the better.
Leaving “War” out, Malloy chose the central love story: young Natasha (Phillipa Soo) is engaged to Andrey (Blake DeLong); he exits through clanging metal doors in a puff of smoke—the same doors and same smoke that will present Anatole (the spectacular Lucas Steele). The first song, “There’s a war going on out there somewhere and Andrey isn’t here” introduces all characters, with each verse ending with the crucial fact, “And Andrey isn’t here.” In his absence, amoral Anatole with his immoral sister Helene (Amber Gray) and dashing military pal Dolokhov (Ian Lassiter) will seduce the naïve and easily dazzled Natasha. Her friend Sonya (Brittain Ashford) is the perfect contralto foil. Pierre (Dave Malloy—so tender, so hangdog, so good) wastes his life; “our merry, feasting friend” drinks too much, reads too long, and becomes the moral pivot of the plot. His final song, when he sees the comet of 1812 in the “firmament,” is quietly glorious.
By David Patrick Stearns
INQUIRER CULTURE CRITIC
PRINCETON - "Is this professional or volunteer?" asked one of the younger audience members at Into the Woods, now playing at the McCarter Theatre Center in a production by the Fiasco Theater. Good question.
Before the show began on Saturday afternoon, the scrupulously casual actors loitered around the stage, greeting friends in the audience, slowly coalescing into the intricate web of fairy tales retold by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine with a wisdom that grows deeper with repeated exposure.
With its makeshift look and low-tech manner, the Fiasco production relies almost exclusively on the theatrical wiles of the acting, singing, and directing, and has enough revelatory moments to be worth a drive to Princeton. But the production isn't quite as charming as it thinks it is.
An ensemble theater that grew out of Brown University's Trinity Rep MFA acting program, Fiasco has enjoyed success with problematic plays such as Cymbeline. Here, it follows a trend toward stripped-down Sondheim with plainclothes actors who accompany each other on guitar, toy piano, etc.
By Jim Rutter
For THE INQUIRER
On a long enough timeline, every theatre in the country will stage Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor. Like Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, Ludwig’s farce fills the stalls with patrons wanting a laugh and willing to pay for it.
However, the perfect casting at Ambler’s Act II Playhouse elevates their production far above the mid-season filler meant for middle America.
By Wendy Rosenfield
for the Inquirer
Hedgerow Theatre honors the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, with Jon Jory’s faithful 2006 stage adaptation. While Sense and Sensibility currently gathers buzz in musical theater circles, Jory, founder of that great American springboard for new work, the Humana Festival of New American Plays, presents a slightly scaled-back, farce-leaning version of Austen’s witty stroll among the marriage-minded gentry--landed, tenanted or landed-aspirant-by-any-means-necessary.
When a military regiment and a pair of noble gentlemen spend the summer in the vicinity of the Bennet family and their five unwed daughters, romance ensues. Led by spirited Elizabeth, the Bennets’ second-oldest, we are introduced to the tantalizingly emotionally distant Mr. Darcy, prototype for many, many feminine fantasies, and witness the full-flowering of the modern independent-minded young woman. (She’s so modern, the 21st century saw her return in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an adaptation of the novel in which Elizabeth wields a mean walker-decapitating katana.)
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
It’s hard to imagine a better production of Philip Dawkins’ lovely, bittersweet play, Failure: A Love Story . Directed with great delicacy and imagination by Allison Heishman for Azuka Theatre, it is a triumph for this superb cast of young actors, some working professionally for the first time.
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Spoofing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson isn’t exactly a novel notion, although this Curio Theatre parody of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Steven Canny and John Nicholson gives “Elementary” a whole new meaning.
By Wendy Rosenfield
for the Inquirer
It took two years, roughly 100 interviews, a dozen workshops and two and a half hours in three acts, for 1812 Productions to birth It’s My Party: The Women and Comedy Project. But Jennifer Childs’ examination of why women are funny (Christopher Hitchens’ infamous Vanity Fair article stating the opposite gets mentioned and drop-kicked out of the room early on) still seems to be suffering some labor pains.
The trouble comes from both the show’s content and its form. Its ensemble of seven includes some of Philly’s funniest and best-loved performers: Melanie Cotton, Charlotte Ford, Drucie McDaniel, Bi Jean Ngo, Cathy Simpson, Susan Riley Stevens and Cheryl Williams. And while each gets the opportunity to riff an Anna Deavere Smith-style anecdote or two, not all work as comedy, which is the point of the whole effort. Simpson’s tale of lovemaking in lockdown? Hilarious. Williams’ bout with breast cancer? Brave, touching, but not funny. (You want funny breast cancer? Google Tig Notaro and be richly rewarded with a brilliant standup routine and overt lesbian perspective, something sorely missing from this show.)
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Once upon a time, not so long ago, in grungy house in North Philadelphia, there lived two orphans. They ate tuna fish every day and kept their dead mother’s coats hanging in the closet. The older brother, Treat (Ben Foster), is filled with rage and makes their living by mugging people in Fairmount Park; the younger brother, Phillip (Tom Sturridge), is not quite right in his head and stays indoors, leaping around the room, from sofa back to windowsill, agile as a young ape.
This impressive and engrossing revival of Lyle Kessler’s 1983 play, Orphans, is like a fairy tale about innocence and neediness (as most fairy tales are), except that here the orphans are grown men. And what every fairy tale needs is a godfather—her literalized by a Chicago mobster named Harold (Alec Baldwin). Turns out he too is an orphan, with emotional scars and needs of his own, and the old television serial, “The Dead End Kids” becomes their own household fable.
Although Harold is the one kidnapped after a drunken night in a bar, the roles are quickly reversed, and Harold’s money, worldliness and need to be a father-figure, transforms both the younger men and keeps them in thrall to him.
The three knockout performances in these juicy roles are each particularized with details and a quirky, individual style under Daniel Sullivan’s high-speed direction. Baldwin’s Harold is self-amused, alternating between paternal pomposity and self-ironizing nostalgia. Foster’s Treat is the most recognizable kind of stage testosterone: vicious and self-defeating and slightly stupid, punching walls, breaking stuff. Sturridge’s Phillip is astonishingly athletic, convincingly brian-damaged, sweet but never cloying, keeping the pathos real.
The set, designed by John Lee Beatty, is perfectly authentic – I recognize that North Philly house. And the Philadelphia Inquirer Treat reads is wonderfully thick, a bon fide relic of the old days.
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Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre 236 W. 45th Street, NY Through June 30. Tickets $67 - $132 Tele-charge: (212) 239-6200, (800) 432-7250
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Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
