Dazzle, The
Gramercy Theater

A few years before R. Crumb's siblings and the Lidz uncles, the Collyer Brothers, real-life "Hermits of Harlem," slowly declined from high society into ostracized seclusion. They were ultimately found, long-dead, by police who discovered the two bodies walled in by eccentric inventions and bundles of newspapers. Richard Greenberg, who is becoming a formidable dramatist, didn't let himself be bound by the truth when turning the Collyer story into The Dazzle, which gives one brother some traits of the other and disregards chunks of real biography.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Elephant Man, The
Royale Theater

The elements are all there for a touching, provocative evening of theater as the sad life of grotesquely deformed John Merrick, "The Elephant Man," is recounted in Bernard Pomerance's famous play. What unfolds at the Royale Theater, however, is a clunky, remote affair, with five Brechtian touches for every two that actually work.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

In the case of drunks, most people prefer to keep a safe distance. But the one on marvelous display in Mike Poulton's adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 150-year-old, 19th-century play is a drunk of the highest order. Playing a rumpled, shabby Russian hanger-on named Vassily Semyonitch, Alan Bates gives a towering portrayal of a man whose world has crumbled on him, and in Fortune's Fool's penultimate scene, Bates performs an extended drunk bit that impresses by how un-technical Bates plays it.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

A play the way they used to make `em, albeit 150 years ago in Russia. In classic theatrical fashion, nothing actually happens -- nothing, that is, except secrets revealed, emotions roiled, foundations shaken and compromises made. Alan Bates, as an impoverished member of the household who pays his rent by occasionally allowing himself to be humiliated, bumbles and apologizes, abases himself and then rises to dignity, and, in a memorable turn, fashions a drunken remembrance into a comedic aria.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Fortune's Fool
Music Box Theater

Fortune's Fool, Turgenev's mid-nineteenth-century play is more of a valid drama for today than most plays written in the last decade. Its people have deep feelings and deep inner pain and find themselves in a moral dilemma. And how brilliant are two of today's finest actors: the great farceur Frank Langella and the amazing Alan Bates, who gives us long monologues without a moment that isn't fascinating. What a privilege to see a master like Bates play a character who declaims while getting progressively drunker -- it's one of the all-time great drunk scenes.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

Okay, regarding what all you've heard about The Graduate: it's only half-true. Yes, Kathleen Turner bares all. Yes, the show often bastardizes Mike Nichols' benchmark counterculture motion picture. And yes, the cast is wildly uneven and, in one case, downright awful. But it seems to me the shuddering cold response by critics operates on a decidedly pro-American bias, almost as if to say, "How on earth could this be a hit in (gasp!) London!" (Let's also not forget that many American productions are now heading there, not vice versa lately).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

Though not the disaster most critics have tagged it, this is still a curious production, one that retains some of the classic film's humor but feels utterly divorced from context or meaning, despite the between-scene snippets of `60s pop.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Graduate, The
Plymouth Theater

The Graduate is a hoot. Kathleen Turner's star turn is in the best Bankhead mode, and her impeccable timing brings a heartfelt laugh to every punchline in this fun-from-start-to-finish comedy. We know what's going to happen in this tale of seduction and first love, and this play's success is all in the telling. Adapted and directed by Terry Johnson, with a brilliant sense of what real comedy is, and long knowledge of whom to cast in the leads, the show totally succeeds.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Four
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

The generally high-level Manhattan Theater Club has a show called Four, by the very inept (for much of the show, we're listening to one half of a telephone conversation) Christopher Shinn, whose forebear was undoubtedly the bumbling Mayor Shinn in Music Man. Much of the dialogue rings false in this story of two interactions: a teenage gay white boy and a fifty-or-so-year-old black man who likes boys, and the man's lovely, bright daughter and her illiterate, basketball-playing young lover.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Mystery of Charles Dickens, The
Belasco Theater

He's the college English professor you wished you had - the one who transforms the life and works of an author into a lecture as entertaining as it is educational. Grandly hammy Simon Callow narrates and plays Charles Dickens, a bunch of Dickens' most colorful characters, and Dickens playing those characters. He justifies his over-the-topness by reminding us that this is probably how Dickens played Micawber, Gamp and Heep when he embarked on the reading tours that thrilled but ultimately killed him.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Helen
Public Theater

It was bound to happen. After a sterling year including the newly Pulitzer-awarded Topdog/Underdog, the interesting Keith David-Liev Schreiber Othello revival and Elaine Stritch at Liberty (probably the most rewarding and transporting production I've ever had the privilege of writing about theater), The Public Theater has finally laid an egg. And, my, how this egg is cracked.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Oklahoma!
Gershwin Theater

Before I nitpick Trevor Nunn's mounting of Oklahoma! to death, let it be said that his production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tuner makes a full and lively evening of theater, that the orchestra - placed above the stage rather than under it - sounds lovely, and Susan Stroman's new choreography for the act one dream sequence proves highly effective. The musical as a whole still casts a spell -- its slapdash, should've-been-cut trial scene notwithstanding. Performances, however, are hit and miss.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

In an effort to be thoroughly modern as well as thoroughly old-fashioned, Thoroughly Modern Millie turns out to be thoroughly rancid. After a slate of dreadful musicals this season (By Jeeves and Sweet Smell of Success among them), here comes yet another, and the worst part is it didn't have to be. Based upon a 1967 film by George Roy Hill that hardly needed reviving in any capacity, Millie could have taken that picture's best assets and thrown away what doesn't quite work (something The Full Monty did so wonderfully).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

With her stick-figure legs splaying every which way yet still suggesting a dancer's grace, with her belty voice and her game goofiness, Sutton Foster is the focal point of this new-but-feels-like-a-revival tuner, which initially plods like a watchable flop and then, after a couple of strong sequences and silly-funny surprises, turns into an audience-pleasing hit.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

I am happy to report there is practically nothing new in this deliciously old-fashioned musical. Therefore, its goal is to be entertaining -- how unusual in today's "modern" standards (and we all know how depressing the "modern" musicals have been!).

Jeanne Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Topdog/Underdog
Ambassador Theater

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks starts with incomprehensible babble and segues into comprehensible babble. More of a vaudeville turn with two terrific actors than a play, it gives us brothers named Lincoln and Booth, with Booth (Mos Def) the verbal one, the rapper, as a petty thief, and Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright), a black man playing Lincoln in whiteface in a carnival, the physical comedian. Wright's miming is super, especially as he drunkenly shows Lincoln being shot several ways.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Dazzle, The
Gramercy Theater

I still remember the headlines in 1947 about the reclusive Collyer Brothers whose apartment was so full of papers and junk, it took sixteen days to find the body of one of them buried under the debris. Richard Greenberg has imagined their neurotic, and eventually psychotic, life from 1905, when the reclusion begins, to their death in `46 in his engrossing play, The Dazzle. Peter Frechette and Reg Rogers as the brothers have each created character idiosyncrasies that make the ordinary fascinating.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
A.M. Sunday
Actors Theater of Louisville

In his claustrophobic a.m. Sunday, the fourth offering in the 26th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, playwright Jerome Hairston drops us into the home and lives of a troubled interracial couple and their two uneasy sons. Hairston himself was born to a black father and a Korean mother, and though he has said the play is not autobiographical, one would expect more dramatic revelations from the situation than he provides. Little here makes this family and its problems different from others without the racial mix.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Broadway By The Year: The Broadway Musicals of 1933
Town Hall

The brainchild of its genial and informed host and popular critic/author Scott Siegel, Broadway by the Year moves into its second season with a modest but vastly entertaining show that commemorates many forgotten and now fabled songs: "The Broadway Shows of 1933." Without sets and costumes and offering little of what you would call choreography, five charming performers (Mary Testa, George Dvorsky, Mary Bond Davis, Anne Runolfsson and Mark Coffin) bring their winning talents to a melange of musical-theater melodies.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Bachelors, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Theater

When this crazy musical first appeared in Milwaukee exactly a year ago, the unthinkable happened. Fred Alley, the Wisconsin playwright who wrote the show's book and lyrics, died of a heart attack in a nearby town. His death was particularly traumatic, as it seemed to end a promising career. Alley's script for The Spitfire Grill had just been optioned for a film, and his other plays were gaining wider acceptance.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Crucible, The
Virginia Theater

Another look at Arthur Miller's great, important play makes us realize the puny ambitions and paltry concerns of nearly every other dramatist out there.  In post-9/11 America, The Crucible seems less about mass hysteria and more about small-minded men trying to govern the world using half-truths and fear. Richard Eyre's acclaimed London staging plods a little around the edges (characters, when not center stage, tend to stand on the periphery with nothing else to do but quiver), but the drama's potency remains undiminished. 

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Crucible, The
Virginia Theater

Richard Eyre has directed a gripping, powerful production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Liam Neeson brings the main character to vivid life and is so strong, his fall is amplified when this honest man is attacked by religious fanatics in the 17th Century. Brian Murray, bringing a soft honesty to his role, gives one of the finest performances of his career, and Angela Bettis shines as the unrelenting accuser.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Melissa Errico: New Standards
Cafe Carlyle at Carlyle Hotel

After making an initial splash in show business at the age of 18 in the national tour of Les Miserables, Melissa Errico landed a major role on Broadway in Anna Karenina. She would soon receive acclaim as Eliza, in the Broadway revival of My Fair Lady (with Richard Chamberlain) and in High Society. But it was as the eternal goddess in One Touch of Venus for the City Center "Encores!" series that probably assured her a place among the best new leading ladies.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, The
John Golden Theater

If you know the play's big secret, that spares you watching the first half hour, so here it is: the lead character, a successful architect and family man, confesses to a friend he's in love with a goat. The next hour shows his wife and gay son screaming at and insulting him while he tries to explain why. The last twenty minutes features a father-son reconciliation of sorts, and a wife who exacts revenge.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Forbidden City Blues
West End Theater

What do a crazy Russian general, an American consul who likes to dress as a clown, and a blind, Black blues singer have in common? Alexander Woo puts them together in Beijing in a new comedy, Forbidden City Blues. From his wheelchair, Blind Amos Cunningham (Jose Ramon Rosario) supplies ironic commentary on people and politics to introduce each scene (music by Ken Weiler, lyrics by Woo). An unsuspecting American couple -- Mandarin-speaking Alice (Kate Chaston) and naive Chinese-American Raymond (Rick Ebihara) -- land right in the vortex of an arch scheme.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Four
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

In his gentle drama Four, Christopher Shinn displays a Kenneth Lonergan-style talent for letting quirky, flawed but very believable characters quietly go through their paces, colliding with each other and leaving both grace notes and scars. Four keeps us guessing what will occur in the pairings of Joe, a married black man and June, a closeted, 15-year-old gay teen, as well as Joe's daughter and a charming, streetwise basketball player and minor thief.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Fred Garbo Inflatable Theater Company
New Victory Theater

The Fred Garbo Inflatable Theater Co. gives us two of the finest performance artists around (or is it "New Vaudeville?"). Garbo is a juggler, mime, clown and gymnast who has created a unique extravaganza using huge inflated cubes as his costumes and props. His partner, the stunningly beautiful Brazilian dancer Daielma Santos, does the acrobatics with him and lights up the stage with her dancing. The show, which runs at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street, is an exposition of creative fun (for all ages) from start to finish.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Further Than The Furthest Thing
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage I

Further Than the Furthest Thing at Manhattan Theater Club is basically about moronic people in a wretched situation. It starts with incomprehensible rapid-fire chatter from Jennifer Dundas and goes to the stupidity of dropping eggs so they break -- twice. A magician/capitalist enters, and things pick up a bit, and it's "should the factory come to this primitive island?" "Local Hero" did that one a lot better. The cast of five utilize five different accents as their community rolls towards death and destruction. Not a lot of fun.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Actor's Asylum

I guess you could call it eavesdropping. Well, it was hard not to hear the Trumans, Sam and Sally, talking with their beach-house guests. They were Sam's sister, Chloe, and her husband, John Haddock. Sally's brother, David, recently died of AIDS, and the Truman's are taking care of the estate. I mean the houses are shoulder-to-shoulder on the beach on Fire Island. And you know absolutely everybody is out for the fourth of July.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Metamorphoses
Circle in the Square

Circle in the Square Theater is the perfect home for this enchanting, imaginative concoction. Where else could the audience get as wet? Metamorphoses is an Arabian Nights out of Ovid - ancient tales retold with marvelous theatricality in "Story Theater" style, with brilliant conception by writer- director Mary Zimmerman, set by Daniel Ostling, costumes by Mara Blumenfeld, and great lighting by T.J. Gerckens. Vivid images and many funny moments fill this juxtaposition of ancient doings with contemporary language.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Oklahoma!
Gershwin Theater

The Gershwin Theater has finally found a tenant sizable enough to fill its outsized reaches, and for the most part, Trevor Nunn's unsurprising but perfectly respectable revival of Oklahoma! makes good on being the latest Cameron Mackintosh spectacle. This transfer of the Royal National Theatre's acclaimed production (which catapulted Aussie Hugh Jackman to international stardom) makes good of the show's old-fashioned intentions, though its makers are clearly trying to fashion an Oklahoma! for the new millennium.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Oklahoma!
Gershwin Theater

The new Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is, from start to finish, a gorgeous rendition. This is a musical for all time, one of the very greats, with a hit song every ten minutes. And this production outdoes all others I've seen in its integration of all the elements, particularly the dance numbers by Susan Stroman -- a perfect blend of music and movement. All the cast members can really sing -- I somehow like that in a musical.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
One Mo' Time
Longacre Theater

The history behind One Mo' Time, the current revival of the wildly successful late 1970s musical about a New Orleans black vaudeville house, is infinitely more interesting than anything contained in this well-meaning but lackluster update. Set cabaret-style amidst a deluge of revues (Ain't Misbehavin' was just one), it seemed right in its time, highlighted the underground movement of black jazz, and arguably paved the way for current acts like many you might see at Joe's Pub on a weekend evening.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
One Mo' Time
Longacre Theater

Throughout the time One Mo' Time occupies the Longacre stage, we keep wondering when will the fun stop? When will the same-sounding songs start to grate? And when will we want more than a wisp-thin backstage plot to fill out the evening? Credit writer/director Vernel Bagneris for staring down those questions for two full hours, right up to the ebullient curtain call.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
One Mo' Time
Longacre Theater

Don't go see One Mo' Time unless you want to smile for two hours. This show is basically a concert of happy New Orleans music, a 1920s "Colored Show" on tour. Written and directed by Vernel Bagneris, who, with his relaxed sleepy tone, defines the soft shoe dance. Singing and dancing, he's the epitome of cool. Co-starring three spectacular women who sing, dance and characterize, B.J. Crosby, Roz Ryan and Rosalind Brown, with a scintillating five-piece band, the show is part Bessie Smith, part minstrel show, all good natured, all entertaining, all fun.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
QED
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

In telling the life story of Richard Feynman, Peter Parnell's QED chops all the charismatic physicist's recollections into mini-bites that are endlessly interrupted by ringing telephones, knocks at the door and his own racing intellect. Alan Alda's charm keeps things percolating for the first hour, but a static and predictable second act - complete with a femme ex machina - dulls the evening considerably. Copenhagen it ain't.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
QED
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

QED, now at Lincoln Center, is a visit with Nobel-winning physicist, drummer and humorist Richard Feynman, one of the most interesting men of the 20th Century, portrayed by one of the most likable actors on Earth, Alan Alda. Both men have a contagious life spirit, and this show is the rare one with intellectual and philosophical content that is unceasingly engaging. It's a treat for the mind and a theatrical delight. Peter Parnell has somehow fashioned Feynman's material into a play that is an uncommon treat -- it has fascinating content and is totally entertaining.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Smell of the Kill, The
Helen Hayes Theater

Michele Lowe's The Smell of the Kill, a zippy but glib dark comedy about three upscale wives debating whether to let their annoying husbands freeze to death in a meat locker, gets two important things right. First, the characters are strongly thought out and, except for a predictable last-minute switcheroo by the most domesticated of the trio (Claudia Shear), stay true to their backgrounds and motivations.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Smell of the Kill, The
Helen Hayes Theater

Want to spend a dollar a minute to see a cute little sitcom? It's Broadway; it's $70 a seat; it's 70 minutes long: The Smell of the Kill by Michele Lowe. The boorish, idiotic husbands of three well-to-do women are trapped in the meat freezer in the basement. Should the wives let them out? That's the play. And it does start cute. Then it gets dumb; then it segues into real stupidity, with a sprinkling of good sitcomish jokes. It's all really one joke, though. It tries to be a black comedy but doesn't have the bite of an Orton, a Pinter (or anybody).

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Sweet Smell of Success
Martin Beck Theater

Another dark new tuner that demonstrates just how tough it is to create musical magic, even when the talent is there, the story is interesting, and a couple of songs catch the ear. John Guare's book shows real ingenuity at times (a build-up of sycophantic Sidney's behind-the-scenes machinations reaches a wonderful payoff in act one) but never clears up some crucial motivations or answers certain basic questions, such as what is J.J. Hunsecker's weird fixation on his sister really about, and why does protegee Sidney have no other career options?

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002

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