Criticopia

I’m going to say some negative things about End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s play about Judy Garland’s last years. But bear this in mind-- Tracie Bennett who plays Garland, is a great singer, actress, dancer and athlete, and, when she is singing (which takes a while to get to), she rocks the house with both her voice and her performance, which captures nuances of Garland and gives us a geschrei from deep inside her agonized soul. In Act 2 her athleticism approaches Cirque dimensions.

Russian theater is not only alive and well, it is doing some remarkable things. A case in point is In Paris,a play adapted from the Ivan Bunin short story by Dmitry Krymov, who currently teaches at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts in Moscow.

Krymov, who is also a painter, has teamed up with Mikhail Baryshnikov, the most celebrated dancer of his time, who not only agreed to act in the play but to help Krymov develop it at his own arts center in NYC. The result of their collaboration is simply astounding.

Next Act Theater concludes its 2011-12 season with the world premiere of Richard Lyon Conlon’s one time, a story billed as “a man, a woman, a park bench, and a need to share secrets from the past.” It is all that, and so much more. This romantic comedy for older adults is a “must-see” of the spring theater season.

Rich Orloff is a very funny writer, and his HA! [sic], now at the Jewel Box Theater on West 36th Street, gives us a very entertaining evening: three stylistically different comedic ventures. The first, Oedi,is a straight-out farce mocking the Oedipus legend, full of laughs, with an absurdist flair, including a hilarious Gerianne Raphael as Oedipus’ Jewish mother/wife. Oedipus-schmedipus -- as long as he loves his mother!

Attention must be paid to Mike Nichols’ stunning production of Death of a Salesman,the insightful American tragedy of Willie Loman, at the Barrymore Theater. Past and present weave smoothly through Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, again reaffirming its place as possibly the most perceptive drama of the American stage.

South Florida’s New Theater presents its second consecutive world premiere of the season in Winter,in which the adult he-and-she twins of Elinor Winter do battle at mom’s London home after her sudden death. There’s only the relatively young, live-in aide to explain the circumstances – until, that is, the discovery of a not-quite complete journal. But Robert Caisley’s play isn’t a mystery so much as a comedy with serious undertones. Under artistic director Ricky J.

I am one of the few who saw the original Broadway production of this play in 1980 (it ran for 12 performances.) I thought it a brilliant work, though neither pleasant nor reassuring in its treatment of our inability to prevent a horrible death, in this case from cancer, or to alleviate its pain. The pain here is central and omnipresent: not only the victim’s physical pain but also the awful pain of loss.

Dennis Lehane, known primarily for his novels (“Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island”), recently turned one of his short stories, “Until Gwen,” into a play, his first. Coronadowas originally produced by the Invisible City Theater in NYC; now a gutsy new theatre company in L.A., Player King Productions, has mounted the West Coast premiere of the play.

Director Drew Shirley has done Lehane proud, putting together an 11-person cast that deftly and flawlessly brings Coronado to life -- no mean feat, considering the challenges posed by the play.

Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madmanwas first written in 1833 as a short story; soon after that the author converted his work into a stage piece, a monologue. It takes place in a mental institution where Poprishkin, a minor government official (played masterfully by Ilya Volok), talks feverishly, compulsively, about his shattered hopes and dreams.

Rash, brash and gutsy, American Idiot is a punk-rock musical with attitude -- lots and lots of attitude.

You don’t easily forget a play with the word “vibrator” in the title, do you? That must have been the intent of author Sarah Ruhl. The noted playwright could easily have played up this title with a series of cheap laughs. However, she rewards us with a play that is as much about electricity, history and relationships as it is about sex.

Originally produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, American Night: The Ballad of Juan Joseis that rare, blessed thing -- an hilarious farce which also has a social bite to it, a bite that draws blood.

Harold Pinter is best known as a dramatist and screenwriter, but thanks to Julian Sands and John Malkovich, we must now recognize him as a poet as well, one of the finest of the 20th century.

Lisa Kron’s The Veri**on Play [sic], the first of seven full-length and three 10-minute offerings, opened this year’s 36th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville with a satiric blast at corporate America and its woefully boneheaded customer service.

Kron herself plays befuddled Jenni, plunged into customer-service hell when the phone company and its robotic minions keep bugging her about a billing problem she consistently asks them to correct.

The revival of a modern classic is always an occasion for reminiscence, celebrations and some recriminations by nostalgic fans of the original production. In the case of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s great breakthrough drama of African-American struggles against inequality, every revival – and there have been very many distinguished ones worldwide – has to deal with comparison to the historical 1959 Broadway original, which was mostly exactly repeated in the classic 1961 movie.

One of the problems of staging a play that largely takes place around a long table — with a number of place settings — is how to permit the audience to see the facial expressions of all the characters, especially if some have their backs to the viewers. Last February, when Lisa Loomer’s provocative play, Two Things You Don’t Talk About at Dinner,was aired in a Play-Summit reading at the Denver Center, this was not a problem, as all the players were more of less in line at their respective music stands.

When the establishing shot of the Denver Center’s new Shrew turned-up on its website — an obviously Cowbo -Petruchio with a Wild-West Kate on his back — this image reminded your arts reporter of the Wild-West Shrewthat Charles McCalley staged long, long ago, at the Globe-of-the-Great-Southwest, in Odessa, TX. Since that epic adventure in updating Shakespeare, Mantua and Padua have occasionally been relocated to Western-American sites in Utah, Arizona and New-Mexico.

The Fall to Earthstarts out as a play in a comic vein: daughter obliged to share not just a motel room but a single bed with her estranged, control-freak mother. Gradually, though, the comedy begins to give way to drama and then horror as the story unfolds.

If Next Act Theatre administrators were looking for a comedy to fill this dead-of-winter time slot, one wonders what made them choose Morris Panych’s play, Vigil. There is a glimmer of humor here, but the comedy is about the blackest this critic has seen.

Two exceptionally talented actors, Ruth Schudson and Mark Ulrich, do about the best job one could wish in delivering this odd play. Ulrich is an unhappy bank teller who rushes to the deathbed of his elderly aunt. They haven’t seen each other in 30 years. It is not a happy reunion.