i love you so
The audience seemed to enjoy the production now playing at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater entitled “Miss America’s Ugly Daughter” written and performed by Bess Myerson’s daughter Barra Grant. This comes to the New York stage after a successful year long run in Los Angeles. It is basically a solo show except for the voice of Bess Myerson provided…
“Soft Power” – the culture-bending, plot-twisting musical within a play currently running at The Public’s Newman Theater – challenges the notion that the only effective parameters of power are money, race, and sex. These constructs of “hard” power are the hallmarks of greed, systemic racism, and misogyny and, from Xue Xing’s (a sensitive and alluring Conrad Ricamora) point of view,…
Charlotte and Doug Walker’s son Kai will be home from prison in three months to begin his court remanded probation. Kai is a white university student athlete who was convicted of raping a black female student behind a dumpster at the school and is half-way through his six-month sentence. Kai’s transgression has shaken the Walker’s world and rent any sense…
It is clear from the start of Donja R. Love’s “Fireflies” that Olivia Grace (DeWanda Wise) is among the disconsolate: Olivia is languishing: Olivia’s wounded heart needs healing. There is a fire in Olivia’s soul that counterpoints the fire in the 1963 Fall sky above the home in the Jim Crow South she shares with her preacher-activist husband Charles Emmanuel…
Present, past, and several possible futures collide with the biblical story of Job in Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive with You” currently playing at Playwrights Horizons Mainstage. And within each time frame and tale exist a multitude of layers of complexity and contingency about the human condition, particularly its vulnerability and resilience in the face of elucidated and unexplained…
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish;/Come to the mercy-seat, fervently kneel;/Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;/Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” (Thomas Moore and Thomas Hastings/Samuel Webbe) Sometimes the brokenhearted are aware on some non-conscious level of the impending inconsolable, melancholic, or woebegone event(s) about to befall them. They might find themselves not associating with…
After seeing her estranged daughter’s “veiled suicide threat” on her “anonymous” blog, Beatriz (the irrepressible Daphne Rubin-Vega) drives her truck “like a bat out of hell” from California to Philadelphia to take her daughter Olivia (the deeply reflective Gizel Jiménez) on a seven-day road trip. After some mild mid-adolescent protestations, Olivia – sixteen – agrees to the trip hoping, perhaps,…
Russia, Mueller, Syria, War, The Wall, Elections, Stormy, Stock Market, Tax Cuts, Scandal, Tariffs, DACA, Immigration and Tweets, are a few current headlines monopolizing the news, infecting and affecting our everyday lives. How can we avoid the negative socio-political environment and get away from it all? The answer may be easier and closer than you think. “Escape to Margaritaville” may…
Steeped in tradition, a musical commentary relevant to the current socio-political atmosphere, and an old tale told with songs that echo the poets of the past and the spoken word of the present, are the skeleton of “Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story,” the Klezmer-folk music-theater hybrid now playing at 59E59 Theaters. The Wanderer (a captivating Ben Caplan) is the…
A visit to Classic Stage Company for the current production of “Twelfth Night” is almost like a case of Déjà vu: one could be watching the Company’s previous production of “As You Like it” which closed on October 22nd. The formula for both new productions of the Shakespeare classics involve adding music and singing, the same configuration of the theater…