Theater

Renée Elise Goldsberry (Good People) is set to star in the 1970s musical I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road for the final Encores! Off-Center presentation of the 2013 season. The

Academy Award nominees Ed Harris (Pollock) and Amy Madigan (A Streetcar Named Desire), as well as Theatre World Award winner Glenne Headly (Balm in Gilead) and Drama Desk Award nominee Bill Pullman (

I did something crazy the other day. I read a newspaper. Not a kindle version.  Not the .com version.  No.  I picked up and read an actual, ink comes off on your fingers, NY Times.  (I didn’t pay for it, however – it came to my hotel room door, so there’s that.) As I turned and folded the big gray pages, I couldn’t help but notice the large section devoted to The Crossword Puzzle.  That sucker takes up a lot of space!  And it’s space that could be sold as advertising.  Certainly they could shrink the puzzle a bit, and squeeze in another 1 x 2. But nope.  The Puzzle, as well as a couple of other word games, just sits there like a big, old, stubborn bull, basking in the sunlight on a warm summer day. Obviously that Puzzle is popular.  Seriously popular.  (And if you don’t believe me, watch this doc.) And, here’s the kicker . . . obviously that puzzle is even more popular in print than online. Let me ask you . . . if you had a choice of doing the puzzle on your computer . . . or by grabbing a pencil (or a pen, if you think you’re a real smarty), and digging in, which would you choose? You’d go with the paper version, wouldn’t you?  You’d choose the live, tactile, problem solving, paper version, over the impersonal, tech version, even if it included clues and easy deletes, and so on, right? Same goes for chess.  Any chess players out there?  Which would you rather play with, a friend . . . a 2-D flat screen computer version?  Or would you rather feel those pieces in your hand, and watch your opponent furrow his or her brow over those 64 squares right in front of you? How about board games?  Or cards? See where I’m going with this? Despite the supreme technological advances over the past 10 years . . . there are certain things that people would still rather do live . . . no matter how much easier they are made for us online.  And that ain’t gonna change. And the theater is the same. Sure, pretty soon we’ll be able to get entertainment beamed to just about any device we want, anywhere in the world, at any time (Google Glass, anyone?). But in my mind, that will only make what we do more rare, and therefore more valuable. We’re just as stubborn as the big, old, crossword puzzle, and I don’t think we’ll ever get out of the paper. Unless the paper disappears out from under us entirely. (Got a comment? I love ‘em, so comment below! Email Subscribers, click here then scroll down to say what’s on your mind!) _ _ FUN STUFF: - VOTE for the 2nd Annual Broadway Marketing Awards!  Click here! - Only 22 performances of Macbeth remain!  Get tix. - Win two tickets to First Date on Broadway!  Click here!

Playwright John Guare has given us many enjoyable nights in the theater with such works as The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation and A Free Man of Color (click here to read my review of that). Alas, his latest work 3 Kinds of Exile, now running at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through this weekend, doesn't come off anywhere near as well. The best things about the show, which runs 1 hour and 45 long intermissionless minutes, are its intriguing title and its motivating concept. As the title announces, 3 Kinds of Exile tells the stories of a trio of displaced persons. All three are real-life Polish emigrés whom Guare knew or admired and he gives each his or her own playlet. Their experiences aren’t uninteresting but neither Guare nor director Neil Pepe has figured out how to make them theatrically engaging. The bookends are Karel, the opening monologue in which a man recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy sent out of Poland to the supposed safety of England during World War II; and Funiage, the Brechtian fantasia inspired by the work of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz that ends the evening. Karel is performed by the actor Martin Moran, who did his own one-man show earlier this spring and is comfortable holding a stage alone. But despite Moran’s congenial manner, my attention wandered. I’m told there’s a nice twist at the end of his tale but I missed it. In Funiage, David Pittu plays Gombrowicz, a novelist and dramatist who found himself stranded in Argentina at the outbreak of the war in 1939 and never returned home. The always-game Pittu works hard but his efforts are overwhelmed by the hyperactive staging. Pepe has filled this part of the production with all kinds of stage business. A nine-member ensemble sings, dances, does tricks with bowler hats and spouts surreal dialogue. But it's all flash without any sustaining fire. The centerpiece, and potentially most intriguing of the three plays, is Elzbieta Erased, a tribute to the Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska (say it Cha-zef-ska) who gave up a rising career in her homeland when she married the journalist David Halberstam in 1965 and moved to the U.S. Their marriage didn’t last, her heavy accent made it difficult for Czyzewska to find acting jobs in this country and she died from esophageal cancer three years ago at just 72, still lamenting the hand fate had dealt her. Guare spoke at a memorial service for Czyzewska and says that he wrote Elzbieta Erased as a way to keep her from being forgotten (click here to watch a video in which he talks about his inspiration for the play). I once met Czyzewska at the home of a mutual friend and she told me her whole life’s story after less than 10 minutes of small talk. It is a compelling tale and it inspired the 1987 movie “Anna,” in which Sally Kirkland played the Czyzewska role. But Guare doesn't do it justice here. For starters, Czyzewska isn’t actually a character in Elzbieta Erased. Instead, Guare and the Afro-Polish actor Omar Sangare, who appeared with her in a Polish production of Six Degrees of Separation, portray versions of themselves and, standing at podiums, tell anecdotes about their friend. Sangare is a charismatic guy but Guare, in his Off-Broadway acting debut, has little stage presence, less technique and a voice so weak that it fails to project even in the small space at the Linda Gross Theater. Still, my admiration for Guare continues despite this current disappointment. Few white playwrights create such textured roles for black actors as Guare has done in Six Degrees of Separation and A Freeman of Color and even here for Sangare. And that's not the only kind of reaching out Guare does. He recently patiently mentored a trio of young playwrights on HBO’s “YoungArts MasterC

Synopsis: Set on the remote island of Inishmaan off the west coast of Ireland just before the outbreak of WW2, word arrives that a Hollywood film is being made on the neighboring island of Inishmore. The one person who wants to be in the film more than anybody is young Cripple Billy, if only to break away from the bitter tedium of his daily life. Billy forges a doctor's letter saying that he has TB and only months to live in order to get sympathy from Babbybobby and a ride in his boat over to Inishmore, where he is spotted by the Director and taken to Hollywood for a screen test. Having failed the test, Cripple Billy returns home to find that life will probably never be the same. Finally finding out the truth regarding his parents' apparent suicide, Fate has a couple of surprises still in store for him. Cast:Kate Osbourne - Ingrid CraigieGillian Osbourne, her sister - Gillian HannaJohnnypateenmike - Pat ShortBilly - Daniel RadcliffeBartley McCormick - Conor MacNeillHelen McCormick, his sister - Sarah GreeneBabbybobby - Padraic DelaneyDoctor - Gary LilburnMammy, Johnnypateenmike's elderly mother - June Watson Creative Team:Written by Martin McDonaghDirector: Michael GrandageSet and costumes - Christopher OramLighting - Paule ConstableI think if you were any member of the cast other than Daniel Radcliffe, you would be really quite peed off with both the Noel Coward Theatre and Mr. Grandage. Not only is Mr. Radcliffe’s mug plastered up all over the outside of the theatre and all over the programme cover (just him, mind you), but he is the only member of the cast given a solo bow at the end of the show. Full company bow, solo bow by Mr. Radcliffe, full company bow, solo bow by Mr. Radcliffe, curtain. Yes, I know he’s young, pretty and Harry Potter (there were at least two sad middle-aged women having their picture taken outside the theatre of them draping themselves over the pictures of Mr. Potter) and a very bankable star name, but this play is very much an ensemble piece (and, frankly, the role of Billy is not actually a very big one). There are other people in it, is what I’m getting at. But you wouldn’t know it. From the same pen as The Beauty Queen of Leenane, this is quite a slight play, but with similarly dark overtones and lots of the same kind of comedy. Like Beauty Queen, there are several points where the plot turns on a sixpence, and you are sit there thinking “Oh my god [this] is going to happen” but then it suddenly doesn’t and the plot twists away in another direction, and you are left sitting there feeling that you have been taken up the garden path and then dumped among the hydrangeas feeling stupid. There seemed to be very little actual plot, and I’m not entirely sure what the audience were expecting but there were an awful lot fewer people in the auditorium after the interval. I could have done with two fewer people in the auditorium all the way through – the two idiot teenage boys sitting next to me. One of them tried to get past on his way to his seat and then barged by before I had managed to get up (narrowly missing poorly foot) and had not yet learned how to blow his nose on a handkerchief and treated everyone in the vicinity to a loud and bubbly nasal symphony every five minutes or so, and neither of them had worked out how to get sweets out of a small cardboard box quietly nor how to drink through a straw without a) blowing bubbles in the drink first and b) making that loud slurping noise you get when the drink is running out and you are chasing the dregs of fluid around the bottom of the cup. Needless to say, one of them had a mobile phone which went off during a quiet bit in the second half. Most of this play is very, very funny – leaning towards the “Craggy Island” style. And a certain amount is very, very dark. And the stage is very, very dark for a lot of the time as well – off towards the wings everything fades into obscurity - thankfully most of the action is well centred o

Hearing Audra McDonald's glorious voice singing a very legit version of Alicia Keys' part in "Empire State of Mind" as Neil Patrick Harris rapped an on-the-fly recap was the perfect way to end this y

Is there a better contemporary American director of Shakespeare than Daniel Sullivan? This is the question we, as audience members, pose summer after summer upon departing Central Park's bucolic Dela

Wicked, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman's worldwide hit musical prequel to the classic film The Wizard of Oz, celebrated its 4,000th performance at the Gershwin Theatre on Tuesday, Jun

Green-Wood Cemetery, Variations Theatre Group, Off Off Broadway By Josh Penzell BOTTOM LINE: Poetic epitaphs presented by moonlight in Green-Wood Cemetery. As we walked through Green-Wood Cemetery, I was struck by how peaceful I felt—this was not at all the ghoulish, terror-filled stuff of horror films, but the quiet and serene resting place of hundreds of thousands of souls now interred in one of the first rural cemeteries of New York. And when we arrived at a small clearing of grass amidst a spattering of gravestones, the audience sat and waited, as darkness overtook us, for The Spoon River Project to begin. The Spoon River Project is a theatrical adaptation of an anthology of short, free-form poems by Chicago-lawyer Edgar Lee Masters published in 1915. Masters wanted to reflect on the small-town life of his childhood in Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois, especially the hypocrisy and secrets of the villagers around whom he was raised. He thus created the fictional town of Spoon River (the name of a real river near his boyhood homes) and peopled it with a couple hundred inhabitants, some based on his memory, some completely made-up. The anthology, however, was not a collection of their remembrances or their stories, but rather a compilation of their epitaphs—the dead, after all, have no need to lie and no recourse to change the past. Truth can, therefore, prevail.

"The Comedy of Error" presented by The Public Theater at Delacorte Theater, June 2, 2013 (photo by Joan Marcus) The first of the Public Theater's presentations of Shakespeare in the Park is Shakespeare's take on Plautus' Menaechmi, complicated with an extra set of twins separated as small children.  There's no adaptation credit given in the playbill, but one might presume that dramaturg