notanotherbookreview

Life scrolls ever more quickly. It's almost January 2025 yet I still recall the surprise of SKYSCRAPER (Urban Stages November 7-17, 2024), the freshness of this 1960s piece (book by Peter Stone, lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by James Van Heusen.)  After many years of existing only in memory and writing, this  SKYSCRAPER  was the first live onstage revival, since its Broadway debut in 1965.  Multiple collaborators-- Regeneration Theatre , Combustion Collective and Nelda Yaw Buckman  wanted to produce this show, a short run in a small storefront theater on 30th St. Why? This was not a showcase for a bigger production. Economies of scale enriched the focus of this show, on target for its era and ours. Groups dancing seemed to defy our time and the small stage.   SKYSCRAPER was a successful musical with 248 performances, 5 Tony nominations, including "Best Musical." The ballad, "I'll only miss her when I think of her, " was a hit for Sina...

Written and Directed By Edward Einhorn  UNTITLED THEATRE CO. February 8 - March 2, 2019   at A.R.T./New York’s  Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre 502 W. 53rd Street (at 10th Ave) A new play examining the nexus between neuroscience, marketing, art, and love. With: Ashley Griffin*, Mick O’Brien*, Yvonne Roen*, Matthew Trumbull* *Indicates member of Actor's Equity Association Thu - Sat at 8pm Sun Feb 10 and 24 at 5pm; Tue Feb 12 and 26 at 7pm Here's the story. Amy, a lapsed artist and one-time artist's model, is married to Stephen, a neuroscientist investigating how emotions affect the brain. As the play opens, she's not been his only subject but his favorite, as he investigates the neurological impact of their relationship--their love. He speaks and she's not to answer. His words are a stimulus for her brain to register emotion. And when she's had enough she can exit by squeezing a bulb. As the story evolves, Stephen is ...

There's been a fashion of  professional theater performed in apartments but until this HAMLET, I hadn't experienced this. A real surprise  how unexpectedly alive and vital this production was in an intimate chair-filled livingroom where actors and spectators were on the same level. This wasn't experimental as much as a classic restored to the bones of what's essentially a family play--dysfunctional to be sure but a moving discovery in this audacious show. The lead (Melissa Nelson) is a young woman, who looked like a Danish boy yet within minutes commanded with a rational self-possession that trumped her torment. Despite the many cries of "Madness!" and her circumlocutions of language, you question that charge. Relentless as any prosecutor, Hamlet investigates her stepfather and mother, accused by her father's ghost. Though you know the stages of her investigation, the process and outcome, this performance, rational and impassioned, is riveting. A...

William M. Hoffman's 1985 play AS IS, which won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and an Obie for Playwriting, uniquely personalized the AIDS crisis. Regeneration Theatre's revival movingly reminds us how acutely personal "political" can be. Imagine what it would be like in our politicized time if members of an "outsider" group were getting sick and dying from an unknown virus?  Even this winter of 2018, no one is talking about the fact people are dying from flus not covered in shots--a strange and scary development. So what was it like in New York, when AIDS began sickening young gay men? Everyone knew or worked with someone. But no one openly talked  about it, until the "Gay Plague" grew to encompass so many people it could not be ignored. Intolerance grew with the public's fears. Disclosing you had been diagnosed with HIV virus was akin to a leper ringing a bell. People did not literally bolt doors and throw rocks, but the s...

Imperfect Love by Brandon Cole was the basis of Illuminata, a 1998 film he cowrote with John Turtorro and, in an unusual quirk of fate, the play first made into a film is now at the Connelly Theater in New York (thru February 18th.). I found it unexpectedly timely for 2018, though it first appears a period piece. We currently ride a wave of social and technological change, where the old verities, values and attitudes have suddenly become suspect, called to question, even irrelevant.  In Imperfect Love , the 19th century verities about love, the roles of men and women, class and status were celebrated in a mythic theater driven by tumultuous passion and poetry. As Imperfect Love begins, the old plays have lost ground to the  new nordic realism of Ibsen and Strindberg. Plays of the mind, psychologically driven, are replacing the "elevated"emotion of the Italians. This clever play surfs the wave, shifting from mythic reality to our modern psychological age. Imperfect ...