FIFTEEN STANDOUT THEATER PERFORMANCES FROM 2016

From the list of 163 plays and musicals I've seen this year on and off Broadway, I'd like to highlight 15 performances I found to be standouts.

Some on the list are seasoned veterans, while others seemingly popped out of nowhere to grab hold of the stage and shake it to its core.  

Those I have identified are, of course, representative of my personal viewpoint and tastes. They appear below in alphabetical order.  

Annaleigh Ashford is always a delight, but she really stood out in the roles of Dot and Marie in the brief fund-raising run of Sunday In The Park With George at City Center in October. Much of the publicity centered on Jake Gyllenhaal as George, but it is Ashford who knocked it out of the ballpark and should only get better as the Sondheim musical moves to Broadway for a 10-week run starting in February.  Go for Jake if that's the draw for you (he's very good in the role), but stay for what is likely to be a Tony nominated-performance by Annaleigh.  


Ato Blankson-Wood (along with Vondie Curtis Hall, featured below) blew the roof off the Public Theater during the production of Heidi Rodewald and Stew's latest show, The Total Bent. Blankson-Wood and Hall appeared as a son and father, and represented the shift in the black music scene from church-style gospel to the world of mainstream funk.  Terrific show.  Terrific performances.

Stephanie J. Block will surely be nominated for a Tony for her performance as Trina is the revival of William Finn's resplendent musical, Falsettos. Her show-stopping "breakdown" song alone is worth the price of admission.  

Alex Brightman in School of Rock. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical cleaved too closely to the movie to provide anything new or surprising, but it sure rang up a winner when it tapped Brightman, a dynamo of energy, for the lead role as Dewey Finn, the rock ‘n’ roll slacker who becomes a long-term substitute teacher at an upscale private school  and bumbles his way into becoming an inspiration to his students.  

Timothée Chalamet exuded charisma and self-assurence by the bucketful as the troubled and troublesome title character in John Patrick Shanley's memory play The Prodigal Son.    

Carmen Cusack gave one of those sit-up-and-take-notice performances as the lead character of Alice Murphy in the Steve Martin/Edie Brickell bluegrass-inspired musical Bright Star.  The original cast recording of the show is up for a Grammy.  Got my thumbs up! 

Vondie Curtis Hall, as mentioned above, shared the spotlight with Ato Blankson-Wood in The Total Bent at the Public Theater and gave an unforgettable performance as a preacher and gospel singer, very unhappy with his gay son's embracing of a personal and musical lifestyle that is totally alien to him.   



Katrina Lenk is Broadway-bound in Paula Vogel's Indecent, which I missed during its acclaimed off-Broadway run. Instead, her appearance on this list is for her performance in the little gem of a musical, The Band's Visit.  She was dazzling as the owner of cafe in an isolated Israeli town that is unexpectedly visited by the members of an Egyptian band,  lost while on their way to another venue. I hope she and the musical, with its lovely score by David Yazbek, get another production (after Indecent, of course).  

Kecia Lewis, like Ms. Lenk, caught my attention at the Atlantic Theater Company.  She wowed in Marie and Rosetta as the gospel and R&B singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Her powerhouse performance, including some mighty fine singing, lifted the show far above its bio-play roots.  


Judith Light is an actress who continues to show an undying

love of and commitment to live theater despite her successful career in the television world. Never one to take on easy, lightweight fare, this year we got to see her in Neil LaBute's one-character play All The Ways To Say I Love You, a disconcerting confessional by a school teacher who is a ruiner of lives, including her own. Another splendid performance from the two-time Tony winner.     

Janet McTeer is currently starring on Broadway alongside another terrific actor, Liev Schreiber, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Her place on this list, however, reflects her glorious performance as Petruchio in the all-female Shakespeare In The Park production of Taming of the Shrew in June. Her turn as the raunchy swaggering misogynist was the awesome highlight.



Patrick Page is an imposing presence in any show that

allows him to use his barreling baritone in service of his craft. He has made this list for two performances:  one in the non-singing role of the patrician Menenius in the Red Bull Theater's fiery production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and the other as the sinister character of Hades in the musical version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hadestown, so wonderfully performed in its Off Broadway production under Rachel Chavkin's pitch perfect direction.  

Ben Platt has been rightly identified as the top contender for a 2017 Tony for his bundle-of-twitchy-nerves performance as a troubled teen in Dear Evan Hansen. The show has made a smooth and easy transition from Off Broadway to Broadway and is consistently drawing sell-out crowds to the Music Box Theatre. Best comparison to Platt's performance is with Alex Sharp's 2015 Tony-winning turn in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  

Jennifer Simard in Disaster. Simard was a comic standout as a nun with a gambling addiction in this spoof of the genre of disaster movies that were all the rage in the 1970s. The show incorporated songs from that era, and Simard knocked it out of the ball park with her rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed and Delivered" as a passionate ode to a slot machine.  


Bobby Steggert always gives 110% in the plays and musicals in which he appears (Ragtime, Yank!, Big Fish, Mothers and Sons, among others). His place on this list is for his performance in a small Off Broadway show, based on a true story, called Boy. In it, he gave a richly layered performance as a young man whose parents attempted to raise him as a girl on the advice of physicians and a renowned psychologist after a botched medical circumcision left him without a penis. This forced transgender role ruined his life even more than the accident. Steggert suffused his performance with warmth, gentle humor, and without an ounce of pathos. This was his best work since Yank!

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

Thérèse Raquin: As Gothic As Gothic Can Be

Thérèse Raquin is about as unrelentingly gothic as anything you are likely to see on stage. It the sort of melodramatic tale that occasionally crops up on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater or in some dark and dank bodice ripper of a movie – the kind of thing that Saturday Night Live might have turned into a skit introduced by Dan Aykroyd as Leonard Pinth-Garnell, host of “Bad Conceptual Theater.” 

Our heroine (Keira Knightley, making her Broadway stage debut) has been reared to be quietly tractable by a mildly annoying aunt (Judith Light, a treasure, even in this thankless role). The aunt, Madame Raquin, has decided how perfectly lovely it would be for Thérèse to marry her son, Thérèse’s doltish cousin Camille (Gabriel Ebert), so that the three of them can continue to live together.  Forever!  Thérèse, who has spent her entire life without the least expectation of experiencing any sort of pleasure, acquiesces out of sheer intertia. 

Through most of Act I, Ms. Knightley's character is the embodiment of clinical depression, her demeanor rotating among various facial expressions that include gawking, gaping, goggling, gazing, ogling, staring, peering, and glaring. She has almost nothing to say as day after dreary day passes by, even after Camille decides to drag everyone off to Paris to live. (Who knew that the City of Lights could be so very gloomy).  

Yet despite Beowulf Boritt’s elaborately bleak set design, Paris still manages to work its magic on Thérèse, whose heart and loins suddenly spring to life when she meets Laurent (Matt Ryan), an old friend of Camille. Before you can say “Anna Karenina,” the pair is engaged in a hot and heavy affair, leading inevitably to a plan to murder Camille – and from there to the sort of consequences you would expect to occur in such a tale as this. 

Director Evan Cabnet and the cast – which also includes David Patrick Kelly, Jeff Still, and Mary Wiseman as friends of the family who show up for weekly games of dominoes and who appear to be oblivious to the goings-on – milk the play for every drop of gothic atmosphere they can muster, and it certainly is unlike almost anything else I can recall seeing through my many years of theatergoing.  

British playwright Helen Edmundson's adaptation of Thérèse Raquin (at the Roundabout Theater Company’s Studio 54) is a brave plunge into theatrical performing for the sprightly Ms. Knightley (Pride & Prejudice; The Pirates of the Caribbean), but oh what a head scratcher it has all turned out to be.   

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

‘The Assembled Parties’: Light and Hecht Shine In Richard Greenberg's Quirky New Play

 

'The Assembled Parties':  14 Rms Pk Vu

In The Assembled Parties, the new play by Richard Greenberg, the buzz begins almost as soon the audience members take their seats at the Friedman Theatre and begin to peruse their programs. 

There it is, right beneath the cast list.  Place:  A fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West.  Let me-GASP-repeat. A fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. Now, that’s one sure way to get the attention of real estate-obsessed New York theatergoers!

So before saying a word about the play itself, let me tip my hat to scenic designer Santo Loquasto for his amazing multi-room revolving set, which gives us a sense of what it would be like to call such a magnificent expanse of space “home.”  If only… [sigh!]

But, I digress.

If I were to give an executive summary of The Assembled Parties, I would say it is about the truths that hurt and the lies that heal, and the unexpected acts of kindness that people are capable of bestowing on one another from time to time.  

Be warned, though; the play is something of a puzzle box.  It takes some patience to get through the opaque exposition of Act I, in which we are privy to only just enough information to lead us down the path to faulty conclusions.  It isn’t until Act II, as the characters—particularly those played most compellingly by Jessica Hecht and Judith Light—reveal themselves more fully, that we come to appreciate the play’s most satisfying heart. 

Act I and Act II take place on a two different Christmas Days, one in 1980 and the other in 2000.  In both instances, members of a Jewish family have gathered at the upscale apartment of Julie (Ms. Hecht) and Ben (Jonathan Walker), and their sons Scotty (Jake Silbermann) and Timmy (Alex Dreier).  The occasion is Christmas dinner. 

Mr. Greenberg never does explain why the Jews in his play are celebrating Christmas, nor why the apartment is filled with “goyishe tchotchkes,” as Ms. Light’s character declaims.  I will say, however, that I was reminded of playwright Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), which opens on a character called Lala Levy busily and happily decorating a Christmas tree, until her mother chastises her: “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars!” 

[The link between the two plays is not, I think, a random coincidence, as Lala Levy was played on Broadway by an actress by the name of Jessica Hecht.  Hmmm!  And, for the record, the Christmas tree onstage at the Friedman does not have a star, but an angel on top.]

But I digress again.

As, actually, does the playwright, who appears to be toying with us throughout Act I, replete as it is with tantalizing red herrings about the relationships among the characters.   These include, in addition to the apartment dwellers, Ben’s sister Faye (Ms. Light), her husband Mort (Mark Blum), and their daughter Shelley (Lauren Blumenfeld), along with Scotty’s college friend Jeff (Jeremy Shamos). 

Questions will surely fill your head:  Why have Faye and Mort remained in a clearly loveless marriage for so long? Why does their daughter Shelley seem to be such a misfit, reminiscent of Lisa Loopner, one of Gilda Radner’s iconic characters from Saturday Night Live?  And what is the real story behind the ruby necklace?   Do note that only some of these questions will be answered in due course. 

And any lover of language will have a field day with the play.  Characters use words like “feckless” and “quixotic” and “gravitas” in their everyday conversation; drop references to e. e. cummings, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gail Sheehy; toss around mouthfuls like “hemidemisemiquaver” and “oasis-less desert” (try saying that one three times fast!); incorporate Yiddish expressions as if they had air quotes around them; and, in the case of Ms. Hecht, employ a heightened affectation of speech that is uniquely her own (or that of her character, a former and apparently famous movie actress).

As I said…a puzzle box.  And yet, despite the odd layers and the fragmented bits of information that Mr. Greenberg has piled on top of one another, The Assembled Parties has a rich vein of humanity running through it.  By the end, you may find yourself caught unawares and surprisingly moved, especially by the amazingly strong, caring, and optimistic women played so well by Ms. Light and Ms. Hecht.   Expect those names to appear on the list of Tony nominees. 

The cast as a whole is uniformly strong, and Lynne Meadow has directed with a sure hand.  And if the title is a little obscure, think of it in the same vein as the set of directions that might come with a Christmas present:  "some assembly required."  

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