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OAN MARCUS / MHT / AP |
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D O U B T
John Patrick Shanley's 90-minute drama is simple in outline, complex in
resonance. A priest at a Bronx parochial school in the 1960s is
suspected by a nun of sexually abusing one of the boys. Is he guilty,
or a victim of groundless accusations? The play thwarts all our
comfortable assumptions. The accused (Brian F. O'Byrne) is a
hardworking, progressive priest whose defensiveness seems perfectly
consistent with a man unjustly charged. The nun (the magnificent Cherry
Jones) is a stubborn, old-school bulldog who has precious little
evidence for her suspicions. The clash of wills is riveting; the
outcome unsettling. This Manhattan Theater Club presentation is moving
to Broadway in the spring and will certainly be a major Tony contender. |
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F I D D L E R O N T H E R O O F
In a bad year for new musicals, let's give a cheer for one Tradition
renewed—this beautifully mounted Broadway revival of the Jerry
Bock-Sheldon Harnick classic. Alfred Molina was a Tevye shorn of
schtick but full of down-to-earth humanity (he's since been replaced by
Harvey Fierstein—oy!), and David Leveuax's production embraces all the
color, humor and poignance of Joseph Stein's book, one of the best of
all musicals.
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S E A O F T R A N Q U I L I T Y
Howard Korder (Boys' Life, Search and Destroy)
may be America's most underrated playwright. His latest play, which had
a short-lived off-Broadway run, revolves around a psychologist and his
wife who have moved to the Western desert to escape personal troubles
that come back to haunt them. Korder's dialogue is as piercing and
cryptic as Mamet's, but he also knows how to build a story with just
the right mix of melodrama and mystery. |
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S I G H T U N S E E N
A famous artist visits an old girlfriend, now living in the boonies of
England with her archeologist husband. Donald Margulies' 1992
relationship drama is perhaps his best play, and the Manhattan Theater
Club's revival provided a great showcase for Laura Linney, an actress
so achingly alive in every moment that you can't take your eyes off
her.
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G E M O F T H E O C E A N
If this were the first of August Wilson's 10-play cycle about 20th
century black life, it might be at the top of this list. But it's the
ninth (set in the first decade of the century, with a character 287
years old and a search for a mythic "City of Bones") and Wilson's
mystical turns have become perhaps too familiar. Yet the poetry and
power of his writing is still one of the glories of the American stage.
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D A M E E D N A : B A C K W I T H A V E N G E A N C E !
With one-person shows all over Broadway this fall, Australian comic
Barry Humphries (in his second visit to Broadway as the primly
irreverent matron Dame Edna) at least knows how to fill up the stage:
enlist the paying customers. Humphries' audience-participation stunts
are inventive, his ad-libbing expert, and his manhandling of the crowd
surprisingly free of showbiz smugness.
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F R O Z E N
Three characters—the mother of a murdered 10-year-old girl, the
pedophile who killed her and the psychiatrist who is studying his
mind—speak directly to the audience in what amounts to a round-robin of
monologues. Bryony Lavery's drama is limited by that format, but she
has crafted a stark and uncompromising look at the various ways a
horrible crime can be dissected. |
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A S S A S S I N S
Stephen Sondheim's famously problematic musical about Lee Harvey
Oswald, John Wilkes Booth and other Presidential-killers from American
history is still problematic: too sketchy, too superficial, too glibly
cynical. But Joe Mantello's slick and well-sung Broadway revival made
the best case possible for it, and resurrected one of Sondheim's most
appealing latter-day scores.
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F I N I S H I N G T H E P I C T U R E
Arthur Miller, 89, apparently felt he didn't get slammed enough for After the Fall.
In this new play (which had its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman
Theater), he takes another look at his failed marriage to Marilyn
Monroe, this time through the lens of The Misfits, her last
movie, for which Miller wrote the screenplay. Miller engages in a
little score-settling (in his portrayal of the Strasbergs, Marilyn's
acting coaches), but mostly his backstage account of a Hollywood film
in crisis is convincing and even-handed, and his portrayal of the last
stages of his marriage brutally candid.
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C H A R L I E V I C T O R R O M E O
This off-off-Broadway docu-play puts us in the cockpit of airplanes
about to crash, as a handful of actors recreate the crew members' final
conversations, taken from actual black-box recordings. From the mundane
small talk to the sudden bursts of panicked pilot-speak, it's a rough
ride, but one of the best examples of the increasingly popular genre of
plays drawn entirely from verbatim transcripts.
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