Category: theatre

“You wouldn’t know it by looking at its current season, but Phoenix Theatre Ensemble is just getting started. It was only October 2004 when the company mounted its first show, but in the next seven months it will offer six new productions, the return of a previous play, and a community-based work on social justice. That level of output puts the Phoenix on a par with many large New York theatres and major regional companies. But unlike most of those groups, the Phoenix doesn’t even have its own space. It doesn’t have an office or a leader, either.”

The Gilbert and Sullivan classic is a masterpiece of word play. “Theatrical translations, of course, are common. Still, Gilbert’s dazzling patterns of double and triple rhymes, his ingenious puns and his lyrics’ perfect match with Sullivan’s music make the work terribly difficult to translate. Why go to the trouble?”

Every actor dreams of directing, but most theatregoers are blissfully unaware of exactly what it is that a director brings to a production. “If she’s lucky, theatergoers meeting her will say something vague, such as that they enjoyed the show. If a director is doing her job, her contribution may be undetectable, like the eggs in a cake. The finished product wouldn’t be nearly as delectable if the yolks had been left out, but you’re darned if you can single out their presence.”

“With an election imminent, political theater is everywhere in New York. Some of it is broad and partisan, [and] some of it is more subtle, aiming at issues rather than personalities. Some of it even aspires to be work you could stand to watch years from now, when the current administration and its troubles are in the history books.”

A new production of Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, starring an unmistakably weak and ailing Harold Pinter “has been hailed by British reviewers both as a triumphant final hurrah for Mr. Pinter and as a lean and compelling performance by an actor-playwright whose own plays draw heavily on broken language, pauses, silence… Mr. Pinter is now 76, and has battled cancer of the esophagus. He said last year that he would not write any more plays, so there was an inevitable sense of valediction.”

“The organization existed as a performance troupe from 1950 to 1972, then reconvened in 1985 as a theater support organization. Now most of the 15 Lobby members are in their 70s and 80s, some living in retirement communities. Seeing the plays, voting on the awards, raising funds for the small cash prizes and the event to hand them out has become too much.”

Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater “gets pigeonholed as a ‘mom-and-pop’ operation. But now this family has a big, newly renovated house up at the historic Biograph Theater that just emptied the piggy bank by $11.7 million (and counting). And it’s facing a whole different set of economic realities. So, will the family values stay the same? Only to a point, say the parents.” One of the coming changes may be a raising of the bar for the theatre’s stable of affiliated playwrights — an ensemble whose existence sets Victory Gardens apart from most American theatres.

“Few plays have traveled to New York with as much excess baggage as ‘My Name Is Rachel Corrie,’ ” which had no such problems in London. “Those didn’t erupt until the New York Theater Workshop, a nonprofit institution known for championing politically daring work, announced in late February that it would indefinitely delay the play’s American premiere. … Rachel Corrie became a name best not mentioned at Manhattan dinner parties if you wanted your guests to hold on to their good manners.” Now that the play has opened, Ben Brantley writes, “many theatergoers wonder what all the shouting was about.”

“There was a time not so long ago when people would hike to the Gatehouse pumping station at 135th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem just to stand at a railing inside and watch the water rush by below. The water is still there, coursing its way underground to points south in Manhattan, but the building above now offers a different kind of spectacle. The architect Rolf Ohlhausen set out to evoke the public-works legacy of this rugged 1890 building in transforming it into a brand-new 192-seat performance space for Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall. … (The) $21 million theater (is) the first new performance space to open in Harlem in a generation.”

There’s a revival of musicals from the 60s and 70s. Why now? “After raiding much of the Rodgers-Hammerstein canon of 1950s and 1960s hits during the past decade, and much of the ’80s Fosse and Sondheim output, too, a voracious Broadway revival market needs more new (old) blood.”