Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Dance -- Keigwin + Company at the Joyce Theater

For their opening night at the Joyce Theater, Keigwin + Company presented four dances.  Natural Selection was the ins and outs of three pairs of dancers in muted colors suggestive of simplicity and nature that didn't add anything to similar modern pas de deux variations, and the dancers sometimes searched for their footing when set down from a lift.  One learned fast to keep ones eyes on Liz Riga, a tall, long legged, extremely flexible and vibrant dancer.

Love Songs, to music by Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, was more varied in terms of partnering and with more traces of street dancing, but tended to repeat its good "bits."  The program notes that Liz Riga "was named one of the top 20 dancers of 2008 by Dance Magazine for her 'over the top raunchy/funny femme fatal' performance of Larry Keigwin's Love Songs."  She's great, but that's an overstatement of the role.

Triptych was a world premier but brought nothing new.  The last, Bolero NYC, had an interesting possibility:  large numbers of people of all sizes, shapes and ages promenading dance-like in an open urban area -- like Washington Square Park, many of the dancers come from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts near there.  Once dancer -- yes, Liz Riga -- leads a dog.  There's a steady-ahead bicyclist.  Everybody wears black and red miscellaneous costumes from "Our Closets."  There are crowd pleasers:  an extremely tall ectomorphic male parading slowly in a tiny red bikini;  an overweight woman in a bright red satin dress wiggling to "Bolero," and in fact, the ballet panders to laughs and sentimentality. A tiny tot of a girl is left too long alone on the stage with an inflated balloon;  and, as if Ravel's "Bolero" wasn't enough, at the end there's a segue to "Celebration." 

The dancing ranged from competent to, in one case, tops -- the women were generally finer dancers than the men -- but all in all the choreography lacked imaginative vigor.

Keigwin + Company dances at the Joyce Theater -- usually a GREAT venue for dance -- in NYC's Chelsea district June 23-27.

                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome ... please scroll down and click on "comment" (absolutely no emails appear with comments)

Film -- Whatever Works, written and directed by Woody Allen ...

                                                   (  ... but he doesn't act in it ...)

Whatever Works is about a brilliant man with a totally morbid view of people and existence -- a real Woody Allen stand-in.  Most of us manage to block out this fundamentally realistic view of existence most of the time, but Boris Yelnikov sees it and feels it every moment -- no wonder he's given to panic attacks.

Once a Physicist at Columbia University "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize" -- echoes of Brando, "I could have been a contender" -- Boris is now a professorial dropout who pays rent on his dingy, wonderfully textured Greenwich Village apartment by teaching chess to children, and berating them for their stupidity.  For Boris, everyone is stupid except himself, and he believes this with good reason:  he had hold of a unique understanding of the full tragedy of existence.

The scruffy, balding Boris, gimpy from a failed suicide attempt, meets up with Meloody, an under-21 beauty pageant winner from the deep South who is, he thinks, stupider even than the other "worms" and "cretins" around him -- this is as hilarious looking a September-May romance as has ever been filmed.  Melody, played by Evan Rachel Wood, has the youthful comfortable in her underwear charm that's characterized Allen's leading ladies since Annie Hall.  Allen has a wonderful time -- so does the lucky audience -- with their collision of sophistication and naivete, of his burdened, wary pessimism and her dreamy optimism and joie de vivre.

Melody's small town Alabama conservative church-going Mother appears -- herself a runaway from the disasters that, yes, even the most mainstream middle class Americans risk, and in no time she's fully into the New York swing, showing her photographic collages of rearranged body parts of naked men and women at a tony art gallery.  Uptight Dad -- sort of a Governor Mark Sanford type -- comes soon and it doesn't take long for him to get liberated either, as it all spins off into an impressive series of mix-and-match loves (like Mom's polymorphic body collages).  And these loves are ... well, "Whatever Works."

New York City is lovingly filmed -- the movie starts reassuringly, though somewhat slowly, in a Greenwich Village cafe, and gathers steam with the arrival of the finest actor in the cast, Patricia Clarkson as the Southern Mom.  It's a very funny movie but ... if only Woody Allen were delivering the irony and pessimism himself.  Larry David as Boris comes recognizably close, and at times even manages to look like Woody -- or Woody's camera manages to make that happen -- which makes you realize whom you really want to see playing Boris.

Woody Allen cuts deeper and deeper to the bone of existence, which has always been his subject.  As the movie moves along, he hands over his ultimate pessimism to love.  That's part of his genius:  he never forgets who he is as an artist -- a comedian -- and by the end he lets you off the hook so you can leave with a happy smile -- thank you, Woody.

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down and click on "comments" (emails never appear with comments)

Off-Broadway in the Hamptons -- Bell, Book And Candle by John van Druten, directed by Jack Hofsiss, at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor

In Bell, Book and Candle, Gillian Holroyd, a modern day witch, bewitches an attractive regular guy to fall in love with her and in the course of it is bewitched herself.  It's a delightful comedy, witty, romantic, with a shiver of the occult, and contemporary -- if by contemporary we can include around 1950.

It all takes place in Gillian's mid-20th century New York City apartment -- complete with sunken living room, portable cocktail bar, and clunky land lines.  She's attracted to the handsome publisher in the apartment upstairs, Shepherd Henderson, and while she'd prefer to attract him to her in the regular way, there's no time -- he's about to announce his engagement that very night and, worse, to a girl she hated in college -- so she has to use her witchcraft in a hurry, helped by her cat Pyewacket -- the name's enough to turn the cat into a character.  (Most witches, like Gillian's brother Nick and her Aunt, Miss Holroyd, can't do much more than turn the lights on and off with a snap of the fingers or pass through a door but Gillian is really tops!)

Sidney Reditch, an eccentric author and expert on witches, happens by (so he thinks, but he's really been compelled by a spell) and holds forth on how witches are hidden everywhere looking like regular people, and holding conspiratorial meetings in high places.  "They're all around us," he claims, "anyone might be a witch."  And seizing on Shep, the one non-witch in the bunch, he says, "But I can tell one when I see one."  Recognizing -- particularly at the word "Un-American" the playwright's spoof on Senator Joe McCarthy and his anti-Communist "witch hunt", the audience had a good laugh.  What a laugh that must have been during the height of McCarthyism and the run of the play!

"Witches don't cry."  The playwright has a psychological point to make.  Witches, as he sets them up, are self-centered, always looking to get what they want via short cuts, and are incapable of love, and as the play unfolds the effects of this personality type on itself and the havoc it can reek on others is dramatized.  Will Gillian make the leap from narcissism to love?  It's not fair to say, but I can tell you that the play ends with one of the best last lines ever!

Bay Street Theatre has given this beautifully crafted play a fine production -- stylish, great set, well paced, and acted with vigor and charm.  Marvelous actors have played the romantic roles:  Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer in the original Broadway production, which John van Druten directed, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novack in the movie, the origin of the TV series "Bewitched";  here, Arija Bareikis as Gillian and Sam Robards as Shep make an appealing pair, and like all the cast  are great fun to watch.

Bell, Book And Candle plays at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY through June 28th.

                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak  

Now here's a story that's followed this play:  During the original Broadway production, the married actor couple Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer were continually trying to break one another up on-stage "for fun."  Rex Harrison arranged with the Stage Manager to make the phone ring at a wrong time.  Lilli Palmer walked over the the phone, put it to her ear, and handed it over to Rex Harrison, saying sweetly, "It's for you, Darling."

Comments welcome ... please scroll down and click on comments (absolutely no emails show on comments.)  Thank you!

Things of Dry Hours by Naomi Wallace, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, New York Theatre Workshop

It's the deep South, 1932, during the Great Depression and we're in the home of Tice Hogan, a Black man who's lost his job at the local factory, and his daughter Cali, a young woman with a sour marriage behind her.  They're making do -- Tice picks up some odd jobs and Cali does laundry for White folks -- when a White guy, Corbin Teel, tumbles into their house, he's probably killed a foreman in a fight at the factory, needs a hideout, and forces the Hogan's to let him stay by using as a lever his knowledge, from some guys at the factory, that Tice is a member of the Communist Party.

How unusual for current theater -- a sympathetic communist character.  Things of Dry Hours  has an important point to make:  capitalism, not racism, is the fundamental enemy of men and women at the bottom of the barrel, a view Marx would endorse.  Racism is a capitalist device and diversion.

Naturally, and metaphorically, bonding takes place among the three.  Corbin has probably been sent by the higher-ups as a snitch.  Nevertheless Tice's humanity and belief that people can change lead him to try teaching the illiterate Corbin the truth about capitalism as he sees it, as well as how to read, using the Communist Manifesto as the text for both.  Corbin falls for the bitter and eccentric Cali.  She's the toughest nut to crack of the bunch but love, of a kind, does filter through her hard veneer.

This is promising dramatic material.  Unfortunately, the play is not well written and makes several missteps.  To mention just a few.  In Scene 1 Tice Hogan has just arrived at a dark entry to heaven after an uncomfortable journey a number of years after the incidents of the play;  this scene has nothing to do with the play as it unfolds.  The grotesque sexual humiliations Cali forces on Corbin, and Corbin's acquiescence, don't ring true:  explanations are provided that she's turning the tables in response to humiliations she's suffered, and he's hot, but nevertheless these sadistic scenes seem dragged in and motivated by something outside the play itself.  The nude male forced strip scene, not of Cali's doing, did not emerge from the play but also seemed dragged in.  And all these characters are much too well spoken and knowledgeable about the world at large than is plausible.  If we weren't told we were in a small town in Alabama in 1932 we'd never guess it.   

What makes Things of Dry Hours  at least interesting to watch is Delroy Lindo as the Biblically magisterial yet vulnerable Tice, Roslyn Ruff as the ornery but tender Cali, and Garret Dillahunt as the frantic, doomed Corbin.  In spite of the fine cast, though, in its present state, it seems like a play with potential seen in an early workshop production.

Things of Dry Hours plays at New York Theatre Workshop in NYC's East Village through June 28.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome!  Please just scroll down and click on "comment" (no emails ever appear).

You, Nero by Amy Freed, directed by Sharon Ott, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre -- Off-Broadway in California

You, Nero is an at times hilarious comedy, so wacky and so focused on the decadent emperor that it's easy to miss it's aimed at serious matters.  The setting is Rome, 64 AD.  Scribonius, a "serious playwright" (much humor derived from contemporary hip lingo applied to the past) is conscripted by Nero to write a play to shine up the wicked emperor's image.  Ah, but Scribonius is an idealist, imbued with the view -- harking back to the Greeks -- that theater should educate and uplift.  

The viperous web of Nero's circle wastes no time in seducing him.  Poppaea, Nero's wife, gets to him with sexual pleasures he'd only imagined (what do they do?).  Worse, yielding to the Emperor's flattery -- and power over life, death and torture -- Scribonius sets about writing a Nero-pleasing play, his conscience yielding to rationalizations conveniently provided by the philosopher Seneca.  Through his art, Scribonius will make Nero a better man.

First try:  he'll write a play that shows Nero as virtuous, and so lead the emperor to virtue.  But that doesn't please feckless, narcissistic Nero, for reasons not clear to me but with lots of laughs derived from the impulsive and cruel antics and responses of the childish, sexually ambidextrous and all-powerful emperor, wonderfully played by Danny Scheie.  Scribonius tries another tack, digging deep to bring out the Emperor's essential human innocence in an extremely interesting sequence because it almost makes you believe in it -- a stretch, though, since in the course of the play, Nero castrates his sex toy, Fabiolo, to keep him boyish and murders his own mother and he will, in due course, play the violin -- his art -- as Rome burns.

Act I relies too much on "we're on our way to Caesar's Palace" type jokes and, when those waver, slapstick -- not everyone stayed for Act II.  Too bad, because in Act II when the comedy gets serious, genuine wit emerges and by the end, so much has been deeply funny, ironic, and worth thinking about, it's hard to remember dull Act I.

Scribonius is castrated as an artist as Fabiolo is physically -- at least he never comes up with a play that pleases the Emperor, and we're left thinking he won't be writing any more plays.  But though he's responded in oh so human ways to seduction and intimidation -- his conflicts humorously and wisely conveyed by Jeff McCarthy -- he's not corrupt.  He's failed to improve Nero's character through his art, and Rome does catch fire during a zany bread-and-circuses rock concert, but the now wiser Scribonius hopes and imagines that sometime in the future -- with the advent of Amy Freed? -- the moral, educative purposes of theater will re-emerge.  In maintaining his vision, Scribonius persuades us of the existence of the essential human innocence that he couldn't find in the Emperor.

But can art really improve anyone?  We are left to wonder.

You, Nero plays at the Berkeley Rep Theatre, Berkeley, California, through June 28.

                                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome ... please scroll down and click on comment button.  Thanks!