Enjoy the show...or else: Orientarhythm

This week in the Village Voice Theater Section:

Michael Feingold contemplates links between violence in the larger world and contemporary drama.

I spent four days covering this incarnation of the New York Fringe. Though largely disappointing and blister inducing, I saw a couple of shows I quite enjoyed, BASH'd and Orientarhythm. Bukowsical? Not so much.

String Theory: Opus

This Week in the Village Voice Theater section:

Michael Feingold offers an appreciation of Ingmar Bergman, focusing on both his films and his theatrical work, a major aspect of his career that too many obits have ignored. “He made this latter reputation doing only what great stage directors are supposed to do: taking on the finest works of dramatic literature and putting his personal mark on them in ways that magically managed to fulfill both his own vision and their authors' deepest meanings.”

I spent my week exploring the disputed territory of Israeli-Palestinian drama, attending Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed and Ilan Hatsor’s Masked. The former concerns four Palestinian from across the centuries, trapped in the afterlife. Alas, “Shamieh has an exasperating impulse toward the general. She wants to speak for all women, always, and in portentous poesy besides.” Though Masked would like to spark controversy, the blurb on its poster "An Israeli play about three Palestinian brothers," is much more shocking than the play itself.

Andy Propst doesn’t really harmonize with Michael Hollinger’s Opus at Primary Stages, calling it “an easily digested soap opera set in the highbrow world of classical music.” At Keith Reddin’s Human Errors, James Hannaham finds plenty: “When Miranda tearfully recites dialogue from the black-box recorder, we know this baby's going down.”

Divinas Palabras: Feingold thinks it's divine

This week in the Village Voice Theater section:

Michael Feingold finishes his festive tour of Lincoln Center. He enjoys Spain's Centro Dramático Nacional's production of Ramon del Valle-Inclán's "Divinas Palabras" and Shen Wei Dance Theater's "Second Visit to the Empress."

I flounce around the New York Fringe Festival, wondering what can be done to restore some of the vim of the earlier years. I interview three current and former fringe artistic directors to discover their various plans of attack.

And John Beer flops out on the sofa to review the American Living Room Festival at Here Arts Center. Beer fizzes, "he three pieces performed—the first of 24 in the festival—displayed impressive technique and quirky imagination. At the same time, each fit a bit too easily into its experimental genre: meta-theatrical whimsy, abstract dance-theater, and biographical study of a neglected historical figure."

Awake and Sing: 33 to Nothing

This week in the Village Voice theater section:

Michael Feingold goes international, without ever leaving the comforts of Manhattan, covering three shows at the Lincoln Center Festival, Hokaibo performed by Heisei Nakamura-za, De Monstruos y Prodigos (Of Monsters and Prodigies) performed by Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, and Gemelos (Twins) performed by Compañia Teatro Cinema—all now closed. He found “moments—though too often they were only moments—when theater seemed like something human beings could enjoy, take pride in, and want to share with people in other countries.” I traveled too, taking a strangely enjoyable trip to the South Pole via Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer and making a much duller visit to the suburban family manse with Two Thirds Home.

A Rose by any other name: Gypsy

This week in the Village Voice theater section:

Michael Feingold waxes enthusiastic about Arthur Laurents’s stripped down production of ecdysiast musical Gypsy. Feingold applauds, “the sense of freshness that librettist Arthur Laurents's speedy, spare new staging gives off--its streamlined approach makes the last full-scale Broadway production, by Sam Mendes, look fussy and cluttered in comparison.”

Feingold found Robert Wilson’s Fables de la Fontaine at Lincoln Center less than fabulous, chiding Wilson for “impos[ing] a personal straitjacket on the material in lieu of interpreting it.” Feingold concludes: “One piece was narrated, inexplicably, by a donkey; I couldn't help thinking it was Wilson's way of telling us the whole event was being transmitted through the sensibility of a jackass.”

I considered David Epstein’s Surface to Air rather earthbound and formulaic to boot, though director James Naughton has assembled a remarkable cast. And gently disagreeing with the New York Times, I found gently against The People vs. MONA, wishing Jim Wann and Patricia Miller had featured fewer song sketches and more fully realized tunes.

Keep it rolling: Absinthe

This week in the Village Voice Theater section:

Michael Feingold rolls over Xanadu, though he finds kind words for the cast, especially Kerry Butler as the Aussie-accented Greek muse. He sings the praises, however, offered by the double-bill of Chinese operas presented by the Contemporary Legend Theatre of Taiwan, alas now closed. One notably features a sword-fighting dramaturg.

I found myself again intoxicated with the naughty cabaret acts offered in Absinthe at the Spiegeltent. I thrilled less to La Vie, likely as these acts were set in Purgatory.

In Sightlines, John Beer doesn’t express reverence for the Rev. martin Luther King The/King/Operetta, calling it, “a frustrating hodgepodge of a piece—infectious, profound, and baffling by turns.” And Angela Ashman reasons about Kirk Wood Bromley’s rhymes during No More Pretending at the Ice Factory Festival.

The paper chase: Doppelganger

This week in the Village Voice theater section:

This week in the Village Voice theater section, I become a Morning person, giving a warm reception to Peccadillo’s revival of Sylvia Regan’s 1940 play Morning Star about immigrant Jews. Though the direction’s uneven and “Regan creates entertaining characters rather than bona fide people,” the production sent “audience members, and even the occasional critic, scrabbling in their bags for tissues.” I also went back to the future with playwright/songster Ethan Lipton’s Goodbye April, Hello May a multigenre (sci-fi/romance/comedy/drama) play about New York in the 22nd-century, with an excellent cast.

Julia Wallace was less than ardent about the Politics of Passion, a trio of Anthony Minghella one-acts produced by the Potomac Theater Project. Wallace concludes that “neither [Minghella’s] plays nor their staging here seem particularly political or connected to each other.” Garret Eisler doesn’t recommend doubling up on Doppelganger, saying the 3LD play “opts more for existential meandering than social commentary. Instead of a story of credible human beings, the writing degenerates—even in the course of its short hour—into a platform for the playwright's Einsteinian gobbledygook.” And Andy Propst takes account of Professional Skepticism a CPA play. Propst applauds playwright James Rasheed’s milieu and characters, but finds “his overladen plot, director Kareem Fahmy's strangely laid-back staging, and a needless intermission combine to sap this 90-minute piece's momentum.”

And Tom Sellar settles in for a festive chat with Lincoln Center Festival artistic director Nigel Redden.

A blog? How droll!

This week at the Village Voice theater section

Michael Feingold is passingly friendly regarding Old Acquaintance, though he does wonder why the Roundabout has produced it: "Not untruthful and not unfunny, it stands as an instance of a life we no longer lead. Whether such a play should, or can, be revived is a different matter." Meanwhile Tom Sellar portions out praise and culpability in his review of Howard Barker's No End of Blame. I sat lakeside during the Public Theater's watery but very enjoyable production of Romeo and Juliet.

In the Sightlines section, Julia Wallace assigned her own personal search engine to I Google Myself. John Beer analyzes the prose of The Toad Poems, based on the poesy of Gerald Locklin. In Central Park, Andy Propst decides that All's Well That Ends Well doesn't end well at all.

David Greenspan: Don't Argue

This week in the Village Voice Theater section:

Michael Feingold pulls up a chair at Target Margin’s The Dinner Party and very much agrees with David Greenspan’s The Argument. He’s not at all eager to look back at Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, but he’s delighted to direct his footsteps toward Peculiar Works's OFFstage: The East Village Fragments.

I take stock of Lear deBessonet’s blues-tinged take on Brecht St. Joan of the Stockyards and test the merits of Matthew Schneck’s comedy Badge.

And them!

Just received news of the next Offstage Voice, the networking event extraordinaire. This incarnation will be held at the Bubble Lounge, June 20th, from 6-8. Join Michael Feingold, Brian Parks, Adamma Ince, our publisher Michael Cohen, and me. RSVP to Mauro Deceglie at mdeceglie@villagevoice.com by June 13.