Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)
• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, extended through Dec. 6, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)]]>
I've been having trouble figuring out Theresa Rebeck--and I've had a lot of opportunities to try. She writes a new script (or two) every year, and most of her plays make it to New York sooner or later, which means that somebody out there must like them. Yet time and again Ms. Rebeck has served up the same disappointing dish, a smart, glib confection that starts off fresh, then goes flat at the halfway mark. So it's both a delight and a relief to report that "The Understudy" is a raucously funny farce that makes it all the way to the finish line, though the two halves of the play, each of which is effective in its own right, don't fit together, at least not neatly.
As the title suggests, Ms. Rebeck's new play is a backstage comedy about a frustrated actor with highbrow tendencies (Justin Kirk) whose inability to get work leaves him with no choice but to take a job as understudy to Jake (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), a second-tier action-movie hero who is diversifying his resumé by appearing on Broadway in a previously unpublished play by Franz Kafka. (The "Kafka" play is actually by Ms. Rebeck, and it's a hoot.) This being a farce, there's a king-sized catch: Roxanne (Julie White), the stage manager, is also the ex-fianceé of Harry, the understudy, who left her at the altar six years before without warning, explanation or good reason....
Farce is the trickiest of theatrical genres, but the first half of "The Understudy" is a little masterpiece of comic clockwork in which the craziness mounts steadily from scene to scene....
Lynn Redgrave needs no endorsements from critics, least of all me. She is one of the greatest actors of her generation, and it is always a blessing to see her on stage, whatever the circumstances. They aren't exactly propitious in "Nightingale," her new one-woman play, a part-true, part-imagined portrait of her maternal grandmother into which Ms. Redgrave has also woven a strand of personal reminiscence....
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Read the whole thing here.]]>
So am I really a closet Luddite, a technological Moses who can't bring himself to enter the promised land of the e-book? Maybe. Six years ago I declared myself to be "open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object." Now that technology has finally caught up with me, I find myself unexpectedly unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. Yet I believe no less firmly than ever that the printed book is a technology whose time has come and gone. Am I, then, a hypocrite? Or merely a middle-aged man who, like most middle-aged men, is reluctant to put aside the youthful things that remind me of myself when young?
I hasten to point out that I no longer own any long-playing records or cassettes, and that I spend more time listening to music on my MacBook and iPod than on my CD player. No doubt the time will also come when I spend more time reading books on a Kindle, or something like it, than reading the handsomely bound volumes shelved in my living room. Not for me the self-conscious posturing of those curmudgeonly poseurs who wail Change and decay in all around I see! at every opportunity. Nor would I surprised if my next book, whatever it happens to be and whenever it happens to come out, is published solely in electronic form--yet I can't imagine that the thrill I get from downloading the first "copy" will be half so intense as the one I got last week when I held the first finished copy of Pops in my hands.]]>