About Last Night

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town 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:

• La Cage aux Folles * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, 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)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 24, reviewed here)

• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes July 18, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through Aug. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Annie Get Your Gun (musical, G, child-friendly, closes July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PHILADELPHIA:

• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, far too complex for children, closes July 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

A performance of Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, choreographed in 1944 and filmed in 1959 by Peter Glushanok. The score is by Aaron Copland and the set is by Isamu Noguchi. Graham dances the role of the Bride:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”

A couple enjoyable things:
• Tom & Lorenzo’s series on the fashion of “Mad Men”, a detailed look at the costumes of the different characters. If I were costume designer Janie Bryant I’d be over the moon about it — they are picking up everything she is laying down.
• Another bookmark: Schott’s Vocab blog, which is doling out a “lexicographical trifle” a day with an assist from the OED. Elsewhere on the word geekery front, I love this Language Log theory that pegs basketball player Manute Bol as the originator of the phrase “my bad.” Also: Team Snuck. (More here.)

“My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw–which I don’t mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker.”
Nigel Rees, Sayings of the Century

“I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children”

I’ll be writing about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this week and next in my Wall Street Journal drama column. Today I review two sharply contrasting shows, Hamlet and the West Coast premiere of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, both of which are outstanding. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
The first rule of theater is that there are no rules–other than not to be dull. Practice always trumps theory onstage, and nearly anything, no matter how absurd it may seem, can be made to work if it’s charged with conviction. Experience has taught me that lesson time and again, but I can still be taken by surprise when a show about which I’m understandably skeptical ends up being terrific. That happened with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s new “Hamlet,” which looked trendy on paper but turned out to be immensely exciting.
Bill Rauch, the festival’s artistic director, goes in for up-to-the-second ideas, and his modern-dress staging of “Hamlet” is full of them. The setting is a contemporary castle equipped with swiveling security cameras and beefy guards who brandish assault weapons. Hamlet (Dan Donohue) is a flippant hipster decked out in sunglasses and skinny tie. Claudius (Jeffrey King) is a glib glad-hander who looks like Daddy Warbucks. Polonius (Richard Elmore) is the clueless father of a sitcom-style family. The Player King (Ramiz Monsef) is a rapper and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Vilma Silva and Jeany Park) are a cute lesbian couple.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? Well, stop it. Mr. Rauch’s “Hamlet” may sound like a cornucopia of postmodern clichés, but no sooner does it get moving than you find yourself swept up in the momentum of a show that makes compulsive sense. Every scene is shaped with easy authority and every line, even “To be or not to be,” is read with a freshness and snap that make it new. It helps–a lot–that the acting is so consistently strong, especially that of Mr. Donohue, who plays Hamlet as a soft-spoken, bristlingly intelligent neurotic who stoops to cheap irony because the situation in which he finds himself would otherwise be too hurtful to bear. But it is the directorial choices that give point to the performances of the cast…
Lynn Nottage and Oregon Shakespeare have close ties. In 2006 the company presented one of the first regional productions of “Intimate Apparel,” the Pulitzer-winning play that opened the eyes of many American theatergoers (myself among them) to Ms. Nottage’s great gifts. Now it’s giving the West Coast premiere of “Ruined,” her portrayal of the monstrous war of all against all that has consumed a generation of Congolese women….
Kate Whoriskey, who directed the original production of “Ruined,” is remounting it next month at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre. While I saw Ms. Whoriskey’s version Off Broadway in 2009 and was as impressed as it’s possible to be, OSF’s production, directed by Liesl Tommy on a three-quarter-round stage, is closely comparable in effect….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.