SOLID BUT ULTIMATELY forgettable playwrights need only create a few passable works to furnish us with a sense of who they are and why they write. What distinguishes workmanlike scribes from great dramatists is that for the latter it takes many plays—a writing lifetime—for us to grasp their complete voice and vision. The Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is one figure on the road to transcending the boxes into which we may too easily classify his work. In The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, both of which ran on Broadway, he served up a taste for blood-splattering savagery that proved cauterizing in an era in which little else fazed us.Were it not for a different kind of play like The Cripple of Inishmaan—McDonagh’s 1997 work currently being co-produced Off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theatre Company and Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company— we might pigeonhole him as one for whom gruesomeness is the holy grail. Like yet another McDonagh play—the Tony-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane—Inishmaan allows us to consider him in multiple dimensions. Read more Read it in print

January, they tell us, is going to be lean and mean. So let’s have a theater festival! Two of them, actually, curated by a pair of artistic directors who put the “we” back into weird. Truthfully, everything in the Under the Radar and Coil festivals intrigues, but unless your hedge fund did especially well in 2008, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to catch all the shows on offer. Someone’s got to separate the “Huh?” from the “What?” so here, like wine, are some pairings to consider. As ever, please don’t drink in the dramaturgy and drive. Read more

"I came to see Patti LuPone,” Ruth from New Jersey states plainly. It’s a Sunday afternoon outside of the St. James Theater where Gypsy has been leveling audiences for months, and I’m trying to find out why people are really coming to this show. “If Patti weren’t in it, I’d want my money back,” Ruth continues. She could get it too, thanks to “nonappearance insurance,” which guarantees Ruth will see Patti—an above-the-title celebrity—and if she doesn’t, it’s refund time. Nonappearance insurance, which has been around for years, assures the celeb-driven audience that if their favorite star doesn’t perform in the show that day, they can get their money back. But only if the celeb’s name appears over the title. If their name is under the title of the show, no matter how famous the person is, tough. Read more Read it in print

Shrek—as inoffensive and serviceable as it is—has pushed me over the edge. No longer will I settle for good enough. I let Billy Elliot’s weak second act and completely unmemorable songs slide because the choreography was stupendous. Equus has two marvelous performances at its center, so why carp too much over the bizarre, gay dance club staging? But poor Shrek must pay for the sins of those that came before it. Why, in a show that’s surely for children, are there so many dead patches? Entire scenes and songs—mostly in an interminable second act, which made me wish for an emery board—are mere filler in this tale of ogre Shrek (Brian D’Arcy James), his donkey sidekick (Daniel Breaker as the gayest donkey in the history of jackasses), and the princess they rescue (Sutton Foster, working as heroically as usual in an attempt to manufacture genuine charisma). Librettist and lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire has a Pulitzer, but fills his book with fart jokes and doesn’t know how (or when) to end a scene or how to write one memorable song. Read more

When it comes to musical theater, some people are ultra-traditionalists who melt into convulsions of pain at the thought of rock music supporting narrative, and they often resemble the worst of the tortured at Abu Ghraib whenever near, missed or false rhymes desecrate their ears. Fortunately, then, for Joe Iconis—a songwriter who understands the sound of rock inside and out, who can cleanly rhyme and whose ReWrite is a bitchin’ triptych of one-act pop/rock musicals—there are a rising number of ultra-nontraditionalists who will melt into convulsions over anything on a stage offering an alternative to the usual dah-dah-dah-dah of musical theater. Read more

Craig Lucas has a lot of balls in the air in Prayer for My Enemy. Some of them are adeptly handled, but too many are allowed to fall with a thud for the play to be wholly successful. Not that the text really matters, since Victoria Clark (reunited with her The Light in the Piazza scribe and director Bartlett Sher) is giving a mesmerizing performance that demands to be seen. As Dolores, a single woman caring for her aging mother in an upstate New York suburb, her series of monologues are a striking note in Lucas’ otherwise muddled play, one so unwieldy that Clark’s character isn’t even integrated into the rest of the story until Prayer for My Enemy’s final 15 minutes. Read more

Please let me enumerate for you three of the things that went wrong during the performance I attended of Theatre of the Expendable’s Three Sisters, an adaptation of the beloved but often bedeviling tragicomedy by Anton Chekhov penned by company’s artistic director, Jesse Edward Rosbrow: Late lighting cues, plus hearing the frazzled board operator call some of them loud enough to be heard (“13—go!”); the scene change between the first and second scenes of Act 2 interrupted by the announcement that the fire department was in the building and, indeed, prowling within the theatre, due to a possible gas leak; the chains of a swing, ostensibly affixed to a water pipe near the ceiling, appearing to give way for a moment, sending the actress sitting on it out of her somber, reflective scene and into a split-second panic. Read more Read it in print

Even in her sixties, Liza Minnelli still has something to prove in Liza’s at The Palace. And prove it she does: that she’s still got it, that she’s not the mess tabloids have painted her as, that she’s a survivor who not only survives but thrives. There are a few wobbly moments, but part of the Liza experience is (as in her mother Judy Garland’s later concerts) the feeling that the woman on stage will collapse if you take your focus away from her for even a second. Read more

DO THEATER ARTISTS ever consider critics when picking titles? The Debate Society’s Cape Disappointment is precisely what I mean—it’s the kind of title that’s tantamount to putting a fresh carcass before a starving dog.Yet the 70minute piece is anything but disappointing. Cape Overachieving might have been better. This is the fourth full-length work by the Brooklyn-based company, which has established a reputation for toying with ideas around deconstruction without hurling at the audience all the academic baggage and intellectual gobbledygook that usually comes along with it. Here, the two performer-creators that anchor the group, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, together with director Oliver Butler, examine the phenomenon of the drive-in movie in order to satirize and mourn the paltry state of our nation. Read more Read it in print

Through Dec. 14, Danny Hoch will be performing his one-man show, Taking Over, at the Public Theater. The 90-minute performance finds Hoch playing a series of characters—from a cab dispatcher to a goofy girl selling T-shirts on Bedford Avenue—that have come to make up today’s Williamsburg. Hoch, a Queens native who’s called the Brooklyn neighborhood home for 20 years, has strong opinions about the hipsters, condos and cafés invading the neighborhood—in a preview of the show at an East Williamsburg high school, the crowd chanted “Go home!” at one of the characters—but will the Public’s audience, a crowd of a certain age that gentrified its own neighborhoods decades ago, respond? Read more