Evita still conquers.
Evita
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, book and lyrics by Tim Rice
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
Everything Evita warned us about has come true.
The 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical about the rise and fall of the real-life First Lady of Argentina, Eva Peron, is being presented as the annual fall gala production at the City Center in New York.
But, as directed by Sammi Cannold, it’s more than just a standard revival of a classic. This Webber-Rice epic was a caution about the scary power of charismatic mass-media stars to inspire the public with false promises, then pick their pockets while suppressing their civil rights. Allied with the army corporal Juan Peron, Evita promised to Make Argentina Great Again in the years immediately following World War II, then robbed the once-rich South American country blind while aggrandizing herself.
Cannold’s production never makes a direct reference to anything happening in American politics today. It doesn’t have to.
Cannold’s staging includes a great innovation. She has split the role of Evita in two. Younger Evita is played by the feisty but vulnerable Maia Reficco; Evita in Buenos Aires is played by the volcanic but ambiguous Solea Pfeiffer. But Reficco doesn’t disappear after the action moves to the capital, as you might expect. She continues to appear throughout the show like a sad ghost—a reminder of poverty-stricken and powerless past that the grown Evita spends her life trying to transcend. This bold staging choice doesn’t change the text but greatly strengthens it.
Pfeiffer brings great power to the title role, but never really takes us inside her character. Is she really an idealistic woman of the people, a she presents herself? Or is she a cynical opportunist who gets control of her country’s levers of power simply to enrich herself? This production tries to have it both ways, and, yes, there are strong elements of both in Evita. But this Evita doesn’t seem certain herself. She remains a cypher.
Enrique Acevedo is an excellent Juan Peron, displaying a ramrod-straight military bearing, but also showing a genuine caring for Eva as her final illness overtakes her. Narrator Jason Gotay has a fine voice, but is too flighty to play the dangerous international revolutionary Che Guevara.
The Webber-Rice score is served well throughout by the leads, by the big chorus performing the Latin-flavored choreography by Emily Malby and Valeria Solomonoff, and especially by the rich, full orchestra (24 chairs), conducted by Kristen Blodgette.
Evita is playing a limited run through November 24 at the City Center on 55th Street in midtown Manhattan.
It’s no Secret how good Derren Brown is.
Derren Brown: Secret
Written by Andy Nyman, Derren Brown & Andrew O’Connor
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
One of the more popular attractions in the golden age of vaudeville was the mind reader—not a person with any special psi powers, but an otherwise perfectly normal person who had sharpened their skills of observation and their knowledge of human nature to the point that they could infer what audience members were thinking with uncanny accuracy.
Some were so good, it seemed like magic.
Fast forward to the present. Vaudeville is vanished, but mind readers like Broadway’s current Derren Brown still ply their trade with a sophistication and a psychological precision that their forebears could only dream of.
Brown, currently starring in Derren Brown: Secret, honed his craft in the U.K. and now comes to Broadway with a solo show that presents itself as pure entertainment, but which carries implications of how easy it is to fool crowds of people who naively trust in their own eyes and ears.
Brown constantly undercuts your skepticism. Are his audience-participation subjects carefully planted ringers? No, he chooses them by scaling a Frisbee-like disc into the house at random. Is he substituting one card or envelope for another through sleight-of-hand? No, he puts such object in the hands of an audience member for safekeeping. He then goes on to tell such people intimate details of their lives and things they have in their pockets, exclusively by reading their body language, their age, the slight changes of emphasis in words they say. Responding to audience gasps of amazement, he assures them, “I have no psychic ability.”
Moreover, he explains some of his feats in advance, or appears to. “I’m honest about my dishonesty,” he says. He warns you that he will bamboozle you, and then goes ahead and does it, all the while wearing the quiet assurance and smug smile of a master con man.
Brown is so good at directing your attention exactly where he pleases, that at one point an assistant in a gorilla suit was able to come onstage and remove a strategically placed envelope without the audience seeing it. It wasn’t invisible; Brown was just forcing you to look elsewhere at that moment because he knows how to do it and he knows that you will succumb to his covert misdirection. Magicians make a science of this. So do many politicians.
The show’s climax is a twenty-minute tour de force epic of divination involving multiple bemused audience members, multiple sealed envelopes, locked boxes, answers written before the show begins, a pre-recorded video, a song sung by a Saturday Night Live cast member, and even the long-promised revelation about the true meaning of the play’s title.
At the finale you’re left with a true sense of exhilaration at Brown’s skill, along with a sobering realization that people, including you, are so easy to “read”—and to manipulate.
Derren Brown: Secret is scheduled to play a limited run through Jan. 4, 2020 at the Cort Theatre on Broadway.
An Earthy Night of Plays
Footprints of the Polar Bear & Other Eco-Centric Plays
By Phil Paradis
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
The Earth is being killed off by pollution and if mankind doesn’t do something to stop it, we are all doomed as well. This is the theme hammered home by playwright Phil Paradis in his Off-Off-Broadway one-act multiple bill, Footprints of the Polar Bear & Other Eco-Centric Plays, presented in a limited run by the American Theatre of Actors.
Several of the playlets attack the subject with a black sense of humor, but the centerpiece of the evening is Footprints of the Polar Bear, directed by Laurie Rae Waugh, in which a homeless and alcoholic Gulf War vet (Ken Coughlin) engages in an epic tirade at passersby, humanity and the universe at large about the fact that we have allowed Big Oil to rape the planet and “What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves.”
The audience is left to wonder if this messenger is the best one to get this message taken seriously. Or is Paradis trying to say that it’s already too late and therefore pointless—just a raging against the dying of the light?
A savage sense of humor informs Natural Rarities Up For Bid, directed by Jessica Jennings, in which the world’s wealthiest man (Bennett Ferguson) buys up the last precious ounces of clean water, food and air in the world as part of a cartoonish auction to raise money for people stranded and starving from rising seas due to global warming. Jamie Bartolett, who plays the co-presenter in the scene, keeps her relentless perky comedic equilibrium in a scene that grows more insane by the moment.
Two other plays sideswipe other social issues as they satirize our culture’s indifference to the pollution disaster. Directed by Monica Blaze Leavitt, Breaking Gulf News shows what happens when a fire-breathing Coast Guardsman (Cedric Jones) who is all set to eviscerate a smooth-talking oil company executive (Johnny Blaze Leavitt) on a TV news show, suddenly is offered the bribe of his life.
Directed by Chris Goodrich, God is a Ford Man, offers another outraged crazy person (Dan Wuerdeman) a chance to harangue us about how God is mad about the 1969 moon landings, and has sent tornados, wildfires, sinkholes and Chevrolets—yes, Chevrolets—as a punishment for our sins.
The gentlest and most elegiac of the playlets, The Perfect Place, directed by Art Bernal, is in many ways the most effective. An old man (William Grenville) and his grandson (Jake Smith) are searching through a wilderness for the perfect spot to plant a tiny oak seedling. Along the way they close a rift between the generations and express hope that a time will come when their descendants will see the tree full-grown. It’s a moment of inspirational optimism that might have played better as the final segment instead of the first. But Paradise obviously feels that the best route is still to fight or die trying.
Footprints of the Polar Bear & Other Eco-Centric Plays is playing an limited run through November 24 at American Theatre of Actors in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan.
Akin to Success
Akin Salawu was a finalist at Tribeca many times. You’re important when you’re a Getty Image!
Akin Salawu is a writer, director and editor. He is also a two-time Tribeca All Access Winner with a BA from Stanford and a Screenwriting MFA from Columbia. He has been a Sundance Finalist cementing his cinematic credentials into the public psyche.
Additionally, Akin wrote 2 short plays on Ferguson for Chicago’s American Theater and wrote Chapter 5 in the book, The Obama Movement. he is currently writing a rather urgent play about a murdered black man who returns from the dead to save his brothers from the white woman who got him killed. It is not a very polite play. it is a very angry play. “… and it scares me – the writing of it. It’s not easy removing the Masks of Masculinity,” the playwright/filmmaker-with-a-message said. But since the response he’s getting just in the writing of it has been astronomical. “…so I suppose the fear is good,” he concluded.
I started working as a video editor and utilized that skill set when I became a grassroots organizer on the Obama 08 campaign. During the campaign I was selected for the Public Theater’s inaugural Emerging Writer’s Group. I went on to work for a Progressive Think Tank for a few years. Then I wrote the book for my first musical, “The Real Whisper” in Ars Nova’s Uncharted. We were part of the 2017 UArts Polyphone Festival. Last year I founded LIT Council, a writers group for Men of Color, with the Tank in midtown. We literally just began Year 2 and it has been a fascinating journey…creating the very space that I wish had been waiting for me and all The other Catholic School Christmas Pageant Rejects. 
A Gorgeous – but lacking – Monster
Doctor Frankenstein
By George Allison
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein in 1818 and James Whale adapted it as a classic Hollywood horror film in 1931. Since then, the story of a scientist who pushes science too far has gotten countless adaptations, sequels and prequels in every medium. Writers find the tale endlessly fascinating.
In his new play Doctor Frankenstein, George Allison takes a different angle on the legend, offering us a drama narrated by the doctor himself, who wants to give us the “real story” behind what he claims is Shelley’s sensationalized version of his life. Audiences will quickly find themselves longing for the original.
The concept is strong, but the script, as staged by Cat Parker, is wordy, static and repetitive.
Allison’s Dr. Frankenstein (John Blaylock) explains that he created the real monster in order to save the life of his friend, master physician Dr. James Lind (Steve Shoup), whose body was crushed in a street accident, but whose brilliant brain was able to be saved. Frankenstein and Lind had been experimenting with bringing dead animals back to life through the use of electricity and special serum. The accident affords the perfect chance to see if the procedure works on humans.
Frankenstein places the brain of the frail old man into what’s supposed to be the strapping body of a young laborer. Then Lind awakens in his new body, he is neither grateful nor happy and the two of them talk about why for a long time. And then talk about it more in more scenes. They are joined by Frankenstein’s much-younger and similarly verbose fiancé Elizabeth (Tammy McNeill), who starts to become a love interest for the monster. Frankenstein himself is portrayed as such an self-important snob you can hardly blame her.
The script has more surgery scars than the monster. Among Frankenstein’s complaints about Mary Shelley’s novel is her lack of hard-core medical knowledge. A few scenes later we see Frankenstein believing he can reanimate a brain he has kept in a box for eleven years. Lind complains about having the body of a street cleaner, a bit of biography that hadn’t previously been established. Lind asserts that he’s in constant pain, but moves about the stage with no obvious discomfort. Dr. F also calls himself a monster, then a few minutes later is asserting that he’s “blameless.”
On the upside, this is an exceptionally impressive-looking production for an Off-Off-Broadway show. Eric Siegel’s beautiful and creepy projections, especially the ones in Frankenstein’s office, get high marks, as does a realistic-looking cadaver, which undergoes a trepanning and brain extraction in full view of the audience. In a nod to Whale’s classic film, the reanimation scene employs a real electric arc machine, as part of the set designed by the playwright himself. If only his script were as compelling and visceral.
Doctor Frankenstein is playing a limited run through November 23 at the West End Theatre at the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Robert Viagas is A Real Lulu
Lulu XX
Created by Ivan Talijancic and Erika Latta
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
The general public has barely heard of Frank Wedekind’s seminal 1895 masterpiece Lulu, which is strange because this lurid and tragic odyssey of an irresistibly beautiful young woman prefigured the realism in theatre (and film and TV) of the coming 20th century.
Erika Latta, in her new 75-minute theatre/film piece titled Lulu XX, presented Off-Off-Broadway by The Wax Factory, makes few explicit references to the source material and eliminates the dominating male characters of the original story almost entirely. That’s interesting because so much of the original play was told through the male gaze that Lulu herself became something of a cypher. In Latta’s rethinking of the story, we get only the thoughts that might have been running around inside Lulu’s head as she navigates a world where women are revered, desired and put on pedestal at one extreme, but objectivized, trivialized and subjected to violence at the other
Like the original Lulu, Lulu XX is divided into sections, but these are presented as hashtags, #ladyinwaiting, #autopsy, #noir, #pandora, etc. Though Wedekind (best known for his later play, Spring Awakening, source material for the Tony-winning musical) created the character of Lulu in the late evening of the 19th century, Latta and Talijancic’s Lulu launches on an odyssey through the 20thand 21s centuries through a cascade kaleidoscopic media images, many of them full of sex and danger, like the original. They are displayed in an Ames-Room-like stage designed to skew the audience’s perspective and make objects and often Lulu herself seems larger or smaller.
Latta is the only performer who speaks. A generally silent male and female duo move scraps of scenery on and off.
Over the 125 years since her creation, the character of Lulu has inspired many versions and influenced better known iterations, including the films Pandora’s Box and The Blue Angel, Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, the TV movie Lulu, and the bizarre Lou Reed / Metallica musical collaboration Lulu. Latta and Talijancic now add a new 21st century Lulu who is thoroughly woke and, for the first time, thoroughly herself.
Lulu XX had a limited run at the Connolly Theatre in the East Village section of Manhattan.
Robert, Rattlestick, and the Monsoon
Monsoon Season
By Lizzie Vieh
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
The craziness and desperation that often leaks out of broken marriages is bottled and served up in Lizzie Vieh’s new Off-Off-Broadway horror/comedy, Monsoon Season, which plays like a cross between Breaking Bad and The Last Five Years,
Not set in India, as the title suggests, but in Arizona, which sometimes endures similar catastrophic rains, Monsoon Season is the story of Danny and Julia, a married couple with a daughter. They crawl through a nightmare of anger and frustration that surrounds their post-separation lives, and finally decide to reconcile under some extreme circumstances.
And this is a comedy. A pretty funny one, too, thanks to way they are brought to sweating, shivering, slow-burning life by Richard Thieriot and Therese Plaen. They slowly build up heads of steam, and then give off little explosions left and right as it all gets too much for them. Plaen’s character has her micro-breakdowns as part of her wacky beauty vlog, “Sexy as Fuck,” and shares them with the world.
What sets Monsoon Season apart from other plays on this familiar subject, is the fact that the play’s reality is literally fractured just as the marriage is. The two actors never appear on stage together until the play’s final moments.
At first it seems like a monologue: Thieriot has the stage to himself for the first half of the play. We see how he tries to survive in a horrible apartment with a horrible job and subjected to constant humiliations by his wife, daughter, employer and customers, not to mention the legal system. We hear only his side. The audience is left to imagine the rest.
Then, suddenly, perspective shifts. Thieriot disappears and we see the whole thing from Plaen’s character’s point of view. We see her trying to rebuild her life while dealing with her age, with her sad sack ex, her confused child, her advertiser-ruled vlog, and especially with her sexy but dangerous new boyfriend.
Again, it’s a comedy. All the above are played for laughs…and, as the play goes on, with a growing departure from reality into a horror element built around creepy bird imagery. Which gives the two something to confront together and perversely seems to reawaken their mutual passion.
In one of the play’s best moments, Thieriot executes a desperate little flamenco, using two pairs of scissors as makeshift castanets. It’s funny, yet threatening.
On a tiny budget, the production relies on the sharp performances of its two actors, and on the imaginative and moody lighting by Sarah Johnson, that creates an atmosphere of building dread.
Directed by Kristen McCarthy Parker, All For One Theater’s Monsoon Season is playing a limited run through Nov. 23 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan.
Viagas and The Hope Hypothesis
The Hope Hypothesis
Written and directed by Cat Miller
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
The endless frustration of America’s immigration system gets a Kafkaesque drubbing in Cat Miller’s play, The Hope Hypothesis.
An Syrian-born aspiring lawyer named Amena (Soraya Broukhim) makes the mistake of presenting her real birth certificate when applying at a government office. The problem is, the area where she was born was under control by the terrorist group ISIS at the time of her birth, so her birth certificate is in Arabic, and bears the ISIS flag. Instead of trying to find a way to work around her problem, an officious clerk (Wesley Zurick) calls the FBI and has Amena arrested. She finds herself not only locked in a government facility with no means of escape, but also locked in a vicious spiral in which all her attempted explanations just get her deeper and deeper in trouble with the two pitiless and cynical FBI agents (William Ragsdale and Greg Brostrom) whose relentless questions cause her to be bound ever more tightly in custody.
In a series of short, punchy TV-like scenes, we see her visit to her mother in Turkey twisted into a terrorist recruitment possibility, her loyal boyfriend (Charlie O’Rourke) warped into uncertainty when the agents show him an indiscreet photo of her kissing another man, a seemingly powerful ACLU attorney (Mary E. Hodges) sucked into the whirlpool of suspicion by an unfortunately timed accidental explosion in a kitchen.
Amena’s simple request metastasizes into an international incident, and the punishment of this demonstrably innocent woman becomes all but inevitable. “Welcome to America” is the show’s ironic catchphrase.
Like any good black comedy, the tone of the play teeters between comic and grim. We may laugh at Connor Carew’s nerdy attempts to defuse the situation with common sense and humanity (only making it all the worse, of course). But it’s clear that the playwright is dramatizing the sober fact that the government’s frantic fight to preserve American freedoms is only doing the terrorists’ own work in systematically destroying them. The Hope Hypothesis is a sharply pointed and dramatic play that makes us laugh and cry at the same time.
Produced by Voyage Theater Company, The Hope Hypothesis plays a limited run through Nov. 15 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan.
Attachments area
Phil Paradis and the End of the World … as we know it.
“Footprints of the Polar Bear and Other Eco-Centric Plays” is a festival of one-act plays by acclaimed playwright, Phil Paradis that will run at the legendary American Theatre of Actors, 314 West 54th Street, Fourth Floor. The limited run will be November 13-16 and November 20-23 at 8:00 p.m. with matinees on November 17 & 24 at 3:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and will be on sale on or before November 1. The event is co-produced by stage and film director, Laurie Rae Waugh
Phil Paradis – a playwright, poet, and professor – compiled a group of works from what’s in the news and on the minds of millions these days–global warming, climate change, environmental degradation.
Footprints …” is a royal flush of clever plays that might make you recycle your thoughts on the climate and the planet.
We wanted to get some thoughts from Mr. Paradis while we still have a biosphere!
Tell us about yourself as an artist
I wrote and published poems for many years — about twenty-five years. During that period, the first ten years I didn’t publish much at all. Then I began having poems appear in periodicals, including Poetry and The American Scholar and College English, and then came three poetry collections: Tornado Alley, From Gobbler’s Knob, and Something of Ourselves. Also during that time I wrote some fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays, and then gradually shifted to one act plays. I’ve been working on plays now for twenty-six or twenty-seven years. The first ten years writing plays I had nothing produced. My luck changed in 2004-5 when I met Athol Fugard in Cincinnati and he encouraged me to write a play with African American characters. I did. Some people got very upset at me. Some thought I was insane to attempt it. But readings of the drama were so well received that I found a director and producer and it was my first produced play.
What was the inspiration to write plays about climate change?
I was inspired by Stephen Crane who had written about homeless men in New York City in 1894. About 2007, I interviewed some homeless men who lived under a bridge in Cincinnati and turned out the men were vets and one in particular a Vietnam vet who was obsessed with global warming and environmental degradation. Ever since reading Thoreau’s Walden, I have been pro-environment but I was fascinated by this destitute man who cared so much. I put my full length play on hold and wrote this one act in 2007 that became Footprints of the Polar Bear. We had a public stage reading of Footprints and Soldiers Christmas in December that year and both were well received. Directed by Arnie Shayne, Footprints went on the win the grand prize for the 2008 Cincinnati Directors Competition and was produced again by Arnie and the Blue Chip Players in 2008. I wrote several short plays for a change as a break from the full-length dramas I had been working on and by 2016 when my futuristic satire Natural Rarities Up for Bid was presented at John Chatterton’s Midtown International Festival, I realized that I had five one acts that focused on global warming, climate change, environmental degradation, and eco-centric concerns. Around that time I met Jessica Jennings and she expressed interest in the plays.
What’s harder… writing a full length or getting the message across in a short play?
I strive to do my best on the short forms too, but full-lengths demand more of my time, and require more research and sustained attention, generally more work as you might expect.
What next for you?
My solo play about The Red Badge of Courage author “Evening With Stephen Crane” is being performed at the Stephen Crane House November 16-17 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, hosted by the Asbury Park Historical Society and The Friends of Stephen Crane. I have completed three full length dramas Soldier’s Christmas, When New York Was Young, and North Country Holiday that I’d like to see staged. And I have a full-length environmental drama in progress, along with a screenplay on the life of Stephen Crane.
Mary Elizabeth Micari: Life in C-Sharp
The Lady in Black 2
Written and performed by Mary Elizabeth Micari
Reviewed by Robert Viagas
The 1990s were a period of upheaval in the life of performance artist Mary Elizabeth Micari. Her marriage was breaking up and she was discovering her true inner self as a Wiccan—a witch. Helping her through this life crisis were two things: the alt-rock songs of disconnection and angst she heard on the radio, including songs by Alanis Morrissette, Tori Amos, Phil Collins and other nineties mainstays—and her diary.
Micari has combined those two supports into The Lady in Black 2, a cabaret show-cum-confessional that premiered Oct. 26 at Pangea in New York City. She relates breathless (and sometimes breathy) accounts of learning how to cast spells, visiting an upscale witch store on the West Side, watching her marriage erode, and conquering her first Witches Ball, all read directly from the red-bookmarked text of her actual diary. In between these autobiographical sketches, Micari closes her eyes, leans back her head, spreads her fingers on upraised hands, and growls her way through Amos’ “Hey Jupiter,” or Elton John’s “The One,” or Sting’s “Sister Moon.”
When switching gears in this, her Halloween-timed bildungsroman, Micari cares enough to warn the audience, “Things get a little more serious, guys, buckle up.”
In The Lady in Black 2 Micari confides in the audience like a friend, with stories that are sometimes deep emo, sometime joyful. MAC Award winning musical director Tracy Stark, makes her three-piece band somehow sound like all the most interesting musicians of that musically complex decade.
Seen previously at Pangea in I’m SOOOO High: Rev. Mary’s Reefer Revue, Micari gets down to brass tacks in this latest installment of her autobiographical musical odyssey.
The Lady in Black 2 played a single performance Oct. 26, 2019 at Pangea, the cabaret club at 178 Second Avenue in Manhattan.
All photos by Dan Lane Williams.
http://www.dlwphotographynyc.com/
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