Vignettes That Return to Tease, Touch and Jab - the New York Times

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'Comedy of Errors' and Musical 'Love's Labour's Lost' on Shakespeare in the Park's Bill - NYTimes.com

FEBRUARY 12, 2013, 2:00 PM ‘Comedy of Errors’ and Musical ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ on Shakespeare in the Park’s Bill

By DAVE ITZKOFF Long before television sitcoms and the modern families they depict there was Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" and its farcical depiction of some convoluted bloodlines. The play -- about two pairs of twin brothers, separated at birth and reunited in adulthood -- is one of two works the Public Theater will present this summer as part of its annual Shakespeare in the Park series in a production featuring the comedy stars Jesse Tyler Ferguson ("Modern Family") and Hamish Linklater ("The New Adventures of Old Christine"). But which twin is each actor playing? The Public isn't saying just yet.

It said on Tuesday that Mr. Ferguson (an alumnus of "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Winter's Tale," among others) would play Dromio, and Mr. Linklater (also of "Merchant" and "Winter's Tale," as well as Broadway's "Seminar") would portray Antipholus, in a production directed by Daniel Sullivan. Asked whether this was referring to Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus, or Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse - or both sets of characters -- a press representative for the Public said in an e-mail, "Jesse and Hamish are playing one set of twins, but Dan Sullivan has some surprises in store for the rest of the casting."

The second production will be a new musical version of "Love's Labour's Lost," with songs by Michael Friedman and an adapted book by Alex Timbers. Mr. Timbers, who is also directing this show, collaborated with Mr. Friedman on "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," the satirical rock musical about the seventh president, which ran at the Public Theater and on Broadway.

"The Comedy of Errors" will be presented at the Delacorte Theater from May 28 through June 30, and "Love's Labour's Lost" will run from July 23 through Aug. 18.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/...sical-loves-labours-lost-on-shakespeare-in-the-parks-bill/?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[2/13/2013 9:15:55 AM] Vignettes That Return to Tease, Touch and Jab - The New York Times

February 12, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Vignettes That Return to Tease, Touch and Jab

By BEN BRANTLEY

Small portions, the foodists tell us, are increasingly the fashion in restaurants, overcoming the more-is-more attitude that has governed American stomachs for so long. So the timing seems right for Primary Stages’ 20th- anniversary revival of David Ives’s “All in the Timing,” one of the zestier plates of theatrical tapas to be had.

Calorie counters will be glad to know that, unlikely many a tasting banquet, this happy (and slap-happy) evening of mini-plays, which opened on Tuesday night at 59E59, leaves you feeling lighter than when you sat down to it. Please note that I said lighter, not emptier.

There’s nutrition in these airy, meringuelike delicacies, and surprising substance in their silliness. That’s not just because “All in the Timing,” directed by John Rando, concerns classic subjects that continue to cause debate among would-be heirs to Einstein: uncertainty, randomness, relativity and the practical implications of the existence of black holes.

Now don’t be alarmed if, like me, you’re not on intimate terms with Schrödinger’s cat. You definitely don’t have to have been a physics major to grasp the essence of these tickling comedies.

You just need to be a person who has muttered common but inescapable conditional phrases like “What if” or “If only.” And if you’ve ever been paralyzed by the infinite possibilities of a blank page, a first date or a restaurant menu, you’ll plug right into “All in the Timing.”

This anthology of sketches was the show that established Mr. Ives as a playwright with a singular gift for turning writerly self-consciousness into short-form intellectual slapstick. That talent has since been applied to sprightly adaptations of Molière, Corneille and Twain; reworkings of vintage musical books for the Encores! concert series; and, most conspicuously, the Broadway hit “Venus in Fur” two years ago.

That dark, two-person comedy — which made a star of its leading lady, Nina Arianda — is the fullest demonstration of Mr. Ives’s knack for ringing reverberant variations on a single theme. Even at 95 minutes, it flirted with the danger of milking itself dry before it ended. But in following the corkscrew course of one increasingly mysterious actress’s audition for an increasingly smitten director, “Venus” breathed a giddy, true fan’s belief in theater as an endlessly transformative exercise. If some people felt dissatisfied with the script’s concluding revelation, that was partly because Mr. Ives had set up a story that was never meant to end.

The playlets of “All in the Timing” don’t really have proper endings either, nor should they. Each exudes the sense of concluding on an ellipsis — of dot-dot-dot ad infinitum — suggesting that what we’ve just witnessed could keep on happening forever and ever.

They’re all brain teasers, given juicy theatrical life by a bouncy young cast and a clever technical team that includes the fertile set designer Beowulf Boritt. But what makes the quick-sketch antics on display here throb

http://theater.nytimes.com/...er/reviews/all-in-the-timing-by-david-ives-at-59e59-theaters.html?hpw&_r=0&pagewanted=print[2/13/2013 9:10:10 AM] Vignettes That Return to Tease, Touch and Jab - The New York Times

affectingly are their visceral feelings of frustration and wonder. Among the main causes of those feelings? The limits and limitlessness of the tools of human communication. I mean those fallible, shimmering entities known (to borrow one of the plays’ titles) as “Words, Words, Words.”

That work takes off from the premise that three monkeys, left alone in a room with three typewriters, will eventually produce Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” In this case, they have been named — by an annoyingly whimsical (and unseen) scientist — Swift, Kafka and Milton. And as played by Carson Elrod, Liv Rooth and Matthew Saldivar, they are resentful, resigned, occasionally excited and mostly daunted.

Like much of “All in the Timing,” the monkey sketch is made up of crude physical humor, wiseguy academic references and jokes of highly varying sophistication, all embodied with vaudevillian gusto by the performers. And somehow this blend of blatant shtick winds up summoning the bewilderment and anxiety that we all face, on some level, whenever we sit down to write even a simple letter. So many choices, so many ways we could miss out on saying what we want or need to say. It’s enough to drive anyone into a simian frenzy of head scratching.

“Words, Words, Words” is sandwiched between two other plays about language and its discontents, featuring verbally challenged human characters. In “Sure Thing,” a boy (Mr. Elrod) meets a girl (Ms. Rooth) in a cafe, where they are allowed by Mr. Ives to keep restarting their conversation until it leads them into the realm of happily ever after.

In “The Universal Language,” the evening’s high point, a stuttering woman (Jenn Harris) shows up in a classroom where a soi-disant professor (Mr. Elrod again) waits to teach the world his answer to Esperanto.

It is called Unamunda, and it is a desperate, free-associating amalgam of substitutions, like “Velcro” for “Welcome” and “Harvard U” for “How are you?” It is as fraudulent, arbitrary and silly as, well, pretty much any language, when you come to think of it. But it allows its characters to make music together, as words connect into a pulsing, transporting jive talk, given blissful life by Ms. Harris and the inexhaustibly nimble Mr. Elrod.

The show’s second half is less about language and more about time. (For me it’s also less satisfying, but then I’m a word man.) It includes one sketch in which the composer Philip Glass buys a loaf of bread to the time- bending, repetitive rhythms of a Glass collaboration with the avant-garde director Robert Wilson.

In another, a diner becomes the setting for a meeting of souls lost in space (or wrenched out of the sensibilities of their own New York City and thrust into those of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Cleveland).

The concluding play allows Leon Trotsky (Mr. Saldivar) to reflect upon the last day of his life, assisted by his wife (Ms. Rooth) and his assassin (Eric Clem). Such contemplation is made possible by the divine grace of the universe-shaping deity which every writer of fictions becomes. Mr. Ives places his exiled Russian, an ax sticking out of his head, in a time warp in which destiny is played in a loop, and Trotsky can marvel for eternity at the strange convergences of history.

Playwrights are of course as bewildered as all of us by the imponderables of time and space and the language with which we try to explain them. But they at least can play God, and indulge us with a world that, like a good joke, has a pattern, a punch line and the fleeting illusion that we “get it.”

All in the Timing

By David Ives; directed by John Rando; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Anita Yavich; lighting by Jason Lyons; music and sound by Ryan Rumery; hair and wig design by Tom Watson; production stage manager, Joanne E. McInerney; production supervisor, PRF Productions; general manager, Toni Marie Davis; associate artistic director, Michelle Bossy. Presented by Primary Stages, Casey Childs, executive producer; Andrew Leynse, artistic director; Elliot Fox, managing director. At 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street; (212) 279- 4200, primarystages.org. Through March 17. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

WITH: Eric Clem (Young Man/Uberbaker/Ramon), Carson Elrod (Bill/Swift/Don/Philip Glass/Mark), Jenn Harris (Dawn/Second Woman/Waitress), Liv Rooth (Betty/Kafka/First Woman/Mrs. Trotsky) and Matthew Saldivar (Milton/Baker/Al/Trotsky).

http://theater.nytimes.com/...er/reviews/all-in-the-timing-by-david-ives-at-59e59-theaters.html?hpw&_r=0&pagewanted=print[2/13/2013 9:10:10 AM] Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Madonna Go Clubbing - The New York Times

February 12, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Madonna Go Clubbing

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

A disclaimer: Your humble critic usually doesn’t drink when reviewing shows. It can be challenging to wield the critic’s ax responsibly under the influence.

I wouldn’t have gotten through “Totally Tubular Time Machine,” though, without a bit of tippling, and that’s not necessarily an indictment. It’s more an acknowledgment of what this show really is: a big, campy drinking party, with a little bit of singing thrown in.

This weekly bash is being held at the Culture Club, an ’80s-themed dance club in Midtown Manhattan, where the walls are spackled with Kurt Cobain posters and Keith Haring stencils.

Small groups are first shuttled through a brief, incoherent time-machine skit that somehow transports everyone back to 1989. Guests are then filed into a large, crowded room, where celebrity impersonators hand out party favors (lollipops from Katy Perry, trucker hats from Justin Bieber) and take turns at karaoke.

Not one, but two, Madonnas perform, usually together, sometimes on key: Madonna Past (Meg Lanzarone) wears a blond wig and a conical bra, while Madonna Present (Jill Pollack Rutsky) wears a slightly darker wig and much bigger biceps. At one point the Madonnas battle a Lady Gaga (Ann-Marie Sepe) clad in a meat dress in a spirited mash-up of “Express Yourself” and “Born This Way.”

The scene is loud and chaotic, and you often wouldn’t know that a performance was going on, unless, say, the hard-working press representative (who was often busy nursing another critic who’d done a touch too much tippling) escorted you to the corner of the room where the cast members were dancing or singing amid the crowd.

Is this experience worth the $60 entrance fee ($90 if you want a reserved seat)? In 1989 dollars that’s quite a pretty penny. But at $15, the Ricky Martini — served “Not straight ... up,” according to the drink menu — isn’t a bad deal.

http://theater.nytimes.com/...er/reviews/totally-tubular-time-machine-at-the-culture-club.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[2/13/2013 9:12:55 AM] Never Mind the Dictionary: Justice Is Spelled With a Z - The New York Times

February 12, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Never Mind the Dictionary: Justice Is Spelled With a Z

By LAUREL GRAEBER

How can you lure children raised on computer-generated imagery and high-tech special effects to a swashbuckling adventure with only three actors, a few props and dozens of plastic cutouts? You’d need clever design, highly skilled performers and plenty of fancy footwork.

That’s mostly what you get in “The Mark of Zorro,” presented at the New Victory Theater by Visible Fictions, a Scottish company with a reputation for doing a lot with a little. (The troupe most recently visited New York with a two-man “Jason and the Argonauts.”) It helps that the show’s intended audience — theatergoers 7 and older — may never have heard of Zorro, a sort of Hispanic Robin Hood invented by the American pulp writer Johnston McCulley in 1919. Distinguished by his black cape, hat and mask and the Z he carved with a sword, Zorro (the word means “fox” in Spanish) brought justice to early-19th-century California and profit to those who helped him live on in movies and television.

Davey Anderson, the playwright, has kept the period setting and crammed lots of plot into a breathless 65 minutes. Under Douglas Irvine’s direction, the talented Tim Settle, Denise Hoey and Neil Thomas function alternately as narrators and characters, appearing seamlessly to change age and even gender (though not accent). Mr. Thomas primarily plays both the hero and the earnest stable boy Diego de la Vega, who is Zorro’s Clark Kent; Ms. Hoey portrays Isabella, the governor’s feisty daughter and Diego/Zorro’s Lois Lane; and Mr. Settle incarnates everyone from Diego’s father to Esteban, a corrupt military captain and the piece’s archvillain.

“Zorro” does have violence, although the only realistic killing is the murder of Diego’s father, an act that leads Diego to take up the sword and mask. It’s hard to be shocked by an execution when the victims are figures drawn on a sheet of paper and dispatched with a cardboard pistol. And the evil soldiers’ abuse of the townspeople — all small cutouts — becomes almost comic, though you have to ask yourself if any mayhem, even that using dolls, should be played for laughs these days.

In pure inventiveness, however, the production is a triumph. Robin Peoples, who designed it, has created a world where a suspended strip of masking tape can become a road, and a simple silhouette a galloping steed. “Zorro” makes effective use of the best of stages: the young audience’s imagination.

http://theater.nytimes.com/.../theater/reviews/the-mark-of-zorro-at-the-new-victory-theater.html?ref=arts&pagewanted=print[2/13/2013 9:14:21 AM] Menu of Fictions, Served Without Intermissions - The New York Times

February 12, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Menu of Fictions, Served Without Intermissions

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Whatever you do, don’t see “Foodacts” on an empty stomach. The last thing this revue needs is the soundtrack of your tummy rumbling.

Over the course of an intermissionless hour and 45 minutes, the cast members perform excerpts from texts touching on various sweet and savory food-related themes: salivation and satiation, deprivation and the ways eating intersects with so many other important moments of our lives.

The source material is a mixture of contemporary and classic, fiction and nonfiction. Some of the prose is enchanting and evocative, like Proust’s famous meditation on the connection between taste and involuntary memory, as conjured by a madeleine. A description of squealing pigs tied up for a mass throat-slashing, from Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle,” is haunting and visceral. And the actors shine in a very funny rendition of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Three Fat Women of Antibes,” about the fragility of friendships founded upon mutually enforced dieting.

But with more than 27 texts, the revue has more courses than the tasting menu at Alinea, and is much less gratifying. Some of the excerpts (like the Last Supper scene from Matthew 26) feel dutifully included, with little added by the dramatizations by Barbara Bosch, who also conceived the show.

Worse — for both the length and pacing — are the many epicurean quotations that the performers recite between scenes.

Independently, these epigraphs might charm. (W. C. Fields: “Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”) But dozens and dozens of them add up to no more than one of those pocket-size inspirational books of quotations sold at the bookstore cash register. Good theater usually resembles a thoughtfully prepared, hearty meal, not an endless assemblage of amuse-bouches.

http://theater.nytimes.com/...acts-at-the-lion-theater-draws-on-food-related-texts.html?ref=theater&_r=0&pagewanted=print[2/13/2013 9:16:35 AM]