this week in theater

GOLDEN CHILD

David Henry Hwang’s GOLDEN CHILD is in need of revival at the Signature Theatre (photo by Richard Termine)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through December 16, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Last year, Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) teamed up with Obie-winning director Leigh Silverman (In the Wake, Go Back to Where You Are) and actress Jennifer Lim on the Broadway hit Chinglish, a charming comedy about an American businessman who arrives in a small town in China ready to make a deal but is beset by communication and language issues. The three are together again for the Signature Theatre’s revival of Hwang’s Obie-winning, Tony-nominated Golden Child, but the results this time are far less successful. Based on his own family history and a visit he made to his maternal grandmother when he was ten, Golden Child begins in 1968 Manila, as an American-born Chinese teenager (Greg Watanabe) gets ready to interview his grandmother, Eng Ahn (Annie Q), on a tape recorder. While he wants to talk about the history of the family, she wants to focus on Jesus and Christianity. The play then flashes back to Fujian, China, in 1918, as Eng Tieng Bin (Watanabe) is returning from three years working abroad. Waiting for him are his three wives: first wife Eng Siu-Yong (Julyana Soelistyo, who originated the title role in the 1998 Broadway production), a traditionalist who follows the rules of decorum; second wife Eng Luan (Lim), a manipulative woman with a master plan; and third wife Eng Eling (Lesley Hu), who is not as familiar with accepted protocol but is the most passionate of the trio. The three women, as well as Eng’s only daughter, Ahn (Annie Q), quickly learn about his travels, including his newfound interest in Christianity, made more apparent when a marble-mouthed British missionary, Reverend Baines (Matthew Maher), stops by for a visit. Golden Child examines such themes as ancestral worship, foot binding, Confucianism, Jesus, and bragging about one’s accomplishments, but Silverman’s stolid direction, the rather lackadaisical acting, and the tepid and didactic dialogue turn the play into a history lesson that sacrifices dramatic conflict and nuance in favor of educating the audience about the Westernization of modern China and the Asian-American experience in the new world. Class is in session, but not even a very interesting one at that. Perhaps the Signature will have better luck in February when Hwang, its new Residency One Playwright, returns with a revival of his 1981 show, The Dance and the Railroad.

A CHRISTMAS STORY: THE MUSICAL

The Old Man (John Bolton) wins a major award in delightful Christmas musical (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 West 46th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Through December 30, $49-$159
www.achristmasstorythemusical.com

Bob Clark’s beloved holiday film, the 1983 family classic A Christmas Story, may now become a beloved classic Broadway musical as well with this sparkling Broadway adaptation. Joseph Robinette’s book and Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s music and lyrics show deep respect for what makes Jean Shepherd’s tale about a young boy’s quest to find a highly coveted BB gun under the tree on December 25 so appealing. Under John Rando’s playful direction, the adult Shepherd (Dan Lauria) wanders the stage narrating his memories as nine-year-old Ralphie Parker (Johnny Rabe or Joe West), a generally good but occasional trouble-prone kid, dreams of receiving the best Christmas present ever. Meanwhile, his little brother, Randy (Zac Ballard), can’t move his arms in his winter coat; their mother (Erin Dilly) sweetly cares for Ralphie when she’s not washing his mouth out with soap for unleashing a dirty word; and their father (John Bolton, whose loose-limbed movement channels Dick Van Dyke), known as the Old Man, gripes and grumbles as he battles the neighbor’s dogs (played by real hounds), manhandles the furnace, and prepares to devour the Christmas turkey. As in Monty Python’s Spamalot, the vignettes in A Christmas Story: The Musical have become familiar favorites, and audiences will start smiling and laughing as many scenes open. The song titles alone let you know what you’re in for: “A Major Award,” “Sticky Situation,” “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out,” and “Up on Santa’s Lap,” fancifully re-created by choreographer Warren Carlyle and set designer Walt Spangler.

Santa (Eddie Korbich) and his elves frighten young Ralphie (Johnny Rabe) in A CHRISTMAS STORY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

There are several bumps along the way — a few of the production numbers, including “Ralphie to the Rescue!,” are choppy and feel unfinished — but those minor quibbles can be forgiven, overshadowed by the sheer delight of “A Major Award,” in which the Old Man celebrates winning a lurid leg lamp in a crossword puzzle competition; the marvelous flat tire scene; and the splendid depiction of the fantasy/nightmare kids experience when visiting the local department-store Santa (Eddie Korbich). Lauria, who recently starred as legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi on Broadway and is most well known as the father in The Wonder Years — a character who shares much in common with the Old Man — is wonderful as Shepherd, reliving some of his seminal childhood remembrances in 1930s Indiana in a way that resonates with everyone. A Christmas Story: The Musical works because at its core, it’s a universal tale of growing up, of family, of being allowed to make mistakes while learning about the world around you, understanding that life is not as fra-gee-lay as so many other holiday books and movies would lead you to believe. Here’s hoping it shows up under the big Broadway Christmas tree for many a season to come.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: CHRIS MARCH’S BUTT-CRACKER SUITE

Holiday audiences are getting bowled over by CHRIS MARCH’S BUTT-CRACKER SUITE! A TRAILER PARK BALLET

CHRIS MARCH’S BUTT-CRACKER SUITE: A TRAILER PARK BALLET
Here Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. (enter at Dominick south of Spring)
Tuesday – Sunday through December 30, $50
212-352-3101
www.here.org
www.butt-crackersuite.com

One hundred and twenty years ago, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Since then, myriad versions of the story, based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s family tale about Marie and Fritz Stahlbaum, Godfather Drosselmeier, a doll that cracks nuts, a mouse queen, and a Christmas wonderland, pop up every holiday season, from movies and plays to contemporary dance and unusual variations. The latter is the case with Chris March’s Butt-Cracker Suite!, a campy production set in a trailer park. March, the Project Runway finalist and star of Mad Fashion, wrote, produced, directed, designed, and appears in the show (he plays Clara in drag), which is laced with tacky pop-culture references but includes no Sugar Plum Fairies. This is not your grandparents’ Nutcracker, in case the title didn’t already give that away.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Chris March’s Butt-Cracker Suite: A Trailer Park Ballet is currently running through December 30 at Here, and twi-ny has four pairs of tickets to give away for free, good through December 16. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time favorite version of The Nutcracker to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, December 6, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; four winners will be selected at random.

BAD JEWS

Cousins fight over a family heirloom in Joshua Harmon’s powerful BAD JEWS

Black Box Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Extended through December 30, $20
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

A family fight over a deceased patriarch’s treasured piece of jewelry is at the center of Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, but the gripping, incisive play is about a whole lot more. Holocaust survivor Poppy has passed away, and his loved ones have gathered on the Upper East Side to say farewell — except for grandson Liam Haber (Michael Zegen), who has missed the funeral because he claims to have been stranded in Aspen without a cell phone while on a skiing vacation with his girlfriend, Melody (Molly Ranson). The play opens with Liam’s brother, Jonah (Philip Ettinger), and first cousin, Daphna Feygenbaum (Tracee Chimo), staying in the rather cramped studio apartment the Haber parents recently bought for their sons, which bothers Daphna, who is jealous of her relatives’ wealth. When Liam finally arrives with Melody in tow, the play explodes, as they argue viciously over just about everything, including that piece of Poppy’s jewelry, his gold chai. Their dispute is about much more than that, though, as it encompasses entitlement, Israel, love, what it means to be Jewish, and even the Holocaust. Daphna and Liam rail against each other, saying hurtful things they will never be able to take back — including Daphna brutally trashing the shiksa Melody — while Jonah tries to stay out of it, but his cousins won’t let him remain silent and neutral. Bad Jews is a verbal wonder; every word of Harmon’s play is carefully constructed and meaningful, performed by an outstanding quartet of actors. Director Daniel Aukin (4000 Miles, The Bad and the Better) turns Lauren Helpern’s cluttered set into a kind of boxing ring where the characters feel each other out and then jab, punch, duck, run, and defend with impressive skill. Chimo, unrecognizable from her role as Myrtle Mae in the recent Broadway revival of Harvey, gives a whirlwind tour-de-force performance as Daphna, a complex character who boldly and brashly speaks her mind and doesn’t care who she offends. Bad Jews might be about a Jewish family, but it could be about any family; you definitely don’t have to be a member of that religion, or any religion, to be blown away by its power.

REID FARRINGTON’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Reid Farrington’s unique version of Charles Dickens’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL returns for an encore season at Abrons Arts Center

Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Thursday – Sunday through December 23, $25 ($5 off through 12/1 with discount code DICKENS)
212-352-3101
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.reidfarrington.com

In a December 2011 twi-ny talk, Reid Farrington discussed his latest multimedia work, a rather unique version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, comprising excerpts from nearly three dozen television and movie versions, projected onto screens of varying sizes held by five moving performers. “I have always been obsessed with the idea of actually walking into a movie. There’s that image from so many movies (or maybe just one?) of a little kid putting his hand through a screen — I forget what it’s from, but that’s it. I think that’s the spark that led to this obsession of having live actors interact with screen images. That flexible reality is so exciting to me,” said Farrington, who has also taken on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in Gin & “It” and Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc in The Passion Project. “I also love the sparseness of a projection surface,” he continued. “It makes the work look easier than it is. There are no wires in a projection surface, no gears, no visible computer, nothing. It’s a simple dance of light.” Farrington’s A Christmas Carol is back for a month-long encore at Abrons Arts Center, featuring John Forkner, Laura K. Nicoll, Erin Mallon, Adin Lenahan, and downtown legend Everett Quinton moving about the space as such Scrooges as George C. Scott, Albert Finney, Mr. Magoo, Alastair Sim, Patrick Stewart, Reginald Owen, Bill Murray (Farrington’s favorite), and others tell the classic holiday story.

THE GOOD MOTHER

Gretchen Mol manages to rise above it all in the New Group’s THE GOOD MOTHER (photo by Monique Carboni)

Acorn Theatre, Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through December 22, $61.25
212-244-3380 ext305
www.thenewgroup.org

On the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, Gretchen Mol plays an extremely devoted mother — which includes having an unnatural sexual attraction for her son (Michael Pitt). The mother of two young children in real life, the forty-year-old Mol (Celebrity, The Notorious Bettie Page) is currently starring as the title character in the world premiere of the New Group’s The Good Mother, running through December 22 at Theatre Row. Mol plays Larissa, a thirty-three-year-old Mount Vernon woman with a deeply troubled past. As the play opens, Larissa is making sure goth college student Angus (Eric Nelsen) understands his responsibilities as he prepares to babysit for her four-year-old daughter, who is autistic and can communicate only through physical gestures. Larissa is going on her first date in a long time, with a trucker named Jonathan (Darren Goldstein) she met in a bar the night before. Angus later walks in on Larissa and Jonathan getting hot and heavy on the couch, and after she checks in on her daughter, she thinks Angus has done something seriously wrong to the young girl, leading to a barrage of accusations and revelations that slowly — ridiculously slowly — come to the surface as Larissa also meets with her former mentor, recovering alcoholic Joel (Mark Blum), who is Angus’s father, and her old boyfriend, Buddy (Afredo Narciso), who is about to become the local police lieutenant. In The Good Mother, playwright Francine Volpe (The Given) and director Scott Elliott (the New Group’s founding artistic director) have teamed up for an incredibly frustrating experience, giving out tiny tidbits of information and disinformation as the story progresses, leaving the audience in the dark — literally, as scenes end with the lights going out, the next scene beginning with the characters talking through the blackness before Jason Lyons’s lighting comes back on. Volpe and Elliott go out of their way to keep critical facts and details just out of reach, preventing the audience from knowing who’s who, how they’re related, and, basically, what’s really going on. All plays provide some level of necessary mystery, but The Good Mother goes way over the top in its obvious manipulation; Elliott even has Blum and Nelsen mumble most of their dialogue at such low volumes that it’s hard to simply hear what they’re saying, forget about what it actually means. But through it all, Mol, in Cynthia Rowley clothing, manages to give a fine performance, combining a tender vulnerability with a lurking danger that’s liable to burst out at any moment. Unfortunately, that’s not nearly enough to sustain what is being billed as a “psychological thriller” but turns out to be a series of tiresome mind games the writer and director lord over the audience, who knows when they’re being toyed with.

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE

Three siblings (Kristine Nielsen, David Hyde Pierce, and Sigourney Weaver) examine their lives and don’t necessarily like what they see in Christopher Durang’s delightful Chekhovian satire (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 13, $85
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

When he was at Yale in the 1970s, Christopher Durang teamed with Albert Innaurato and Jack Feldman on The Idiots Karamazov, a musical about a Russian translator that begins with a song titled “O, We Gotta Get to Moscow,” as she confuses Dostoevsky with Chekhov and other writers. That line shows up again in Durang’s delightful new satire, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, running through January 13 at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater. Durang sets his latest play in a Bucks County farmhouse by a lake where a blue heron stops by daily, based on the Bucks County farmhouse by a lake with a blue heron where Durang and his partner reside. Living in the fictional house are Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen), a pair of fiftysomething step-siblings who have essentially sacrificed what lives they might have had by taking care of their ill, elderly parents while their sister, Masha (Sigourney Weaver), became a famous movie star gallivanting around the world with five husbands. Clearly, their parents had a thing for Chekhov; Masha is named after characters from The Seagull and Three Sisters, Vanya and the adopted Sonia from Uncle Vanya. Invited to a neighbor’s costume party, Masha arrives at the house in grand diva fashion, overemoting and unable to keep her hands off her hot new boy toy, Spike (Billy Magnussen), who enjoys taking off most of his clothes at a moment’s notice and striking muscular poses. Masha quickly grows jealous when Spike meets young, pretty ingénue Nina (Genevieve Angelson), a wannabe actress named after the young, innocent actress in The Seagull. Meanwhile, the cleaning lady, Cassandra (Shalita Grant), makes dire predictions that keep coming true, just like her namesake, the Greek mythological figure with second sight. As Vanya, Sonia, Masha, Spike, and Nina prepare for the party — Masha insists they all go as characters from Snow White, with Masha as the beautiful protagonist, slyly referencing Weaver’s portrayal of the evil stepmother in the 1997 television movie Snow White: A Tale of Terror — jealousy, fear, deception, childhood resentment, and more bubble to the surface and threaten to erupt, albeit in primarily wacky, hysterical ways, until Vanya lets loose in a tirade to end all tirades.

Spike (Billy Magnussen) and Masha (Sigourney Weaver) flaunt their sexual desire in thoroughly enjoyable Durang comedy (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

You don’t need to know anything about Chekhov and his searing dramas about seriously dysfunctional families to get a huge kick out of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which has a unique family feel itself — Weaver has been working with Durang since the Yale days, Hyde Pierce starred in the Broadway production of the playwright’s Beyond Therapy (as well as Peter Brook’s The Cherry Orchard), and Nielsen is Durang’s acknowledged muse, having appeared in many of his shows, in parts specifically written for her. Director Nicholas Martin, who previously helmed Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public, keeps things relatively natural and grounded even with Weaver, Magnussen, and Grant playing things deliciously way over the top, as the story’s tender heart is wonderfully captured by Nielsen and Hyde Pierce, who agonize over their loneliness and advancing age, the importance of family, and, perhaps most Chekhovian, a world that seems to be passing them by. Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a thoroughly enjoyable, if often goofy, mashup from one of America’s most engaging satirists at the top of his game. (On November 30 at 6:00, there will be a Platform Series talk between Durang and Martin in the lobby of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, free and open to the public. And be sure to pick up a copy of the fall 2012 Lincoln Center Review, which includes Durang’s “My Life with Chekhov,” an essay detailing seven encounters he had with the Russian playwright, dating back to when he was fourteen.) [ed note: As of March 1, the production can now be seen on Broadway at the Golden Theatre, where it is running through the end of June.]