this week in theater

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.]

MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE AND BIG BALLOON BLOW-UP

Hello Kitty will fly into New York City this week, making her Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade debut

77th St. & Central Park West to 34th St. & Seventh Ave.
Thursday, November 22, free, 9:00 am – 12 noon
212-494-4495
www.macys.com

In 1924, a bunch of Macy’s employees joined forces and held the first Macy’s Christmas Parade, as it was then known. This year Macy’s celebrates the eighty-sixth edition of this beloved American event. (For those of you going crazy trying to figure out how 1924 to 2012 makes 86, the parade was canceled from 1942 through 1944 because of World War II.) The 2012 lineup features such new giant balloons as Hello Kitty, Papa Smurf, and Elf on the Shelf and such new floats as Sprout, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Gibson’s Music Is Our Life, and 75 Years of March Madness alongside such returning favorites as Kermit the Frog, Spider-Man, Julius, the Kool-Aid Man, Uncle Sam, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Snoopy’s Dog House, and Big Man Santa, all making their way through a new route that will take the parade down Sixth Ave. from Central Park South to Herald Square. Among the Broadway shows that will present lip-synching floats are Annie, Bring It On, Cinderella, Elf, and Nice Work if You Can Get It in addition to live performances by Carly Rae Jepsen, Flo Rida, the Wanted, Karmin, Neon Trees, Cody Simpson, Jimmy Fallon & the Roots, Jennette McCurdy, Chris Isaak, and Don McLean. Other special guests include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Whoopi Goldberg, Geoffrey Zakarian, Colbie Caillat, Mannheim Steamroller, Trace Adkins, Miss USA Olivia Culpo, and Olympic gold medalists Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, Kyla Ross, and Jordyn Wieber. The parade will feature 11 marching bands, 16 giant balloons, 28 floats, 19 novelty balloonicles, 20 marching bands and cheerleading groups, 30 clown troupes, and more.

To get a start on the parade, head on over to Central Park West and Columbus Ave. between 77th & 81st Sts. the day before, November 21, from approximately 3:00 to 10:00 to check out the Big Balloon Blow-up. Watching the annual inflation-eve blow-up of Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons is a growing tradition, with crowds getting bigger and bigger every year, but it’s still a thrill to see the giant characters raised from the ground, reborn every Thanksgiving to march in a parade viewed by millions and millions of people around the world. (For further information, you can get the official parade app here.)

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MAN

Four imprisoned Yiddishists contemplate their fate in gripping new play by Nathan Englander (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. below Astor Pl.
Extended through December 16, $75-$85 ($35 if you use the promotion code “friend”)
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

Inspired by actual events, Nathan Englander’s The Twenty-Seventh Man is a powerful, Kafka-esque drama about totalitarianism, freedom of speech, and the impending death of Yiddish literature. Expanded from his short story in the 1999 collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, the gripping one-act play is set in 1952 in a dank Soviet cell where Moishe Bretzky (Daniel Oreskes), Yevgeny Zunser (Ron Rifkin), and Vasily Korinsky (Chip Zien) have been imprisoned. Three of the seminal Yiddish writers of their time, Bretzky the poet is a big bear of a man, Zunser the novelist is a quiet, humble thinker, and Korinsky is a brash shill for the state who is certain an error has been made and that Joseph Stalin himself will free him. The three men are soon joined by a mysterious boy named Pinchas Pelovits (Noah Robbins), the twenty-seventh man arrested. Pelovits seems to know a lot about the other writers, but they have no idea who he is or why he is part of this elite, endangered group of Yiddishists. As the four men explore literature, politics, and Jewish identity under Stalin’s brutal regime, Korinsky demands to see the agent in charge (Byron Jennings) despite the guard’s (Happy Anderson) physical threats and own fears. Directed by Public Theater Shakespeare veteran Barry Edelstein, The Twenty-Seventh Man is superbly acted, each man bringing unique qualities to their very different roles. Michael McGarty’s set of hardened steel is claustrophobic despite being open on three sides, as if the possibility of freedom is within the victims’ grasp. Englander’s (The Ministry of Special Cases) skillful, incisive dialogue is a wonder of economy, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats while avoiding becoming pedantic or overly sentimental, proving him to be as adept a playwright as he is a novelist and short story writer.

SCANDALOUS: THE LIFE AND TRIALS OF AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON

Carolee Carmello desperately tries to save new musical by Kathie Lee Gifford (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Neil Simon Theater
250 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31 [new closing date: December 9], $35-$140
www.scandalousonbroadway.com

“Aimee Semple McPherson is a liar and a fake,” declares Asa Keyes (Benjamin Howes) at the beginning of the new Broadway musical Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson. In response, Emma Jo Schaeffer (Roz Ryan) proclaims, “Sister Aimee saved my life.” The two statements set up the unusual dichotomy that was McPherson, an enigmatic Pentecostal evangelist who was a female radio pioneer and the leader of the popular Angelus Temple in Los Angeles but might best be remembered for her mysterious disappearance at the height of her career. It took ten years for Kathie Lee Gifford — who wrote the book and lyrics, along with additional music — to bring Scandalous to Broadway, but now that it’s here, at the Neil Simon Theatre, it’s likely to follow in its subject’s footsteps and disappear, although not nearly as mysteriously. Two-time Tony nominee Carolee Carmello (Parade, Lestat) is very good as McPherson, spreading the word from high atop a blindingly white pulpit, but Gifford and composers David Pomeranz (who worked with Kathie Lee on her first show, Under the Bridge) and Disney veteran David Friedman make the proceedings feel more like an Up with People concert than a Broadway musical. David Armstrong’s direction is tiresome and repetitive, Lorin Latarro’s (American Idiot) choreography is nearly nonexistent (when it’s not head-scratchingly obvious), and two-time Tony winner George Hearn (Sunset Boulevard, La Cage aux Folles) is sadly, drastically underused. And it’s rarely a good sign when the Playbill includes a slipped-in loose sheet of the musical numbers that reveals that several songs in the second act have been axed. Today show cohost Gifford, whose husband, Frank, went to McPherson’s Foursquare Church when he was a child, spends too much time putting McPherson, and faith in general, up on a pedestal, essentially preaching herself, only without the edge that McPherson seemed to have. “Was she a true woman of God? Or just one helluva woman?” Louella Parsons (Elizabeth Ward Land) asks near the end of the show. Don’t expect to find out — or care — in the trivial Scandalous. [ed. note: On December 4, it was announced that the show would close on December 9, after thirty-one previews and twenty-nine regular performances.]