Tag Archives: Manhattan Theatre Club

THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES

Julie (Jessica Hecht), Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), and Faye (Judith Light) share a Christmas toast in THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 16, $67-$120
www.theassembledpartiesbroadway.com

Throughout Richard Greenberg’s splendid new play, The Assembled Parties, characters comment on how easy it is to get lost in the Bascovs’ fourteen-room Upper West Side apartment. It is also easy for the audience to get lost in Greenberg’s compelling story and well-drawn characters as the Jewish clan celebrates Christmas first in 1980, then twenty years later, with things having substantially changed. Jessica Hecht (A View from the Bridge, After the Fall) is captivating as the family matriarch, Julie, speaking in an elegant, drawn-out voice that instantly reveals her character’s unique take on the world. As the play opens, she is joined by Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), her son Scotty’s (Jake Silberman) college friend, who appears smitten with her as he helps chop vegetables in the kitchen. Soon Julie’s older sister, Faye (Judith Light), arrives, with her gruff husband, Mort (Mark Blum), and their somewhat simple daughter, Shelley (Lauren Blumenfeld). “What is all this goyisha hazarai?” Faye declares upon seeing the spread in the living room, firmly establishing her character in a mere six words. As Santo Loquasto’s superb revolving set roams from room to room (to room to room), Faye tries to set Jeff up with Shelley; Jeff throws around a basketball with Scotty while discussing Scotty’s gorgeous, unseen girlfriend; Faye demands a pill from Julie to help her get through the evening; Jeff can’t break free of the telephone-umbilical cord, obsessed with calling his mother; and Mort has quite a surprise for Julie’s husband, Ben (Jonathan Walker). “God is bogus,” Julie says over dinner, “and religion a scourge. Still, I believe in something, though I’m not sure what.”

Twenty years later, things are vastly different, the only constant being Jeff’s unending dedication to Julie. Although so much of the story is built around Julie and her Jewish family, the centerpiece of the story is really Jeff, who serves as the onstage proxy for the audience. He interacts with all the characters but often does so from an observational distance, so glad to be among such unique and intriguing people. The audience is likely to feel the same way, glad to be among such unique and intriguing characters in Greenberg’s highly entertaining and extremely clever play.

THE MADRID

Mother (Edie Falco) and daughter (Phoebe Strole) have to reevaluate their relationship in THE MADRID (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Extended through May 5, $95
www.themadridplay.com

It’s an intriguing proposition that many people probably consider at least once in their lives. In Liz Flahive’s The Madrid, Martha (Edie Falco) goes ahead and does it. One day, while teaching her kindergarten class, Martha simply gets up and walks out of her life, leaving her career and her family behind. Her gentle, loving husband, John (Tony nominee John Ellison Conlee), and their daughter, Sarah (Spring Awakening’s Phoebe Strole), are stunned and devastated by Martha’s disappearance, as are neighbors and best friends Becca (Heidi Schreck) and Danny (Darren Goldstein). However, Martha’s elderly mother, Rose (two-time Tony winner Frances Sternhagen), seems to take it a little more in stride. A recent college graduate who gets a job at Starbucks while contemplating her future, a confused Sarah is eventually contacted by her mother, who has moved into a ratty city apartment building called the Madrid; soon Sarah must decide whether she wants to have any kind of a relationship with her mother, who insists that Sarah tell no one, especially John, about where she is and what she is doing. Flahive and director Leigh Silverman (Chinglish, In the Wake), who previously teamed up on From Up Here, also for Manhattan Theatre Club, ask lots of questions but don’t necessarily provide the answers in the quirky, unpredictable 130-minute show that examines personal and familial identity and one’s place in the world. Martha never fully explains why she’s done what she’s done, and Falco plays her with an air of repressed mystery, like she’s not sure of the reasons either. Throughout the play, Flahive, a producer on Falco’s award-winning Showtime series Nurse Jackie, has John and Sarah prepare for a garage sale, trying to get rid of so many of the physical objects that remind them of Martha while also attempting to figure out how to deal with her desertion emotionally and psychologically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that walking out on one’s life is not exactly a party, something Flahive handles in The Madrid with an at-times frustrating lack of clarity but also with sensitive care and humor. (Falco will be at the 92nd St. Y on April 7 for a Broadway Talks conversation and audience Q&A about the play and more with Jujamcyn Theaters president Jordan Roth.)

THE OTHER PLACE

Real-life mother and daughter Laurie Metcalf and Zoe Perry star in Sharr White’s fascinating THE OTHER PLACE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 3, $67-$120
www.theotherplacebroadway.com

Three-time Emmy winner Laurie Metcalf won both an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award for her 2011 off-Broadway portrayal of neurologist Juliana Smithson in Sharr White’s The Other Place, and now she has a strong shot at a Tony as the play moves to Broadway in the gripping MTC production at the Samuel J. Friedman. Metcalf stars as Juliana, a pharmaceutical pitch-woman who suffers an “episode” while on the road touting a new wonder drug. Long estranged from her daughter (Zoe Perry, Metcalf’s real-life daughter, in her Broadway debut) and accusing her doctor-husband, Ian (Daniel Stern), of having an affair with her much-younger doctor (Perry again), Juliana is trying to hold herself together even as she believes she has brain cancer. But as the complex, highly cinematic play continues, it becomes evident that she is suffering from something very different, and in many ways far more frightening.

White and Tony-winning director Joe Mantello (Other Desert Cities, Wicked, Love! Valour! Compassion!) tell Juliana’s harrowing story by going back and forth between the past and the present, as Justin Townsend’s lighting signals the time shifts. The action takes place within set designers Eugene Lee and Edward Pierce’s semicircular web of bleak gray frames (hiding lights and speakers) that serve as doors, windows, and mirrors while also evoking the misfiring synapses of Juliana’s brain. Metcalf (Rosanne, November) gives a dazzling performance as Juliana, an intelligent, scientific woman who doesn’t understand — and is unwilling to accept — what is happening to her. As the audience filters into the theater, she is already onstage, sitting in a chair, fiddling with her cell phone, helping the incoming crowd instantly identify with her. But soon it’s Ian, strongly portrayed by Stern, who is standing in for the audience as the truth is slowly revealed. Despite a few missteps — primarily a somewhat baffling finale that takes things much too far — The Other Place is an involving eighty minutes of fascinating theater, expertly told and brilliantly acted.

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Richard Thomas and Boyd Gaines star as brothers at odds in Broadway revival of Ibsen’s AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 11, $67-$120
www.anenemyofthepeoplebroadway.com

When Dr. Thomas Stockmann (four-time Tony winner Boyd Gaines) discovers that the water in the baths of his spa town is dangerously contaminated, he thinks he will be celebrated as a hero, a supreme protector of the public health. But he is shocked when his brother, Peter (Emmy winner Richard Thomas), the mayor, decides to cover up the findings, more interested in ensuring the future financial success of the small Norwegian coastal town than in saving lives, setting off an all-too-familiar battle between the government and the individual, the public welfare versus corporate greed, the rich against the poor, and the role of the media in the controversy. Written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People is now running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a streamlined, hackneyed adaptation by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz (The Night Season) that attempts to be relevant to modern-day concerns but instead, after a somewhat promising first act, falls flat on its clichéd bottom. Gaines is strong as the determined yet conceited doctor, refusing to believe that the truth will get buried, but Thomas is far too weaselly as the mayor, strutting about like Snidely Whiplash in his top hat, cape, and cane. Doug Hughes’s flaccid direction turns the proceedings into a ridiculous series of overblown, pedantic scenes that culminates in a cringe-inducing town meeting in which everyone piles on the good doctor.

Following 1878’s A Doll’s House and 1881’s Ghosts, Ibsen continued his scathing indictment of various aspects of contemporary society in An Enemy of the People, but it is not one of his better plays, as evidenced by how infrequently it turns up in major productions onstage and onscreen; in 1950, Arthur Miller’s adaptation ran on Broadway with Fredric March and Morris Carnovsky, and a little-seen 1978 film starred Steve McQueen and Charles Durning. This 2012 version also features Kathleen McNenny as the doctor’s wife, Catherine; Maïté Alina as their idealistic daughter, Petra; John Procaccino as newspaper publisher Hovstad; and Gerry Bamman as Aslaksen the printer, whose constant calls for “restraint” grow as tiresome as the production’s overwrought political statements. Lenkiewicz’s An Enemy of the People can’t decide whether it’s an ironic black comedy or a serious treatise on power and corruption, winding up as neither.

THE COLUMNIST

The Alsop brothers (John Lithgow and Boyd Gaines) toast to happier times in THE COLUMNIST (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through June 24, $67-$121
thecolumnistbroadway.com

Based on the real life of American journalist Joseph Alsop, David Auburn’s The Columnist is a rather sterile exercise in twentieth-century historical fiction. Multitalented Tony and Emmy winner and Oscar nominee John Lithgow, a Rochester-born Harvard grad who in recent years has played a serial killer on Dexter, published a series of popular children’s books, and penned his autobiography (An Actor’s Education), gives a wonderful performance as the erudite Alsop, an acerbic columnist who believes he is more powerful than the president. A staunch conservative, he is surprisingly delighted with JFK’s victory, celebrating with his wife, Mary (Margaret Colin), stepdaughter, Abigail (Grace Gummer), and brother and sometime writing partner, Stewart (Boyd Gaines), convinced that the new president will show up at his house on the night of the inauguration. But Alsop’s power and influence begin to wane as he very publicly pushes for greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, directly challenged by such up-and-coming journalists as David Halberstam (Stephen Kunken), while Stewart tries to protect his brother from a potential scandal surrounding a sexual fling Joe had with a young Russian man (Brian J. Smith) several years before, depicted in a very strong scene that opens the play. Auburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2000 play, Proof, never quite gets below the surface in The Columnist, resulting in a series of predictable, clichéd moments that feel stale and unnecessary, particularly when delving into the Vietnam war, something in interviews he claimed to know very little about, which shows. He does somewhat better handling the practical marriage between Alsop, a closeted homosexual, and Mary, a respected DC party hostess, although he changes several important facts about their relationship, including its length, and turns Mary’s two daughters into one. Directed by Shakespeare veteran Daniel Sullivan, The Columnist, despite a terrific lede and a Tony-nominated lead actor, is still in need of significant editing.

VENUS IN FUR

Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy are electrifying in David Ives’s VENUS IN FUR (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45ht St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through June 17, $76.50- $141.50
www.venusinfurbroadway.com

“Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather / Whiplash girlchild in the dark / Severin, your servant, comes in bells, please don’t forsake him / Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart,” Lou Reed sang on the Velvet Underground’s 1967 S&M classic, “Venus in Furs.” The song was inspired by the 1870 novella of the same name by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which also serves as the basis for David Ives’s wickedly funny play, Venus in Fur. Following its recent run at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the sizzling-hot two-character Manhattan Theatre Club production is back on Broadway, thrilling audiences at the Lyceum through June 17. In a small New York basement studio, Thomas (British actor Hugh Dancy) has just finished auditioning actors for his next play, Venus in Fur, when Vanda (breakout star Nina Arianda) suddenly storms into his life, a whirlwind of crazy energy who has come to try out for the role of Wanda von Dunajew in Thomas’s theatrical adaptation of Sacher-Masoch’s story-within-a-story about gender, sexuality, and degradation. Thomas tries to get rid of Vanda, but the two of them are soon reading the play, with Ives cleverly creating a developing story-within-a-story of his own as Thomas and Vanda start mimicking what is going on between Wanda and Severin von Kusiemski. What begins as a classic battle of the sexes turns into so much more as they seductively fight over power and dominance. Tony nominee Arianda (Born Yesterday) is a marvel as Vanda, effortlessly going back and forth between the nasal-voiced wacky ingénue and the strong, defiant characters she is portraying. Dancy, in a role originally performed by Wes Bentley in the show’s January 2010 Classic Stage Company debut, does an excellent job of keeping up with Arianda’s boundless energy as he plays both Thomas and the subservient Severin. Anita Yavich’s costumes are sensational, with Vanda continually reaching into her bag of tricks, pulling out erotically charged items, including to-die-for thigh-high leather boots. With Vanda and Thomas continually fighting over where to stand as they read the play-within-a-play, it is easy to forget that the show is actually directed by Walter Bobbie (Chicago, Footloose), who seamlessly weaves everything together. Venus in Fur is a breathless, electrifying drama that should not be forsaken; you’d have to be a masochist not to see it.

AFTER WORDS: A CONVERSATION WITH CYNTHIA NIXON

Cynthia Nixon will discuss WIT at the Greene Space on February 16 (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Greene Space
44 Charlton St. at Varick St.
Thursday, February 16, $20 ($15 with code GREENE), 5:00
www.thegreenespace.org
www.witonbroadway.com

After we recently saw Wit, Margaret Edson’s marvelous Pulitzer Prize–winning play that is making its Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, we wrote that “Cynthia Nixon is magnificent as Vivian Bearing; for all her eccentricities, Bearing should not be a sympathetic character, but Nixon turns the lonely, snarky woman, who has no real friends or family, into a delightful character who is not afraid to look death in the face.” The play deals with Bearing’s battle with stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer with both humor and seriousness. Following that matinee, cast members Greg Keller, Carra Patterson, and Jessica Dickey participated in a talk back with the audience, shedding illuminating light on the production’s creative process. On Thursday at 5:00, Keller (Dr. Jason Posner) and Patterson (nurse Susie Monahan) will join Tony and Emmy winner Nixon, herself a breast cancer survivor, for a special presentation at the Greene Space, going behind the scenes in a conversation moderated by WNYC’s Amy Eddings as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s “After Words” series. Tickets are $20, but if you use the code “GREENE,” they’re only $15.