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Friday, November 20, 2009

    [ STARS ]  Ragtime Harmony; Encores! Season Opener: Girl Crazy; Kudisch/Denman Home for the Holidays; What Next for Rob Marshall?; Oscars Going MTV Route; Tennessee Williams Symposium/Film Retrospective; Remembering Johnny Mercer; Idiots Return by Ellis Nassour

  • Posted by Tim Dunleavy at 10:39 AM | Item Link


      • This morning's Peter Filichia:

      [ TM ]  Jim Brochu: The Pope and the Showgirl—and Zero

      When Jim Brochu was 13, his goal was to be the first Brooklyn-born Pope. "Then," he says, "my father took me to see Gypsy, and afterward, we went back to see Merman, When she asked me, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' I said, 'A showgirl.'" Well, that didn't quite happen, but now he's playing Zero Mostel in Zero Hour, the one-man show he's also written.

      [ S ]  A Moon To Dance By arrives in New Brunswick

      It's happened many times in their 34-year marriage. Jane Alexander gets a tap on the shoulder from her husband, Edwin Sherin, who has a script in his hands. "Would you read this and give me an opinion on whether or not I should direct?" he asks. This time, the play was A Moon To Dance By, by Thom Thomas. And though Alexander and Sherin will open it at the George Street Playhouse this Friday, she's still a little surprised that she's in it.

      This morning's Michael Riedel:

      [ NYP ]  Flop-Secret

      The latest trend in New York theater: reviving the biggest flops of all time. As The Post reported, producers Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller are resurrecting Carrie. The other famous flop that's coming back is Paul Simon's The Capeman, which lost $11 million on Broadway in 1998.

      This morning's reviews of In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play:

      [ NYT ]  Beyond Electricity, Toward Female Emancipation, by Charles Isherwood

      Alert the authorities. Shocking sexual acts are taking place in In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play, an inspired new comedy by Sarah Ruhl.

      [ NYP ]  Only Good Vibrations, by Elisabeth Vincentelli

      Sarah Ruhl presents something a lot more intimate and a lot more daring: women's discovery of their own bodies and their own pleasure. It may be the first time we've seen characters repeatedly reach orgasm on a mainstream stage—in a Lincoln Center Theater production, no less—and it happens in a play that's smart, delicate and very, very funny.

      [ DN ]  Good buzz loses its charge, by Joe Dziemianowicz

      After seeing Ruhl's previous works Dead Man's Cell Phone, Eurydice, and The Clean House, one expects an element of fantasy. She ends with one as she suggests an answer to the show's central question: To be seen, you have to really see what's around you. Sweet. But it's too lite to be illuminating.

      [ ND ]  Picking Up Good Vibrations In the Next Room, by Linda Winer

      In the Next Room or the vibrator play is a great big idea with a mildly amusing play tacked onto it. The comedy is more substantial and less self-consciously whimsical than the three previous Sarah Ruhl plays that also have been luxuriously produced in New York in the past three years. But I still wish I understood the appeal.

      [ TONY ]  Reviewed by David Cote

      Ruhl's subject is rich with comic possibilities, many of which, I'm glad to report, she elegantly and thoughtfully teases out. More, she doesn't just point at historical ignorance and cackle, but probes sympathetically, to portray a marriage warped by shame and secrecy, in which scientific ritual occludes common sense and instinct.

      [ NYM ]  The Story of Oh!, by Scott Brown & Stephanie Zacharek

      In the Next Room or the vibrator play is pure pleasure. Plus: The strains of Ragtime.

      [ WSJ ]  Reviewed by Terry Teachout

      Sarah Ruhl writes retchingly coy plays that pretend to be transgressive—a sure-fire recipe for success of a sort. In the Next Room or the vibrator play (trendy capitalization and punctuation by Ms. Ruhl, not me) is an all-too-typical example of her method.

      [ USA ]  In the Next Room will elicit paroxysms of mirth, sadness, by Elysa Gardner

      Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room or the vibrator play, which opened Thursday at the Lyceum Theatre, is set in the 1880s outside New York City, in the home of an impeccably gracious physician who has grown fond of the aforementioned gadget—as a therapeutic device. He uses it on hysterics, as emotionally disturbed women were known in that era, to produce healing, um, "paroxysms."

      [ AP ]  Electricity adds spark In the Next Room, by Michael Kuchwara

      This provocative, often quite funny play, which Lincoln Center Theater opened Thursday at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, is Ruhl's most entertaining work to date.

      [ BLOOM ]  Ruhl's Flighty Vibrator Play Lives Up to the Buzz, by John Simon

      Wonders will never cease. Sarah Ruhl, whose previous work I execrated, has now written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel.

      [ BS ]  Reviewed by David Sheward

      Farce and drama blend in Sarah Ruhl's odd but endearing new work, In the Next Room or the vibrator play. This is the type of play no commercial producer in his or her right mind would ever mount on the Main Stem, but Lincoln Center Theater is presenting it at the Lyceum because South Pacific continues to run at the Vivian Beaumont. It's challenging and strange and addresses the uncomfortable issue of women's sexuality. Conventional Broadway audiences won't know what to make of it.

      [ V ]  Reviewed by David Rooney

      Victorian repression gets a rude poke in Sarah Ruhl's typically idiosyncratic rumination on women's struggle to understand and explore their sexual selves, In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play. While the signature 19th century ailment being treated is "hysteria," the chief weakness is the bipolar disorder of the inconsistent second act, which shifts uncertainly between serious developments and the more farcical business of romantic cross-currents. But there are so many lingering moments of emotional truth, and even more of daring comedy, that the play amuses and charms even if it doesn't quite satisfy.

      [ OOB ]  Reviewed by Matt Windman

      In the Next Room or the vibrator play, Sarah Ruhl's first play on Broadway following several major Off-Broadway mountings, is raw, fascinating and madly entertaining.

      [ TM ]  Reviewed by David Finkle

      Sarah Ruhl's new comedy about the treatment of hysteria is genuinely hysterical.

      [ HR ]  Reviewed by Frank Scheck

      Although it would seem to hold the promise of being an extended dirty joke, Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room or the vibrator play actually is a surprisingly funny and sensitive portrait of the eternal disconnect between men and women.

      [ EW ]  Reviewed by Thom Geier

      The plotline of In the Next Room, which just opened on Broadway, is not nearly as ribald as you might expect. That restraint is almost a shame, because Ruhl's play could have benefited from a broader, farcical touch. As it stands, In the Next Room occasionally seems like a barely dramatized version of a college lecture about the treatment of women in the 19th century (both medically and otherwise). Too often, the characters seem like types, stand-ins for some period point of view, rather than flesh-and-blood individuals.

      [ NJNR ]  New Broadway comedy explores Victorian sex lives, by Michael Sommers

      A frisky new comedy equally naughty and nice in contents, In the Next Room or the vibrator play is Sarah Ruhl's thoughtful consideration of sex and the Victorian woman.

      [ NJ ]  Stimulating Comedy, by Robert Feldberg

      Can I persuade you that a play that centers on the invention of the vibrator is warm, romantic and affecting, in addition to being very funny?

      This morning's reviews of The Orphans' Home Cycle - Part 1: The Story of a Childhood:

      [ NYT ]  Heart of a Small Town, Vast in Its Loneliness, by Ben Brantley

      The first part of Horton Foote's Orphans' Home Cycle is a thrilling demonstration of an artist soaring into the realm of the epic.

      [ WSJ ]  Reviewed by Terry Teachout

      Would that Foote could have lived to attend the New York opening of the first part of The Orphans' Home Cycle, co-produced by Signature and Connecticut's Hartford Stage, where all three installments were seen earlier this year. It will, I suspect, be remembered as the most significant theatrical event of the season, the kind of show you tell your grandchildren you saw.

      [ TONY ]  Reviewed by David Cote

      Foote's understated epic is an authentic American classic about the birth pangs of the 20th century. It's told with humor, deep sadness and great writerly craft. I can't wait to see what happens next.

      [ AP ]  Horton Foote chronicles a man's search for family, by Michael Kuchwara

      If Part 1 of The Orphans' Home Cycle is any indication, we are in for a remarkable journey.

      [ BS ]  Reviewed by Erik Haagensen

      From the moment the redoubtable Pamela Payton-Wright settles into her train seat and, as an enthusiastic elderly Southern Baptist, engages the young male stranger seated before her with ladylike aggression, you know you are in the best of hands. By the time director Michael Wilson's bone-deep production of the first part of Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle is over, nearly three hours have passed in the blink of an eye. I wanted the second part to begin immediately.

      [ TM ]  Reviewed by Dan Bacalzo

      Signature Theatre Company's production of Horton Foote's nine-play, three-part opus gets off to an excellent start.

      [ EW ]  Reviewed by Melissa Rose Bernardo

      Happiness is illusory and joy fleeting, but there's much melancholy beauty to be found in the first third of the late Horton Foote's nine-play Orphans' Home Cycle at Off Broadway's Signature Theatre Company.

      [ NJ ]  A heartbreaking story from Horton Foote, by Robert Feldberg

    • Posted by Matthew Murray at 10:11 AM | Item Link


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