'Leopoldstadt': Theater Review

No disrespect to Bob Dylan, one of the greatest songwriters in modern American music, but hearing his tunes sung by the melodious voices in Girl From the North Country is a revelation — the second time even more than the first. Moving to Broadway after a hit 2018 run at the Public Theater, this brilliantly conceived project from Irish writer-director Conor McPherson could be called the anti-jukebox musical.

Some people think Bob Dylan’s music is depressing — and in “Girl From the North Country,” Conor McPherson makes the case by setting more than twenty of Dylan’s songs into a surprisingly sturdy narrative about the residents of a seedy boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, at the height of the Depression in 1934.

Suddenly Last Summer — Photo: DJ Corey

The Bitter Earth — Photo: Manaf Azzam

There’s a lot of tsuris in Richard Greenberg’s witty and quite wonderful “The Perplexed,” — at least for the older generation of characters on this 10-actor cast. In this new play now making its bow at Manhattan Theatre Club, they’re struggling madly with changing times they can’t fathom, family wounds that won’t heal and a posh wedding that no one particularly wants — except perhaps for the off-stage, wicked, ancient billionaire whose palatial home is the setting for the event.

The cast of Timon of Athens — Photo by Henry Grossman

Amen Corner — Photo: Scott Suchman

The Wanderers: Theatre J — Photo: Teresa Castracane

Shipwreck — Photo: Teresa Castracane

Clearly inspired less by the Book of Exodus than the Playbook of Disney, DreamWorks' screen-to-stage adaptation of the 1998 animated feature The Prince of Egypt is a frenetic, spectacle-driven show, massive in scale but lacking in charm.

When the sinisterly charming emcee played by Francis Jue clicks through black and white slides of the Khmer Rouge period near the start of Cambodian Rock Band, he rolls his eyes at the automatic associations most people have with the Southeast Asian country. "Bor-ring," he groans.

It says something about the supreme power of flesh-and-blood people portraying raw human feeling onstage, without the filter of another medium, that the most emotionally devastating and visually stunning moment in the radical new Broadway revival of West Side Story occurs when its extensive video elements are stripped away.

Everyone toils away during Alice Birch's new play,Anatomy of a Suicide: The audience, which attempts to decipher three separate but interconnected storylines being depicted simultaneously; the actors, who display perfect, split-second timing as they deliver dialogue constructed with the complexity of a musical fugue; and most of all the British playwright herself, who has created this jigsaw puzzle of a theatrical event that seems less designed to convey its provocative themes than to illustrate

Money corrupts. Not just the possession of it, but the lack of it; and democracy, justice, human decency will all suffer at its hands.

It takes guts to admit you were wrong — especially when you have been so right, so often.

“Leopoldstadt,” the most slow-burn and personal work of 82-year-old Tom Stoppard’s long stage and screen career, is an intimate epic. It springs to astonishing dramatic life in a now bare, but once glorious apartment off Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1955. The only problem is, for all the visceral emotional intensity of that scene, it forms less than the last quarter of a play that begins, two hours earlier, at the same address in 1899.

The title of Daniel Zaitchik's new musical provides a clue that it isn't simply going to be a story of boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy runs the danger of losing girl. Most musical love stories feature one character rapturously singing an ode about another.

A large part of what makes Ruth Negga such a distinctive screen presence, in films like Loving and Ad Astra, is the emotional transparency she brings to characterizations notable for their meticulous physical composure.