'The Last Ship': Theater Review

“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.

A musical drama about the imminent demise of a shipbuilding town in the North East of England, and a union’s last-ditch attempt to reclaim the village’s pride? Audiences: No thanks.

Silent Sky — Photo: Scott Suchman

The idea that Samuel Beckett’s plays are actually funny in performance is considerably more honored in theory than in practice. But happily, a rare pairing of his “Endgame” and the little-seen “Rough for Theatre II,” now playing at the Old Vic in London, bucks the trend.

When an ancient woman seeing out her last days in a trash can asserts that "nothing is funnier than unhappiness," it's impossible not to laugh. But then she, and playwright Samuel Beckett, quickly add a corrective: "We laugh with a will in the beginning.

It took a trio of MacArthur Fellows — composer Matthew Aucoin, playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Mary Zimmerman — to bring to the boards L.A. Opera's world premiere Eurydice, a vibrant and musically of-the-moment take on a tale that has been adapted to the medium roughly 70 times before.

Paul Mazursky's 1969 film comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a witty social satire about the sexual revolution and the confusion it engendered among a generation, was perfect for its era. Now there's a new musical adaptation, receiving its off-Broadway world premiere with The New Group and staged by the company's artistic director, Scott Elliott.

There's an awful lot of baggage attending the new modern-day riff on the classic Greek tragedy Medea. Written and directed by Simon Stone "after Euripides," as the program puts it, this version retains very little of the original beyond the essential plot element of a scorned woman murdering her children.

Pilgrims — Photo: Christopher Banks

Spring Awakening: Evan Daves — Photo: C. Stanley Photography

Merry Wives — Photo: Cameron Whitman

The Confession of Lily Dare fairly begs the question: Why stay home watching old films on Turner Classic Movies when you can see Charles Busch send them up in his gloriously campy, cross-dressing fashion? Returning to the parodistic style with which he made a name for himself in such comedies as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! (the last two also made into movies), the actor-writer here delivers an amusingly loving send-up of the sort of melodramatic, pre-Code

“The Last Shift,” a fast-food tragedy written and directed by Andrew Cohn, is a gut punch with a side of anguish. In this wonderfully sad small-town drama, the ever-empathetic Richard Jenkins plays Stan, a former high school athlete who took the graveyard shift at local chain Oscar’s Chicken and Fish in 1971 and never left.

Netflix seriously raised the bar on the true-crime police procedural with Unbelievable, its shattering, forensically detailed miniseries about the hunt for a serial rapist. That standard of excellence does no favors to this poorly scripted feature from the streaming platform, based on the unsolved Long Island Serial Killer case in which more than a dozen sex workers were murdered over a period of almost 20 years.

“I’m having the greatest adventure of my creative life,” says Sting on starring in the touring production of his musical The Last Ship. “It’s so satisfying.”The Tony Award-nominated The Last Ship is sailing across the U.S.

It's easy to see why documentary and TV director Andrew Cohn's first narrative feature, The Last Shift, was at one time considered as a project for Alexander Payne, who remains on board as executive producer. Empathy for aging men navigating complicated crossroads in their unfulfilled lives has often shaped Payne's films and very much applies to the terminal under-achiever played here with characteristic dimension and heart by the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins.

It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there. The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.

Even famous people get starstruck. Take Sting, who got totally busted studying his own his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.