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DAVID COOPER |
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C O N T I N E N T A L D I V I D E
David Edgar, the British author of Nicholas Nickleby, tackles American politics in a dense, sprawling pair of linked plays about a campaign for governor in an unnamed Western state — one play focusing on the Democrats, the other on the Republicans. Ambitious, verbose, untidy (and still being worked on, after a premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), it is nevertheless an enormously impressive effort to create epic theater out of the intersection of the political and the personal in post-'60s, post-Watergate America. |
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W I C K E D
What if the Wicked Witch of the West was just misunderstood? That's the question posed by this surprisingly grown-up revisionist take on The Wizard of Oz. The music (by Stephen Schwartz) is just passable, but the script is often ingenious and the stars (Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel as the good and bad witches) will be competing for Tonys next spring. |
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F ________ A
Forgive the needlessly provocative title. Suzan-Lori Parks' Brechtian play with music — set in a "small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere," where abortion has been outlawed and its practitioners are branded with an A — is a powerful and original fable, in which social protest is leavened with irony. |
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W O N D E R F U L T O W N
Too many revivals seem superfluous. But this one — back on Broadway for the first time in 50 years — is almost a revelation. The story of two career-girl sisters rooming together in Greenwich Village is one of the rare classic musicals that involve contemporary American characters with contemporary American problems. And Leonard Bernstein's score, with its snappy tunes and modernist snippets, is as good as anything he ever did for Broadway. |
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M A T T A N D B E N
As in Damon and Affleck. This fictional one-act, about two Harvard roommates who stumble into show business, is written and performed with deadpan hilarity by two women, Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers. Yet it's not a sorority-house jape, but a sly and oddly touching satire on the arbitrariness of fame. |
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T H E M A N F R O M N E B R A S K A
Tracy Letts' play, being given its world premiere at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, starts in near silence: a man and his wife driving, going to church, stopping for a bite at the local cafeteria. This placid life is shattered by the man's crisis of faith, and his subsequent journey of discovery. He doesn't discover much, to tell the truth, but the play, beautifully directed by Anna B. Shapiro, is an austere and moving portrait. |
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T A B O O
Enough dumping on Rosie O'Donnell. The musical she brought to Broadway, about the wild ‘80s London club scene that spawned Boy George, has plenty of problems. But any show with songs as good as (grown-up Boy) George O'Dowd's and performers as thrilling as Raul Esparza (as the cross-dressing narrator) and Euan Morton (as Boy George) deserves to stick around for a while. |
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C A R O L I N E , O R C H A N G E
Tony Kushner's very serious, semi-autobiographical musical, about a black maid and the white Louisiana family she works for in 1963, doesn't connect emotionally as it should. Still, he and composer Jeanine Tesori have created an innovative piece that must be seen by anyone interested in new directions for the musical. |
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A N N A I N T H E T R O P I C S
Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama has its moments of soap opera and poetic excess. But his deeply felt play about a "lector" who reads novels to the workers in a Tampa cigar factory takes a near-forgotten slice of Cuban-American history and turns it into an affecting piece of theater. |
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T H E B E A R D O F A V O N
Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? Amy Freed's off-Broadway play (which debuted at California's South Coast Rep) posits an amusing theory: Shakespeare did, but only after first lending his name out to every hack playwright in London, including Queen Elizabeth. Intelligent and fun. |
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S I X D A N C E L E S S O N S I N S I X W E E K S
A Florida widow and her dance instructor (Polly Bergen and Mark Hamill) learn about each other, and about life, in a tedious, sentimental dinner-theater trifle that somehow invaded Broadway for a brief run. |
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