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OAN MARCUS / MHT / AP |
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D O U B T
John Patrick Shanley's 90-minute drama is simple in outline, complex in resonance. A priest at a Bronx parochial school in the 1960s is suspected by a nun of sexually abusing one of the boys. Is he guilty, or a victim of groundless accusations? The play thwarts all our comfortable assumptions. The accused (Brian F. O'Byrne) is a hardworking, progressive priest whose defensiveness seems perfectly consistent with a man unjustly charged. The nun (the magnificent Cherry Jones) is a stubborn, old-school bulldog who has precious little evidence for her suspicions. The clash of wills is riveting; the outcome unsettling. This Manhattan Theater Club presentation is moving to Broadway in the spring and will certainly be a major Tony contender. |
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F I D D L E R O N T H E R O O F
In a bad year for new musicals, let's give a cheer for one Tradition renewed—this beautifully mounted Broadway revival of the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick classic. Alfred Molina was a Tevye shorn of schtick but full of down-to-earth humanity (he's since been replaced by Harvey Fierstein—oy!), and David Leveuax's production embraces all the color, humor and poignance of Joseph Stein's book, one of the best of all musicals.
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S E A O F T R A N Q U I L I T Y
Howard Korder (Boys' Life, Search and Destroy) may be America's most underrated playwright. His latest play, which had a short-lived off-Broadway run, revolves around a psychologist and his wife who have moved to the Western desert to escape personal troubles that come back to haunt them. Korder's dialogue is as piercing and cryptic as Mamet's, but he also knows how to build a story with just the right mix of melodrama and mystery. |
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S I G H T U N S E E N
A famous artist visits an old girlfriend, now living in the boonies of England with her archeologist husband. Donald Margulies' 1992 relationship drama is perhaps his best play, and the Manhattan Theater Club's revival provided a great showcase for Laura Linney, an actress so achingly alive in every moment that you can't take your eyes off her.
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G E M O F T H E O C E A N
If this were the first of August Wilson's 10-play cycle about 20th century black life, it might be at the top of this list. But it's the ninth (set in the first decade of the century, with a character 287 years old and a search for a mythic "City of Bones") and Wilson's mystical turns have become perhaps too familiar. Yet the poetry and power of his writing is still one of the glories of the American stage. |
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D A M E E D N A : B A C K W I T H A V E N G E A N C E !
With one-person shows all over Broadway this fall, Australian comic Barry Humphries (in his second visit to Broadway as the primly irreverent matron Dame Edna) at least knows how to fill up the stage: enlist the paying customers. Humphries' audience-participation stunts are inventive, his ad-libbing expert, and his manhandling of the crowd surprisingly free of showbiz smugness.
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F R O Z E N
Three characters—the mother of a murdered 10-year-old girl, the pedophile who killed her and the psychiatrist who is studying his mind—speak directly to the audience in what amounts to a round-robin of monologues. Bryony Lavery's drama is limited by that format, but she has crafted a stark and uncompromising look at the various ways a horrible crime can be dissected. |
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A S S A S S I N S
Stephen Sondheim's famously problematic musical about Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth and other Presidential-killers from American history is still problematic: too sketchy, too superficial, too glibly cynical. But Joe Mantello's slick and well-sung Broadway revival made the best case possible for it, and resurrected one of Sondheim's most appealing latter-day scores.
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F I N I S H I N G T H E P I C T U R E
Arthur Miller, 89, apparently felt he didn't get slammed enough for After the Fall. In this new play (which had its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theater), he takes another look at his failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe, this time through the lens of The Misfits, her last movie, for which Miller wrote the screenplay. Miller engages in a little score-settling (in his portrayal of the Strasbergs, Marilyn's acting coaches), but mostly his backstage account of a Hollywood film in crisis is convincing and even-handed, and his portrayal of the last stages of his marriage brutally candid.
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C H A R L I E V I C T O R R O M E O
This off-off-Broadway docu-play puts us in the cockpit of airplanes about to crash, as a handful of actors recreate the crew members' final conversations, taken from actual black-box recordings. From the mundane small talk to the sudden bursts of panicked pilot-speak, it's a rough ride, but one of the best examples of the increasingly popular genre of plays drawn entirely from verbatim transcripts.
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