by Jack Gohn | May 20, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
It is gratifying that Christopher Durang’s latest comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which is assuredly going to be produced in time by every community theater company in the country, gets its Baltimore premiere in style at Center Stage, as a sort of reference production by which other local ones can be gauged. The show, which rolled out over the last two years in regional test runs, then at the Lincoln Center, and then on Broadway, where it closed last year, is in joint production here with the Kansas City Repertory Theatre. The fun seems effortless; with a solid cast and wonderful direction by Eric Rosen at Center Stage, of course nothing is going to go wrong. But I’m willing to bet it would take a lot of trying to do this well-made play badly; I expect we’ll find out.
by Jack Gohn | Apr 22, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
Of course, the musical is not just the tale of the working-out and the ultimate dispelling of a family curse. It is also a poignant account of a woman relating to a treasured younger brother and an even more treasured son in light of the early loss of the brother.
by Jack Gohn | Apr 10, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
A jukebox musical, whatever its dramatic blueprint, is first and foremost a delivery vehicle for nostalgia. This is a popular thing and to a great extent a good one. It is no easy trick, though. Almost every song tells some sort of story. The stories in most songs, even the simplest ones, imply surprisingly extensive contexts, and taken together, these contexts tangle rapidly. There exist only a few possible fundamental ways to minimize those tangles.
by Jack Gohn | Apr 9, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
The tale of a marriage from first kiss to the moment of separation, it leaves essentially unidentified the problems that cause the separation. What we see are more in the way of symptoms. Catherine is uncomfortable with her writer husband’s celebrity; she opts out of attending parties with him; their careers make them spend a lot of time in different cities; he has an affair. These are common kinds of incidents in breakups, but they do not explain the breakups; they do not explain how a couple who were originally propelled into each other’s arms by passion come to be so awkward and distant with each other. That part of the story is told in ill-connected snapshots.
by Jack Gohn | Mar 1, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
Something happened involving those two and Mrs. K’s deceased husband. We may think we know, but I suspect most guesses will be wrong. We know the play is going in a dark direction, but we may well not guess how dark.
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.