Knocking the Songs Out of the Park: Chess
A first-rate production of a second-rate show. The astonishing cast delivers song after song that sails out of the park.
Mondo Preview
Things that help in the strange ecology of the contemporary serious drama: rolling premieres, black box theaters, foundations, and residuals. But in consequence the reviewer may have to go guerilla. As seen with Detroit, The Train Driver, and Bullet for Adolf.
Boeing Boeing: A Delirious Farce
The thing about really great farces is that once they wind up, they become like three-ring circuses, with physical comedy (pratfalls and double-takes), character-based comedy, and the sheer geometry of exits from impossible situations being closed off, one by one, contributing to constant hilarity and nearly non-stop laughter. Of course, even in the case of the most beautifully-constructed farces, this requires a deft directorial touch, because the whole thing is always a soufflé of improbable coincidence, of characters missing unmissable cues, of perfectly-timed entrances and exits, of unbelievable ingenuity preventing inevitable disaster, of insults taken where none were intended, of passes made and, against all probability, not rebuffed. And keeping soufflés from falling is hard work.
A ‘Deliciously Disgraceful’ Tallulah
This is not great drama or great comedy, but it is an enjoyable evening of theater. Of course, in the end none of it matters if Powers does not deliver, but no one can deny that she knocks it out of the park. It may be a tinier park than some, but knock it she does.
A Misconceived MENAGERIE
True, the conclusion that Tom is gay, closeted, and alienated thereby from his family is not absolutely compelled. The failure of the script to “go there” arguably leaves room for actors and directors to interpret. But any other conclusion than that Tom Wingfield, like Tom Williams, is gay would be misinterpretation. And it is a misinterpretation with consequences.
A Rousing FIDDLER
Fiddler traffics in the safest kind of nostalgia, reminiscences of a world no one would want to return to. It’s a lovely flirtation with a way of life that is safely dead. Naturally, none of that would have mattered, had the songs not been so infernally catchy, the dancing not so athletic and exotic, the sentimentality not so powerfully schmaltzy, and the love-stories, even perfunctorily sketched, not so appealing.
About Jack Gohn
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.