Midsummer

Last night, I attended Midsummer: A Banquet, a wonderful new production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (with food!) that is a co-production of Food for Love and Third Rail Productions.

Last year, Food for Love presented Shake & Bake: Love's Labour's Lost in the meatpacking district. Victoria Rae Sook, who played the Princess of France in that production, returns to play Hippolyta and Titania in Midsummer. This production doesn't provide quite as much food as the last one, but it delivers on all the laughs and romance that made Love's Labour's Lost one of my favorite productions of last year.

Instead of being in the meatpacking district, Midsummer is across the street from the Strand Bookstore in Greenwich Village. The historic building where the play is performed (which once housed the studio of Willem De Kooning) has been transformed into Cafe Fae, an Art Nouveau restaurant that becomes an enchanted forest as well. The small cast deftly performs multiple roles while also managing to serve the audience a tasting menu that includes antipasti, a forest picnic, and "fairy kababs" which fortunately are not made of actual fairies.

Zach Morris directed and choreographed this production. I had seen some of his choreography years ago, and I was delighted to find that his work is as imaginative and emotionally engaging as ever. Music and dance are woven seamlessly into the production, and part of the fun is watching the cast sing and play instruments as well as act an incredibly physical Shakespearean drama only a few feet behind even the furthest seat in this intimate space.

Summer is winding down now, so make sure you see this production soon. Tickets are currently on sale through the beginning of September, but you'll definitely want to catch the show before in vanishes into the mists of a magical forest.

Top Plays of 2018

Each December, I compile a list of the top plays I saw that opened that year in New York City. Last year, Sweeney Todd, HOME/SICK, and Julius Caesar topped the list.

This year both Roundabout Theatre Company and the Public Theater have multiple shows on my list. Playwrights William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw get multiple nods as well.

So without further ado, here’s my list:

10. Romeo and Juliet – Each year, New York Classical Theatre Company puts on free productions in the city’s parks. This summer’s production of Shakespeare’s classic tale about star-crossed lovers used innovative doubling to tell a familiar story in a memorable new way.

9. Heartbreak House – Gingold Theatrical Group makes the list this year with another innovative adaptation of a classic. This re-imagining of Shaw’s chestnut about Europe during World War I was reset as a play-within-a-play during the London Blitz, which worked quite well.

8. Love’s Labour’s Lost – This Shake & Bake production combines the Bard’s romantic comedy with a five-course tasting menu. The actors do a wonderful job creating magical moments in a pared-down production in the Meatpacking District. The food is tasty, but it’s the acting that is truly delicious.

7. Stories by Heart – So, what is this thing? That’s what John Lithgow quipped at the beginning of his one-man show about the stories his father read to him as a child. Ordinarily, I don’t go in for one person plays, but Lithgow’s mixture of personal memoir with classic storytelling won me over in the end.

6. Othello – Not everyone loved the Public Theatre’s production of Othello this summer at the Delacorte, but I found Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s direction to be superb. The relationship between Iago and Rodrigo was particularly fascinating to me, and Chukwudi Iwuji did a great job playing the title role.

5. Mother of the Maid – The Public Theatre scored another hit with Jane Anderson’s new play Mother of the Maid about the family of Joan of Arc. The piece was marketed as a vehicle for Glenn Close, who played Isabelle Arc, but Anderson’s play tells the story from an interesting perspective, and would be worth seeing even without Close’s star power.

4. Bernhardt/Hamlet – As a fan of both Sarah Bernhardt and William Shakespeare, I knew I had to see this show. This is probably Theresa Rebeck’s best play to date, and the cast was superb. Janet McTeer was deservedly praised as Bernhardt, but Dylan Baker was also wonderful as the legendary French actor Constant Coquelin, and Jason Butler gave a memorable portrayal of the playwright Edmond Rostand.

3. Pygmalion – Bedlam theatre company’s productions are sometimes hit-or-miss, but they are generally memorable even when they don’t entirely succeed. This year’s re-imagining of Shaw’s most popular play definitely qualifies as a hit, though. The immersive first act led into an exploration of not just class, but also race, ethnicity, and assimilation, all in the frantic Bedlam style in which performers play multiple characters to hilarious effect.

2. Twelfth Night – What happened to musicals this year? All of my top ten picks were straight plays this year, with the exception of Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which she co-created with director Kwame Kwei-Armah as part of the Public Works program, but came back in a new production this summer as a part of the regular Shakespeare in the Park season. Taub’s songs are inspired by Shakespeare’s text, but not usually direct settings of his poetry, in spite of the fact that Twelfth Night already contains multiple songs. Her lyrics fit in with the Bard’s play beautifully, and her performance as Feste was equally delightful.

1. Travesties – To me, the most delightful production this year, however, was Roundabout’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. As a playwright, I’ve always admired Stoppard’s skill in weaving together the stories of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara into a rollicking farce that also makes us think and feel in new ways. Perhaps because this production was directed by a fellow playwright, Patrick Marber, it was able to encompass both the profundity and goofiness of Stoppard’s writing. A cast that included Tom Hollander, Scarlett Strallen, and Sara Topham also seemed exceptionally sympathetic to Stoppard’s ambitious vision.

So that’s my list. Here’s to an even better year of New York theatre in 2019!

Shake and Bake

Last week, I saw Shake & Bake: Love's Labour's Lost in the meatpacking district. Of all the creative adaptations of Shakespeare's bitter-sweet comedy about love and loss, this is the most original I've ever attended, and it's well worth seeing.

The space on Gansevoort Street that houses the production (and previously had been a succession of pop-up stores) is intimate and elegantly decorated. The audience lounges around in the lobby, then is led into the performance space where the actors will also be serving them dinner.

Yes, that's right. This is dinner theatre with a twist. Where else can you have the King of Navarre prepare artisanal tacos right in front of you? In this production, you'll be literally wined and dined by Shakespeare's characters. (And they don't skimp on the alcohol, either.) The amazing cast is constantly in motion, delivering fast-paced witty dialogue, engaging in nearly acrobatic feats of physical comedy, and providing a tasting menu right to your table.

The performance area is set up in the round, with couches, chairs, and tables circling the action. A little bit behind them are some stool seats that are half price. While I didn't sit in them, they looked like they had perfectly good views, if you're looking to save money. Nothing in the meatpacking district is cheap these days, but you can be assured of both quality food and quality acting.

Darren Ritchie and Victoria Rae Sook lead the cast as the King of Navarre and Princess of France respectively. I first met Ritchie back in my Carnegie Mellon days. He played a mean guitar back then, and has since gone on to multiple Broadway credits, including playing Jonathan Harker in Frank Wildhorn's musical Dracula. He's back on the guitar again in Love's Labour's Lost, and is credited with supplying original music for the piece.

Sook I was not familiar with, but she gives an exceptional performance as the King's love interest, and was also one of the show's three co-creators. She provided the movement direction, which is one of the more sensational parts of the show. We get to see the King use kitchen implements to have a sword fight with his friend Berowne (played by Matthew Goodrich), and Berowne's love interest Rosaline (played by Mary Glen Fredrick) spin on a wheeled table to the utter delight of the audience.

The other two creators are director Dan Swern and executive chef David Goldman. Both do an excellent job, as did the production designer, Shawn Lewis, who managed to make even the bathroom Instagram-worthy. (The woman ahead of me in line for the toilet apologized for being in so long, explaining that she had to take pictures!)

Tickets are on sale through the beginning of January, so make sure you go!

Michael Friedman

So I was going to blog today about the lovely production of The Climbers I saw last night at Metropolitan Playhouse, but unfortunately I have something much more sad I need to say. Yesterday, songwriter Michael Friedman died, and contemporary musical theater is much poorer because of it.

According to Friedman's obituary on Playbill, he was only 41. His death followed complications with HIV/AIDS, which should remind us that the epidemic is NOT over, and people are STILL dying of this disease. As the obituary notes, he was one of the founding members of The Civilians, one of my favorite companies in New York, and was most famous for writing the music to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

The obituary doesn't mention one of my favorite Friedman shows, Love's Labour's Lost, which The Public Theater did at the Delacorte in 2013. Based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, the musical included both original songs and rock-music settings of poems by the Bard. Friedman's music captured the exuberance of youth, and also the melancholy undertone of the play. I recently saw a student production of the piece at Marymount Manhattan College, and by the time they got to "The Tuba Song" at the end, I was in tears.

Friedman also wrote the music and lyrics for This Beautiful City, which explores culture clashes in Colorado Springs. The Civilians, which is an investigative theater company, went out to Colorado because they wanted to do a show on Evangelical Christians, and Colorado Springs has been transformed in recent years from the most "unchurched" city in America to a center of the Evangelical movement. While they were there, news broke that Ted Haggard, leader of a Colorado Springs megachurch, had been involved in a scandal that included male prostitutes and crystal meth. Reaction to the scandal fills the second half of the play.

Though Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was the only Friedman show to make it to Broadway, he did an amazing amount of work in his short life. He wrote the songs for The Great Immensity, a show by The Civilians investigating climate change, and provided music for The Public Theater's production of The Tempest in Central Park in 2015. He also wrote and adapted songs for Paris Commune, another investigatory piece by The Civilians, this time examining a crucial but often overlooked moment in French history.

Michael Friedman will definitely be missed. I hope, however, that more theaters will produce the plays that he has left us, particularly Paris Commune and This Beautiful City. They have a lot to say that could speak to America in our present moment.

Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost is not one of those plays by Shakespeare that has always been universally acclaimed. In fact, when Lucia Elizabeth Vestris and Charles James Mathews decided to use the play to inaugurate their management of Covent Garden in 1839, it appears to have been the first time the play was performed since 1605!

The heart of the play is usually the "secondary" pair of lovers, Rosaline and Berowne. (Vestris made sure she was playing Rosaline.) That was true also of The Public Theater's musical adaptation of the play currently running at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Maria Thaler plays Rosaline as the sassy best friend who is always more interesting than the protagonist, and Colin Donnell is appropriately cynical as Berowne, while at the same time remarkably self-aware of the limitations of his own cynicism.

This new version features the songs of Michael Friedman, who also gave us the music and lyrics for such hits as Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson and This Beautiful City. Director Alex Timbers, the man who brought Hell House to New York, provided the adapted book, which is clever, though sometimes scattered.

King Ferdinand of Navarre and the Princess of France (simply billed as "King" and "Princess" is this version) outrank everyone else in the play, though they're not quire as interesting as Berowne and Rosaline. Still, Daniel Breaker of Passing Strange fame was wonderfully engaging as the king, and the former Lysistrata Jones star Patti Murin turned the princess into a memorable party girl with a bit of a mean streak.

The concept for this version, that the whole thing takes place at the five-year reunion of a bunch of college friends, worked surprisingly well. Each of the four couples had a backstory, and their falling in love seemed more like a rekindling of old flames than a whirlwind romance. It turned the play's central motif into that tricky gray area in between being young and carefree and having to grow up, something reinforced by the play's dark ending that (spoiler alert) shows love's labour's lost.

Don Armado often comes close to stealing the show, and this was very much the case with Caesar Samayoa, who makes his entrance in this production while wearing a red speedo. Described in Shakespeare's first folio as "a fantastical Spaniard," Armado in this production flaunted both his latin roots and his sexuality in a way that made him the envy of the play's over-educated males. This was by far the most sympathetic portrayal of Don Armado I've ever seen.

Love's Labour's Lost is only playing until Sunday, so if you haven't seen it, you better get there early to get in line for tickets!