Category — Off Broadway

Complex emotion in a Neil Simon revival

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When you hear the name “Neil Simon,” you might think of knee-slappers like The Odd Couple, but recently, several directors have been working to expand his legacy.

David Cromer’s woefully short-lived Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs found delicate drama inside family comedy, and in her current remount of Lost In Yonkers for The Actors Company Theatre, Jenn Thompson places loneliness and hope next to rat-a-tat laughs.

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We ask the director of “Rated P For Parenthood”

What does it take to direct a revue? A typical show follows one group of characters through a single story, but a revue, with its collection of songs and sketches, introduces new people and new situations every few minutes. How does a director make it all feel coherent?

That’s a question for Jeremy Dobrish, director of the musical-comedy pastiche Rated P for Parenthood. Running through April 8 at the Westside Theatre, the show gently pokes fun at parenting foibles, with four actors playing various parents and children. As Dobrish says, his challenge became, “How do you keep the audience following not just each protagonist for three minutes, but an overall sense of the journey of the show?”

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A new play takes its time at MTC

How long does it take to build a fire? Make a can of soup? Repair a table that an angry drunk smashed to pieces?

To find out, you can time the scenes in Regrets, Manhattan Theatre Club’s carefully paced new drama, now at City Center.

Set in Nevada in 1954, the play follows life in a “divorce camp.” Sixty years ago, Nevada had the most liberal divorce laws in the country, so men would move there just long enough to establish residency and split from their wives. Sometimes, they lived in special campgrounds, forming temporary communities of the listless and the lonely.

In Regrets , the community mixes card games and beer runs with unpleasant secrets, and the consequences get heavy. If we feel those consequences, it’s arguably because the play takes its time defining them. Scenes are long and conversations are rich, and if someone sweeps the floor, he sweeps the entire thing. This creates a methodical calm, even as emotions flare.

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Red Bull Theater evokes the play’s dark, funny spirit

No matter where you sit for Red Bull Theater’s revival of The Maids, now at Theatre at St. Clement’s, you might be startled by the set. Patrons are ushered past the regular seats and taken to specially constructed risers on the stage. They sit on all four sides of an elegant bedchamber, and throughout the show, everyone can see everyone else.

And the performers, of course, are as close as the crowd. Jean Genet’s 1947 play follows sisters Solange (Ana Reeder) and Claire (Jeanine Seralles), two maids who plan to kill their mistress, Madame (J. Smith-Cameron). To prepare, they playact the murder with each other. Solange may put on Madame’s finest gown while Claire, pretending to be Solange, pretends to kill her.

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Jeff Bowen’s overnight edits for “Now. Here. This.”

During dress rehearsals and preview performances, a new musical constantly adds, deletes, and changes songs. This can be stressfully exhilarating for the composer, who has to crank out fresh material, and for actors, who have to learn it on the spot.

But when you’re the composer and the actor, you face twice the intensity. Just ask Jeff Bowen (above, second from left), the composer and co-star of Now. Here. This. at the Vineyard Theatre. The show began previews on March 7, and before its official opening on March 24, he says it “may be totally different every night.”

On March 6, one day before audiences arrived, Bowen decided he needed a new song for the moment his character realizes he’s afraid of being himself. “There was a song that had a different temperature,” he recalls. “We needed a song that said the same thing, but at a different temperature.”

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