My Broadway Review

As you surely know, Will Ferrell has been on Broadway this winter and into the spring in his “You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush.” People really this show! It is considered to be one of the better shows on Broadway at the moment. It is what SNL hasn’t been very much in many years. Clever. Pithy. Right on the mark. For the full 90 minutes, Ferrell entertains the audience and gets a lot of the issues out of the way that have happened over the course of the last 8 years. It’s sort of unfortunate that we have to make fun of leaders, but when you see someone all day every day for a long time, it gets easy. Ferrel has put all of that together into a fun concentrated bit of comedy.

The Eugene O’Neill Sea Plays are some of his least performed works of all time. We’re not sure why it’s so rarely played, but it does seem to be a good work to see. At the Goodman Theater in Chicago, these one-act plays were performed until this last weekend. And they were apparently very good performances. It was presented by a theater troupe out of Brazil and it was performed in Portuguese. One of the things that I find most interesting is in one of the plays where they bring the audience onstage to show them the “fall of a sailor” and then they take them backstage to see what seems like the inside of a ship. It’s a cool sounding show. It’s closed now, but maybe it’ll be shifting off to another city along the way.

The off-Broadway show “Complicit” is a big show coming at a bad time. The Obama administration has really changed the prism through which we will be able to view this show. The show looked like it could have been one of the most interesting ones and perhaps very dramatic. But according to Variety, it is a show that lacks the drama that it needs to be very compelling. The show stars Richard Dreyfuss as a reporter who wrote an op-ed after 9/11 saying the torture may be acceptable in the new atmosphere. But after seeing that it happened, he worries that he might have been complicit in the justification of it. It’s not a complicated show, but that’s part of the problem. Good actors, but not so good direction and writing. Too bad.

A new show just opened on Broadway, called Hedda Gabler, which is a revival of a Henrik Ibsen play. It’s, to be candid, not very good. At least, according to the New York reviewers on first pass. It just opened the other day, so it does have the chance to get a lot better. The show doesn’t seem to be the best, because, while the actors are great, the interpretation isn’t that good. Mary-Louise Parker seems to be highly regarded, and they wish that she could have done better in terms of which show she was chosen for. Even the guy who put it all together is highly regarded, because he made a great revival of “Seagull” last year. Perhaps they’ll improve this show in the first few weeks, keeping in mind that the show just opened. We’ll keep an eye out.

There is a cool play on Broadway now called God of Carnage. The name sounds terrifying, but actually it’s a comedy. It is in fact a French comedy play. Now, French comedy isn’t necessarily for anyone, because it is kind of cerebral. But it is actually pretty cool. It is about the families of two boys who basically got into a fight over a game called “God of Carnage” at school. The parents of these two boys come together and it is a literal clash of personalities. They are just different kinds of people and aren’t all that interested in understanding one another. There’s the blue collar father married to the leftist activist mother, and the lawyer father with his controlling wife. Suddenly, the boys don’t seem so stupid and childish anymore.

Antony and Cleopatra are on Broadway. Well, actually they are off-Broadway this year and are hoping to get on. But unfortunately, with the recession and several other issues going on, the New York City Opera’s production season is just compacted into two nights of this show. And unfortunately, the import of that doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of the players’ minds during the show. The music battles the singers a bit and the show isn’t the best anyway. Samuel Barber is always good, but sometimes it’s hard to imagine the combination of words of Shakespeare with the music of Barber. Of course, they are great singers, so you can always go to see that. It’s just not for the real opera lovers in your life.

Both the music and choreography are directly pulled from China for the innovative Broadway play “Soul of Shaolin.” Instead of focusing in on all those words, plot, character development and so forth (i know, yawn) like other plays do, this one offers the audience non-stop kung-fu action. The rough storyline of the play is that a young boy who is taken in by a group of monks, who then teach him all of the martial arts and high flying moves they know. The choregraphy on this play is exhilarating.

West Side Story is back! Well not quite yet. The 50 year old show is on its way back to Broadway, and is performing tryouts to make it the whole way. But it’s not exactly the same as the show or the movie you might have seen before. The main difference with this particular production is that it is bilingual. There are some songs that are done in Spanish now, “Siento Hermosa” being the biggest change that you’ll notice. It’s reviewed to be a very very well done revival, with strong choreography and good actors involved. And it couldn’t come at a better time. Broadway needs something big and beautiful to try to push back the tide of closing shows. Second, what could be more relevent than a show about Latin American immigrants having trouble with white Americans?

When Jeremy Piven suddenly fell ill to mercury poisioning in mid December, he was forced to withdraw from the David Mamet play “Speed the Plow.” Though there was an initial scramble for someone to fill the large shoes of Piven, a more than apt substitute has been found in Norbert Leo Butz. After being immediately questioned if he would take the part, Butz accepted without pause, hung up, second guessed himself, threw up, and then redoubled his commitment to the part. Now, he eats, drinks, and (thanks to his ipod) sleeps his part in Speed the Plow, in an effort to catch up with his role. So far, the initial reviews are all positive, accreditied to Butz’s incredible skill and determination.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol had a great cast this year, including Christopher Lloyd, John Goodman and Jane Leeves. All these actors were good. But according to the Variety reviewer, that’s about the only thing that’s good in the show. I mean, it sounds like it was decent, but not quite up to par with what they would’ve expected from the cast and the cost. One of the big issues is the pre-recorded narration. It was recorded by a respected, but deceased actor. But it apparently doesn’t fit with the actual show very well, sometimes with laughing covering over the narration and some of the narration was unclear and inaudible. It’s such a good play as written, but it’s unfortunate that we can’t see it done a bit better than this.