My Broadway Review

Without much to think about on Broadway, we have continued to review things that may come to Broadway at some point in the future. Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is one of the exciting recent shows that is playing. Perhaps exciting isn’t the right world. But it’s definitely a great show, being performed well. It holds the fun irony that Chekhov apparently had in mind with this particular show, which explores way that unreasonable women can take the best minds and take them off their game. It’s kind of an interesting show and the acting is great. The only problem that the reviewer had was that the set was a bit impractical and distracting, being two stories high and kind of hard to use in the production. Otherwise, it seems like a worthwhile show to check out if you’re in the area.

While it isn’t Broadway as such, it is a major professional show right now. Rod Blagojevich Superstar! is one of the funniest shows onstage right now. The show takes the former Illinois governor and mercilessly mocks him, his wife, and several other characters in this real-life political drama. They don’t really tone down the well known Blago cursing and get his wife really into the deal. It doesn’t take much to make comedy out of these characters and the Second City crew has put together a great new show. Last year, they did between “Barack and a Hard Place” and now they have this in their continuing line of timely shows. Read about Blagojevich Superstar! here.

A virtually unknown Rogers and Hammerstein show is being performed by the Encore! theater company. “Music in the Air” is one of the shows that you don’t hear much about. It is over 70 years old, like many of their early musicals. It is about two rural musical writers from Bavaria who go to Munich for their big break and end up stuck in the hidden world of musical theater. It’s a good show, because it allows the writers to sharpen their satirical chops. But the satire of that many years ago seems a bit overdone or hokey now. It’s kind of a sad thing to see such a good show get so worn down, but that’s natural after all that time.

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.