Tag: comedy

A dysfunctional family spills the tea in ONE GREEN BOTTLE

March 3, 2020 / Tami Shaloum

Lilo Baur, Hideki Noda, and Glyn Pritchard
Photo by Terry Lin

A family that’s chained together does not necessarily stay together in One Green Bottle. Acclaimed Japanese playwright Hideki Noda, Artistic Director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, wrote, directed, and stars in this farce, now playing at La MaMa, in association with Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and Noda’s theater company NODA・MAP.

One Green Bottle features an excellent international and gender-reversed cast, with the Japanese Noda as Mother (Boo), Swiss actress Lilo Baur as Father (Bo), and Welsh actor Glyn Pritchard as Pickle, their teenage daughter. Taking place over the course of one long night, all three family members have plans to go out. But who is going to stay home with their very pregnant dog, Princess? Each selfishly believes his or her own plans are more important than the others. Boo has a ticket to a concert by her favorite boy band; she never gets to go out. Bo, a well-respected theater actor, is attending a meeting he simply cannot miss. And Pickle just has to go out and meet her friends; they are discussing very important things.

It doesn’t take long for the family to fall apart over this conundrum. Secrets are revealed, arguments flare, and the family ends up staying home together anyway, just not at all like they had intended.

One Green Bottle, originally a Japanese play (English translation by Will Sharpe), features music based on Japanese Noh and Kabuki traditions (Genichiro Tanaka) that does a good job of underpinning the various ebbs and flows of the story. Not being too familiar with Noh and Kabuki, it’s unclear to me whether Noda is employing these traditions in the play. I will say that it has a very specific style, with melodramatic dialogue, and a lot of broad physical and slapstick humor. Noda also plays with the concept of time, where sometimes moments are slowed down and sometimes you’re not quite sure how much time has passed.

The set (Yukio Horio) plays an important role as the house, through a series of increasingly absurd events, slowly deteriorates along with the family. The costumes (Kodue Hibino) are also interesting. Pickle wears more modern clothes in stark contrast to the kimono worn by her parents, suggesting she is aching to break free from traditional molds.

What makes One Green Bottle work so well is that it’s not all ruthless backstabbing. Yes, it’s a lot of fun watching this dysfunctional family unravel. But at their most vulnerable moments of desperation is when some honest moments emerge, and real tenderness can be felt.

One Green Bottle is playing through March 8, 2020 at The Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.

COOKING WITH KATHRYN at the FRIGID Festival

February 23, 2020 / Tami Shaloum

Kate Owens in Cooking With Kathryn
Photo by Sokvonny Chhouk

Never has a cooking demonstration gone so off-course. Cooking with Kathryn, an interactive, mostly solo comedic performance by Kate Owens, is indeed a cooking show, except the cook shows up wasted and does not bring any appropriate cooking tools. Directed by Deby Xiadani (who also co-wrote the show with Owens), Cooking with Kathryn is also a birthday party. We’re there ostensibly to celebrate the host’s birthday in the pink-decorated basement of St. Ann’s Church. However, after a few too many drinks, it becomes something so much more.

Kathryn is an adorably awkward, boozy southern belle, the kind of person you just want to say “Oh honey” to in a slightly pitying, slightly exasperated tone at almost everything she does. Case in point: Her demonstration of how to make a margarita is so hilariously off the mark (hint: it involves vodka, a banana, and bacon bits), but you have to laugh because she is so committed to it that you feel like it must be good.

Most of all, Kathryn is a loveable hot mess whose idea of a mimosa is emptying a bottle of whiskey (aka “mimosa mix”) into a cup with a splash of La Croix (aka “La Crocs”). Her ridiculousness is demonstrated best by a clownish attempt to put on makeup, applying way too much blush and misapplying eyeliner while trying to make a cat eye. Evidently, it gets real hard to put on your face when you’re plastered.

The show takes a turn when Kathryn invites a “friend” from the audience–her crush Jeremy (played by a random audience member)–onto the stage to help her open up birthday presents. Soon enough, more audience members get coaxed onstage to allow the zany story to play out.

Owens has created a pretty kooky character who is a jumble of contradictions: as sweet as she is judgemental, as conservative as she is flirty. A devout Christian who has no problem getting drunk in a church basement in front of her priest. There’s a complete lack of self-awareness that is often the key to making these types of characters so funny. You want to like her but you can’t stop cringing.

Cooking with Kathryn runs through March 8 at The Kraine Theater as part of the FRIGID Festival.

All For One Theater’s Dark Comedy MONSOON SEASON

November 3, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Therese Plaehn and Richard Thieriot in **Monsoon Season**
Photo by Maria Baranova

It’s monsoon season in Arizona and all the rain in Phoenix can’t wash away the crazy that is conjured in All For One Theater’s production of Monsoon Season. This darkly funny play, written by Lizzie Vieh and directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, is practically two distinct solo acts that intertwine in an interesting way. Like two sides of the same coin, both complement each other in the end.

IT specialist Danny (Richard Thieriot) is on the brink of exhaustion. His wife just kicked him out of the house, his four-year-old daughter doesn’t want to see him, even the hermit crab he bought as a pet keeps hiding from him. He can’t catch a break. To keep himself sane, he spouts facts about the Juarez Cartel and visits the strip club next door to his new apartment. Conversely, the blaring neon lights are keeping him awake and he can’t afford blinds despite moonlighting as an Uber driver. To compensate, he takes microsleeps (kind of like a spontaneous nap), which can occur at any moment.

Julia (Therese Plaehn) is a makeup artist and beauty vlogger (her YouTube channel is called “Pretty As Fuck”). She is a hot mess whose life only gets messier once her husband moves out and her drug dealer boyfriend moves in, feeding her Adderall habit. She laments that she wasted her good years on her loser husband, so she hooks “boy toy” Shane. The only problem is that Shane is kind of abusive and people keep showing up at her house to buy drugs. Soon, she starts hallucinating that there are strange birds in her backyard. It’s enough to drive someone to do something crazy.

The performances by both actors are great, especially when they play to other characters that are invisible to the audience. The nuances of Danny and Julia as people who are spiraling, but who are also in denial about it, are played out really well and to humorous effect. What could have been a really bleak story turns out kind of sweet, in a sick and twisted way, thanks to the script and the ability of the actors to make these characters somewhat likeable.

If I have one complaint it’s that the constantly changing neon lights are annoying and distracting. Of course, this is the point of the neon lights in the play. They represent the strip club lights outside Danny’s window, making him unable to sleep and leading him down a dark path. Aside from that bit of set design (You-Shin Chen), the rest of it is pretty cool, especially at the end when blacklights make everything look like a surreal dream.

I like to think that the play being set during monsoon season is a nod to how weather can make people a little nutty. When it’s raining like crazy in the desert, where it doesn’t normally rain that much, it can seem like things are a little unnatural. Like during a really bad storm, people do things they may not do otherwise. But after that storm, when the rain passes, the sun always comes out and makes things seem just a little bit better.

Monsoon Season is playing through November 23 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Forbidden Broadway is Back With Hilarious Musical Parody

October 20, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Clockwise from top left: Houston, Mayagoitia, Stern, Turchin and Collins-Pisano in **Forbidden Broadway**
Photo by Carol Rosegg

There’s a place where all the Broadway haters can go–a magical place where songs are sung that make fun of the overblown, over-produced, based-on-a-movie jukebox musical. It’s called Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation and, incidentally, it’s also a place where all Broadway lovers can go. Yes, that’s right, both haters and lovers of Broadway will feel welcome here. It’s a fantastic place full of parody and laughter, spoofing all things theatrical.

Forbidden Broadway is an Off-Broadway mainstay that just came back after a 5-year hiatus. This newest version is so current that it references something that was announced just the day before (the musical version of Mrs. Doubtfire is set to open this spring). Gerard Alessandrini–who created, wrote, and directed The Next Generation as well as 25 other iterations of Forbidden Broadway since 1982–must update the show constantly. He certainly seems to keep the ensemble on their toes, hilariously re-writing the lyrics to famous musical numbers and, in this show, giving his take on the very nonmusical The Ferryman.

Speaking of the ensemble, each of the five performers gives memorable performances as they rotate through, costume-change into, and present dozens of characters, all to the accompaniment of pianist Fred Barton. Youngest cast member Joshua Turchin impressively plays such characters as Evan Hansen (in Evan Has-Been), The Phantom of the Opera, Santino Fontana as Tootsie in “It’s Got to Be a Musical” (lampooning musicals based on popular movies), the 12-year-old son in The Ferryman (or, “How Are Things in Irish Drama?”), and Albus Severus in “Harry Potter and His Cursed Child: Magic For Two” (re-written from the Pippin song “Magic To Do”).

Jenny Lee Stern lends her powerful voice as Gwen Verdon in a Fosse/Verdon medley, Judy Garland in a send-up of Renee Zellweger’s portrayal in Judy, Aunt Maggie in The Ferryman, Mary Poppins (poking fun at Emily Blunt and introducing an In Memoriam style montage showing us “Where the Lost Shows Go”), Bette Midler (“Hello Dolly Madison” set to “Alexander Hamilton”), and Mary Testa in Oklahoma! (aka Woke-lahoma!).

Stern, Houston, Mayagoitia, and Collins-Pisano
in **Woke-lahoma!**
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Immanuel Houston does fine work parodying Andre De Shields in “Forbidden Hadestown,” Toulouse-Lautrec in “Moulin Rude” (mocking jukebox musicals), Jeremy Pope in “Ain’t Too Proud,” the IRA guy in The Ferryman, and my personal favorites: Billy Porter singing Gypsy’s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” re-written as “Ev’rything Now is Inclusive,” and Jennifer Holliday singing her heart out to “And I Am Telling You” from Dreamgirls.

Houston as Billy Porter and Collins-Pisano
as Lin-Manuel Miranda
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Aline Mayagoitia is amazing as Karen Olivo in “Moulin Rude,” Elsa in Frozen singing “Let It Go”(here as “Overblown”), Caitlin in The Ferryman, Bernadette Peters as one of three Broadway veterans (including Bette Midler and Jennifer Holliday) in “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This,” and Laurey in Woke-lahoma!

Mayagoitia as Elsa
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Chris Collins-Pisano rounds out the wonderful cast as Danny Burstein in “Moulin Rude,” Alex Brightman in Beetlejuice, Bob Fosse in Fosse/Verdon, Tevye in “Fiddler in Yiddish” (where “Tradition” is re-written as “Translation”), two characters in The Ferryman, Lin-Manuel Miranda rapping in “Say No to This” about casting Billy Porter as Angelica in Hamilton, Harry Potter Sr. in “Harry Potter and His Cursed Child,” and Curly in Woke-lahoma!

Stern and Collins-Pisano in **Fosse/Verdon**
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Of course there are more fabulous group numbers such as The Prom: It’s Time to Dance, making fun of the teen musical genre and its propensity for indulging in large grand finales. There’s something for everyone in this show. Nothing and no one is spared in Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation. It is quite simply a Broadway lover’s dream, a must-see for everyone who loves, or loathes, theater.

Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation runs through November 29 at The Triad Theatre.

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST: A Shakespearean Romp in the Summer of Love

October 12, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Sometimes, modernized adaptations of Shakespeare plays work really well, as with this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing. Other times, as with Thomas G. Waites’ adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, it’s a little silly. But, to be fair, it is kind of a silly premise. King Ferdinand (Joshua Lazarus) and his three noblemen swear off women for three years just as four lovely ladies, led by the beautiful French princess, Maria (Grace Langstaff), arrive at court to discuss a piece of land. The King swiftly falls in love with the princess, as do his lords with her ladies. Lord Berowne (Steven Smith) is captivated by Lady Rosaline (Melissa Molerio), Lord Longaville (Daniel Kornegay) by Lady Michaela (Julie Spina), and Lord Dumain (Luis Guillen) by Lady Katherine (Chandler Robyn). Of course, the women each conveniently fall in love with the men who love them.

This adaptation is supposed to take place during the Summer of Love (an apt time period considering the romantic story line) but the only indication that we are being transported to that setting is the costumes and music that are thrown in willy-nilly. The actors gamely don the bell-bottoms, peasant tops, and long flowing skirts that the era is known for, but it becomes a bit over characterized and makes me long for straightforward period clothing.

Which is not to say that I don’t appreciate the musical interludes. Songs by musicians of the 1960s such as Jackson Browne, The Doors, The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, and The Rolling Stones are sung by the ensemble at the beginning of each scene. These are some of my favorite songs but they are also a bit nonsensical, seemingly interjected just so we can be reminded that this is supposed to be the 1960s. I don’t quite get some of the musical choices either (or why there are three Beatles songs, four if you count the Joe Cocker version of “With a Little Help From My Friends”) and what they have to do with story at any given time.

Despite this weak connection to the summer of 1969, the ensemble does a good job with the material. The play definitely benefits from having a solid supporting cast playing out a couple of side plots, including Robert Thorpe as Boyet, a courtier of the princess, Jonathan Mastrojohn as Costard, the country bumpkin who tries to trick the noblemen by switching around their love letters, Olivia Hardin as the country wench Jaquenetta, Brandon Hynum as the foppish Don Adriano de Armado, and Josh Rubenstein as his page, Mouth.

The text is heavy on witty wordplay and flirtatious double entendres spoken by both men and women. There’s also a lot more overemphasized rhyming than I’ve seen in most Shakespeare plays, which can be cloying at times and charming at others. I wish that Waites had the actors add more physicality to make the story more interesting and meaningful. The plot is very simple and perhaps it’s this simplicity that makes it kind of dull.

If you like the music and styles of the sixties and don’t mind that it feels kind of forced in the context of this play, Love’s Labour’s Lost may be for you. This is no Hair, although you may hear the music.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is playing at the Gene Frankel Theatre through October 26.

L.O.V.E.R. – A comedic revue of one woman’s love life

September 9, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

L.O.V.E.R. Lois Robbins
Photo Credit: JOAN MARCUS

Lois Robbins recounts the ups and downs of her multi-decade love life in the one-woman autobiographical show, L.O.V.E.R. Starting at the age of 5, she regales the audience with stories about various loves won and lost, sexual exploits, mistakes made, and betrayals suffered over the years. She moves across the country a couple of times, goes back to the same guys who are bad for her, and acknowledges the good ones who help her find herself.

Truth be told, the first half of the show, when her love life is a mess and she’s trying to figure out who she is, does tend to be more interesting than the second half where she finds peace and contentment. Robbins emphasizes the passion and drama that come out of your tumultuous teens and twenties. How can that possibly compare to the more humdrum existence of marriage and kids in your thirties and forties? She contends that finally knowing who you truly are and being comfortable in your own skin is what’s really exciting.

Watching L.O.V.E.R. brings to mind another solo autobiographical show I saw a few months ago. Accidentally Brave, by Maddie Corman, is a powerful account of a very extreme event that happened in the actress’ life–the arrest of her husband for possessing child pornography. While both shows are similar in that they have a confessional style, and both women have an incredible capacity for connecting with the audience, Corman’s show tended toward the intensely personal. She goes into agonizing detail the fallout from the arrest, from how it affected her marriage to her kids and her career. While Robbins does go into a lot of deeply personal stories, she steers away from the more dramatic stuff–aside from a brush with cancer–to focus on the more comedic, fun, and sexy stuff.

Accidentally Brave has since closed but it seems as though these kinds of heartfelt stories are what audiences are craving. Now audiences can find it in L.O.V.E.R.

LO.V.E.R. is playing a limited engagement through November 2 at The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center.

Japanese Storytelling Brings Eastern Culture to a Western Audience in RAKUGO

February 16, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Rakugo stage

From a cultural perspective, Rakugo by performer Katsura Sunshine, is a perplexing delight. Translated as “fallen words” and jokingly referred to as “Japanese sit-down comedy,” rakugo is a form of minimalist Japanese comedic storytelling. It involves one performer kneeling on a cushion wearing traditional Japanese garb, telling funny stories and jokes using only two props: a fan and a hand towel. Sunshine’s performance is charming and confident, as he smoothly transitions from the monologue that marks the first half of the show (kind of like a stand-up comic warming up the crowd) to the stories, which range from parables to play on words to personal self-deprecating jokes.

I confess to not knowing anything about rakugo or the performer Katsura Sunshine before seeing Rakugo, aside from knowing the show is Japanese and supposed to be funny. And it certainly is, as performed by Sunshine. However, I wonder how many people in the audience are expecting a Japanese performer because, much to my surprise, one never appears. Yes, Sunshine is not Japanese. He’s a Canadian who wears a kimono while performing this very traditional Japanese art form.

The question that keeps running through my head—in between laughing at jokes—is this cultural appropriation? Granted, Sunshine has lived in Japan 20 years, the last 10 performing rakugo, 3 of those 10 years in an apprenticeship with a rakugo master (a requirement in order to perform). He describes himself as “culturally Japanese” and speaks fluent Japanese. One has to believe he would not be accepted by a master if this were not okay. In his bio he does mention that he is one of only two western rakugo storytellers to ever perform in the 400-year-old history of rakugo in Japan.

But Sunshine only slightly addresses this in the show, instead focusing on bringing what I imagine to be a hybrid eastern-western cultural experience to a wider western audience. He certainly highlights and almost mocks Japanese social conventions, such as their extreme deference to authority, but at the same time he mocks himself and the embarrassing roadblocks he has run into as a westerner in an eastern tradition. While I appreciate the cultural crossover, I’m left wondering what it would be like to see an actual Japanese rakugo storyteller perform. Perhaps it wouldn’t be all that different. I’m eager to visit Japan to find out.

Rakugo is playing four preview performances at the Royal Family Performance Arts Space through Sunday, February 17, 2019 before an Off-Broadway run in March at a theatre TBD. Visit rakugo.lol for details.

TORCH SONG on Election Night

November 7, 2018 / Tami Shaloum

While everyone is buried in think pieces on this historic election, I want to talk about “Torch Song” on Broadway. Call it “Broadway Talk” if you want (as long as you say it with a strong Brooklyn accent á la Linda Richman). “Torch Song” is Harvey Fierstein’s laugh-out-loud play about a gay man (Michael Urie), his on-again off-again lover (Ward Horton), and his Jewish mother (Mercedes Ruehl). It’s pretty brilliant and the performances are phenomenal. Also, as my dear friend (and theatre companion) Marissa pointed out, “Torch Song Trilogy,” the original Tony-award winning iteration of this play in 1981 cast beloved soon-to-be “Golden Girl” Estelle Getty as Mrs. Beckoff, mother to Fierstein’s Arnold. This is where her acting career began…at age 58! Talk about a second act!

So I saw this play on election night and two things struck me:

1. During intermission (around 8:20 pm), some women on the bathroom line were nervously chatting about the election results, saying they were too anxious to check their phones. The worlds collide. No longer can you enter a theatre and be transported. At least not when there’s an intermission (one argument against intermission, which I have mixed feelings about).

2. We still really need more stories like this. The world of the 1980s and the world 30 years later don’t look all that different. There’s still too much hostility toward LGBTQ people and this is one of many plays reflecting that injustice. There’s something really wrong with that.

As many plays, TV shows, movies, books, podcasts, etc. about gay people are out there, we need more. We need ALL the gay stories and ALL the trans stories. And, sadly, all the Jewish stories and Muslim stories. And all the stories about people of color, and women in power, and all the scary things that keep conservatives up at night so much they simply cannot accept that this is in fact normal. So let’s saturate our culture with as many stories as it takes so that we don’t ever have to talk about it again. Let’s flood humanity with humanity. There is nothing alternative about us. There is nothing to fear.

Okay, rant over. Now to the play because, well, the play’s the thing, right? “Torch Song” is, in short, excellent, which is not to say it isn’t without it’s faults. Going in you should know it’s very talky. That means for those of us in the cheap seats, many words tend to get lost. And the words are so good (some might say Fierstein has the best words….shhhhhh don’t tell Trump). Mercedes Ruehl is the number one offender in swallowing her lines. The house is thankfully intimate, but not small enough.

And speaking of words, can we give Michael Urie a Tony for his accent alone? He plays the main character Arnold, a New York drag queen known for singing torch songs. For a goyish Texan, he’s got the Jewish Brooklyn thing down. Of course, we already knew he could nail it from the wonderful “Buyer and Cellar,” a one-man show in which he sort-of portrayed Barbra Streisand, among other characters. Sorry if you missed it. It was pretty great.

Urie’s a bit slight for a drag queen but I guess if you’re singing Judy Garland, you want to represent. I would have liked to hear/see some performances by Virginia Ham (Arnold’s drag alter ego) but I guess Urie isn’t much of a singer? Or, more accurately, Fierstein isn’t. But I guess it’s not really about the drag.

Also great is Jack DiFalco as gay foster teen and truant David (originally played by Matthew Broderick, so you can just imagine the charm emanating from him). Arnold is in the process of adopting David and their interactions are equally hilarious and moving. They are platonic soulmates who bounce off each other in wondrous ways.

And, aside from the line swallowing, Ruehl happens to be more than competent with a difficult role and she manages to deliver the most uproarious line in the entire play (I won’t ruin it but it’s a line that can only come from the most homo-ignorant). So she’s kind of a bigot. She’s old…and also a Depression baby (“that stays with you”). Is being old and in a heteronormative bubble your whole life an excuse for bigotry? Discuss. It’s messy and “Torch Song” does a fine job of addressing the mess.

As if the play isn’t seeping with talent already, the inimitable Moisés Kaufman directs. Okay, there you have it! Topical, talented, terrific…all the Ts! Go see it.