Beauty and the Beast Married performance artists Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, billing themselves as Oneofus, spend a none-too-subtle evening drawing parallels between the titular 18th-century fairy tale and their own romantic relationship. Muz, a burlesque performer and onetime Miss Coney Island, is the beauty, while Fraser, a self-described disability artist with thalidomide-induced phocomelia (he calls his arms “small and perfectly deformed”) is, discomfitingly, the beast. For 80 minutes they alternately enact the fairy tale, ably assisted by clever puppetry and cunning scenic design, and recount the course of their romance. Neither story digs much below the surface, and neither performer has adequate chops to command a stage as large as MCA’s. By the finale they’re nude and thrashing away in semi-simulated coitus. Bully for them. —Justin Hayford
—Albert Williams
The Rosenkrantz Mysteries: An Evening of Magic and Spirits There’s something decidedly amateur about this new show (slotted in at the last minute) at the Royal George Theatre. Presumably inspired by or adapted from a class he teaches at Northwestern for medical students, Medicine and Magic, physician Ricardo Rosenkranz’s 90 minute one-man performance is full of fascinating bits, from our contemplation of Wittgenstein’s duck rabbit to Rosenkranz’s meditation on how medicine is, like magic, a performance art. Including many audience members in the show (so be prepared), Rosenkranz moves us through the illusion of health, the magic of empathy, the power of sympathy. To be sure, there are some impressive tricks here; still, it takes a seasoned performer—not just a gifted clinician and lecturer—to pull off a solo show. —Suzanne Scanlon
Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera! The kitschy premise behind Elizabeth Searle and Michael Teoli’s new musical—relitigating Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan’s 1994 Winter Olympics figure-skating fiascovia musical theater—sounds like the inspiration for a piano-only 45-minute late-night Annoyance or Upright Citizens Brigade set. At its heart, that’s what I suspect this Underscore Theatre Company production, directed and choreographed by Jon Martinez, more closely resembles, though this ensemble has the comedic and vocal chops to more than fill an hour and half on Theater Wit’s full-size stage. Amanda Horvath and Courtney Mack radiate as the titular ice queens, and Veronica Garza steals the show a handful of times doing double duty as each’s Shakespearean mothers. It’s a fabulously weird and legitimately experimental musical presented in a time when they’re too hard to come by. —Dan Jakes
Uncle Philip’s Coat The title garment is ratty old thing Uncle Philip schlepped with him from Ukraine (which he fled as a nine-year-old, after a pogrom) to Coney Island (where he died decades later, after a marginal life as a boardwalk peddler). Now that his nephew has inherited it, it’s a ratty old nuisance. But in the course of this one-man show written by Matty Selman and performed by the estimable Gene Weygandt, the coat also becomes a way into Philip’s mind—an interesting place to be, given the trauma that determined his life and the sweet, cracked humor that helped him negotiate it. Weygandt and director Elizabeth Margolius make the visit as engaging as possible; Jews of Ashkenazi descent, especially, should find multiple points of communion. But they don’t solve basic dramaturgical problems that make what should be minor issues loom large. Nor can they avoid tripping over the odd bucket of schmaltz. —Tony Adler