Author Archives: Lawrence Bommer

Sublimely silly and unashamedly offensive, Mel Brooks’s musical skewers showbiz cliches while it celebrates Broadway’s glorious excess with an anthology of shtick. The songs sell the story and the story sells the songs. Marc Robin’s lean and hungry yet faithful staging reinvents Brooks’s irreverence at every turn. The lovable title shysters are played by Chicago […]

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s vastly popular treatment is heavy-handed and manipulative, but Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston’s lesser-known version of Gaston Leroux’s ruthless romance is too lightweight. Their phantom, basically a deformed music teacher longing for his lost mother, is neither sinister nor seductive enough to rise to any operatic occasion. Neediness doesn’t cut it. Porchlight […]

Like last season’s successful Holmes and Watson, Terry McCabe’s latest adaptation owes much to the passive-aggressive partnership of Don Bender’s prickly-perfect sleuth and Will Schutz’s wonderfully game chronicler as they play out Holmes’s miraculous powers of deduction and Watson’s dogsbody reliability. Perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle’s most extravagant adventure, Hound combines melodrama, criminal psychology, and a […]

The title of Roddy Doyle’s play notwithstanding, the pub quiz–a very Irish version of Trivial Pursuit–that’s played in a raucous north Dublin dive is no metaphor for combat. It doesn’t even offer a microcosm of Ireland. It’s just a slice of very loud life, and somehow all the hyperrealism becomes its own reward. It’s also […]

Holy holograms! Broadway composer Alan Menken and sci-fi writer Alan Brennert (mis)treat alternative realities in two wacko make-believe tales with questionable resolutions. The Girl Who Was Plugged In celebrates love’s power to triumph over dystopic cybernetic mind swapping. In Her Pilgrim Soul, a literal ghost in the machine defies death by delivering a final message […]

Patrick Marber’s exasperatingly self-ignorant characters never manage to fall in love at the right time. Instead a doctor, photographer, stripper, and writer who bed and betray one another over a period of five years prove that “lying is the currency of the world” and jealousy can live in a vacuum. A bitter pill is best […]

More than just a human jukebox, Ron Hawking brings as much appreciation as impersonation to his Rat Pack impressions, especially of Frank Sinatra. As in the eight-year hit His Way, Hawking’s earlier musical memory album, his songs here are energized by a terrific band and a female backup duo. Paying the highest compliment–imitation–to the singers […]

It’s scary to watch a great writer lie about love. The trials of Wilde, which resulted in penal servitude for “gross indecency” (homosexual acts), are meticulously recreated by Moises Kaufman (of Laramie Project fame). A riveting assemblage of heartbreaking and contradictory testimony, this 1895 media circus delivered the goods–Wilde’s own martyrdom (which he could easily […]

It’s a joy to watch a seemingly shallow play turn generous and important. Director Scott Shallenbarger treats the scenes in Terrence McNally’s 1994 play, about eight gay friends who spend three holiday weekends in a country home in upstate New York, like memories in the making. Time deepens everything: rather than delivering silly soap opera […]

A lip-synching drag queen Titania, a leather-loving Oberon, androgynous sybarites, and biker fairies in orgiastic raves: MidTangent Productions’ “queer tale” treats Shakespeare’s lovers as mismatched closet cases who get sorted into same-sex partnerships. There’s no hidden agenda, just a well-seized opportunity to turn the Bard’s sturdy comedy into a vehicle for salacious anachronisms (“How now, […]

The first act of Edward Albee’s dark drama reveals a bracing eagerness not to please: Jo is dying, and we taste her angry envy of the abstractly mortal. No one not dying can understand the one who is. But the second act pushes Jo’s story into the wings. When the title character, a kind of […]

A playful and exhilarating look at the tricks time plays, Arcadia is Tom Stoppard’s 1993 thinking person’s thrill ride, its multifaceted three hours merrily depicting the effects of entropy on human affairs. Set in one country manse, the action alternates between 1809 and the present, plumbing the mysteries of both the original inhabitants and guests […]

Citizens of an Oregon coastal town where meth labs have replaced paper mills are divided by accusations of child abuse. But the truth–and an opportune wildfire–sets them free. Avoiding the show-off symbolism of slicker scripts, Alice Austen’s down-home drama is about real people who’ve reached dead ends: a confused charismatic preacher, a pot-growing “horticulturalist” who […]