I was last at this theater on West 22nd Street for George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple in December, so knew that the company was well used to accomplishing much with minimal resources – cast and space-wise.  Still, the story, based faithfully on the 1873 novel by Jules Verne, stretched the limits over the ensuing two hours of action: 5 actors, playing 39 characters, and one simple set, representing 24,000 miles of rugged land and high seas.

Mark Brown adapted the adventure of unflappable English gentleman Phileas Fogg (Daniel Stewart), who makes a £20,000 wager that he can circumnavigate the globe in the titular 80 days. The journey, made with his French manservant Passepartout, takes Fogg from London to Suez to Bombay to Calcutta to Hong Kong to Yokohama to San Francisco to New York to Liverpool and back to London. Mistaken identities, skirmishes with local officials, weather delays, a lady in distress and sheer bad luck all seem to conspire against Fogg meeting his deadline, but we all know how things turn out in the end, don’t we?

The 19th century source material veered at times into political incorrectness in its characterization — or rather: caricaturization — of foreign cultures, and that bias unfortunately also colors this production. Passepartout (Evan Zes)’s Pepé Le Pew accent, while good for a few early chuckles, wore thin after a while.  Overall, though, this was a pleasant enough romp that received middling to good reviews in the press.

Most fun to watch was how the indispensable pair of on-stage foley artists kept flawless pace with the action when called upon to suggest swaying steamers, chugging trains, a lumbering elephant, a raging typhoon, a sledge through a snowstorm and gunplay with Apaches. (Contrary to popular impression, however: no hot air balloon.) In an age of ever more elaborate special effects, their work was a refreshing return to basics.

Incidentally, Fogg’s £19,000 in travel fees would have been the equivalent of nearly £1.5M today, adjusted for inflation. It now costs considerably less to make the same trip, even when accounting for fuel surcharges and airline baggage fees.

Rafta, Rafta… is based on Bill Naughton’s 1965 comedy All in Good Time; here, the action is set within the Anglo-Indian community and moved to working-class Bolton. Khan-Din’s play was a critical hit at London’s National Theatre last year and went on to win the 2008 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. (Stateside critique has been similarly favorable.)

The title is culled from a Hindi song, and means “slowly, slowly.” The lyrics, as translated in the program by professors Faisal Devji and Rachel Dwyer:

Slowly, slowly she became part of me,
First my life, then the life of my life, and then life of life itself.

After their wedding feast — an overlong evening involving two sets of families, copious whisky drinking, spirited bhangra dancing, and a father-son arm-wrestling match — Atul Dutt and Vina Patel (Manish Dayal and Reshma Shetty in their fine Off-Broadway debuts) embark on their wedding night at Atul’s parents’ house. It soon becomes apparent, however, that their new home is not the ideal place to begin a new marriage: with the groom’s parents a thin bedroom wall away, their loving union remains unconsummated after six long weeks. When word leaks out after a frustrated Vina confides in her mother (Sarita Choudhury, whom we saw last fall as Frida Kahlo), some hilarious, but cringe-worthy interference ensues as both sets of concerned parents convene to decide how to best tackle the delicate situation.

The surface farce is stripped away to expose past wounds and some deeply-held resentments among the older married couples — what is it Tolstoy said of unhappy families? And as the often-obtuse and domineering patriarch (Ranjit Chowdhry) says of life, in a rare moment of reflection: “It might make you laugh… but one day it’ll make you bloody cry.”

No worries: this being a comedy, a happy ending is all but assured. That the play manages to feel both exotic and familiar is to the playwright’s credit. (He is currently working on the film adaptation.)

In addition to the impressive bi-level set by Derek McLane, the play features original music by Basement Bhangra™ founder DJ Rekha at rousing volumes.

Rafta, Rafta… is playing a limited engagement at the Acorn Theatre through June 21, 2008.

The “Pizza” episode of the History Channel’s “American Eats” series — set your TiVos for the next airing: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 — tells the story of Gennaro Lombardi, the “founding father of American pizza,” and his contribution to New York City pizza: locally grown tomatoes (instead of San Marzano), cow mozzarella (instead of water buffalo), and pies fired in coal ovens. To some extent, all the old school city pizzerias can be traced to Lombardi’s pioneering shop at 53½ Spring Street.

That first pizzeria was established in 1905, though in 1994, Lombardi’s grandson re-opened it at its current location at 32 Spring. For the pizzeria’s centennial on November 10, 2005, Lombardi’s sold whole pizza pies for 5 cents apiece.

We paid somewhat more for our pepperoni and mushroom pie, but it was still worth it.

At the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center’s Milagro Theater on Suffolk for the premiere of playwright Carla Ching’s TBA. The 1898 building is a former public school (P.S. 160), but since the mid-1990s, has served as a multicultural center for contemporary arts and art-related community services. CSV has four theaters and exhibition spaces; 53 visual artists have studios in the building.

Enhancing the LES hipster vibe was a dimly lit bar/gallery through a beaded doorway on the ground floor with vibrantly colored paintings of female nudes and cans of PBR, which we were invited to bring inside the theater.

Through April 5, theater company Second Generation celebrated its eleventh anniversary of supporting Asian American dramatic literature with ELEVEN, a month-long festival of 11 plays: one full-length production, four developmental staged-readings, and an evening of six one-acts. The centerpiece was Ching’s drama, starring Lloyd Suh, Second Generation’s artistic director and a playwright in his own right. (Both he and Ching are members of the Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab.) Suh appeared as a last-minute replacement for Ken Leung, who was called back to the set of Lost, where he has a recurring role as Miles Straume.

From TBA’s press notes:

When Silas Park’s girlfriend leaves him, he becomes a shut-in, pumping out blistering autobiographical writings in his little East Village apartment. Just as Silas finds himself unexpectedly on the verge of literary stardom as the next Asian American wunderkind, his brother Finn shows up on his doorstep, accusing Silas of stealing his life. A play in two acts, in the crevice between fact and fiction.

An intriguing exploration of how impression and memory can form their own reality. Excellent work all around.

Oh, and we sat in front of Dr. Chen from ABC’s “Eli Stone,” whose real name is James Saito.

The staging was in the round, with scenes played out amidst sliding panels and in every nook and corner of the stage, which made for interesting, if occasionally obstructed views. It all began with a jolting bang (a Confederate flag burning and a hanging) and ended on a somewhat more hopeful note (a wedding). In between there were all kinds of brutality, and quite a bit of sex and swearing. The sprawling cast and rapid-fire series of vignettes made it difficult to invest much emotion into any of the characters’ plights; as a result, the violence and loss did not resonate as intended. What should have been horribly shocking, felt contrived, or worse: gratuitous.

Variety called the play “clever, attention-getting and not very nice”; The New York Times assessed that “the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts.”

After such depressing fare, we went in for the comfort of ramen noodles. Months ago, we were thwarted in our first attempt to visit much-hyped Ramen Setagaya; this time out, the newness had worn off sufficiently for us to be seated with no wait. (Well, also, it was 10:30PM.)

The narrow glass-enclosed restaurant on First Avenue is the first U.S. location of a popular Japanese ramen chain — just part of a larger Ramenaissance afoot in the city. (See also: newly-opened Ippudo.)

To start, vegetable gyoza. Store bought (beware!), but nicely pan crusted:

Setagaya’s signature ramen is the shio, or salt, ramen. I found the noodles pleasingly firm (there is a row of cooking timers on the kitchen wall to ensure this) and the toppings fresh — grilled-to-order pork slices (which I removed), seaweed, marinated bamboo shoots, julienned green onion, and half a soft-boiled egg, which had just the right custardy consistency. The super-authentic broth is “10 percent meat and 90 percent ingredients such as dried anchovies, clams, scallops, mushrooms, ginger, garlic, and (the secret weapon) Vietnamese salt, all boiled for five to six hours every morning.” It was light, with a complex, distinct seafood flavor which I rather enjoyed; those like my friend who prefer a heartier broth may be better served at Minca. (For what it’s worth, New York magazine likes Setagaya’s ramen the best.)

Oh, and on the way home, I met my first ever Academy Award winning director — riding the 2 at midnight with his son and Academy Award winning wife, no less.  Stars… they’re just like us!

Originally written as a radio play, Under Milk Wood — subtitled “a play for voices” — was first broadcast (posthumously) in January 1954 by the BBC with a distinguished all-Welsh cast, including Richard Burton. Later, it was put on as a stage play and then adapted into a 1972 film, with Burton reprising his role, supported by Hollywood luminaries Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole. The plot follows an entire day in the life of the inhabitants of the imaginary seaside town of Llareggub, Wales — that’s “Bugger all,” backwards — so classy!

To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

For the first twenty minutes, the entire cast wandered the stage with closed eyes, and we were brought through each character’s dreams– 40+ in all — guided by a pair of omniscient narrators (“voices”). I cast a sidelong glance at SC, and fleetingly wondered if I would ever be allowed to pick another play again.

But once the day began in earnest, and we were able to get into the groove of Thomas’ poetry, things picked up considerably. (Good thing, as there was no intermission.) The action followed the townspeople through their daily business, shifting among sets of characters as they sang, worked, frolicked, gossiped, lusted, reminisced and plotted murder — with some surprisingly bawdy language.

Thomas had worked on this, his final work, for years and in October 1953 he delivered a full draft of Under Milk Wood to the BBC as he left for his fourth and ultimately, final, American tour. He gave his first public reading of the script in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and soon after, sound-recorded a performance at the 92nd Street Y. Within the month, after a famous drinking binge at New York’s White Horse Tavern — the “18 whiskies” of legend — Thomas fell into a coma and died at St. Vincent’s Hospital, just a couple of weeks after his 39th birthday.

In the poet’s wake, we have this play, which stands as a testament to the lyrical dignity in the everyday. Read the beginning of Under Milk Wood here.

In other theater news:  On the strength of last week’s favorable reviews, Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years has been extended at The Acorn through March 22, 2008.

Naomi Emmerson stars in the title role (as well as also being responsible for the set and costume design and stage direction) with Carmela Sinco accompanying on the piano. Emmerson grew up one of three daughters of a Quebecois Anglophone family — the only one to speak French fluently. She first performed Piaf: Love Conquers All at The Limelight Supper Club in Toronto in 1993, re-creating the role for the 2005 Toronto Fringe Festival. The show had its American debut at last summer’s FringeNYC festival, where it won an Overall Excellence Award for Outstanding Musical. Thirteen of Piaf’s songs were interspersed among the biographical anecdotes whose plot points were familiar to me from La Vie En Rose — the Piaf biopic, which earned French actress Marion Cotillard her Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win (not that anyone noticed.)

As a revue of Piaf’s songs, the show worked well; we were admonished at the outset to resist the urge to join in singing the more familiar tunes, a temptation avoided by most in the audience. Most. I was less moved by the show as a story framed around the singer’s loves and heartbreaks. Act I (“Marcel”), set in 1949 with flashbacks, closes with the plane crash death of middleweight championship boxer Marcel Cerdan, the man generally perceived to be the love of Piaf’s life. The second, shorter half fast-forwards to 1961 and features a visibly diminished Piaf – wracked by rheumatism and addiction. Her post-Cerdan lovers for the most part don’t even warrant names — the pair of cyclists, “the artist,” “the actor” — and though this act is titled “Theo,” after Piaf’s second husband Théo Sarapo, a Greek hairdresser-turned-singer and actor two decades her junior, the man seems less a great love than the singer’s last ditch hope for love at last. As in the film, the show closes on Piaf’s defiant declaration: “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien.”

It was such a beautiful day that I decided to walk uptown. At Father Demo Square:

As dusk approached, the sidewalks began emptying of people as everyone gathered around the communal televisions for Super Bowl XLII. By now, we all know how that turned out, no? And after our underdog Giants quarterback hit receiver Plaxico Burress for the winning touchdown with 35 seconds left in the game, following that incredible, fortune-changing Hail Manning… well, for an otherwise “miserable city,” there was an outpouring of joy in the streets.

Katchor described it as an “absurdist romance… about the romance of poetry and humanitarianism.” For his darkly funny, slyly political musical, he collaborated with Mark Mulcahy, former frontman for indie rockers Miracle Legion and Adventures of Pete & Pete house band Polaris.  The Kitchen, New York’s non-profit experimental performance space, commissioned The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island and secured the majority of the show’s funding; it was presented at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003 and at The Kitchen in 2004 before making its way to Union Square.

The action is set in Manhattan and on a tropical factory-island in the fictional “Roomy Archipelago,” where workers toil to transport small lead weights (destined for placement in unseen appliances to give the impression of “heft and worth”) from factory to ship. After the laborers plight is exposed on the news, well-intentioned philanthropist Dr. Rushower (Peter Friedman) takes it up as his annual cause to organize an expedition from New York City to Kayrol Island; he sends his idealistic daughter GinGin (Jody Flader) and her suitor Immanuel Lubang (Bobby Steggert) to provide solace to the exploited workers by introducing them to the beauty of “consumer fiction” — poetry found in the text of obscure appliance instructional pamphlets. Complications ensue when the locals don’t — or can’t — appreciate the offering, and GinGin falls in love with local slug bearer Samson (Matt Pearson) — who, as it happens, is not all that unhappy with his lot — drawn to the liberation of a life where labor is divorced from purpose. Katchor’s colorful, shifting landscapes are projected onto large, folding screens on stage: a swanky penthouse, a poetry slam at a Macedonian coffee house, a city street, a biplane soaring over the ocean, a tropical paradise marred by smokestacks and cinderblock buildings… The overall effect is whimsical and delightful, and Mulcahy’s catchy pop score is sung through by the actors and played with terrific energy by an actual four-piece rock band.

The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island is playing at The Vineyard Theatre through March 2, 2008.

Instead, I was at The Acorn in Theatre Row for The New Group’s American premiere of Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years, featuring onetime troubled actress Natasha Lyonne, which began previews on January 15.

Leigh has written more than 20 plays since 1965; the four which have been staged previously by the New Group — Ecstasy, Goose Pimples, Smelling a Rat, and Abigail’s Party — all date from his late 70s and 80s residence at London’s Hampstead Theatre. For the most part, Americans — I included — are more familiar with Leigh’s film work, such as Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999) and Vera Drake (2004).

Commissioned by the National Theatre back in 2001, Two Thousand Years is the playwright’s first play in over a decade. As such, there was quite a bit of excitement in theatre circles when its imminent arrival was announced in 2003; before the play even had a title, and with no information available about its content, it managed to sell out the entire 16,000 tickets of its London run.

This is the first of Leigh’s works — film or theatre– to deal exclusively with his Jewish background. The story concerns a well-to-do, intellectual Jewish family in the Northern London suburb of Cricklewood, and the domestic trauma that ensues when their brooding, unemployed, university-educated son becomes religiously observant. The rest of the family is decidedly secular: although several members have spent time on Israeli kibbutzes, and all of them casually toss Yiddish words into conversation, they eat bacon and do not attend synagogue; their “Jewishness” seems mostly reflected by their close reading of The Guardian’s coverage on the Gaza disengagement, bewailing the loss of their Zionist ideals, and loudly shouting during family gatherings. (That last is a stereotype that’s been reinforced endlessly on American sitcoms such as Will & Grace and Frasier. I know: I’ve watched the late night syndicated episodes more times than I care to admit.) When the son starts sporting a kippah (yarmulke) and skulking out into the patio for morning prayers, his parents are at a loss over how to react. (“It’s like having a Muslim in the house… or a martian,” balks the father; the mother, in the meantime, frets over what her son will be able to eat.) In addition, there are the usual family conflicts: sibling rivalries, an estranged aunt (who makes a sudden, unexpected appearance in the second half) and an argumentative grandfather.

An intriguing premise and excellent acting throughout, with scene fade-ins and outs punctuated by original music by the New York-based Klezmatics. Based on the frequent outbreaks of laughter, the audience seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, while the play’s analysis of the strains of religion and family life were both thought provoking and moving.

Playwright Beth Henley won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama after Crimes of the Heart was produced off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club for a limited, sold-out, engagement of 32 performance, making it the first play ever to win before opening on Broadway. (It transfered in November 1981, and went on to also win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best new American play.) Henley also wrote the screenplay for the well-loved 1986 film version starring Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek, which garnered three Academy Award nominations, including one for Henley’s adaptation.

I’d never seen the play or the movie: a Southern family melodrama revolving around three sisters as they convene at the family estate in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. In addition to having grown up in the shadow of their mother’s suicide, each faces her own personal tragedy: the eldest, Lenny (Jennifer Dundas), is marking her 30th birthday and facing the prospect of life as an infertile spinster; Meg (Sarah Paulson), once known as the town tramp, has a sputtering career as a singer/actress in Hollywood; the youngest, “Babe” (Lily Rabe), is in jail for shooting her abusive, state senator husband. Abandonment, broken dreams, domestic violence, adultery, interracial relations, attempted murder… all of which takes place before the curtain even rises. And yet, despite the decidedly dark and emotionally heavy subject matter, and its characters who are at turns kooky and sympathetic, the play’s general tone is warm and humorous, and it stands as a testament to the strength of family.

The performances were solid throughout: most of the cast originated their roles in the recent Williamstown Theatre Festival production. Previews began on Friday, and based on this performance, there may be a few pacing adjustments to make before the official opening on February 7. Rabe, who was injured in rehearsals, did not perform the first weekend; in her place, understudy Jessica Cummings went on as the youngest McGrath sister, and turned in an impressive performance in her New York theatrical debut.

Check out more photos of the Crimes of the Heart cast and set here.

In other New York theater news: after glowing reviews in the The Times, The Sun, and The Wall Street Journal, the Classic Stage Company’s production of New Jerusalem has been extended through February 10. Talented actor Jeremy Strong (who played Spinoza) is set to star in the upcoming film, Humboldt County.

The temperatures were dropping steadily, and I hurried home through the bitter chill after the performance. Later that night, while reading in the cozy confines of my living room, I heard what sounded like my entire building erupt into spontaneous cheers.

w00t! The Giants are going to the Super Bowl!

Lorenzo Pisoni was all rakish charm in the lead role, gleefully tweaking the establishment, while proving himself in action to be as moral a character as any.

Glowing reviews all around, and a well deserved extended run.