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.

Michael Shannon stars as Son Hayes, who along with younger brothers Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs), shares the hard memories of being abandoned as children by a violent drunk of a dad, who reforms and remarries, eventually becoming a loving father to four more sons. The older Hayes boys are formed of a certain Southern stereotype, which until the eye-opening trip last summer, I would have assumed to be some a kind of gross exaggeration: one lives in a pup tent pitched in his brother’s yard; the other, literally, in a van down by the river. The intensity of the young men’s bitterness burns deep, sharpened by their lives of constant struggle, all sparingly presented with minimal dialogue and improbably beautiful landscapes. (Credit to Adam Stone for the cinematography.)

A laid-back Shannon was tonight’s guest, fresh off a Public Theater rehearsal for Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Little Flower of East Orange, in which he plays Ellyn Burstyn’s junkie son; The Times called Shannon’s performance “undeniably commanding, if at times exhausting.”

That seems to be a recurring theme throughout the little of Shannon’s oeuvre I’ve seen; I still recall his creepy, but memorable turn as a devout ex-marine in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

The part of the seminar I most enjoy is hearing the backstory of how these independent films get made. In this case: Arkansas-native Nichols, while a student at the North Carolina School of the Arts, had watched some scenes Shannon filmed with his professor Gary Hawkins at the Sundance Labs. Nichols was so taken with the brooding actor that he wrote an entire screenplay with Shannon in mind, eventually contacting him through Hawkins about starring in his film. And in a turn of events sure to frustrate aspiring screenwriters everywhere, Shannon read Nichols’s script, was likewise impressed with the student’s work, and agreed. Just like that.

The way Shannon described it this evening, the entire shoot was a labor of love. Nichols’s whole family was involved in aspects of the film’s production: his parents and assorted family friends hosted much of the cast and crew in their homes, his mother was put on craft services duty, cooking dinner for 30 every night. Nichols’s brother wrote the film’s music while his father was a driver on set and an all-important funder. (David Gordon Green, director of All the Real Girls, the 2003 romance starring Zooey Deschanel, has official producing credit.)

Shannon was an engaging, if not particularly chatty, presence… slightly less scary in person than on screen. He did more than once say he wished that Nichols could have been at Town Hall tonight himself to explain the film better. Nichols, however, was unavailable, due to attending his own wedding the day before. Good excuse.

Anticipation has been high for the stateside transfer after the lavish praised heaped upon this production by the usually reticent British critics: The Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh pronounced it the “Macbeth of a lifetime“; The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer called it the “best Macbeth” he had ever seen – this from a man who presumably has seen a lot of Shakespeare.

What could I possibly add to all the rave reviews? Anthony Ward’s stark, grey-washed set generates a fitting level of eerie foreboding throughout as it multi-purposes as war hospital, a kitchen and a morgue. The visual projections on the back walls ranged from documentary footage of Stalin’s marching armies to dark, dripping blood, adding to the unsettling atmosphere. There were so many moments and performances to admire: Kate Fleetwood’s fiercely sexy take on Lady Macbeth… the innovative staging of Act III’s banquet scene: first as viewed through the guilt-crazed eyes of Macbeth, and then replayed after intermission from the perspective of his guests… the “weyard sisters” making their first appearance as preternatural field nurses, rap-chanting their “Double, double toil and trouble” spell amid zapping lights and booms of thunder (well, that may have been a little gimmicky)… the unbearably drawn-out, horror-stricken silence that follows when exiled future king Macduff (Michael Feast) is told the news of his butchered wife and children…

And of course, it hardly needs to be said that Stewart was sublime as Macbeth, making even the simple act of making and eating a sandwich completely menacing. And yet, for all his unchecked ambition and grand, brutal scheming, when he delivers the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy in Act V, it is with the world-weariness of a soldier ready to head home.

This production deserves a wide audience, which it may get if speculation of a Broadway transfer proves true. If that happens, I would make but one suggestion: pipe in Alexander Courage’s Star Trek fight theme music during the final Macduff-Macbeth showdown. Hey, it worked brilliantly in The Cable Guy.

NYGASP’s 2008 New York season includes six productions over four weeks at City Center – two weeks each in January and June. This month features performances of Princess Ida, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Trial by Jury; June’s repertory will include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Gondoliers, The Mikado, and The Pirates of Penzance.

The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty, which J and I were here to see tonight, is one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduring “Big Three” comic operas, along with H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Mikado. Even those who have only a passing familiarity with the Victorian-era composing duo’s works are able to identify The Mikado as the faux-Japanese/yellowface operetta (the production of which was the subject of Mike Leigh’s 1999 Academy Award-winning biopic Topsy-Turvy); the other two operettas are perhaps slightly less distinguishable from one another, as I discovered when a couple of different people I spoke with that day conflated the sea-faring works in their recollections.

Buttercup? (No, that’s Pinafore.) “What, never?”/“No, never!”/”What, never?”/“Well, hardly ever!” (Pinafore again.) Pirates is the story of Frederic, a dutiful young man mistakenly apprenticed to a band of tender-hearted, orphaned pirates, who yearns to return to “respectable society” and marry his love Mabel, the daughter of a Major General. The comic opera features a bevy of beautiful, unwed maidens, a team of timid constables, plots and hijinks galore. Cutting edge theatre it’s not, and NYGASP’s production, despite its physical proximity to Broadway is not quite a Broadway-caliber show. What it is, though, is a flagrantly and joyously fey production of painted backdrops, goofy costumes and hokey choreography, which at one point, includes a broadly hammy kickline of pirates shaking sparkly silver hats. I laughed aloud several times: the performers’ unabashed love of Gilbert and Sullivan was downright infectious. Even J, just a day back from his tour of Italy, managed to battle off jetlag through to the end.

Of course, we all sat up in anticipation during the rapid-fire patter-filled Act I showstopper, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” It takes some wit (and quite a bit of gall) to rhyme “lot o’ news” with “hypotenuse.” Check out this clip from the 1983 film version (Kevin Kline as The Pirate King! Linda Ronstadt as Mabel! Angela Lansbury as Frederic’s maid, Ruth!) then watch the same video dubbed over with “Baby Got Back,” G&S-style, by Sirs Gilbert, Sullivan and Mix-a-Lot. (According to the folks at VH1’s Best Week Ever, it’s among the “Top Ten Worst Karaoke Trap Songs.”) Isn’t YouTube great?

The play, which Hwang has called a “mockumentary,” explores themes of race and art, starts off as a semi-autobiography, with a lead character named David Henry Hwang or DHH (wittily portrayed by Hoon Lee), just as he is reaching a high point in his nascent career, having just won the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and John Gassner awards for his Broadway debut, M. Butterfly. With his new stature as the premier Asian-American playwright, Hwang was in a high profile position to lead the Actors’ Equity union protests against the yellow face casting of Caucasian actor Jonathan Pryce in the 1991 Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Hwang was initially praised by Asian groups for his support, but when Broadway producers refused to mount any Broadway run that did not include Pryce, which would result in the loss of many local jobs, the union backed down and Hwang was ultimately abandoned by the theatrical community. (Pryce, of course, went on to win both the Tony and the Drama Desk awards for his dynamic portrayal of a Eurasian pimp.)

From that point, the events turn to farce as fact blends with fiction. A stung Hwang tries to move on with his life and return to writing. Cruel irony builds when the playwright mistakenly casts a white actor named Marcus G. Dahlman (a charismatic Noah Bean) as an Asian-American in his M. Butterfly follow-up Face Value, believing the young man to be Eurasian. When Hwang discovers his error, he must go to great efforts to stretch the definition of what it means to be “Asian” – hence, a young man whose father was a Russian “Siberian” Jew, could perhaps, technically, almost be considered “Asian.” (To further bolster his position among a group of activists, Hwang produces a map showing Siberia just north of China, and a magazine cover of Buryat model Irina Pantaeva.) Dahlman, whose name is now truncated to “Marcus Gee,” goes along with the charade reluctantly at first, but eventually is so touched by how the community supports and embraces him that he comes into his own as a spokesperson for Asian-American actors, with a higher profile even than Hwang himself. Hwang manages to fire Gee – replacing him with the more traditionally Asian actor B.D. Wong — but Face Value famously flops, closing even before its Broadway premiere in 1993, ultimately losing its entire $2 million investment.

When is ethnicity “authentic”? Is identity something that can be adopted? The first half of the play was the comical high point, filled with the playwright’s self-mocking commentary and strewn with theatrical in-jokes; refreshingly, real names are used. (B.D., Jane Krakowski, then-Times theater critic Frank Rich, novelist Gish Jen and mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh are just a few who pass through the stage.)

By the second half, things take a grim and scary turn: the FBI’s investigation against Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee; the “Donorgate” campaign-contribution probe; the Senate investigation of the Chinese government’s transactions with Chinese-American banks, which implicated Hwang’s father Henry Y. Hwang (played with quiet dignity by Francis Jue) founder of the first Asian-American-owned federally chartered bank in the continental United States. (Although the Far East National Bank was a target of those investigations, no formal charges were ever brought against the elder Hwang, but the disillusionment of his American dream is one of the real tragedies of the play.) Things take on an even more sinister bent when a racial stereotyping New York Times reporter referred to as NWOAOC (“Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel”) tries to manipulate DHH (who once sat on the board of the FENB) into deflecting blame by betraying his father, and raising questions about whether there is any inherent paradox in the term “Chinese-American.”

In the end, there are no neat conclusions. A thought-provoking evening of theater, and a “lively, messy and provocative cultural self-portrait of a play.”

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.

“Broadway Sings the Phone Book” was created by a trio of young producers (Sarah Melissa Rotker, Joe Tropia and Jonathan Tessero), inspired by the sentiment that fans would be willing to listen to their favorite stars “sing the phone book.” The gala concert was sponsored by the KeyZe Company and organized as a fundraiser for the Metro New York Chapter of the The Make-A-Wish Foundation. Since its founding in 1983, the Metro New York chapter has granted nearly 7,000 wishes; in 2007, the organization granted 481 wishes for local children, and facilitated 238 wish assists for children from Make-A-Wish chapters around the world whose wishes involved travel to New York City.

Julie White emceed the festivities. The actress is best known to television audiences for her supporting role as Nadine, the quirky neighbor on ABC’s mid-90s sitcom Grace Under Fire, and was last seen on stage in The Little Dog Laughed for which she won the 2007 Tony Award. I didn’t see White in either of those roles, though I did catch her turn as the mom in this summer’s Transformers movie — ”Autobots, roll out!”

Tonight’s line-up included Avenue Q’s Stephanie D’Abruzzo, Sunset Boulevard’s Alan Campbell, The Drowsy Chaperone’s Mara Davi, Grey Gardens’s Erin Davie, The Threepenny Opera’s Brian Charles Rooney and Brooke Sunny Moriber, and two eliminated contestants from television’s Grease: You’re the One That I Want! : Austin Miller and Kate Rockwell.

The cast of Broadway stars (and would-be stars) sang familiar songs… with the lyrics replaced either Mad Lib style (the word game, not the DJ/producer) or with the contents of pages ripped randomly from a phone book or dictionary. Performers were given the option of experimenting, or delivering their selections straight; most chose to embrace the challenge of spontaneity, to varying levels of success and hilarity. Hence: “Suddenly Sanchez.” “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” (one of my favorite songs from Avenue Q) became “There’s a Hot, Hairy Line.” And “Maria” from West Side Story segued into a listing of Marias in the Manhattan phone book (names and addresses only).

“Maria.  Say it loud, and ten thousand Marias will answer.”