Tag: theatre

Pirates! (No ninjas)

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 | All Things, Arts

The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players was formed in 1974 by a group of friends, mostly alumni of the Barnard College Gilbert & Sullivan Society. The troupe’s first performances were held at block parties, street fairs, nursing homes, and in city parks, with costumes, sets and a sound system borrowed from the school. From those humble beginnings, the troupe has grown over the last three decades to become “America’s preeminent professional Gilbert & Sullivan repertory ensemble” with over 2,000 performances of G&S masterpieces throughout the eastern United States and Canada under their belts.

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.

City Center

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.

Pirates of Penzance

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?

Pirates of Penzance

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Yellow Face at The Public

Sunday, December 30th, 2007 | All Things, Arts

At the Public Theater on Lafayette for a performance of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, which recently extended its run until January 13, 2008. The play premiered in 2007 at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum as a co-production with East West Players.

Yellow Face

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.”

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The Devil’s Disciple

Friday, December 21st, 2007 | All Things, Arts

At the Irish Repertory Theatre tonight for The Devil’s Disciple, the first of George Bernard Shaw’s Plays for Puritans (1901) and his only full-length play set in America.  The Revolutionary War-era comedy is the story of rascal Dick Dudgeon, a renegade at odds with his strict, religious society.  As usual, Shaw’s acerbic wit shines in its skewering of self-important piety and political conceit.

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.

Irish Rep Theatre

The Devil’s Disciple

The Devil’s Disciple

The Devil’s Disciple

The Devil’s Disciple

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