Bill Marx
What is refreshing about the muscular back-flipping in David Farr’s amusing rewrite of the Robin Hood fable is that Maid Marion is as much into derring-do as the Merry Men.
Given how rarely “Henry VIII” is staged, any Shakespeare enthusiast worth his or her salt should definitely take in this uneven production.
Chekhov’s jokes are the inevitable by-products of his characters confronting life’s absurdities; Christopher Durang is content to wring laughs out of wacky situations and cartoon caricatures.
In her compelling deconstruct/rewrite of “Miss Julie,” set in South Africa 18 years after the end of apartheid, director/dramatist Yaël Farber doubles down on the elemental energies of Greek tragedy.
With the 1% rapidly vacuuming up the resources of the upper and middle classes, A.R. Gurney’s comic vision of the tipsy idle rich, shorn of cares and criminality, floats completely free of reality.
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British dramatist Caryl Churchill proffers a valuable line of satiric attack on our delusions of doing good, so it is easy to forgive the dramatist her broad and scattershot comic approach.
Unfortunately, there are only flickers of Kurt Vonnegut’s dark and playful genius in “Make Up Your Mind.”
Whenever you hear greeting card bromides intoned with a straight face (it’s usually in scenes set in a hospital) you know that moral fuzziness isn’t far behind.
Interestingly, both of these powerful visions of horror root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children.
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