YOUR GUIDES:
A MAN-EATING PLANT, A BAD-NEWS HOLIDAY, BELLA ABZUG AND ‘THE SCOTTISH PLAY’ — AND THEY’RE ALL ONE-ACTS!
Check out these point-by-point critical appraisals of four new Off Broadway productions, and soon you, too, can impress friends and acquaintances at chic dinner parties by saying things like “Really, is Seymour in ‘Little Shop’ that different from Macbeth? Both men committed murder to hold on to power and glory.” At the very least, you can drop Harvey Fierstein’s name. And pronounce it correctly.
‘AUDREY, YOU’VE GOTTA STOP DATING SADISTS’ Jonathan Groff as a mild-mannered flower-shop employee and Tammy Blanchard as his sexy but misguided co-worker in a revival of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
(1) The music is adorable, and everybody sings. Music by Alan Menken, lyrics (and book) by Howard Ashman, written long before they collaborated on “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid” or “Aladdin.” (Ashman died in 1991.) Some songs are wacky, like "Dentist” and “Suppertime.” Some are poignant, like the whole cast’s ‘Suddenly, Seymour” and Audrey’s “Somewhere That’s Green.”
(2) The world needs more musicals about man-eating plants. In this one, Seymour (Jonathan Groff), a mousy employee at a financially struggling flower shop on Skid Row, buys a plant from a man in Chinatown for $1.95 , and it’s so strikingly unusual that just putting it in the shop window brings in big business. (Paraphrase: “As long as I’m here, I’ll take a dozen roses. You don’t have change for a hundred-dollar bill? Then I’ll take two dozen.”) Too bad it turns out that the plant needs human blood to survive. Eventually, Seymour has to become a murderer to keep Audrey II (as he’s named the plant) satisfied..
THERE WILL BE BLOOD Groff, left, and Christian Borle, as a man happy in his work.
3) Top-tier Broadway talent in a tiny theater.with great acoustics. Groff was the star of “Spring Awakening” and was brilliant as King George III in “Hamilton.” Tammy Blanchard, who plays Audrey, was ultra-lovable as a corporate executive’s hapless mistress in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Christian Borle, always brilliant, plays the dentist and several other characters; this is the kind of thing an up-and-coming actor usually does, so his casting is a special treat. Borle won Tony Awards for his roles in “Peter and the Starcatcher” and “Something Rotten.” And the Westside Theater Upstairs, a cozy 270-seat venue, makes the performance feel as if you’re at a glamorous dinner party with the cast.
(4) The show began as a (nonmusical) 1960 horror flick from Roger Corman, king of the B movies. The dentist’s favorite patient, who loves pain so much that he visits often and always refuses Novocaine, was played by Jack Nicholson in one of his first screen roles.
HANGING OUT ON SKID ROW Seymour (Groff) heeds the Urchins’ advice.
(5) The Urchins may be the coolest early-‘60s girl group since the Supremes. And by the end of the show, they’re dressing like them. The trio, supposedly truant local schoolgirls, are sort of the Greek chorus of “Little Shop,” but their character names are pure Brill Building pop: Ronnette (Ari Groover), Crystal (Salome Smith) and Chiffon (Joy Woods).
“Little Shop of Horrors,” Westside Theater Upstairs, 407 West 43rd Street, westsidetheatre.com. Limited run. Closes on Jan. 19, 2020.. 2 hours (no intermission).
O HOLY NIGHT Jeffrey Bean, left, and Cillian Hegarty on Christmas Eve in the Irish Repertory Theater production of “Dublin Carol.”
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DUBLIN CAROL
(6) “Dublin Carol” was written by Conor McPherson, and that alone makes it worth seeing. Maybe you’re familiar with some of his other plays — “The Weir,” “The Seafarer,” “Shining City,” “Port Authority”? Oh, and he wrote the book for “Girl From the North Country.” McPherson, born in Dublin in 1971, is a gift writer who builds plot suspense and character at the same time and makes every line of dialogue flow as naturally as blarney.
(7) There’s a doubly morbid premise. On a dreary Christmas Eve in the back office of a funeral home, an alcoholic employee, John (Jeffrey Bean), spends some time with a new, much younger employee, Mark (Cillian Hegarty), after they’ve worked a daytime burial.. Then John receives a surprise visit from his estranged daughter, Mary (Sarah Street), who bears sad tidings. Does John, a pathetic excuse for a human being, have the character to deal with the news? Probably not.
(8) Jeffrey Bean, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, gives a heart-wrenching performance full of pain. How is it that we don’t know this actor? Maybe because he spent the last couple of decades at the renowned Alley Theater in Houston, starring in everything from “Amadeus” to “Born Yesterday.”. “I’m old,” he tells Mark in the first scene as he picks up a bottle of whiskey. “I’ll die if I don’t drink this.” And he makes the word “shite” sound like poetry.
(9) Charlie Corcoran’s set is one of the best pieces of effortlessly ugly scenic design around. Even when the Christmas decorations are up, the room could make Pollyanna cry.
DADDY’S BRUISED LITTLE GIRL Sarah Street plays Mary, the protagonist’s brave daughter, in “Dublin Carol.”
(10) Sarah Street’s accent is heaven. The whole cast sound aptly Irish, but when Street pronounces “her” as “hoor,” Irish eyes and hearts are smiling big. She’s a native of Cork.
“Dublin Carol,” Irish Repertory Theater, 132 West 22nd Street, irishrep.org. Limited run. Closes on Nov. 10. 1 hour 20 minutes (no intermission).
GET THEE TO A SLEEP-DISORDERS CLINIC Nadia Bowers as Lady Macbeth, theater’s most famous sleepwalker, in the Classic Stage Company production of “Macbeth.”
MACBETH
(11) How often do you get a Shakespeare tragedy pared down to an hour and 40 minutes? This production, directed by John Doyle, puts the plot in sharp perspective. A nice guy (Macbeth, played by Corey Stoll) who was always a team player and a decent human being gets carried away with his own importance, with a little help from his ambitious wife (Nadia Bowers), and loses his mind. He will and does commit murder — more than once —- to get to the top and stay there.
(12) The acting. Bowers is a vibrant Lady Macbeth, the rare kind of actor who appears to know the meaning of every Elizabethan syllable she’s speaking, which means she transforms a historically distant character into a timeless human being. Stoll’s Macbeth is just the kind of bad guy we despise but kind of understand. Also, more bald men should play Macbeth.
(13) The fighting. Making stage combat believable is hard enough in a big Broadway theater (500-1,900-or-so seats). Generations raised on motion pictures, television, video games and every possible iteration of computer-generated imagery are a tough audience for “pretend” stabbings and falls. I was in the second row with SS, my press-nights guest, and I fell straight into suspension of disbelief. The fight director is Thomas Schoal. The fight captain is Erik Lochtefeld, who plays Banquo.
(14) You get extra witches! Normally, there are three cauldron-stirring women (a.k.a. the Weird Sisters) making predictions about Macbeth’s life and career. In this production, when the witches have lines, from “Double,double, toil and trouble” to “Something wicked this way comes,” at least seven cast members speak in unison. One of them is the estimable Mary Beth Peil, who also plays Duncan. (Yeah, gender-neutral casting isn’t even news anymore.)
(15) More famous word inventions than you can shake a spear at. Oh, sure, you know that Lady Macbeth wails “Out, damned spot!” during her big sleepwalking scene and that she’s referring to a spot of blood on her hand, but did you know that “one fell swoop,” “a sorry sight” and “the milk of human kindness” were descriptions invented by Shakespeare for this play?
“Macbeth,” Lynn F. Angelson Theater, Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, classicstage.org. Limited run. Closes on Dec. 15. 1 hour 40 minutes (no intermission).
HAT IN HAND: NEVER HER STYLE Harvey Fierstein as Bella Abzug in her 1970s heyday in “Bella, Bella.” The set is by John Lee Beatty.
BELLA, BELLA
(16) Harvey Fierstein is a genius. (And you know it’s pronounced fire-steen, right? Now you do.) He’s won four Tony Awards for acting and writing: one for “Hairspray,” one for “La Cage aux Folles” and two for “Torch Song Trilogy."
(17) Doing a drag show without doing drag works surprisingly well. Fierstein makes his entrance (in silhouette) in a doorway with a big-brimmed red hat. And what looks like an elegant red coat-dress is on a clothes hanger behind him. But he spends the entire play in a loose black shirt and comfy black pants, barefoot. (Barefoot is very popular this season. See “American Utopia.”) Which, come to think of it, is what any sensible female politician would wear while awaiting election returns at her hotel. The play is set in in 1976, when Abzug ran for the United States Senate.
EDITOR’S NOTE Not that Fierstein doesn’t look fabulous in a dress. The photo with the multicolored number is from “Hairspray,” in which he played the heroine’s lovable agoraphobic (at first) mom.
(17) You won’t see many John Lee Beatty sets like this. Beatty is known for elegant scenic design, winning Tonys and Tony nominations for the likes of “The Royal Family,” “Dinner at Eight,” “A Delicate Balance” and “Talley’s Folly” (among many others). Here he has Abzug hiding out in a messy hotel bathroom. The tub is piled high with discarded cardboard campaign signs. There’s a messy makeshift makeup table. The baby blue toilet lid (but not the seat!) is up during most of the play.
(18) The voice is perfect. Fierstein’s distinctive voice (the result of an overdeveloped vestibular fold in his vocal cords, they say) has been described as “pebbles in a Cuisinart set to purée” and “that Brillo-and-bourbon growl.” Abzug sounded a lot like him.
SEPARATED AT BIRTH (O.K., THAT’S SOMETHING OF A STRETCH) Fierstein and Abzug, who died in
(19) It’s an invaluable history lesson. I knew all about Abzug. I even met her at a small political meeting in the Village in 1970, when she was practically unknown. But the Willie McGee story was a revolution. McGee was a black man convicted of raping a white woman in Mississippi. Abzug handled his appeal and lost (it was 1945). After her client was executed — in a faulty electric chair that made the act even more horrible — she miscarried.
20) And it’s a Yiddish lesson. Granted, describing Abzug’s experience with her omnipresent hat box as “the slings and arrows of outrageous schlepping” is not the cleverest Fierstein line of all time.. In fact, “Bella, Bella” is far from Fierstein’s finest work, but he’s never un-charming. Yiddish gets laughs from those who understand it and those who don’t. (Personally, I’m a shiksa who knows a putz when she sees one and has dealt with enough tsouris for several lifetimes, but some of it went over my head.)
“Bella, Bella,” City Center, Stage I, 131 West 55th Street, bellabellaplay.com. Limited run. Closes on Dec. 1. 1 hour 30 minutes (no intermission).
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