Archives for April 5, 2018

The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

In this episode, Peter, Elisabeth, and I interview a new face in the theater world:

The panel’s guest is acclaimed singer-songwriter Erin McKeown, who is making her first foray into musical theater with Miss You Like Hell, the musical having its New York debut this month at the Public Theater. McKeown—pronounced “Mc-KYONE”—talks about the collaboration she’s forged with the Pulitzer winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (Water by the Spoonful) to tell the story of a mom played by Daphne Rubin-Vega who goes on a road trip with her long-estranged teenage daughter….

Vincentelli, Teachout, and Marks devote a segment to analyses of two recent Broadway openings that have sparked Tony buzz in the theatre world: first, they talk about the revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, starring Laurie Metcalf, Alison Pill and Glenda Jackson, in her first Broadway appearance in 30 years. And then they shift to the powerful new staging from London’s National Theatre of Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America….

We wrap up the episode by talking about other shows that we’ve seen lately.

To listen, download the episode, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, nearly all shows sold out last week, alternating in repertory through July 1, reviewed here)
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, virtually all shows sold out last week, closes May 13, reviewed here)
• Three Tall Women (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, closes June 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Good for Otto (drama, PG-13/R, closes April 15, reviewed here)
• Later Life (drama, PG-13, closes April 14, reviewed here)

“There was something about an old prison, even when declined into a mere remand centre, that brought comfort to the weariest soul, a sense of tried and tested purpose, a feeling of solidarity in a shifting world. Hither men had come to pay for their crimes, and paid, and hence returned to the society that had judged them, and thence more often than not returned again to this same spot in a cycle of crime and punishment, wrong and retribution, as endless and unremitting as all those other cycles of day and night, birth and death, Left and Right, Romantic and Classical, promotion and relegation, marriage and divorce, ingestion and defecation, permissiveness and puritanism, itching and scratching, whose centrifugal forces hold the timeless, limitless, meaningless universe together.”

Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence (courtesy of Mrs. T)