GLENDA FRANK

in New York

Oh, those bad boys! New York can't seem to get enough of them. Even at the start of this new season, they are filling the seats of the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park in an ensemble bill of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well. Bucking the trend is the red-and-blue superhero of Spider-Man: Turn of the Dark at Foxwoods Theatre, but maybe the production itself with all its disasters qualifies as the definitive bad boy.

    It's not surprising that Mark Rylance, Broadway's latest blue-eyed boy, specialises in outsiders. He won a 2010-2011 Tony Award for playing Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, a contemporary Lord of Misrule, who follows Baudelaire's imperative 'Be forever drunken' and sells drugs to underage teens in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem at the Music Box Theatre. Even those of us who found the play in need of doctoring and flawed by uneven performances agree with the enthusiasts that Rylance's performance rocked the theatre world  again, as it had in La Bête earlier in the season and in Boeing-Boeing, which earned him his first Tony in 2008. His Rooster stammers, shouts, stares, scratches, pauses, struts, and stumbles -  all at unexpected moments. It's mesmerising. In the face of absolute defeat, Rooster adopts a mythic defiance that is at once inane and thrilling.Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, Rooster's bumbling, scolding but faithful side-kick, provides a brilliant complement.

    A 2002 Spielberg movie and a true biography provided the bad boy in Catch Me If You Can (Tony Award for Best Musical), in a lively stage adaptation by Terrence McNally with music by  Scott Wittman and Shaiman (the team that brought us the musical Hairspray) at the Neil Simon Theatre. All the magic of theatre is here: clever sets on turntables (David Rockwell), fine lighting (Kenneth Posner) and orchestration (Larry Blank and Marc Sharman, Tony nominees), beautiful ensemble performances directed by Jack O'Brien, and Norbert Leo Butz (Tony and Drama Desk awards) and Tom Wopat (Drama Desk nominee) as the leads. The plot follows Frank Abagnale, Jr.(Aaron Tveit), a young con man who uses charm, a quick eye, and a glib tongue to move between careers in finance, aviation, law and medicine. He is tracked by a determined FBI agent (Butz), who eventually recruits him for the Bureau. The excitement is in the chase, but the poignancy is the father's (Wopat) confusion between pride and shame in his son's adventures.

  At the Delacorte, the bad boys are at once the love interests and the villains. Sometimes you just want to hiss. Since the plays are comedies, the women are forgiving although it's not easy to understand why. Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well force us, the audience, into uncomfortable moments and curious reconciliations. The drama is distinctive and strong with lots of food for thought. All's Well that Ends Well is the better of the two productions, with a rare lucidity and impressive performances. The story centres on a one-sided romance complicated by political patronage and class conflict. Helena (Annie Parisee), the daughter of a recently deceased physician in the Countess (Tonya Pinkins) of Rousillion's household, is hopelessly in love with her son, Bertram (Andre Holland). Following him to the French court, Helene risks her lives to restore the dying king (John Cullum) to health.

  The jubilant king offers her any husband of her choosing. She selects Bertram, who roundly renounces her for her class and, defying the king's wrath, sets off for Florence to fight. Shakespeare pulls out his bag of tricks for the comic turn: disguises, mistaken identity, braggadocio, a mock trial, autocratic parents, and journeys. Bertram has offered Helena a challenge. To win him she must obtain his family ring and be with child by him. Beware determined women! In Florence, Helena learns that Bertram has been courting the virtuous, beautiful but poor Diana (Kristen Connolly), who knows he is married. ..

  Turn off the Dark is worth the wait. I had been wondering how long it would take Broadway to rival the theatrics of Phantom of the Opera.. The exhilarating flying sequences are more thrilling than the falling chandelier, and the extraordinary visuals, especially the set design by George Tsypin with its unique city perspectives, exceed even the underground scenes in Phantom. The leads -- Jennifer Damiano (Tony nomination for Next to Normal) and Reeve Carney  -  become more appealing with every challenge. Patrick Page as the Green Goblin, a mad scientist who created the Sinister Six mutants, gives the performance of a life time.

   Superlative subtext, timing (even in the pointing of a demonic fingernail), and lines: 'I'm a $65 million circus tragedy,' he boasts. The songs by Bono and The Edge open bland but turn into something beyond show tunes, especially 'Rise Above' and 'If the World Should End.' The book is weak and confusing, a problem common to musicals, and some devices are absurd, such as Swiss Miss as a biological mutant but, oh, those outrageous costumes by Eiko Ishioka and the astonishing Spider-Man chorus.

   Resonance Shakespeare Ensemble is a new little theatre group devoted to making classics feel new. Their tools are scenes with film and live actors, projections and focused performances. Their H4, an adaptation of Parts I and II of Henry IV, directed by Allegra Libonati, is a knock out.

BROADWAY LISTINGS:

The Addams Family, Lunt-Fontane Theatre; Anything Goes, Stephen Sondheim; Baby It's You, Broadhurst; Billy Elliot: The Musical, Imperial; The Book of Mormon, Eugene O'Neill; Catch Me If You Can, Neil Simon; Chicago the Musical, Ambassador; Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, St. James; How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Al Hirschfeld; Jersey Boys, August Wilson; Jerusalem, Music Box; The Lion King, Minskoff; Mamma Mia!, Winter Garden; Mary Poppins, New Amsterdam; Master Class, Samuel J. Friedman; Memphis: A New Musical, Shubert; The Phantom of the Opera, Majestic; Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the Musical, Palace; Rain-- A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway, Brooks Atkinson; Rock of Ages, Helen Hayes; Sister Act, Broadway; Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, Foxwoods; War Horse, Vivian Beaumont; Wicked, Gershwin.

LAWRENCE BOMMER

In Chicago

Now the recipient of Chicago's fifth Tony Award-winning theatre for regional excellence, Lookingglass Theatre Company more than justified that vote of confidence with its summer show, The Last Act of Lilka Kadison. A ravishing 90-minute enchantment, this company-composed creation, staged splendidly by co-author David Kersnar, is Lookingglass storytelling at its most inventive and disarming. The crowded, cluttered set depicts both the past and present of 87-year-old Lilith Fisher, who 70 years before as Lilka Kadison played a small but special role in the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

   There this Jewish girl, the eldest of ten siblings, who was soon to lose everything she loves, meets a handsome Jewish charmer and puppeteer named Ben Ari Adler (Chance Bone, exuding the confidence you need in a crisis). Her proto-feminist story is inspired by the life and work of Johanna Cooper, as reported on the Public Radio International series One People, Many Stories. Like Williams' Gentleman Caller, Ben helps this shy teenager (Nora Fiffer in a role of astonishing delicacy and tact) to find her voice as they collaborate on depicting the reassuring story of the Queen of Sheba's cerebral and sexual liaison with King Solomon. (It was to be performed in Vilna but the blitzkrieg put a stop to that. Still, we later learn that, thanks to Ben, the saga found an unsought audience, children in the concentration camps.)

   They argue about what the Jews have been chosen for, indulge in a tango that temporarily banishes the horror around them, and somehow find and make love in a world that seems consumed by its opposite. Now sick of life and a broken hip in her Los Angeles nursing home, a wickedly lucid Lilith spends her last afternoon feuding with the all-suffering Pakistani orderly Menelik Kahn (Usman Ally, proving the power of patience) who works for Jewish Family Services. At the same time she reckons, wonderfully, with her past. Lilith is, quite simply and complexly, the willing victim of a friendly haunting: A ghostly but still protective Ben returns to persuade her to reconcile with her estranged son and to both claim her legacy and die within the faith.

   The overlapping scenes from 1939 and 2009 quickly become greater than the play's whole, weaving a richly interwoven tapestry of testimony and remembrance. The play ends with a glorious moment: The toy theatre is transformed into what the girl Lilka was never allowed to see in her Polish temple, the inside of the Ark of the Covenant. This is not your usual Lookingglass offering. Jacqueline and Richard Penrod's proscenium stage transforms the script into a kind of retro-vaudeville, while Kersnar encourages concentrated rather than athletic or expansive performances from this superb quartet of master players. The authors - Nicola Behrman, Abbie Phillips, Heidi Stillman, Andrew White and Kersnar - deserve as much credit as the actors for making Lilka's past and present engage us. The Last Act of Lilka Kadison feels a lot like a bedtime story that we can never hear too often or too long.

    Next to Goodman Theatre's showcase of a new work by a proven playwright: Two-time Pultizer Prize finalist, David Henry Hwang, is already well represented in Chicago - with Silk Road Theater Project's successful revival of Yellow Face, a satirical fantasy about the perils of non-traditional casting and racial stereotypes. Now comes Goodman's equally playful world premiere: Chinglish is a charming if half-baked confection about the dangers of faulty translation - between languages or lovers. The latter are a desperate American entrepreneur trying to sell English signage to a cultural centre in the mid-sized (4 million) provincial capital of Guiyang, China, and the ambitious vice-minister who has her own agenda for bedding him and securing the lucrative contract.

   Like the film Lost in Translation (which uses its Japanese setting much better to convey cultural isolation as well as the mixed messages that complicate relationships and contracts), Chinglish employs supertitles rather than subtitles to deliver the 'double takes' of minor and major misunderstandings. Coming fast and furious, these instantly illustrate the treacherous tricks that happen when idioms get mistranslated, either too literally or too abstractly. Almost half the play is in Mandarin Chinese: The comedy is not fooling around when it comes to impersonating culture shock. Daniel Cavanaugh (bumptious James Waterston), a casualty of the Enron scandal, is hoping to recoup his losses by giving his Ohio sign-making company a new lease on life in a very distant market. He seeks help from a volatile Australian 'migr' (Stephen Pucci), who can translate well but can't hold his tongue when dealing with the Chinese officials' courteous deceptions and elaborate double talk.

  Daniel thinks he's found a more reliable ally in Xu Yuan (Jennifer Lim, subtle and sprightly), a mid-level government flunky whose idea of adultery is as much a negotiation as any business deal. All but inscrutable, she's got designs against her boss Cai Guoliang (a minister of culture embroiled in nepotism and influence peddling). So, even more than in the U.S., in this hot-house world of intrigue that passes as Guiyang, the personal is the political and all's fair in love and networking.

  Continuing Hwang's collaboration with Leigh Silverman (who staged the original Yellow Face), Goodman's fast-moving, two-hour debut features dazzling revolving sets by David Korins that deliver instant and cunning locales, claustrophobically lit by Brian MacDevitt. These along with very slick work in two languages from a deft, cross-cultural cast keep this more than just an extended joke about funny English signs in Chinese hotels. The problem is the play's pull-out-the-plug ending: Its abrupt and even desperate resolution suggests that Hwang doesn't know how to sort out his tangle of foreign mis-relations. He uses the opening and closing scenes - depictions of Daniel's Powerpoint presentation on the difficulties of conducting business abroad--as a cop out as much as a framing device. We need a bit more closure than a giant theatrical shrug indicating 'Well, you never know, do you, folks!'

    Finally, Steppenwolf Theatre Company's latest offering, Middletown, by Will Eno is a disappointing attempt to update Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Grovers Corners is now a mid-American backwater where life's miracles are dulled to death by this very generic habitation. The characters are really just the author's commentary (they all sound like stand-up comics complete with zingers and one-liners).

   Despite Les Waters' competent staging, their comings and goings never develop a direction, weighed down as this (in)action is by the author's sardonic deadpan and enervating shoulder-shrugging. This is much more a play meant to please its actors and not the audience.

Plays International also regularly reports from Connectitcut, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver and from many North American festivals like those of Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky