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Heavy topics abound, but there’s still room for a laugh and a song – from an Alanis Morissette musical to a dildo-waving new play
It doesn’t seem long ago that announcements around Manhattan were urging playgoers to see a Broadway show “for the fun of it”. Such exhortations have disappeared with the changing times, amid a New York theatre scene that, if my holiday-season trawl through a dozen or more productions is any gauge, isn’t these days exactly high on fun.
That’s not to suggest in any way a lack of theatrical bounty, not least at a time when two new American plays – Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (Linda Gross theatre), and The Sound Inside (Studio 54) – were as remarkable as anything I’ve seen over the past year or more. Both merit a London outing that seems more than likely given the increasing preponderance in the capital of American titles from every corner of the repertoire. Halfway Bitches…, now closed, but set among the death throes of a New York City women’s shelter, featured a cast of 18 (plus a goat), and would seem a natural for, say, the Young Vic, while Adam Rapp’s bleak yet beautiful two-hander The Sound Inside signals the overdue Broadway debut from the author of Red Light Winter, a Pulitzer finalist in 2006, and could surely be done almost anywhere, even if its Broadway cast of Mary-Louise Parker and Will Hochman has set the bar tremendously high. A never-better Parker plays an ailing Yale creative writing professor at home with her own solitude, with Hochman as the precocious and nervy student who all but upends her life. Continue reading...