Fun Home
music by Jeanine Tesori
book and lyrics by Lisa Kuhn
based on the graphic novel by Alision Bechdel
produced by Circle In the Square
June 16, 2015

💉💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

Production website

Although I am not a musical theatre person, I was in the audience for the first week of the run of Rent and knew that musical theatre was going to change forever. I felt the same way sitting in the audience for Fun Home. Never have I felt the songs so connected to the story. When the show was over, it never occurred to me that the characters sang – – it was just that beautiful and that invisible! The story is about family and those crazy often toxic people that we will never be able to truly escape. They truly shape ever decision and turn that our life takes. Continue reading Fun Home →

Skylight
written by David Hare and Mathew Beard
starring Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy
Golden Theatre – June 14, 2015

Production website

💉💉💉💉 out of 5.
This is going to sound a bit crude but watching this show seemed to me a very literate and brilliantly played out feasting on the Animal Channel.  Crude I know – – but the constant clashing of horns for both the materialist, Bill Nighy, and the newly drafted idealist, Carey Mulligan was a scary thing.
Early in the evening Kyra (Carey Mulligan) puts a pot of Bolognese on the stove (literally food on the stove) and literally heats it for all of the audience to watch and smell.  This meal cooks and cooks and when finally served we can only guess how hot it gets and how severely it burns the tongue.

At its simplest, Skylight is the story of an old rich married man with a sickly wife who befriends and later woos a much younger woman.  The secret plays out for a long time until the death of the wife and conscious of the younger woman kicks in.  Now, separated, they join on this rainy night to rekindle (?) what could have been, or might be, or hasn’t a chance of being.
It was very scary to watch the match up here.  The language was so brilliantly sharp and you couldn’t find two better actors/swords to wield against each other.
On a funny note, one of my teenage students with me found it totally unbelievable that a man as OLD as he was could ever have a relationship with someone as YOUNG as she was.  “What could possibly drive them together?”
Patience young teenager – life will reveal stranger things then this.

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, based on the novel by Mark Haddon.

Ethel Barrymore Theatre – June 13, 2016

Curiousonbroadway

💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

I have seen this play and loved it both times.  This is a perfect example of using expressionism to really get inside the life of an autistic boy and yet still be meaningful to the audience.  What struck me both times about seeing this play is PLAY:  the wonderful, joyous practice of play that we adults abandon way to early for our own good.  When is the last time that someone grabbed you by the waist and helped you play rocket ship around the living room?  When is the last time someone held you above your head threatening to send you plunging into the bed below?  Autistic or not – – why in the hell did we ever give up our sense of play? Continue reading Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time →