Marc Brenner

Sunset Blvd.

November 7, 2024

Now, director Jamie Lloyd has taken the clunky—but entertaining—Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Sunset Blvd." (1993) and stripped it of all realistic scenery—and a few songs—hoping to get to the nitty-gritty of its Hollywood characters and period with enormous projections which suggest an expressionistic silent film. The results are decidedly mixed mostly due to a failure to settle on a tone plus some head-scratching additions that have nothing to do with the story. Lloyd, most recently represented by his dreary, stripped-down A Doll’s House and an equally spare production of Pinter’s Betrayal, has shepherded this production with a combination of brilliance and self-indulgence. [more]

Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club

May 13, 2024

The lead of the show is film star Eddie Redmayne, who won the Olivier Award for his performance as the Emcee in the London production and is also Tony nominated for this show. Director Rebecca Frecknall’s staging (with her British production team) is imaginative and innovative, quite unlike any Cabaret you have seen before. The new Sally Bowles is Scottish American actress Gayle Rankin who appeared as Fraulein Kost on Broadway in Sam Mendes’ 2014 Broadway revival of "Cabaret" which appeared at Studio 54. Frecknall’s interpretation is more dissolute and dissipated than most versions so that when American writer Clifford Bradshaw arrives in Berlin to get material for a novel the city is already deep in the throes of degradation and degeneracy when he meets second-rate singer Sally Bowles as the party girl par excellence and lead female singer of the Kit Kat Club. [more]

The Effect

March 20, 2024

Soutra Gilmour’s setting is a sort of empty runway with the audience sitting on either side. The other props are two black chairs at either end for the two doctors. Scenes are created entirely by Jon Clark’s impressive lighting which turns a portion of the stage into a white square, the rest being kept in darkness. Since Connie and Tristan meet in various dorm rooms, doctor’s offices, examination rooms, etc., there is no sense of place. The problem is that each scene looks the same as the previous one and the many scenes covering the four weeks tend to become tiresome without an intermission to break the mood. Gilmour’s costumes which put the doctors in all black and the patients in all white are equally monotonous. [more]

Cyrano de Bergerac

April 19, 2022

Playwright Martin Crimp, an adherent of the ”in-yer-face” school of British playwriting, has taken Edmond Rostand’s turn-of-the-last century verse drama, Cyrano de Bergerac, and not only blown off the cobwebs but exploded it into an entirely new 21st century experience. Staged by innovative director Jamie Lloyd, it has become a showcase for titanic Scottish stage and screen actor James McAvoy making an unforgettable New York stage debut in the title role as the 17th century poet and soldier. [more]

The Inheritance

December 24, 2019

Samuel H. Levine, Kyle Soller and Andrew Burnap in a scene from Matthew Lopez’s “The [more]

Hughie

March 5, 2016

When the audience enters, the curtain is up and Christopher Oram’s imposing scenic design of the faded hotel lobby is in view. The visual effect of its industrial greenish walls, dirty stone columns, chipped wooden adornments, ancient elevator, central staircase, frayed threadbare furnishings, severe front desk, and grimy windows is that of a stunning representation of hellish imprisonment. Also on view while the audience waits the play to start is the night clerk staring into space. [more]