Sven Ortel

Once Upon a One More Time

July 3, 2023

The only problem with Hartmere’s plot is that it remains undeveloped. None of the princesses get to read Friedan's book (there is initially only one copy) and they take it on faith that it offers them alternatives. The plot goes off on a series of tangents (Prince Charming’s assistant Prince Erudite the Celibate reveals that he is gay when he meets Snow White’s assistant Clumsy, the Cinderella’s Stepmother attempts to get the Narrator to choose one of her daughters for Prince Charming after Cinderella’s defection) but these narratives turn out as you would expect with no surprises. As staged by director/choreographer team Keene & Mari Madrid, whose credits up until now are mainly in film and music video, (creative consultant: British director: David Leveaux), the many production numbers look like aerobics for a rock video which may please Spears fans but look incongruous in a Broadway musical based on 18th and 19th century stories. Spears’ fans will be pleased that the show includes eight of her top ten hits: “Oops!... I Did It Again,” “Baby One More Time,” “Gimme More,” “Toxic,” “Circus,” “Lucky,” “Work Bitch,” and “Stronger,” almost all with lyrics tweaked by Hartmere to fit a story of princes and princesses. [more]

Parade

March 27, 2023

While Brown's tunefully varied score strives to historically situate the bigoted nightmare we're witnessing within the cultural context of the South's fabricated sense of nobility and victimhood, an offensive postbellum myth known as The Lost Cause, Alfred Uhry's reductive book ham-fistedly narrows our attention, transitioning from a corrupt law-and-order procedural in the first act to a preposterously scripted search for the truth after the intermission. Although Dane Laffrey's unremarkably fungible from-courthouse-to-prison-to-gallows set overbrims with historical figures, most of them exist on a character believability spectrum somewhere between "My Cousin Vinny" and "Driving Miss Daisy" (also written by Uhry). If not for Sven Ortel's rear-wall historical projections of these real people, an audience might suspect at least a few of them were invented out of whole cloth. [more]

Thoughts of a Colored Man

October 20, 2021

Keenan Scott II’s engrossing Broadway debut play, Thought of a Colored Man, appears to be a masculine version of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" updated to 2021. Both plays have seven unnamed characters all the same gender, take place in 20 scenes, and mix poetry, prose and dialogue. However, Scott’s play develops characters that each have a through line and they encounter each other as members of the same Brooklyn community. Set on one Friday from 6 AM to 1 AM the next morning in a Brooklyn community experiencing gentrification, we meet seven African American men in various combinations each given a monologue addressed directly at the audience to tell us part of their stories. In the final scene, they announce their names (Love, Happiness, Wisdom, Lust, Passion, Depression and Anger) but by then most of these appellations have become obvious. [more]

Party People

December 3, 2016

The framework is a fictional fiftieth anniversary party given in a New York art gallery by collaborating media/visual/performing artists Malik “Mk Ultra” (Christopher Livingston) and Jimmy “Primo” (William Ruiz a.k.a. Ninja) to commemorate the creation of both the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. Their interest is familial: Jimmy is the nephew of Tito (Jesse J. Perez), a former Young Lords Party member still involved with union organizing, and Primo is a “Panther Cub” as he is the son of a Panther member now in prison. They want to pay homage as well as reveal unspoken truths. Malik and Primo have created a video of the many former party members that they have interviewed that they plan on debuting at the event. The party with people who have not spoken for years will be a charged reunion. The troubled legacy of the two organizations is thoroughly explored in the course of "Party People." [more]