Theater May 2006
Greatest hits & misses
On Hedda Gabler, Hell, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and Ring of Fire.
Almost any week of the year, you can experience the familiar sensation of a great performance in a lousy play. Debra Monk’s marvelous turn in Paul Weitz’s Show People, at Second Stage, is a more or less typical example. Miss Monk and Lawrence Pressman are cast as has-been old troupers who turn up at a Hamptons beach house in order to play the parents of a young tycoon eager to impress the girl he wants to marry. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but all the complications can be seen coming from a mile off. This is the kind of labored comedy-thriller that would have eked out a few weeks in the West End and Broadway of sixty years ago, when the defiantly sterile Hamptons beach house—all cold steel and glass panoramas—would have been a Gothic mansion, all wood paneling and French windows. Now it’s upgraded to the status of non-profit pseudo-art. And, given that, these days, “commercial theatre” is...
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