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Movie Reviews: "The Book Thief"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Friday, 22 November 2013 17:51
Written by Matt Oakes

"The Book Thief"
Directed by Brian Percival
Starring Sophie Nélisse, Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, Roger Allam, Nico Liersch, Kirsten Block
Drama, War
131 Mins
PG-13

It's not the first time we've seen a World War II movie rife with Holocaust themes and the omnipresent horrors of war nor will it be the last, but The Book Thief manages a healthy dose of thoughtful introspection and rock solid performances amidst extraneous narration a la the Grim Reaper. This narrative tactic might have worked fine in book form but in the film only serves to interrupt the sense of immediacy inherent to the lifeblood of film. Death the narrator comes in unannounced to smooth over the rough edges, blunting the emotion impact of sequences that should have been the most shocking and gut-wrenching. Each time the film reaches an emotional apex, Death takes the stage and narrates us through what we ought to be feeling like we're reading a storybook about pretty ponies.

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NYC Theater Roundup: More Shakespeare on Broadway; Beckett, Beth Henley off-Broadway

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Thursday, 21 November 2013 20:34
Written by Kevin Filipski
Richard III/Twelfth Night
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Tim Carroll
Performances through February 2, 2014
Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, New York, NY
shakespearebroadway.com
 
All That Fall
Written by Samuel Beckett; directed by Trevor Nunn
Performances through December 8, 2013
59 E 59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
59e59.org
 
The Jacksonian
Written by Beth Henley; directed by Robert Falls
Performances through December 22, 2013
Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
thenewgroup.org
 
Barnett and Rylance in Twelfth Night (photo: Joan Marcus)
Although Mark Rylance has two Tony awards—he won for his memorable turns in the rickety farce Boeing Boeing and the rickety epic drama Jerusalem—his current mugging as Olivia in Twelfth Night and the title role of Richard III for the Shakespeare's Globe all-male, “authentic” Elizabethan productions might be cause to return them: for all his formidable skills, the actor and his self-centered antics are a disappointing comedown from his previous highs.
 
 
Since Twelfth Night is an ensemble piece whose masterly mix of comedy and romance is handled with aplomb by other actors in and out of drag, Rylance’s interpretation of the grieving Olivia who falls for Cesario (actually heroine Viola in disguise)—go-between for Duke Orsino, whose love for Olivia is not reciprocated—doesn’t entirely ruin it. But as Richard, he’s the whole play, so his stuttering, stammering, wink-wink/nudge-nudging quickly becomes tiresome, much of the time remindful of another brazen comic ham: Robin Williams.
 
Mork III would be a more accurate (if less catchy) title: Rylance is so busy playing to the audience (which includes dozens of people onstage seated at either side of the stage for closer proximity) that he never creates a compelling, consistent characterization of Shakespeare’s loathsomely conniving but monstrously charming king. Rylance makes comic faces while speaking, then gives blank stares, similar to what Williams does on talk shows after going off on some kind of riff or impression, putting on his “normal Robin” face to gales of laughter.  
 
Rylance’s brazen hamming as Richard (who knew “tragedy” is spelled “travesty”?) also deflects from decent “drag” acting by Joseph Timms as Lady Anne and Samuel Barnett as Queen Elizabeth; in fact, Timms is the sole reason the infamous wooing scene—when Richard sweet talks the newly widowed Ann in front of the body of her husband whom he killed—works at all, since Rylance is too busy making sure we “get” that he’s being an utterly magnificent bastard.
 
Although he reins it in for Twelfth Night, his Olivia is basically the same as his Richard except for a more feminine voice, which makes him sound like Williams’ own drag role Mrs. Doubtfire. He goes for cheap laughs by, for example, overreacting when discovering that Cesario/Viola and Sebastian are twins, saying “Most wonderful!” before falling into an exaggerated faint.
 
Barnett, as Viola/Cesario, gives a textbook example of how to beautifully underplay as a man playing a woman playing a man: everything that Rylance overdoes is balanced by Barnett’s graceful but riveting performance. Also worth mentioning is Stephen Fry’s lower-key Malvolio, a comic villain often camped up; Fry’s more elegant demeanor, which makes him more sympathetic, allows his final threat of revenge to be more bittersweet than funny.
 
Tim Carroll’s competent if uninspired directing is enhanced by Jenny Tiramani’s hand-stitched 16th century costumes and Stan Pressner’s lighting, which works subtle wonders on Tiramani’s functional unit set—but why are electric lights used for supposedly authentic stagings instead of just candles? These shows’ gimmickry, like Rylance, far outstrips their real pleasures, like Barnett, Timms and Fry.
 
Gambon and Atkins in All That Fall (photo: Carol Rosegg)
Along with game-changing classics Waiting for Godot, Endgame andHappy Days, Samuel Beckett wrote several works that only diehards defend or even remember. Case in point: the obscure but patently autobiographical 1957 radio play All That Fall.
 
This 75-minute black comedy, which begins with elderly Mrs. Rooney going to the train station to meet her blind husband after work, is another Beckett play about earthly pain and suffering in a world devoid of God. Mr. and Mrs. Rooney, both suffering from physical and spiritual ailments, deal with life’s unrelenting bleakness that culminates with an explanation of why the train was late—a small girl fell out of the train and died—that the old man may have had something to do with. At the end, their cathartic explosion of laughter at the theme of that Sunday’s sermon—“The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down”—is their own revenge on a vengeful (or non-existent) God.
 
Trevor Nunn's staging puts us in a radio studio watching the actors (who sit in chairs on either side of the stage when not part of the action) play their roles while various sound effects are heard: they walk around with scripts and speak into overhanging microphones. The lone stage prop, of the car in which Mrs. Rooney gets a ride, seems out of place, raising the question of whether Beckett’s blunt, meandering play should remain in its original audio-only form.
 
But a superior 10-member acting troupe—led by Michael Gambon, who perfectly embodies Mr. Rooney’s torturous existence and, even more exquisitely, Eileen Atkins, whose Mrs. Rooney (Beckett’s first female protagonist) is simply and heartbreakingly real—makes every single word count, the ultimate compliment for any Beckett production.
 
Harris and Pullman in The Jacksonian (photo: Monique Carboni)
In her new play The Jacksonian, Beth Henley dives headfirst into the depths of depravity, surfacing with a diverting if improbable melodrama. Set in the eponymous motel in Jackson, Mississippi—and moving back and forth between April and December 1964—the play is narrated by precocious teenager Rosy Perch, whose parents are local dentist Bill and mentally unbalanced Susan; Bill, staying at the motel since they’ve separated,  finds his life spinning out of control. Then there’s the motel’s menacing bartender Fred Weber and flirty waitress/maid Eva White, whose relationship is in flux: Eva, who desperately wants to get married, sets her sights on the estranged dentist after Fred lies to her about his terminal heart condition.
 
 
Two murders—one offstage, one on—propel the hackneyed plot to an enjoyable conclusion after 90 minutes of characters twisting themselves into pretzels. Henley’s (in both senses) hysterical dialogue provides local flavor, with 20/20 hindsight, of course: Eva, who profusely and casually uses the N word, insists after Bill tells her to say “Negro” that “it doesn’t matter what you call them—they’re still not white.” Henley obviously identifies with awkward, acne-scarred Rosy, who’s out of place with these people in this era and locale.
 
In Robert Falls’ brisk staging on Walt Spangler’s knockout set of a bar and hotel room, a terrifically game cast makes the most of these wildly careening characters, even if four of them are a couple decades too old for their roles: but Ed Harris (Bill), Bill Pullman (Fred), Amy Madigan (Susan) and Glenne Headly (Eva)—who looks smashing in her underwear, by the way—give committed, fiercely funny performances as people unable to escape traps of their own device, while 20-year-old Juliet Brett—who looks all of 14—is scarily perfect as a youngster scarred by what adults are up to around her.
 
Richard III/Twelfth Night
Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, New York, NY
shakespearebroadway.com
 
All That Fall
59 E 59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
59e59.org
 
The Jacksonian
Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
thenewgroup.org

November '13 Digital Week III

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Monday, 18 November 2013 04:51
Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week

All the President’s Men

(Warners)
Alan Pakula’s classic 1976 paranoia thriller is scarier than his earlierParallax View because it’s true! Pakula’s low-key documentary style perfectly fits this look at Woodward and Bernstein doggedly pursuing the Watergate story no one cared about, eventually toppling Nixon’s White House.
 
There’s superb acting by Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Martin Balsam and Hal Holbrook, down to the tiniest parts. The Blu-ray transfer retains the grain underscoring the film’s effectiveness as a shadowy mystery. Extras include a new documentary, All the President’s Men Revisited(narrated by Redford), Redford’s commentary, a 70-minute retrospective documentary (narrated by Holbrook), and a Dinah Shore talk-show segment with Robards.
 
The Attack
(Cohen Media)
The Israel-Palestine rift is given intensely personal expression in Ziad Doueiri’s shocking drama about a Palestinian doctor—revered among colleagues at an Israeli hospital—whose wife is a suicide bomber: his voyage of discovery gives him a few answers about why the woman he loved chose jihad.
 
Doueiri doesn’t treat his subject with kid gloves, and the result is a probing, intelligent exploration of the unexplainable chasms deeply held convictions create. The Blu-ray image is superb; lone extra is a Doueiri interview.
 
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Bishop's Wife
(Warners)
William Wyler’s Years, 1946 Best Picture Oscar winner, is a sprawling, absorbing soap opera about three American GIs adjusting to postwar civilian life; Harold Russell, a real-life military man who lost his hands in the war, movingly played Homer and also won an Oscar.
 
1947’s Wife, thanks to Loretta Young and Cary Grant’s star power, is an entertaining romantic tale of a guardian angel, based on Robert Nathan’s novel. Both films look luminous in hi-def; Yearsextras are an introduction and interviews.
 
Blackfish
(Magnolia)
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite—who says she has no anti-Seaworld agenda—made this devastating polemic about killer whales in captivity lashing out at their trainers, with documented woundings and fatalities.
 
Astonishing video footage and remarkably candid interviews with ex-Seaworld employees and whale experts allows Cowperthwaite to fashion a powerful statement against keeping such exquisite but deadly creatures caged and performing for audiences instead of swimming free in the ocean. The Blu-ray image looks good; extras include director’s note, director/producer commentary and featurettes.
 
City Lights
(Criterion)
I waver when choosing Charlie Chaplin’s best film: when it isn’tModern Times or The Great Dictator, it’s City Lights (1931), the master’s most unashamedly sentimental but deeply moving film. The final shot of Charlie is my favorite close-up in cinematic history: the movie itself is 90 minutes of simultaneous comic, tragic and romantic bliss that wears its 80-plus years with remarkable grace.
 
The Criterion Collection’s hi-def transfer is beautifully crisp and clean; extras include a commentary by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance, documentary on the film, visual effects featurette, on-set footage, unused scene, rehearsal and excerpt from Chaplin’s shortThe Champion.
 
 
 
The Cunning Little Vixen 
(Arthaus Musik)
Eugene Onegin (Opus Arte)
Leos Janacek’s delightful Vixen—whose graceful animals show life’s cyclical nature—is given a wondrous 2009 staging by Laurent Pelly in Florence, Italy. Veteran Seiji Ozawa conducts a lovely account of Janacek’s glorious score, and a cast led by Isabel Bayrakdarian is fantastic in both senses.
 
Tchaikovsky’s great Oneginhas a trio of meaty roles—superbly filled by Simon Keenlyside (Onegin), Pavol Breslik (Lensky) and Krassimira Stoyanova (Tatyana), who sings a heart-melting letter scene—so it’s too bad Kasper Holten’s 2013 wobbly London staging uses doubles to show paths the characters might have taken. The hi-def video/audio is sublime; Onegin has Holten’s commentary.
 
The Hobbit—Extended Edition
(Warners)
Why director Peter Jackson turned Tolkien’s middle earth novel—a straightforward, unpretentious prequel to the massive Lord of the Ringstrilogy—into a multi-part, lengthy film adaptation is a mystery.
 
There’s much to enjoy (like the elaborately created physical production), but the plot, dragged out beyond endurance, and characters, who aren’t fleshed out, keep the movie at arm’s length as it slowly unfolds. The hi-def image is, unsurprisingly, perfect; extras include a bonus Blu-ray with seven hours’ worth of making-of documentaries.
 
 
JFK—50 Year Commemorative Ultimate Collector’s Edition
(Warners)
Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK assassination conspiracy-theory drama is risibly over the top about who was involved, but Stone’s assured direction, Robert Richardson’s robust photography and Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia’s razor-sharp editing remain gripping, as does an all-star cast led by Kevin Costner (“Back and to the left”).
 
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, this deluxe set includes the 2008 Blu-ray (which looks fine), a Blu-ray of Stone’sUntold History of the United States JFK episode, the 1963 feature filmPT-109 with Cliff Robertson as JFK and two DVDs with documentariesYears of Lightning, Day of Drums and the new JFK Remembered: 50 Years Later.
 
Lion of the Desert
The Message
(Anchor Bay/Starz)
These films produced and directed by Moustapha Akkad tackle historical figures with epic sweep but cardboard characterizations. Lion, about Libyan Omar Mukhtar—who resisted Mussolini’s army—and The Message,about the unseen Mohammad and birth of Islam, have far-flung locations, requisite overlength and huge casts, but there’s the matter of flimsy scripts, uneven acting and plodding direction.
 
Still, these kinds of films are rarely made today—too costly—and these Blu-rays preserve interesting examples of cinematic, not real, history.
 
Syrup
(Magnolia)
Amber Heard is perfectly cast as a brainy, beautiful businesswoman whom our slacker hero (a lackluster Shiloh Fernandez) unsurprisingly falls for, hoping she can help market his invention. Despite Heard’s appealingly natural screen presence, even she can’t save this tiresome attempt at a hip modern comedy about marketing and romance.
 
Brittany Snow, a near-dead ringer for Heard, has little to do and the men (Fernandez and Keillan Lutz) are boringly presented, which leaves Heard stranded. The Blu-ray image is fine; extras are a featurette and interview.
 
DVDs of the Week

As I Lay Dying

(Millennium)
There’s no denying the passion, blood, sweat and tears that writer-director-star James Franco put into his adaptation of William Faulkner’s brilliant but flagrantly unfilmable classic novel.
 
Therefore—despite a “look” that’s absolutely right, including the use of split screens to visualize the shifting perspectives of the various narrators throughout the book—Franco’s film ends up an honorable failure or, more succinctly, a nice try. Extras include cast interviews.
 
BAM 150
Becoming Traviata
(Cinema Guild)
A celebratory overview of the first century and a half of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Michael Sladek’s BAM150 has vintage clips from innovative shows like Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with interview snippets. But missing—except in a still photo—is the imposing presence of Ingmar Bergman, whose extraordinary productions remain the venerable institution’s high-water mark. 
 
Traviata, Philippe Beziat’s fly-on-the-wall look at soprano Natalie Dessay and director Jean-Francois Sivadier reconceiving Verdi’s tragic courtesan, becomes repetitious with its recurring rehearsal footage, but Dessay’s vivid presence keeps interest.BAM150 extras comprise Sladek’s commentary, extended interviews and deleted scenes.
 
Broken
(Film Movement)
Asthmatic 12 year old girl Skunk witnesses the self-destruction her neighbors bring upon themselves: a teenage girl accuses a young man and a teacher she dislikes of impregnating her, whereupon her father putatively beats up both men and lives spiral out of control, including the young man’s parents.
 
This is depressing material in the extreme, and even with actors like Tim Roth, Cillian Murphy, and newcomer Eloise Laurence, director-writer Rufus Norris is unable to keep a handle on the drama, and his attempt at a happy ending is excessively tacky after such grimness. A bonus short, The Way the World Ends recounts the aftermath of a family death.
 
 
Deceptive Practice—
The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
(Kino)
For decades, magician Ricky Jay has delighted and astounded audiences with his amazing sleight of hand, which Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein’s documentary demonstrates over and over for 85 beguiling minutes.
 
Jay himself discusses his important mentors—with names like Slydini and Cardini—and how he became one of the world’s best-known magicians. Colleagues and friends like David Mamet and Steve Martin give their stamps of approval on Jay’s magic. Extras include added interviews and footage.
 
The Heidi Chronicles
 
A Life in the Theater
(Warner Archive)
Plays by two of America’s noted playwrights were turned into enjoyably slight mid-‘90s TV movies. Wendy Wasserstein’s wonderful Heidi—which I saw on Broadway in 1989 with the peerless Joan Allen—loses a lot with the lightweight Jamie Lee Curtis as the complicated heroine; good support from Kim Cattrall, Tom Hulce and Peter Friedman (reprising his stage role) helps immensely.
 
David Mamet’s two-hander Theater has juicy roles for Jack Lemmon and Matthew Broderick, but the play and movie are basically one-note actors’ exercises; not even Gregory Mosher’s clever direction covers up its thinness.
 
Tutumuch
(First Run)
The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, a prestigious academy for young, aspiring ballerinas, holds auditions every year for a select number of spots for its next class, and Elise Swerhone’s inspiring film follows some girls and their families as they respond to being chosen—or not.
 
This intriguing inside look at a world-class cultural institution and the people who run it also juggles several human-interest stories that pack a lot of insight into a short amount of time.

Theater Roundup: “Big Fish” on Broadway, Julie Taymor's “Dream,” Irish Rep's “Juno,” Lincoln Ctr Theater's “Luce” off-Broadway

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Thursday, 14 November 2013 21:56
Written by Kevin Filipski

 

Big Fish
Music/lyrics by Andrew Lippa, book by John August; direction/choreography by Susan Stroman
Performances through December 29, 2013
 
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Julie Taymor
Performances through January 12, 2014
 
Juno and the Paycock
Written by Sean O’Casey; directed by Charlotte Moore
Performances through December 29, 2013
 
Luce
Written by JC Lee; directed by Mae Adrales
Performances through November 17, 2013
 
Baldwin and Butz in Big Fish (photo: Paul Kolnik)
From Daniel Wallace’s novel and Tim Burton’s film, the musical Big Fish is jammed with big emotions, big production numbers, even big songs. But, as in most new musicals, composer/lyricist Andrew Lippa’s conventional tunes (interchangeable ballads, showstoppers and romantic duets) seem an afterthought, but they advance the show by allowing the always inventive Susan Stroman to choreograph the hell out of each number. Thanks to her ingenuity and the show wearing its sentimental heart on its sleeve, it works, up to a point.
 
 
Big Fish—book, movie, musical—hits on a poignant theme: reconciliation between family members before death makes it impossible. Edward Bloom, an irrepressible teller of seemingly tall tales, recounts his fantastical stories about his life, which include a giant, a witch and his hometown escaping a disastrous flood. His just-married son Will feels that all he knows about his father is through his stories. So when Edward falls ill, Will checks them out for himself with results that surprise his skepticism.
 
Stroman’s brisk but unfrantic pacing helps the show keep moving, even when there may be one Bloom tale too many, as well as a few too many endings. But it’s all done to such an illustrious sheen by its boatload of talented performers—Kate Baldwin as the winsome heroine/wife/mother Sandra, Bobby Steggert as the likable son Will and the indestructible Norbert Leo Butz as Edward—that Big Fish overcomes its flaws to pull in its audience hook, line and sinker.
 
Benko in Taymor's Dream (photo: Es Devlin)
No one would deny that Julie Taymor is a dazzling director, but Shakespeare seems her comeuppance. She did wondrously with The Lion King onstage and Frida onscreen, but when she attacks the Bard (Titus and The Tempest on stage and screen), the results are underwhelming. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the inaugural staging at the Theater for a New Audience’s impressive new downtown Brooklyn space—her sumptuous stagecraft obscures the heart at the core of this classic.
 
 
For three hours, a whirlwind of visual wonderment from Taymor and her co-conjurers—Donald Holder (lighting), Sven Ortel (projections), Constance Hoffman (costumes), Es Devlin (sets)—time and again causes the audience to “ooh” and “aah” at will. There’s not as much flying as in her woebegone Spiderman as Taymor’s aerial team Airealistic smartly picks its spots to elevate the fairies. Unfortunately, Taymor is on less firm ground with the play proper, since her performers can’t handle Shakespeare’s verse.
 
Despite a stunning opening—the spirit Puck disappears into the first of the production’s many billowing sheets above and on the stage—Taymor gets the Bard’s impish sprite totally wrong: despite her elasticity, Kathryn Hunter’s mischievous fairy is the least puckish Puck I’ve seen.  It’s tempting to give the rude mechanicals a pass, since Bottom and his performing buddies are supposed to be daffy and dumb: but even with such a resourceful actor as Max Casella playing him, Bottom never reaches comedic heights, and his awkward donkey head (which the actor has to manipulate with controls in his hands) is something that might have worked on paper but stops the seemingly foolproof “love scenes” with the fairy queen Titania dead in their tracks.
 
The less said about the quartet of lovers in the forest—Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander—the better, since none of the actors and actresses playing them makes any impression, and even Taymor seems stymied, resorting to farcical standbys like ripping clothes off and pillow fights, in desperation. The two pairs of monarchs—Athens’ Theseus and Amazon Hippolyta, King and Queen of the Fairies Oberon and Titania—fare better, with Tina Benko’s Titania by default the best performance in a visually memorable but otherwise deficient Dream.
 
The cast of the Irish Rep's Juno and the Paycock (photo: James Higgins)
Sean O’Casey’s humane, masterly Juno and the Paycock delicately dissects the fraught emotional lives of a poor Irish Catholic family—carefree father Jack (the peacock/“paycock”), overworked mother Juno, son Johnny (physically and emotionally crippled by the Irish Civil War), and daughter Mary, hoping for a better life elsewhere—in Dublin, circa 1922.
 
 
In Charlotte Moore’s straightforwardly-directed Irish Rep production—especially intimate on the tiny stage with James Noone’s set credibly evoking this ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious era—the family and their friends (and even enemies) are presented as flawed but recognizable human beings, as O’Casey merges the personal and political in a way that’s still exciting and incendiary.
 
And the performances by Ciaran O'Reilly (Jack), Ed Malone (John), Mary Mallen (Mary) and, best of all, J. Smith-Cameron (Juno) keep Moore’s respectful presentation of an enshrined masterpiece out of mothballs.
 
Onaodowan and Hinkle in Luce (photo: Jeremy Daniel)
JC Lee’s at times auspicious debut Luce attempts too much as it explores how natural cultural divides lead to misunderstandings—and worse. Lee introduces Luce, a seemingly perfect high school student: he’s smart, well-liked and an all-star football player. He’s also the adopted black son of Amy and Peter, white liberals who plucked him from the war-torn Congo at age seven and have raised him right—or so they think. His teacher Harriet notifies Amy about a paper bag full of explosive fireworks in his locker and a provocative pro-terrorist harangue in a journal he keeps at school, so they begin to wonder about their “perfect” son (Amy more than Peter, it must be said).
 
 
Although Lee sets up the dramatic fireworks convincingly, his characters—Amy, Peter, Harriet, Luce and Stephanie, Luce’s ex-girlfriend who has a revealing scene with Amy at Starbucks—are less plausibly etched. The play is, literally, too black and white: more shading would help. It’s apparent from the start that Luce is guilty, and there’s no doubt about it when he commits a climactic act of treachery that undermines Lee’s lip-service to ambiguity.
 
Under May Adrales’s sensitive direction, the quintet of actors givesLuce a veneer of substance. Would that Neal Huff’s befuddled, hands-off dad, Marin Hinkle’s complicated, loving mom, Sharon Washington’s no-nonsense teacher (though I doubt she would tell a student to “F—off”), Olivia Oguma’s typically shallow ex and Okieriete Onaodowan’s appealing but distant Luce weren’t undermined by this provocative but unprovoking drama.
 
Big Fish
Neil Simon Theatre, 250 West 52nd Street, New York, NY
bigfishthemusical.com
 
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY
tfana.org
 
Juno and the Paycock
Irish Rep, 132 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
irishrep.org
 
Luce
Claire Tow Theater, 150 West 65th Street, New York, NY
lct.org

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