The Irish Rep is offering a high-spirited farce for the holidays. London Assurance, a nineteenth-century drawing room comedy is so completely over the top guffaws are sometimes in order. A huge cast on a tiny stage benefits from some lively choreography. Mugging at the audience is encouraged. And a few vaudevillian tricks work surprisingly well. The price of a ticket buys you a little “time travel.”
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Power Strip, despite being freighted with all the tales of innocents ravaged and legendary conquest pillage the world has ever seen, is a right-now story. In the grim confines of a Syrian refugee camp, Jasmin is forced to re frame her notions of virtue and value. This is a thoughtful play that stays with you.
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Brian Cox stars as LBJ in The Great Society at the Beaumont. Playwright Robert Schenkkan takes a second swing — telling the second chapter in the Johnson legacy. Johnson’s ambitions for his war on poverty, and his actual accomplishments to that end — Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps and more — are imperiled by the turbulence of sixties. The Vietnam War ruins him and the Civil Rights movement, which he’s supported and advanced, cannot stomach his pace.
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Eileen Atkins and Jonathan Pryce are Madeleine and Andre, married fifty years and facing the ultimate divorce. Lots of clever misdirection keeps audience tuned in as we figure out who is actually loved and lost.
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Broadway Bounty Hunter — the noisy musical comedy at the Greenwich House Theater –is the theatrical rendition of “Go Big or Go Home!” Nowhere is there a flimsier premise: aging Broadway actress is recruited to be a martial arts bounty hunter. I won’t tell you the premise works; it’s just that the show is so much fun, and the performers so winning, and the production so acute. I’m saying GO
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