Look Back in Anger (Roundabout Theatre Company)

By Harry Forbes

This is not, as they say, your grandfather’s “Look Back in Anger.” Director Sam Gold has pared down the play, eliminating one character, conventional scenery, and most of the playing area. (The action takes place entirely downstage in front of an austere black wall.)

University educated, lower-class Jimmy Porter (Matthew Rhys), the original “angry young man,” -- more or less, based on playwright John Osborne himself -- lives with his wife Alison (Sarah Goldberg) and Welsh buddy Cliff (Adam Driver) in a comfy, non-sexual ménage a trois, over the candy store he runs, steadfastly refusing to strive for anything more exalted.

He rails against the bourgeois establishment with its maddening complacency, taking it out primarily on his long-suffering, upper crust wife. Alison’s efforts to tell Jimmy that she’s pregnant are continually thwarted, and eventually she leaves him to find “peace.” Her actress friend Helena (Charlotte Parry), who had been an unwanted (by Jimmy) house guest, summarily takes her place.

In Gold’s concept, Jimmy and Alison have a sort of Stanley Kowalski/Stella kind of dynamic. He’s something of a brute but she loves his animal magnetism. Alison’s relationship with Cliff, platonic though it may be, involves much affectionate fondling and kissing.

Josh Marquette’s setting is squalid in the extreme, and the emotions are heightened throughout. When I got home after seeing it, I pulled out a videotape of a TV production with a young Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson – directed by Judi Dench – and it seemed almost as genteel as “Downton Abbey” by comparison.

Frankly, I’m not sure Osborne would have approved Gold’s radical concept or recognized the characters or the slum-like setting quite as his own, and yet, his dialogue certainly bristles in a way I haven’t quite heard before. And that includes the Roundabout’s own revival with Malcolm McDowell years ago. I suspect a straight reading of the play might now register as staid as the conventional dramas "Look Back in Anger" was primed to usurp. Here, one certainly gets the flavor of what made the original so shocking. And the human emotions ring true.

Matthew Rhys is absolutely brilliant as Jimmy, even if he’s been directed to play up the intensity. Still, he radiates charisma and star quality, with a sonorous voice that suggests Richard Burton (who played Jimmy in the movie).

Fight director Thomas Schall has staged the frequent physical scuffles between Rhys and Driver (the taciturn but stronger Cliff usually getting the upper hand), with a wonderful naturalness.

Goldberg simmers enigmatically as she tries to get on with her ironing while Jimmy needles her incessantly, and she’s quite touching in her vulnerability.

Also fine is Adam Driver, who played Frank Langella’s son so well in the Roundabout’s revival of Terrence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy.” Rattigan, of course, was one of the traditional playwrights, along with Noel Coward, that “Look Back in Anger” was supposed to finally rout.

Even if Jimmy is something of a self-portrait, Osborne surely couldn't have expected that our sympathies should lie entirely with him, as – especially today – his misogyny towards Alison and then Helena is hugely repellant and uncomfortable to watch. Dominant as Jimmy's character is, we're given plenty of opportunity to feel Helena's and particularly Alison's pain.

For all the sometimes off-putting harshness of Gold's staging, this revival is well worth your time.

(Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (111 West 46th Street, 212-719-1300 or www.roundabouttheatre.org; through April 8)

Rose-Marie (Light Opera of New York)

By Harry Forbes

The Light Opera of New York launched its third full season of staged operettas with as ambitious a piece as they’ve attempted so far: one of the megahits of the 1920’s, “Rose-Marie,” a once ground-breaking operetta set against the novel backdrop of the Canadian Rockies. The show – with its music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, and book and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II -- was a “Phantom of the Opera”-like phenomenon in its day.

The titular heroine (Julie Anne Hamula) loves miner Jim Kenyon (Daniel Greenwood). But her brother Emile Steve Gokool) wants her to marry the smarmy, well-to-do business man Hawley (Evan Alboum) who has secretly been carrying on with Wanda (Kirsten Kane), wife of the crooked Indian Black Eagle (Matt Elizondo). There’s also Sergeant Malone, the Mountie who loves Lady Jane (Sarah Bleasdale), the good-egg proprietress of the local hotel, who’s also being pursued by Kenyon’s milquetoast sidekick Herman (David Macaluso). Along the way, Black Eagle is murdered, and Kenyon’s the suspected killer, driving the disillusioned Rose-Marie to think she might marry Hawley after all.

Part of what made the piece so innovative, besides the setting and atypical murder theme, was its generous underscoring intended to effect a seamless whole, so much so that co-librettist Hammerstein requested that individual song titles not be included in the program.

Under music director James Bittlecome, the ensemble of six musicians (piano and five strings) played many of the melodrames which gave the flavor of the piece, though ideally of course, one would hope for a more robust sound for such a full-blooded score than even an accomplished salon ensemble could produce.

The cast possessed uniformly excellent voices, if not necessarily cast to type. Kane and Hamula, for instance, towered over Alboum‘s Hawley an unlikely rival for Kenyon, requiring a serious suspension of disbelief.

Greenwood sang the hero role with firm, well-rounded tone. Gomez gave a good account of the rousing Mounties number, and Gokool sounded strong in his brief singing bits, but dramatically, the males in the cast were on the stiff side (or perhaps just under-rehearsed).

Macaluso’s Herman was anything but stiff, though I’m not sure he quite conquered the shortcomings of the part, despite channeling, in turn, Nathan Lane, Bert Lahr, and Groucho Marx.

Bleasdale, resembling Carol Burnett, may not have been totally convincing, but she and Macaluso enlivened all their scenes, within the limits of their often hokey comic material. She was also given Rose-Marie’s vocal part of the third act “Minuet of the Minute” duet with Herman, and did well by it.

As for Rose-Marie, Hamula – fresh from her outstanding performance in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ light opera “The Poisoned Kiss” for Bronx Opera – made a strong-voiced heroine, with a capable French-Canadian accent. She and Greenwood blended beautifully in the iconic “Indian Love Call.”

Adapter Alyce Mott mercifully trimmed what she could of the original book.

When one considers the original Broadway production had no less than 75 chorus girls stopping the show with the Indian-flavored “Totem Tom-Tom” (a tad more modestly staged here!), it must be acknowledged that Gary Slavin directed the forces at his disposal resourcefully. And LOONY’s chorus of eight still works wonders.

The costumes on this occasion were rather drab (partly due to the outdoorsy locale, partly not), and in some cases, ill-fitting, but one makes allowances.

LOONY is to be commended for using some discreet miking for the first time, which greatly improved audibility in their overly reverberant playing space, and made for a more involving experience all around.

Village Light Opera Group once mounted a very fine version with full orchestra, and Light Opera of Manhattan (LOOM) performed the work capably several times with their usual piano accompaniment. But “Rose-Marie” is a rarity these days, so it was good to encounter it again in such a well sung performance which also afforded the chance of hearing such rarely recorded numbers as the tuneful opening chorus and the comic trio “Only a Kiss,” entertainingly delivered by Bleasdale, Macaluso, and Gomez.

At the start of “Indian Love Call,” the couple in front of me gazed at each other with fond recognition of the tune and perhaps something more. So it seems Friml’s immortal melodies can still cast their spell.

(Landmark on the Park, 76th St. and Central Park West, 866-811-4111 or www.LightOperaOfNewYork.org; Feb. 4 and 5 only)

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Richard Rodgers Theatre)

By Harry Forbes

First things first. This production, which hailed from the American Repertory Theater, is no desecration of DuBose Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin’s masterpiece. Despite some patronizing comments from director Diane Paulus and adapters Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray prior to Broadway that indicated the work needed fixing – comments that drew ire from Stephen Sondheim and others – this is very much the “Porgy and Bess” we all know and love.

And despite streamlining, at two and a half hours, it is a satisfyingly full evening and hardly feels like a Reader’s Digest version by any means.

Paulus has, in fact, done a superb job of giving the drama sharp focus, and she’s been aided by a uniformly excellent cast.

Audra McDonald’s Bess – finely characterized and sung as it is – does not blow away Norm Lewis’ grey-bearded Porgy, nor anyone else on stage for that matter.

David Alan Grier reveals a strong voice, and registers as one of the best Sporting Life’s within memory. Natasha Yvette Williams’ amusingly gruff Mariah is a constant delight, and her “I Hates Your Strutting Style” putdown of the drug-pushing Sporting Life is a little show-stopper in itself. Nikki Renée Daniels’ Clara offers as sweet a “Summertime” as I’ve ever heard in the show’s opening moments. And Bryonia Marie Parham’s Serena gives full measure to “My Man’s Gone Now.”

The supporting men hold up their end, too, with powerful work from Joshua Henry’s Jake, Nathaniel Stampley’s Robbins, and Phillip Boykin’s scary Crown.

McDonald acts up a storm as Bess, playing her as a damaged (literally as per the scar on her cheek) as well as emotionally. Though not as innately sexy as some past interpreters, she certainly plays up the sexuality in her first scenes, and then transforms most affectingly once she moves in with the crippled Porgy after her lover Crown commits murder and must go undercover.

When Crown surprises her at the picnic and virtually rapes her, she succumbs with graphic abandon. And, near the end, when she falls under Sporting Life’s sway, she becomes a pathetic creature again, hungrily sniffing the cocaine on the ground.

Lewis is a pillar of strength, and though Porgy’s lost his cart in this production, Lewis’s twisted legs make him as “crippled” as the character needs to be. He and McDonald make beautiful music together, slipping into the numbers, like the rest of the cast, as naturalistically as possible.

This is probably the dancingist “Porgy and Bess”you’ve ever seen, and Ronald K. Brown’s choreography is tasteful and satisfying throughout.

Purists may rankle at re-orchestrating Gershwin, but William David Brohn and Christopher Jahnke’s adaptation sounds just fine to me. There’s a new Broadway-style overture, and a couple of numbers such as “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” have a slightly more pop inflection, but not egregiously so.

This Broadway-style adaptation is miles better than Trevor Nunn’s West End version a few years ago, which played well dramatically, but was musically undernourished.

(Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 West 46th Street, 800-745-3000 or ticketmaster.com)

Close Up Space (Manhattan Theatre Club)

By Harry Forbes

David Hyde Pierce is a highly adept stage actor and it’s a pleasure to watch him at full throttle in the opening moments of Molly Smith Metzler’s, alas, ultimately not very compelling play. He’s Paul, a widowed publisher whose 18-year-old daughter Harper (Colby Minifie) has been thrown out yet another school, this time for some naked rooftop shenanigans on campus.

The school has just written him about her expulsion, and Paul, red pen in hand, bitingly dissects all the errors of redundancy, syntax, and grammar in the series of letters, blithely oblivious to the disturbing content therein.

Soon after, he similarly decimates the application letter of would-be intern Bailey (Jessica DiGiovanni) whose initial assurance soon gives way to humiliation and tears. Despite all, he hires her.

These are the play’s most entertaining moments, but in short order, we’re introduced to his eccentric office manager Steve (Michael Chernus) who, unbeknownst to Paul, has been camping out in the office reception area at night in a big yellow tent. Why? Because he’s disconsolate about his beloved dog shifting affections to Steve’s roommate, and can’t bring himself to return home.

Suddenly, we’re in annoyingly absurdist territory that only escalates with the cyclonic arrival of the delinquent Harper, now defiantly spouting Russian – unintelligible to Paul -- and behaving in an alarmingly threatening manner.

There’s also Vanessa Finn Adams (Rosie Perez providing some chuckles), the firm’s best-selling author. Against all odds, both she and Steve end up bonding with Harper who, as the play’s (thankfully short) 85 minutes progress, reveals her genuine hurt at her father’s lack of empathy.

As our sympathies are so much with Paul, however, it’s difficult to feel much pity for the eccentric Harper, though the script would seem to have us do so.

The play is ultimately about communication, or lack thereof. Thus, the title refers not to “Close Up” in the cinematic sense, but the editing term that mirrors (and might conceivably fix) the metaphorical ellipsis between Paul and Harper.

All the performers are decent, and to varying degrees, appealing, including, little by little, Chernus’ initially annoying Steve.

Leigh Silverman directs a well-paced production. Todd Rosenthal’s detailed office set provides visual interest. Emily Rebholz ‘s costumes, Matt Frey’s lighting, and Jill BC Du Boff’s sound design are fine.

(Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City Center – Stage I, 131 W. 55th St., 212-581-1212 or nycitycenter.org; through January 29)

Neighborhood Watch (Brits Off Broadway)

By Harry Forbes

In his 75th play, Alan Ayckbourn shows that he is still very much at the top of his game (though when has that not been the case?), and “Neighborhood Watch,” direct from Ayckbourn’s home base, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, features his usual exemplary ensemble of actors that have you marveling at the absolute perfection of each characterization.

A large part of the pleasure derived from Ayckbourn’s plays is the skill with which he orchestrates each new development, but on this occasion, the play does open with a long speech in which the the middle-aged Hilda (Alexandra Mathie) eulogizes her beloved brother Martin who, we gather, has been killed “tragically and prematurely.” That much we know. The rest of the play a flashback.

We see how said Martin (Matthew Cottle) and Hilda have taken up residence at the Bluebell Hill Development and are relishing their anticipated carefree suburban existence. But a young trespasser climbs over their fence just as they are preparing for a housewarming party. Their first guests – the ex-security guard and sometime vigilante Rod (Terence Booth) and the gossipy Dorothy (Eileen Battye) – convince them there’s danger everywhere.

Rod, in particular, warns that the lower class folk in the estate houses at the bottom of the hill are a bad lot, and Martin and Hilda had better put a strong fence, topped with barbed wire, around their house if they know what’s good for them.

In short order, we meet their other neighbors: sad sack Gareth (Richard Derrington), a retired engineer, obsessed with ancient torture devices, whose sexy young wife Amy (Frances Grey) is having her latest extramarital affair with none other than Martin and Hilda's next-door neighbor, powder-keg Luther (Paul Cheadle), abusive husband of meek music teacher Magda (Amy Loughton).

Martin is sufficiently galvanized by Rod’s alarmist talk to form the titular neighborhood watch, one which carries increasingly fascistic overtones. If the police won’t adequately protect them, as Rod has demonstrated in his cautionary tale about how his hedge trimmer once went missing, they'll do it themselves. Before long, we see that there can be just as much danger within their gated community as outside.

A dark undercurrent imbues the play, with Ayckbourn taking every opportunity to satirize right-wing, sanctimonious folks whose fear and paranoia are far more destructive than whatever they perceive as the enemy. Hilda and Martin are devout Christians, but Ayckbourn takes sharp aim at the hypocrisy beneath the good intentions. The character with the least hang-ups – the amoral Amy – is the one who most earns our sympathy.

The cast, as noted, is truly brilliant. Each brings one of Ayckbourn’s masterful character studies to vivid life. They exemplify the best of the British school of acting, with Mathie especially impressive as the sweet but, as we gradually come to see, scarily controlling sister.

Set designer Pip Leckenby’s cannily placed pair of crescent-shaped sofas, with three perfectly positioned throw pillows, makes the apt living room centerpiece, even without having to show us the dreadfully green wallpaper which Hilda has proudly covered the walls.

Under Ayckbourn’s own direction, every funny barb, delicious nuance and ominous utterance lands just as it should.

(59E59 Theaters, 212-279-4200 or www.59e59.org; through January 1)

Seminar (Golden Theatre)

By Harry Forbes

If “Seminar” offered nothing more than a chance to see Alan Rickman at his most sneeringly, witheringly sarcastic, that would probably be enough for the audience that cheers his entrance, and laps up every subsequent scene. He’s Leonard, a famous fiction writer, hired for a cool $5,000 each by four aspiring young novelists, to coach them over a period of 10 weeks.

His feedback as they tremblingly offer him a few pages of what they’ve written is anything for paternal, and he – like everyone else in this play – seems to be able to assess the quality of prose by the merest glance. But we’ll forgive playwright Theresa Rebeck this bit of dramatic license.

The well-heeled Kate – whose spacious 10-room rent controlled apartment is setting – gets the worst of Leonard, as he harshly laces into the story it’s taken her six years to write. She’s played by Lily Rabe in a sardonic, New York style eons removed from her much-praised Portia in the Al Pacino “Merchant of Venice.”

Jerry O’Connell (in his Broadway debut) is Douglas, the cockiest member of the group about to be published (though Leonard decrees his writing is perfect “in a whorish way”); Hettienne Parr is the sexy Izzy (she uninhibitedly bares her breasts early on) with a tougher skin than Kate, but with the more pragmatic outlook; and Hamish Linklater is Martin, the most insecure, and the one most reluctant to hand over any of his precious prose for Leonard’s exacting, no-holds-barred inspection. Literary matters aside, love and sex enter the picture, but I shan’t spoil what the pairings.

Rebeck has written five juicy parts, and they all rise to the occasion, under Sam Gold’s smart direction.

The play is far from profound, and more than a little implausible, though there are some astute observations on the writing process and the realities of the publishing world, and certainly, the Rebeck's setup holds your attention, with a good number of laughs. When matters take a more serious turn, we go along with the mood shift

Rickman has a long revelatory speech that he delivers with understated power. I found his projection a little understated, too, for much of the evening (perhaps the result of an acute respiratory infection that felled him earlier in the week), but in every other respect, he was at the top his game here.

David Zinn’s striking set design for Kate’s apartment defines Kate to a tee, and gives way to a striking scene change when you least expect it, lighting designer Ben Stanton’s bright illumination morphing to something more atmospheric in kind.

(The Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, 212-239-6200 or www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200.)

Private Lives (The Music Box)

By Harry Forbes

Kim Cattrall proves the real deal in Noel Coward’s classic “Private Lives.” As the mercurial, witty Amanda, there’s nary a trace of the “Sex and the City” Samantha on display. Her assumption of the role is, in fact, the latest in a string of latter-day performances that have seen the actress stretching with a number of versatile roles, from Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” to “My Boy Jack” on PBS’s “Masterpiece Classic” to her recent stint as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in the U.K.

Cattrall received praise for Richard Eyre’s production of Coward's play in London last year, opposite Matthew MacFadyen as Elyot. Here, she’s joined by the wonderful Paul Gross, star of “Slings and Arrows,” that superb mini-series about a Canadian Shakespeare festival, not unlike Stratford, which you can still catch on the Sundance Channel.

As the formerly married couple who meet in Deauville on their respective honeymoons to other people – the stuffy Victor (Simon Paisley Day) and the simpering Sybil (Anna Madeley) -- they play with great style, tossing off their barbed lines with crisp British aplomb in a way that honors the roles’ originators, Coward himself and Gertrude Lawrence, with the overlay of their own considerable personalities.

The first act is set on the traditional double balcony – though those early scenes are marred by “off-stage” music far too intrusive and not appropriately directional. The actors shouldn’t have to compete with what should only be distant ambient scene-setting. The music, of course, eventually leads into Amanda and Elyot’s sentimental favorite, “Someday I’ll Find You,” vocalized most charmingly by Cattrall and Gross.

They are far from the whole show, however, as Day and Madeley are quite wonderful in their supporting roles, both showing their mettle in the third act, after Victor and Sybil come in upon their squabbling mates who have fled to Amanda’s Paris apartment, designed – like the period-perfect costumes -- by Rob Howell in witty Art Deco fashion. But though highly fanciful, the spacious layout gives the stars ample room for the considerable slapstick of the second act, which Cattrall and Gross enact adroitly.

What makes Eyre’s production so special is the sensitivity to the serious subtext beneath the witty banter: those significant pauses and silences, the casual references to death, belief, afterlife, love, attraction, and fidelity. The seemingly idle banter of much of Coward’s dialogue belies the comedy’s true substance. One is reminded anew how human and natural is the dialogue with its quicksilver shifts from light to shade.

This is, if anyone need be reminded, a great play, and it’s happily been accorded an ace production.

(Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, 212-239-6200 or www.telecharge.com; through February 5, 2012.)